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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 51 flow of energy and materials, due to the limitations of nature. And terming the unscrupulous wasting of the resources of the planet as development is by no means self-evident. The green economists arguing for a stable economy prove exactly its opposite. Yet I quote not them, but instead the words of their great forebear, the classic of utilitarian liberalism John Stuart Mill: “It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. ‘There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture and moral and social progress; as much room to improve the art of living and much more likelihood of being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on. Even the industrial arts might be as earnestly and as successfully cultivated, with this sole difference, that instead of serving no purpose but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements would produce their legitimate effect, that of abridging labour.”” The fact that economic growth not only does not serve cultural development but in fact stands in irreconcilable contradiction to it, can remain hidden only so long as the availability of material goods and services remain, explicitly or implicitly, at the centre of concepts of the good life. In consumer society, wellbeing is nothing other than being solvent: the ability to satisfy ones needs — as defined by the system — through using up more goods and services than ones jealous neighbours. Consumer society — a society in which consumer is a synonym for person — revolves around the satisfaction of needs: it devotes a historically unparalleled amount of energy to the discovery, awareness and satisfaction of needs — and their creation. Before the age of industrial societies, the word “need” did not exist in its current usage, as some objective connection between man and certain goods that exists independently of us. Only recently has consumer society managed to detach from man first his labour — in the form of wage labour — and then even his “needs”, which he can only satisfy through the possession of goods and services that he can purchase on the market. The Meadows couple, Ivan Illich, Manfred Max-Neef and others warn society in vain that man has no need for a vehicle, for instance, or even for transportation. In reality these are merely tools which he is forced to use through the transformation of the social space. Vehicles bridge the gap they themselves create. “They create distances for all and shrink them only for a few,” Illich explains. “Everywhere in the world after 2 John Stuart Mill: Principles of Political Economy. Book 4, Chapter 6.
