(see the mail exchanges on the content of this editorial at :

First we thought about taking a commercial domain name interzone.com, but it was already taken, as well as inter-zone.com. Inter-zone.org was available, so I registered. Then some Zoners said : "Hey ! we are not a commercial group. We are an organization.", which seems correct to me.

This is the first time we are confronted practically to the question of money really. We have made an attempt last year with the tee-shirts Pierre printed, in coordination with Foe in US and me in France, and it came out that we were able to get organized to produce something and sell it in the frame of the Zone. Pierre gave me 10 tee-shirts which he bought 4 fr and printed for free , and I sold them to Zoners 30 Fr plus the mail : 45 fr. We had a benefit of 275 fr, which are presently in a bank account I openned for the circumstance, plus a check of 250 fr which Wales in Amsterdam sent as a gift. So we got 575 fr, a bit less than 100 $.

I have no experience of management, just starting to study some, so it's out of question for me that I deal alone with the money. We do not have a status at the moment, as the existing formulas (association, society), do not fit what we do, and putting them up would have been more a hassle than a help. But I think that we should have a group of Zoners able to deal with this domain altogether.

We did not make these works for money originally, just to share them, because they are mainly related to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and it is not so easy to find other people interested in their work out of the Internet. So at first, Interzone came out from a similarity of centers of interest and personal researches. We were feeling rather isolated, and discovering after some weeks that we were about 300 all over the world was a happy surprise and cheerful feeling, and gave us the impression to belong to a community

Then we thought, "Let's get organized to produce, and distribute in the frame of the Zone". It came out that it was possible, with much cheaper means than we would have had to invest using the classical ones.

Now, our work is different from commercial products in the ways that: :

1. Function of time binding: writing binds humans through time-space, it binds the reader to the author at the moment and in the space, he was when he wrote his texts. Thanks to writing, men become time-binders.
2. and the magic function of writing: to make things happen, to create reality: the reader reads a scenario written by an author, which he can decide to make happen in his own life : Brion Gysin : "Writing is about making it happen.". Thanks to writing, men become creators of reality. (See by Burroughs, in "The Adding Machine", the chapters dedicated to writing, which explain all this very clearly.)

Art is not something dedicated to be owned: the copyrights on writings and images rest on the false belief one can own them, when they are uncontrollable. Ideas, images and knowledge have their own way of diffusion nobody can physicly control. They belong to everyone, are part of human accomplishment, and trying to monopolize them is a treachery towards the creator, a robbery towards the rest of mankind, and a ridiculous pretension impossible to realize.

Our only commercial argument we might have is that what can be found in this site cannot be found anywhere else, this is 100 % pure Interzone creation. So we are not taking any part of market to anyone nor competing with anyone about it : everybody is perfectly free to do the same without taking away anything from us

We have been thinking together about different formulas, and a community one seems the most adapted. Now which type of community ? We do not want to fall into the tricks of the communes of the sixties which collapsed, do not have any pre-recorded model out of our common references to Burroughs and Gysin.

The rules of business are based upon competition and strength relationships, and this seems to be a credo among businessmen.
Now after 20 years of studying GS, I am sorry but cannot agree with such rules. Not so much on a moral point of view as on a scientific one, related to the notion of structure:

If we want to put up anything solid and which lasts in any human domain, business included, we got to have a similarity of structure between our elaboration and the structure of human organism. This means that the structure of the relations in the domain we put up must be similar to the structure of human organism. Otherwise we will not get the results we expect and the enterprise will be doomed to failure, sooner or later.

What is a structure: "A structure is the set of relations existing between the different elements of a set." Henri Laborit. (see more on Laborit at the bottom of the page).

"The structure of living organisms confers them two basic characteristics, which are strictly dependent the one on the other:

"The structure of living organisms rests on relations of non-domination, complementarity, interdisciplinarity, and informational openness. In a living organism, each cell, each organ orders nothing. It just informs and is informed. There are no hierarchies of power, but of organization. The term "hierarchy" should even be abandoned, and be replaced by "levels of organization", which means "levels of complexity": molecular level (to compare to individual level), cellular level (to compare to the level of the social group), level of organs (to compare with the level of human sets assuming a certain social function), levels of systems (nations), level of the whole organism (species). No level has to have a "power" on the other one, but to be associated with him for a harmonious functioning of the set in relation to the surrounding. " Henri Laborit "La Nouvelle Grille", Editions Robert Laffont.

Laborit emphasized the complete dissimilarity of structure between the structure of human organism, and the structure of our institutions and elaborations in most of human domains (politics, economy, psychology, etc.), which often end to disastrous results at human levels.

Our different organs work together: no one is gonna say "Hey, I'm gonna steal the whole blood to be the strongest, and the others won't have any": if one organ was starting to act like this, the whole organism could not survive, and at last, the parasitic organ as well: the organs do not compete nor fight, they work together in harmony.
As long as we accept those rules of competition, it means that we agree to eat the other one, and, one day, to be eaten as well, because nobody can remain the strongest all the time.

I'm sorry, but this is what I call a rigged game, a scenario in which we end to loose all the time, and which gets to the destruction of the elements of the set. So we agree with rules, which will end, sooner or later to our own destruction. This seems rather suicidal to me.

Since two years (Interzone started in August 10^th 1997), the structure of relations between us has been similar to the one of human organism, and it's one of the main reasons of our success.

Hence, my first preoccupation is trying to make business with new rules, which preserve our physical and mental health instead of ruining them!

The absolute value in management is money, all the other values being relative to it. The issue of the game is to earn more and more, without consideration for the real human needs to fulfill, and the end justifying the means.

Now what is money originally? A symbol of exchange, the value of which is based upon an agreement between the seller and the buyer and which allows to trade without exchanging directly objects of similar value. It is a useful tool for trade, but not necessary to human life, as some human societies do not use it.

The value of this money depends on us; it is a human invention. It has no existence without any human brain to call
it "money": a case full of dollars in the desert without anybody around to conceive it as such is not "money", it's a case of paper with ink. A treasure at the bottom of the sea is not a "treasure"; it is a bunch of metal pieces.

Now the case full of dollars in the desert, if there is nobody around to exchange it against food or water, will be
useless to us: it won't feed us, and we shall die near it if we find no supply.

Then, the value of a bill does not depend so much on the one its owner attributes to it, as the value which the owner of the goods we want to get attributes to it: if we are in Japan and want to buy bread with francs, nobody will accept them, and even if we got a case full of francs, which are real money, they won't have any value in a country which does not use them as a symbol of exchange. Hence, the value of symbols or objects is relative to the criteria of evaluation of their potential users.

So, I'm sorry to say, but the whole belief in the absolute value of the money, as existing by itself independently of a human brain to conceive it is a nonsense, and the whole present financial system, which also is a human invention, rests upon a high level hallucination at the scale of the Western civilization, which is absolutely ridiculous!

More: if someone presents as having a value X something which does not have this value X, for instance if you give me a check of 50 000 $ without any money on your bank account, the check does not represent the 50 000 $ written on it, it represents nothing. What is a symbol? A sign which represents, stands for, something. (Korzybski) For a symbol to be a symbol, it must represent something real, otherwise, it does not represent anything, it is not a symbol anymore, but a meaningless word.

So if one presents a symbol of exchange as having a value which is deprived of existence, the words generally used to call this behavior are "fraud", "swindle". Hence, the whole monetary system based on the absolute value of the $, or of any other symbol of exchange, is a swindle. There generally are laws against this kind of behavior, if you see what I mean.

Money is a human tool invented to make the exchange easier. Its value consists in this function, out of it, it has none. If it is misused to get power on other people, it becomes a tool of domination, which has nothing to see with its original function. Hence, this conception and use of money rests on an inversion of values: money as absolute value, and human value as relative to it.

Now this is Aristotle's concept of money, as something existing in itself, the possession of which makes its owners appear as "superiors", and the ones who lack it, as "inferiors". Nothing democratic in this: we still are on the base of relationships of the old regime, which are incompatible with democracy, based upon the absolute value of human person. As a result, there is a structural incompatibility between the model and bases of democracy, and the postulates of our monetary system, and as long as we got this incompatibility, then we shall get economical and political crisis and monetary problems. Now if we manage to put up a new monetary system structurally similar to our biologic structure and democratic models, then we should be able to get rid of those problems.

To get to a better understanding of our situation, we got to consider it in terms of evolution: Our main problem presently is that we have not integrated yet in human domains the new data of our scientific evolution: in sciences, we work according to the data of quantic physics, which are scientifically valid in 1999, but in human domains, we still think according to Aristotle and Newton. Therefore, our technological inventions are reliable, when our human sciences do not lead to the expected results. GS is a tool to solve human problems of everyday life in applying to them methods of mathematic solving, in the frame of a quantic vision of mankind and of the world.

Businessmen say : "You cannot change those rules, as business has always worked as such and always will." Well, this is a matter of opinion : until Newton and Galilee, the earth was supposed to be at the center of the world, and the sun to turn around it. Nobody had put this in question before.. And suddenly, it came out it was not so, which was a big shock for the people of the time.

Getting rid of this belief in real existence and absolute value of money would gladly preserve our mental health really : it would avoid to people suddenly confronted to the facts to flip out and shoot people around, their own family and themselves.

Now we can apply GS in any human domain, in apprehending it in the frame of a scientific step, based upon the observation of the facts, drawing inferences, building hypothesis, and then checking the hypothesis in confronting them to facts which can invalidate them or confirm them. Then we can progress.

I propose we use safer rules, for our own safety. Again this is not a moral point of view, but more a "wise selfishness" , as Korzybski would say, and to my taste, a more civilized base of relationships than the jungle law.

Cannot we do better than playing a rigged game based upon false beliefs? I hope so.

Now here, we cannot foresee a sale at a large scale, as we do not know yet if what we sell can interest people out of the Zone. However, in the frame of the Zone itself, we are a group of more than 300 people, (rather about 500 since the creation of Interzone Coffee House) which are themselves potential buyers.

Therefore, we can product according to the number of requests, as they come, which does not require investment, nor a place to store the productions, and are sure not to loose money nor time this way.

A specific attitude among Zoners with money, which is rather different from the formal attitude, is that we do not bind the work done with money to get: Paul is making the CD and wants to sell them without taking a part for him, Vincent here does not foresee to get anything from the work he is gonna do for the CD-ROM on general semantics, and I'm working for you guys for free since 2 years.

Now, for the CD, if I understand well, we are gonna produce them for the 10^th of their financial value in the shops. So rather than selling them 10 Fr (1 £, 80 cents) plus the mail fees, I think that we can sell them for instance 30 Fr, and Paul, as well as Steve who works with him: gathering the files, putting them on their sites, converting in the proper format, etc.), can take 20 Fr for their work.

Same for Vincent and I with the CD of the courses: we shall sell them for a cheap price, and let us share the benefits equally if some come, and let's give a percentage to the Zone.

Vincent objected that it requires from him just a work of technician, that he is just an executor, that it's gonna be an experience for him, etc.

I refuse personally the opposition between "decider" and "executor", because the realization of the work rests on the decision of the executor to make the work, which is basic for it to be done. Henri Laborit : "Power is tributary of indispensability of the function": In a hierarchic scale, the pyramid rests on executors. If they decide not to execute, the pyramid falls down. The upper levels directly depend on the base, without it, their decisions remain at the level of wishes.. Also the base is the only level which is confronted to the effective consequences of the decisions, and to this title, which can state and evaluate them (in public services for instance, only the base deals with the public, and can see the effect of the decisions taken by the hierarchy). So one should not be over-evaluated compared to the other, and the benefits should be equally shared between both deciders and executors, because, each of them, at different levels, are indispensable to the realization of the work.

This opposition between deciders and executors rests on an opposition on the old Aristotelian opposition between "soul" and "body" in terms of value, the "soul" being supposed to be "superior" to the "body", and as such to "dominate it", when they are in fact two parts of a whole. This has led to the opposition between "manual" work and "intellectual" work, as if some people were naturally born to think, and the others to execute, as well as on the Aristotelian postulate that the work of the mind is more valuable than the work of the body.

Moreover, in the domain of art, the decider is also the executor : the painter, the writer, the musician, the video maker, etc., deal with both levels. And in the Zone, we deal with all levels, as we control all of them. So those concepts are not valid here.

As a result, if we want to be coherent with ourselves, we got to put up new rules and ways of working together which do not rest on the old system of thinking and postulates, otherwise we shall fall into the same tricks, but are adapted to our needs.

We have been trying to experiment at our scale Burroughs' and Gysin's concepts : at the relational level : the "Third Mind":

"The Third Mind".

Now, since the law of non-additivity, we know that 1+1 = 2 only in arithmetic : one liter of water plus one liter of alcohol is less than two litters. In human relationships , 1 + 1 = 3. The result of our productions comes from this principle . Now if we apply it to community life, it comes out that you need much less money to live several people together than each all separate. 350 $ per month is not much if you live alone. But 3500 $ per month is great if you are ten and get organized with it in function of the effective human needs of the group.

Now I have not got all the answers, these are just some elements. They require a common thinking, as we have done until now. Let's take this as a game and a bet.

Also we are an international group, which means that we got different opportunities due to our different countries. We got to use them to our benefit , and see where things are easier to realize.

Now, we might find another symbol of exchange than money, but I have not found any yet.

Hope this is understandable

Thanks for letting me know what you think. We can make a forum about it if you want, or use el Gorgo's Yahoo club , which is dedicated to the research in the frame of the Zone, so all the mails are available to everybody, and I do not have to forward them nor put them in a page.

Izzy, August 1^st 1999

________

Laborit studied animals' and humans' behaviors in situation of inhibition, and on the consequence of inhibition on the structure of living organisms: "L'Inhibition de l'Action". He wrote a number of books to spread his work and make it accessible to non specialists ('L'Eloge de la Fuite", "La Nouvelle Grille", "L'Alchimie de la Découverte". The filmmaker Alain Resnais made a film to illustrate his theory of inhibition of action: "Mon Oncle d'Amerique", with Laborit and Gérard Depardieu. His work in pharmacology (gamma OH, Minaprine (Cantor), was important.

Laborit was a member of the Institute of General Semantics, and the most of his work is an application of Korzybski's general semantics in the domain of biology.

France-US competition between Laborit's molecules (gamma-OH, minaprine) and prozac