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OCR
What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? 157 dissatisfaction was never the existence of differences in wealth in general, but rather the want of the lower classes. Ihis can be eradicated by technical progress and by the growth of the economy’s production capacity and must in fact be eradicated, when the difficulties in the path of accumulating profit no longer concern production of the mass of goods, but rather its sale. The identification of poverty with the lack of goods is not a harmless theoretical error; it has fatal practical consequences. Curiously, for a long time hardly anyone noticed that the number of people in serious want has, far from decreasing, actually increased in both a relative and an absolute sense in the age of successive technological revolutions and soaring economic achievements. Maybe this is because poverty was measured according to the indicators of mainstream economics: by the development of national income per capita or by the data of the consumption of products and services. Thus, could it occur that this process clearly appeared to be one of development, closing the gap and modernisation, as a result of which globally, on average, the populace shops more, travels more, uses more power, has more electronics for entertainment, takes more medicine, etc. than before. This applies to the poor countries as well, to the lower classes as well, to the humiliated and distressed. It is just to poverty that this does not have a necessary connection. And here I am not referring to the fact that never has such a great proportion of humanity suffered from the terrible lack of nutrition and drinking water, though all public remarks on this topic should probably begin with this sentence. One must know, however, that their unbearable situation, their hellish suffering and early deaths are not only the consequences of social injustice in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, the fact that the basic maintenance of life causes difficulty for many hundreds of millions of people is a public manifestation of a constantly growing poverty that effects a// humanity. (In past centuries, this occurred only in times of war, plague or drought. It is also true that then there was usually war, plague or drought.) Yes, we inhabitants of Earth are growing poorer together and the key reason for our impoverishment is exactly what is called economic growth. As long as we fail to understand this, we will be unable to comprehend the horrors that are occurring at the extremes, in the subsocial populace and in the hunger belts that are turning into deserts. Let us therefore take the components of our poverty one by one. We must start with the impoverishment of knowledge, not because of
