Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: The Greeks had a word for it

[seerd...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]]

 

 Assessing civilization by it its number of toilets is a wonderful metric and 
embodies all that makes the United States (and Netherlands) the greatest 
countries in the world.  Toilets are a grand testament to our technological 
savvy in designing billion dollar systems to rid ourselves of icky stuff.  I 
mean its just organic crap like  nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and all 
that boring like chemistry stuff   Good riddance.  Far more sophisticated to 
use civilized chemical fertilizers. We get to to use all those magnificent big, 
high tech mining machines to transform the earth from mere dirt to huge 
craters. Ah the glories western civilization.  We rock. And look at countries 
like india -- they produce only 10% as much CO2 per capital of the US (15% as 
much as the Dutch). What losers. 
 

 Would you believe that I actually read "Small is Beautiful back the mid 70's. 
I have to laugh -- back in college  I was so deluded. What a hoot. A totally 
looney-bin hippie manifesto. Schumaker probably hated toilets. and would have 
tooted graywater and growing fresh vegetables. As if !.  I am glad men of the 
world like us see through such garbage. Came across a review the other day. I 
think the copious amounts of acid his mother must of taken never really left 
the writers brain. 
 

 " Small is Beautiful was a radical challenge to the 20th century's 
intoxication with what Schumacher described as "gigantism". For several 
decades, mass production methods were producing more cheap goods than ever 
before; the mass media and mass culture opened up new opportunities to a wider 
audience than ever. It was creating bigger markets and bigger political 
entities. .. he believed such scale led to a dehumanisation of people and the 
economic systems that ordered their lives.
 

 One of the recurrent themes through the book is how modern organisations 
stripped the satisfaction out of work, making the worker no more than an 
anonymous cog in a huge machine. Craft skill was no longer important, nor was 
the quality of human relationship: human beings were expected to act like 
adjuncts to the machines of the production line. The economic system was 
similarly dehumanising, making decisions on the basis of profitability rather 
than human need... What Schumacher wanted was a people-centred economics 
because that would, in his view, enable environmental and human sustainability.

 It was a radical challenge which, like many of the ideas of the late 60s and 
early 70s (feminism is another example), were gradually adopted and distorted 
by the ongoing voracious expansion of consumer capitalism. ... a "small is 
beautiful" model of economic enterprise that put relationship, craft and 
environment at the heart of their way of working .. were later snaffled up by 
corporate giants. Small became cool but only as part of a branding strategy 
which masked the ongoing concentration of political and economic power. 
Gigantism has triumphed.
 The power of the global multinational and the financial institutions was 
beginning to become apparent in the early 70s, but it has grown exponentially 
since, unaccountable to national governments. Schumacher warned that a city's 
population should not rise above 500,000, but we are now living in an era of 
the megapolis and several cities around the world are heading towards 20m. 
Schumacher would be weeping over his herbal tea at the fate of his big idea.
 ... We yearn for economic systems within our control, within our comprehension 
and that once again provide space for human interaction – and yet we are 
constantly overwhelmed by finding ourselves trapped into vast global economic 
systems that are corrupting and corrupt. 
 .