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Gee David, what a compliment! "Extreme views"?
Have you recognized the essential arrogance of the winners of the rat race?
I
am in recovery from elitism. My family's claim to fame was generations back,
but I was taught the attitudes. (To show you how low we've fallen, I clean up
my own mess and other people's too.) ;-D
I consider it a basic part of the growth paradigm. In my humble opinion, in
the growth paradigm there's a dominating us putting down a gentler (or
sometimes just less technological) them. The mentality is that they victimize
us, threaten what is "rightfully" ours. So we are entitled ...
We have to struggle and strive to stay on top, not to fall to the level of
these despised subhumans.
We've had 3 to 300 generations to get in the habit. But it's getting more
ridiculous and now we're over sustainability and Mother Nature (with a little
help from chaos) is fixing to cut us down to size.
Before you get too smug and say "I'm not like that", I'll add that I think
many
(most) humans have elitist attitudes toward animals. "Dirty rat" "How dare
he come in my apartment.." "The lions, bats, and killer rabbits are out to
get
us."
I love your examples below. "The government will steer the people." "The
rich
earned their wealth, the poor are lazy." "The third world is ignorant and we
will teach them how to be self-reliant."
Cut us a little slack. You're in New Zealand. Easier to be down to earth
there? Being citizens of the Peerless Global Power (for the moment anyway)
means we tend to be humility impaired.
Nan
At 03:15 PM 1/18/99 , David wrote:
>
>** I cannot agree that central government should be the leader
>("government .. sets goals"); I believe leaders should be from your own
>city or county, maybe State/Province if there's less than ~10,000,000
>people in it.
>
> It has to be possible to bump into your leaders in Main Street, tell
them
>what's on your mind (about what they should be doing) in no more than 2
>minutes, and move on if they're uninterested or too busy.
>
>** Also, his: "moving people from welfare to work" gets up my nose. He
>seems to think that "work is good", without any concern for whether there
>are suitable jobs: suitable for the individual, and suitable for the
>ecology of that area and of the world. In my view, most paid jobs are
>unnecessary and downright bad. That is, bad because (though less so in
>service industries) they are likely to be using resources and producing
>waste at a total rate that is far too high to be sustainable.
>
>** That's obviously an extreme view. Does that make it wrong?
>
>** I recently provided some information to a group in the western US that
>are planning to set up a community in the Himalayan foothills. One of my
>numerous comments was:
>6/ you say: "We [can] instruct .. others in the dynamics of personal
>independence and self-sufficiency" all well and good for devotees from the
>over-developed world - this is the bit I would like to be a part of - but
>_please_ do not imply that _you_ could instruct Himalayan-foothills-Indians
>in the skills of independence and self-sufficiency! Rather, state that one
>of the reasons you are keen to have your community just there is so that
>you may learn from _them_.
>
>** They came back to me with a comment on my extremism:
>
> We have reviewed the information on your
> homepage and were impressed by many elements
> of your character, but also sensed a bit of
> extremism in some areas as well.
>
>** I replied:
> As you might guess, I regard taking frugalism to an extreme as
eminently
>suitable for the over-consuming world we're currently inhabiting, at least
>in the OECD countries.
>
>David.
>** http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/6783/index.html#top
>David MacClement <davd@geocities.com>
> http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/index.html#top
>