[pf] How big a risk is convenience, (being habituated to it?)

I'm giving about 4 examples (with some comment) before my main point.

· Yesterday I was reading Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes' *The Return* (ISBN:
0-312-87424-3) - {not as good as Catherine Asaro's *The Last Hawk* (ISBN:
0-312-86044-7)} - in which one of the protagonists, Scott, says to another,
Thalia: "You've got a lot of winterizing to do ...", and later, taking a
while to get to the phone: "I was just getting storm windows up; did you
even do that last fall?"  "No," Thalia admitted, "it was easier to just pay
for more heat." She had simply adjusted the thermostat - it was so convenient.

· It's a drizzly spring day today, as I walked to the local store to order
some cabbage; others going to the store just hopped in their car to go that
couple of blocks. I frequently call cars "motorised raincoats" for this
reason, though there's a lot more to criticise than that.

· People assume their government's main purpose is to make their lives as
easy as possible, even if this means wars and similar "to protect our vital
interests"; in this case, to enable one-person-per-car commuting, and
products and produce from the other side of the continent to get to your
local store; on into the indefinite future. As a part-Scot, I am very aware
that the ordinary clan/gang members relied on their leader to defend them
when another clan/gang tries to hit on them (the Lamonts, my ancestors,
were losers in this gang warfare). Things haven't changed since then: the
current top-gang is the USA. (But for how long?)
  By the way, I favour a milder version of this: one of the pre-existing
models we can learn from was the set of self-governing cities in the
Hanseatic League of Western Europe in the 13th to 16th centuries. Here, a
person (maybe a businessman) could move to the city that suited him (I'm
not so sure of "her"). So there was a real element of democracy: the
leading burghers had to pay at least some attention to ordinary people's
desires.

· Again in *The Return*, the third of the protagonists asks himself "is
this going to be another of those 5000-mile days?"; he runs the R&D side of
a major aerospace industry. The convenience of hopping on a plane to
hype-up your engineers is taken for granted - no thought of asking either:
"is this worth it?" or "_should_ I be doing this?"

· I can remember the beginning of this push for convenience, in the 1950s;
the emphasis was then on kitchen gadgets. I was somewhat puzzled that so
much brain-power and advertising money was going into what seemed to me to
be tiny "labor-saving" improvements that might actually save you 1 or 2
minutes!


· So my main question is: what is the actual cost, to the nation, to the
human race, and to the living world, of having hundreds of millions of rich
people addicted to convenience? And /really/ unwilling to consider
making-do with a different, "lower" level of convenience?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
*************************************************

___________________________________________________________
T O P I C A  http://www.topica.com/t/17
Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics