Book summary “Does It Matter?”: summary

Introduction

You often feel like a skin-encapsulated ego trapped inside cold abstract systems. You measure your life through money, schedules, and bureaucratic metrics that drain away direct sensory experience. This constant calculation separates you from the living world and turns your daily existence into a source of chronic anxiety.

Alan Watts argues in Does It Matter? that modern civilization suffers from a single fatal error. You mistake abstract symbols, monetary measurements, and bureaucratic systems for actual living reality. This confusion causes widespread ecological destruction and deep personal alienation.

The book examines how this symbolic trap distorts your everyday life. You will explore the following questions throughout the chapters:

• How does confusing money with real wealth create artificial scarcity?
• Why does industrial food production destroy both nutrition and sensory engagement?
• What do your clothes reveal about your internal psychological splits?
• How do altered states of consciousness dissolve the illusion of the separate ego?
• In what ways does ancient philosophy help you manage modern technology without anxiety?

1. Wealth Versus Money

Civilized society suffers from confusing abstract symbols, descriptions, and measures with the actual living reality of the world. Language, numbers, and monetary systems are useful tools for description and coordination, but humanity has begun to mistake these abstractions for the concrete universe. This confusion leads to ideological dogmatism and a callous disregard for the natural environment.

A Harvard professor declared that no academic knowledge is respectable unless it can be put into words, ignoring nonverbal fields like music, art, and dancing.

The Illusion of Scarcity

Money is merely a measure of wealth rather than wealth itself, and confusing the two prevents the proper distribution of society's abundant production. True wealth consists of energy, technical intelligence, and raw materials. Because automation and computers have created the potential for total abundance, treating money as a scarce physical commodity like gold creates artificial scarcity and economic depressions.

Money is merely a measure of wealth rather than wealth itself, and treating it as a scarce physical commodity causes artificial scarcity and destructive wars.

During the Great Depression, physical resources, factories, and human labor remained completely intact, but economic activity halted simply due to an absence of abstract money units. You can trace this absurdity back to the gold standard, which tied money to a physical metal rather than real productive capacity.

Governments mistakenly use war and military spending as a method to issue credit and maintain economic prosperity under the guise of national debt. Because society fails to understand that money is a measure rather than a physical substance, nations resort to the perpetual emergency of war production to justify issuing financial credit, destroying real material wealth in the process. Since 1914, the money spent on war could have supplied a comfortable independent income to everyone on earth.

Guaranteed Basic Income

Society should replace taxation and welfare with a guaranteed basic income funded by national credit linked to actual industrial productivity. As machines and automation replace human labor, traditional jobs disappear. To prevent mass impoverishment and unsold stockpiles of goods, the community as a whole must issue itself credit for the work done by machines, granting everyone a baseline purchasing power.

Corporate investors and business executives remain blind to environmental degradation because their financial metrics completely abstract away physical realities. Stockholders and absentee owners judge business success solely through arithmetical monetary results, ignoring the destruction of landscapes, pollution of air and water, and the degradation of food quality caused by industrial operations. You can observe a home in Beverly Hills valued at $80,000 inhabited amidst thick exhaust fumes.

Operators of industrial chicken farms actively avoid eating their own mass-produced battery-raised poultry products. By the year 2000, society reached a predicted target date for the potential realization of a wealth-standard economy, yet old habits of scarcity persist. You continue to measure success by monetary accumulation rather than ecological vitality and human well-being.

2. The Kitchen as Alchemical Altar

A living human body is not a fixed physical object. You are a flowing event and a temporary wiggle in a continuous stream of energy and matter. Substance continuously enters the body as light, heat, air, and food, and leaves as waste, breath, and action. Most of your substance was once other living bodies obtained through biological existence, which relies on the mutual slaughter and ingestion of species.

Industrial food production reduces nutrition to chemical abstractions, while true ecological living requires sensory engagement with raw materials and mindful cooking.

Modern bread has been reduced to a weightless compound of porous plastic film injected with preservatives and chemicals. This abstraction stems from confusing diet with medicine and cooking with pharmacology, treating food based on theoretical nutrient percentages rather than sensory experience. Scientific American patented a process for continuous bread flowing through electronic ovens like toothpaste. Consumer Reports analyzes bread purely through vitamin content rather than taste, while ordinary gelatine analysis measures 85-87 percent protein, 12-14 percent moisture, 1 mg sodium per serving, and 28 calories per envelope.

The Ethics of Eating

To resolve the ethical predicament of living by killing, you must face three distinct choices. Alan Watts outlines three personal answers to the dilemma of mutual killing:

• Decide to kill expertly and swiftly when necessary without hesitation.
• Husband and cherish every form of life killed for food.
• Honor the creature that died by cooking it to perfection and relishing it to the full.

You observe this principle when Reginald H. Blyth discusses plant pain and Lin Yutang remarks on properly cooking a chicken so it does not die in vain. You consume items ranging from air and water to beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pâté de foie gras. Plastic represents the negative spiritualization of matter and the ultimate mock-materialism of an industrial civilization obsessed with fake, textureless substitutes. Plastics mimic any shape to become textureless everything, destroying tactile quality in everyday objects and ecological environments alike. You see this mock-materialism in plastic litter accumulating along Japanese beaches and plastic antimacassars hanging over furniture, mirroring a cultural rejection of biological reality.

Redesigning the Home Kitchen

The kitchen must serve as the primordial center of the home and an alchemical ritual space grounded in love for raw materials. Proper cooking requires a deep sensory appreciation for the shape, feel, smell, and texture of raw ingredients. You can transform your domestic environment by rejecting sterile surgical aesthetics and excessive plastic gadgetry. Sumire Jacobs achieves this balance by using a permanently installed wok adjoining her range.

You can rebuild your cooking space using specific structural guidelines:

• Take out the wall between kitchen and living room.
• Partition off a small area for a scullery containing a dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, and deep-freeze.
• Install a table-top gas range of stainless steel and a windowed oven-broiler about four feet from the floor.
• Keep basic food supplies in stoppered glass jars on open shelves.
• Hang skillets, saucepans, and utensils from well-ordered wall hooks.
• Install a charcoal pit, Japanese hibachi, or wide round-bottomed wok for stir-frying.
• Use solid heavy chopping boards made of hardwood strips cut across the grain.

These material details anchor you in physical reality rather than abstract metrics. You rely on a 10 by 20 inches double-size Japanese hibachi and 3/4 inch strips of hardwood for chopping boards. You maintain a 2.5 by 3 feet minimum working area made of chopping board material alongside an 18 inches square and 9 inches deep dishwashing receptacle.

3. The Cosmic Masquerade of Clothing

The Burden of Western Dress

Western male clothing derived from British fashion is unnecessarily constricting, uncomfortable, and ignores human anatomy. From Beau Brummel to Savile Row, Western dress forces rectangular cloth into unnatural cylindrical and conical shapes using tight pants, stiff collars, neckties acting as symbolic nooses, and restrictive shoes that cause foot ailments.

Western male apparel relies on rigid, uncomfortable tailoring that reflects an internal psychological split, whereas traditional Eastern garments offer comfort and celebrate life as a masquerade.

You wear crustacean apparel that treats your body like a rigid shell. The author recalls his boarding school Eton suit, which included tight dark grey pants, a monkey-jacket, suspenders, garters, and an immense starched white collar. You often endure these garments because affectations of military pomp and restrictive clothing are outward manifestations of an inner split and a compensation for inadequacy.

Effective soldiers and groups, such as guerillas and commandos, move soundlessly and avoid the stiff posturing of formal uniforms. The author notes that German armies utilized military pomp and lost two world wars, while Americans achieve success only when employing Indian-style tactics. This pomposity expresses the vice of taking yourself too seriously and correlates with ineffective, aggressive behavior.

The Gentle Way of Judo

Humans are the only creatures that wear clothes and laugh because they intuitively know their lives are an act. Vedanta philosophy views the entire universe as a masquerade and all bodies as mere clothes worn by the ultimate Self. The Bhagavad-Gita compares laying aside a worn-out body to putting on new robes. You are simply playing the Joker in the deck of cards when you adopt a formal social role.

Traditional Eastern garments like the sarong and the sari offer superior comfort, dignity, and practical utility compared to Western tailoring. Garments such as the Philippine sarong or the Indian sari require no complex tailoring, zippers, or belts. They allow complete freedom of movement and can be packed easily while supporting the economies of the developing world.

The author describes how a Philippine sarong is constructed from a cylinder of cloth divided into two legs, secured without buttons or weird tailoring. You can adopt these alternatives using straightforward methods:

• Step into the sarong and adjust it to your waist-ankle length.
• Fold the excess material from the waist inside.
• Tighten it around your waist and tuck the overplus to the right.
• Secure the garment with a safety pin.

These items require minimal space, as twenty of them or twenty saris fit into a small suitcase. The dimensions remain simple, such as three feet wide and four feet long for a sarong, or six yards long and four feet wide for a sari.

Trying to improve yourself or the world by direct force is futile, requiring instead the gentle approach of intelligent alignment with natural forces. Because the ego and the environment are a single system, forcing an issue is like trying to lift oneself by the bootstraps. True intelligence uses judo principles—trimming sails to the wind, rolling with the punch, and working along the grain.

4. Psychedelics and Mystical Awareness

Psychedelic chemicals act as artificial microscopes revealing our fundamental unity with the universe, dissolving the illusion of the separate ego.

Alan Watts spent thirty years studying peculiar states of consciousness. He experimented with five principal psychedelics to identify the active components behind traditional mystical practices.

Just as a microscope is an unnatural contrivance used to study bacteriology despite distorting naked vision, psychedelic drugs can predispose consciousness to mystical states. These substances induced major mystical states exceeding his prior spontaneous experiences.

Alan Watts tested LSD25 with Dr. Keith Ditman at UCLA Medical School in 1958, and later in 1959 with Drs. Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron at the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Francisco.

The Four Dimensions of Awareness

Psychedelic awareness is characterized by four dominant dimensions that radically alter our normal socially induced consciousness.

These four characteristics include:

• a concentration in the present moment with a slowing down of time;
• an awareness of polarity where opposites are seen as interdependent;
• an awareness of relativity showing all life forms as variations on a single theme;
• an awareness of eternal energy where existence is recognized as a pulsation.

Alfred Lord Tennyson experienced his individuality dissolving into boundless being by silently repeating his own name. This matches the awareness of eternal energy where existence is recognized as a pulsation, much like the formula $e=mc^2$ equating energy with mass and speed of light.

Western society's resistance to mystical and psychedelic experiences stems from a monarchical and political concept of God. Judeo-Christian traditions view God as a supreme governor or monarch who rules by force, making any claim of human identity with the Godhead appear as insubordination, blasphemy, or madness.

Historical figures like John Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart were condemned as heretics for their mystical claims. This contrasts with Asian cultures, which conceive the universe as an organism rather than a manufactured artifact.

The Vicious Circle of Self-Improvement

Every project for self-transformation and self-improvement is an impossible and contradictory vicious circle.

Trying to become a Buddha, attain enlightenment, or become unselfish is self-contradictory, much like trying to lift both feet off the floor by pulling on one's ankles. True release comes from abandoning these conceptual fantasies to focus on practical, immediate actions.

Zen master Dogen argued that spring does not become summer, and an unenlightened person does not become a Buddha through deliberate effort.

5. Mahayana Buddhism and Technology

Mahayana Buddhism perceives life through universal interdependence, offering a philosophical framework to manage technology without anxiety or alienation.

Human consciousness is normally fixed on the apparent separateness of things. This narrow focus creates a deep anxiety that death or nonbeing will eventually swallow being. Recognizing yourself as an expression of the universe allows you to participate in life games without hostility toward nature.

Interdependence and Science

Mahayana Buddhists never possessed Western machinery. They practiced art as a cooperation between man and nature, showing that science can be the work of nature itself.

You can approach modern technology through this lens of relativity and mutual interdependence. You stop treating the environment as a hostile realm to conquer. Instead, you see yourself as part of The Body of Total Bliss, known as sambhogakaya.

The Mindless Scholar

D. T. Suzuki practiced scholarship with total unselfconsciousness, embodying Zen principles through effortless intellectual work. He maintained scholarly disarray by writing separate books across multiple rooms of his home. Rather than using bibliography to boost his personality, he loved learning for its own sake and handled knowledge unpretentiously.

When a student asked how to prepare an article, Suzuki asked twenty-year-old Alan Watts for advice and actually followed it.

Suzuki possessed a genius for deflating academic pedantry and windy arguments through humor, silence, and gentle deflection. When an audience member at a lecture asked whether he referred to relative or absolute reality, Suzuki closed his eyes for about a minute before answering simply yes.

10 Key Ideas

1. Modern civilization suffers from mistaking abstract symbols, monetary measurements, and bureaucratic systems for actual living reality.
2. Treating money as a scarce physical commodity rather than a mere measure of wealth creates artificial scarcity, destructive wars, and economic depressions.
3. True ecological living requires sensory engagement with raw materials and mindful cooking rather than industrial food production that reduces nutrition to chemical abstractions.
4. Redesigning the home kitchen around raw materials and tactile spaces anchors human activity in physical reality rather than abstract metrics.
5. Western male apparel relies on rigid, uncomfortable tailoring that reflects an internal psychological split, whereas traditional Eastern garments offer comfort and celebrate life as a masquerade.
6. True intelligence uses judo principles of working along the grain because trying to improve yourself or the world by direct force is futile.
7. Psychedelic chemicals act as artificial microscopes revealing our fundamental unity with the universe by dissolving the illusion of the separate ego.
8. Every project for self-transformation and self-improvement is an impossible and contradictory vicious circle like trying to lift oneself by the bootstraps.
9. Recognizing yourself as an expression of the universe allows you to participate in life games without hostility toward nature.
10. Mahayana Buddhism perceives life through universal interdependence, offering a philosophical framework to manage technology without anxiety or alienation.