|
ILLS |
CHANGES |
|
The first two hundred years have been
characterized by a play of power informed by ownership and greed,
not by humaneness. |
Knowledge, concrete life, is not
ingrained in ownership but in use (usefulness) and the
capitalistic umbrella is really that screen between the owner and
reality, not owned by anyone, that has to be played down to its
expediency level. |
|
Free enterprise has failed, socially
and culturally, and established rules of practicality at a
dismally low level of realism. |
"Free" enterprise man has generally
not the knowledge, the inclination nor the wisdom to decide how he
is going to put his skills to use for his own sake and the sake of
mankind. Society must help him to define its sociality together
with the gap between the practical, with it immediate rewards and the real with
its long term rewards of concreteness. |
|
The technological explosion has
subordinated the needs of people to the tyranny of the
production-consumption mystique. |
We cannot go on letting technology
tell us what to do next. We'll have to put ends ahead of means by
defining less hypocritically our aims, if we have any, and then by
telling technology and science to define the means appropriate and
sufficient to the task. |
|
Feasibility has all but killed
desirability. Consequently, waste has become a physical and
ethical dilemma. |
People's gullibility and attachment
to things, to fragments of performance, have allowed the producer
and the merchant to indulge in the irrelevant while the most
down-to-earth needs go ignored (equity and congruence). That makes
for a grand gross national product and a massive glut of things
done because feasible -- and of things needed and not done, the
doing of which is imperative. |
|
Whole man has been mortified by
persistently wrong priorities favoring questionable practices. |
The order of priorities denounces the
reasons and the reality of a civilization more clearly than wealth
and power. In the case of the United States, there is a clear and
brutal contrast between the wealth of the nation and the pauperism
of its civilization. If we want to make the individual a livelier
man, we must give him (that is to say ourselves) an environment
that fosters life. |
|
Expedience has characterized
performance, and expediency is most of the time irrelevant for the
lot of man. With a condition of pervasive irrelevance, the social
temper becomes, by necessity, fraudulent and reactionary. |
We must come to terms with the
ambiguity of the expedient. The drowning man needs a rope, not a
lesson in swimming or a lecture on physical fitness or
life-after-death. The rope, for the American man, is a structure
that will physically afford him the urban life he seeks. It does
not help to wrap this primordial need in the hypocrisy of
expediency and call it social, political, economic pragmatism.
Gravity, thermodynamics and the ferocious demands of biology are
the number one reality, the bottleneck opening on the mental
kingdom. If we ignore them, we are in for obscurantism. |
|
The country has separated itself from
the continent, inasmuch as it has demonstrated a cunning for the
destruction of the ecological balance it lives in and by. |
That the country be one under God
might be of interest for some people. It is, though, of far more
benefit to mankind if the country is one with the continent
physically, biologically and mentally speaking, advancing the
cause of the world at large and benefiting more from it than
anything else. |
|
The experiment in irresponsibility
that is so much part of the contemporary scene might come to a
conclusion, as time for recovery is getting short, some say one
generation. |
The American experiment has had its
course and it curses. It is time for adulthood where the pollution
of the mind gets a good blow as much as must the pollution of the
environment. Now we know we can undertake unbelievable tasks.
(What good American, ten years ago, would have conceived as
believable a moon shot with an eleven-second discrepancy between
programming and performance - or that we would invest three to
four hundred thousand dollars per kill per person in Asia, and
that in five years we would kill hundreds of thousands of "them"?
And the whole in the face of widespread poverty and indigence...?)
It is well time we concern ourselves with tasks which might well
be unbelievable because unbelievably compassionate. |
