Oldal 105 [105]
What can I hope for (from politics)? 1103
life, which would make the need to act, create and care for others
irremovable from us."
The development of civilisations, aside from brief transitional periods
(by which I am referring primarily to the periods of restoration following
wars), does not involve the significant increase of the mass of goods per
capita. Even so, population growth and the exhaustion of natural
resources has still led more than once to collapse, desperate wars for
dwindling resources or mass emigration.” A global civilisation and the
inhabitants of an overpopulated planet must today also face the
uncomfortable fact that they have nowhere to run from the consequences
of the destruction they have wrought.
‘There are quite simply no rational arguments for maintaining the
pursuit of growth. Man is not satisfied by the increase in size or quantity
of the things he likes; rather, it arouses confusion or disgust. Nor is he
made happy by acquiring them too easily. What he holds good is if the
measure of the given thing fits its nature, be it the sweetness of a cake,
the size of a city or the number of people in a group. If there is such a
measure, then the good steward or the clever businessman has to know
not how to increase what they have but how much and how big is just
enough. This is how it was while economic performance was measured
by material indicators. The pursuit of growth began when the value of
economic performance began to be measured and compared with formal,
abstract and unified index numbers.
Economic globalisation has brought with it a fatal turn of events in
this process: the initiative slipped from the hands of the participants of
the real economy into the hands of the creditors and financial investors.
Their decisions and theirs alone are driven by a single motive: whether
their investments will yield a return, without regard to anything else.
‘There is no room here for personal considerations anyway, since the
banks and portfolio investors are managing the money of people who
perceive nothing out of the whole process apart from the rate of their
shares. The decisions of the management therefore have to be made
primarily with them in mind. And it is in fact difficult to increase the
profit realised in the process of reproduction without an increase in the
volume of production.
** Thomas Princen: Treading Softly: Paths to an Ecological Order. The MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 2010.
Carl N. McDaniel — John Gowdy: Paradise for Sale. A Parable of Nature. The University
of California Press, 2000.