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February 6 - August 5, 2023
egregious
Dr Marx fell into this devastating error when he formulated the so-called ‘labour theory of value’.
Let us take a closer look at this ‘natural capital’. First of all, and most obviously, there are the fossil fuels. No-one, I am sure, will deny that we are treating them as income items although they are undeniably capital items. If we treated them as capital items, we should be concerned with conservation; we should do everything in our power to try and minimise their current rate of use;
I specified three categories of such capital: fossil fuels, the tolerance margins of nature, and the human substance.
In industry, again – and, surely, industry is the pace-setter of modern life – we can interest ourselves in new forms of partnership between management and men, even forms of common ownership.
Why should a rich man go to war? He has nothing to gain. Are not the poor, the exploited, the oppressed most likely to do so, as they have nothing to lose but their chains?
Lord Keynes? In 1930, during the world-wide economic depression, he felt moved to speculate on the ‘economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ and concluded that the day might not be all that far off when everybody would be rich. We shall then, he said, ‘once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful’. ‘But beware!’ he continued. ‘The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not.
The average fuel consumption per head of the ‘poor’ is only 0.32 tons – roughly one-fourteenth of that of the ‘rich’, and there are very many ‘poor’ people in the world – on these definitions nearly seven-tenths of the world population.
The condition of Lake Erie, to which Professor Barry Commoner, among others, has drawn attention, should serve as a sufficient warning.
the idea of personal enrichment has a very strong appeal to human nature.
‘if only people would realise where their real interests lie!’ But why do they not realise this? Either because their intelligence has been dimmed by greed and envy, or because in their heart of hearts they understand that their real interests lie somewhere quite different. There is a revolutionary saying that ‘Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word of God’.
I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man. It could well be that rich people treasure peace more highly than poor people, but only if they feel utterly secure – and this is a contradiction in terms.
From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study the economics of permanence. Nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities. There can be ‘growth’ towards a limited objective, but there cannot be unlimited, generalised growth. It is more than likely, as Gandhi said, that ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed’.
‘what were luxuries for our fathers have become necessities for us’.
What is it that we really require from the scientists and technologists? I should answer: We need methods and equipment which are – cheap enough so that they are accessible to virtually everyone; – suitable for small-scale application; and – compatible with man’s need for creativity.
That is to say, if such a man can normally earn, say, $5,000 a year, the average cost of establishing his workplace should on no account be in excess of $5,000. If the cost is significantly higher, the society in question is likely to run into serious troubles, such as an undue concentration of wealth and power among the privileged few; an increasing problem of ‘drop-outs’ who cannot be integrated into society and constitute an ever-growing threat; ‘structural’ unemployment; maldistribution of the population due to excessive urbanisation; and general frustration and alienation, with soaring
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The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge
megalomanic
abate
Quantitative differences can be more easily grasped and certainly more easily defined than qualitative differences; their concreteness is beguiling and gives them the appearance of scientific precision, even when this precision has been purchased by the suppression of vital differences of quality.
proletariat
secede
‘it will be desirable that the most ordinary of men is not embarrassed by the use of a logarithm table, the elementary concepts of the calculus, and by the definitions and uses of such words as electron, coulomb, and volt. He should further have become able not only to handle a pen, pencil, and ruler but also a magnetic tape, valve, and transistor. The improvement of communications between individuals and groups depends on it.’
What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: nothing.1 And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another – here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature?
phantasmagorias
Positivism,
metaphysics.
Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction, in accordance with the principle corruptio optimi pessima.
“azoic”
utilitarian
If man-as-producer travels first-class or uses a luxurious car, this is called a waste of money; but if the same man in his other incarnation of man-as-consumer does the same, this is called a sign of a high standard of life.
noblesse oblige.
Karl Marx appears to have foreseen much of this when he wrote: ‘They want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people,’
It will be more fully discussed in later chapters.
Good wy to note in an essay that you are coming back to that point
IN MANY PLACES in the world today the poor are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer, and the established processes of foreign aid and development planning appear to be unable to overcome this tendency. In fact, they often seem to promote it, for it is always easier to help those who can help themselves than to help the helpless.
‘Coverage must come before perfection’, to use the words of Mr Gabriel Ardant.
Franz Kafka’s nightmarish novel, The Castle, depicts the devastating effects of remote control. Mr K, the land surveyor, has been hired by the authorities, but nobody
Therefore any organisation has to strive continuously for the orderliness of order and the disorderliness of creative freedom.
the Principle of Subsidiary Function teaches us that the centre will gain in authority and effectiveness if the freedom and responsibility of the lower formations are carefully preserved, with the result that the organisation as a whole will be ‘happier and more prosperous’. How can such a structure be achieved? From the administrator’s point of view, i.e. from the point of view of orderliness, it will look untidy, comparing most unfavourably with the clear-cut logic of a monolith. The large organisation will consist of many semi-autonomous units, which we may call quasi-firms. Each of them
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However that may be, the health of a large organisation depends to an extraordinary extent on its ability to do justice to the Principle of Motivation.
antinomy
magnanimity
What is required is something in between, a middle axiom, an order from above which is yet not quite an order.
If the purpose of nationalisation is primarily to achieve faster economic growth, higher efficiency, better planning, and so forth, there is bound to be disappointment.
The strength of the idea of private enterprise lies in its terrifying simplicity. It suggests that the totality of life can be reduced to one aspect – profits.
the idea of private enterprise fits exactly into the idea of The Market, which, in an earlier chapter, I called ‘the institutionalisation of individualism and non-responsibility’.
It is no accident that successful businessmen are often astonishingly primitive; they live in a world made primitive by this process of reduction. They fit into this simplified version of the world and are satisfied with it. And when the real world occasionally makes its existence known and attempts to force upon their attention a different one of its facets, one not provided for in their philosophy, they tend to become quite helpless and confused.
The point is that the real strength of the theory of private enterprise lies in this ruthless simplification, which fits so admirably also into the mental patterns created by the phenomenal successes of science. The strength of science, too, derives from a ‘reduction’ of reality to one or the other of its many aspects, primarily the reduction of quality to quantity.
fantaticism
Stalinism;
