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Price of Progress

Efforts to solve the problem of human suffering through spiritual, technological, and political ideals have usually been subverted by greed of one sort or another. We have learned to distract ourselves from fundamental issues of equity and justice through the mythologies of the market place and the delights of consumption. Globalism is wrecking the planet, killing off species by the hundreds of thousands, creating exaggerated disparities of wealth and well-being, motivating terrorism and reducing democratic institutions to a farce, and threatening to replace life itself by artifice. This is in addition to the ongoing menaces of nuclear or biological holocaust, climate change, or other human-induced disasters to which we become inured as the price of “progress.” Smooth-talking advocates of development wheel and deal to get a piece of the action while it lasts, despite the costs to future generations. None of this will change significantly under the present system. A central obstacle to change in a system whose measure of all value is money, and whose solution to all problems is economic growth, is that it has always been possible to buy off potential malcontents by corrupting them further into the system. Deep change can only take place if the system itself is rejected, along with the values underlying it.

RELATED TAGS: [subversion/corruption by greed, mythology of marketplace, economic parity/equity/growth, global trickle-down, trivial(ized) democracy, price(cost) of progress, (gender) equality of women, economic globalism]


© Copyright Dan Bruiger 2008. All rights reserved.