Anne Herbert - interview

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1988

My current crummy office job I got through a friend who has worked at this place for years. As I struggle through the boredom minute by minute, I ask my friend, "How can you take it?" She said, "I'm over sixty. I couldn't get anything else." She isn't less bored than 1; she has fewer choices. I may get a fairly good writing job soon, so when I quit that particular vale of boredom, do [leave my friend there in the spirit of "Tough luck for you?"

What are educated people for? For ourselves we are educated partly to get ourselves out of the worst jobs our society has. We are educated partly to escape having to work at a job where you have to turn off all the switches in your brain but one. We aspire to the jobs where you only have to turn off half the switches in your brain to endure the day's work. I think educated people are partly to keep thinking of utopian ideas because some of them will work. It must have been a great breakthrough years ago to think of breaking down thing to do into many simple repetitive tasks. Now we've got that down - anyone reading this article can figure out how to break a job down into tasks that are easy and deadly to do for more than an hour. Now is a time to think the other way, to imagine groups, organizations, cities being based on every human being being as smart as humans are in every moment. How to do that? How to get there? How to start? I don't know. Being happy when people offer ideas because our offerings of ideas to each other sustains us, in its way, as the plants offering of oxygen does - it's a life making process not to be sneered at, Thinking about how learning could be all the time happening easily might help, For example, I think it might be a lot easier than we think for people to learn to read. Or, to put it another way, I think if schools taught people to talk, millions would be mute. There should be a way for people to pick up reading as they pick up talking. I think subtitles for some TV shows that have the same words the characters are saying as they are saying them might be a good way for reading to ooze in like so many other knowings do.

What do you think? I think dumbing ourselves down must have been a survival technique for a while, or seemed like one. But I think we could stop faking, and enforcing, a mental limp now. How could thinking become common, daily encouraged, rewarded? If you have any dreams about this, questions or comments, or any of this reminded you of something you almost know, write me a letter. Marianne Faithful once said, "To make good work, you've got to connect head and heart and cunt." And allowing for local variations in genitals, I think she's right, Which makes it good work to change, now that many jobs don't involve any of those three important things but just some dumb activity done by a person made for much more than that. -Anne Herbert, Box 5408, Mill Valley, CA 94942