All I Know Is How Much Is Enough

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Albert Camus, The Fall.

I find it more than vaguely disheartening to see 'Austerity' being imposed on people like parents might ground an unruly child. It tells us that people, in spite of their age and maturity, can no longer look after themselves, and require the state to intervene in matters of 'economic crisis'. The same will no doubt occur on the ecologic scale, that people, in their solipsistic self-serving states, have got so out of control that radical measures will have to be imposed in order to 'clean it all up'. John Locke said so much 250 years ago, that the tragedy of the human was his insistence on burying his head in sand and seeing his human lifespan as the be all and end all of existence. To be sure, faced with all those advertisers and marketers, profiteers and petitioners, who try to convince us that we are nothing without their products and their 'goods', it is a hard slog to swim against the tide.

The sad situation is that 'economism' (not economics) has taken hold, which sees 'Growth' so single-mindedly as to defy any intelligence whatsoever. As Edward Abbey once remarked: Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

No longer is economic growth a case for busy-ness, it is a case for manic-ness; it is a pathology, a neurosis, and an obsessive compulsive disorder, and yet.... it is still the primary objective of all economies across the world bar none.

'There is no national government anywhere in the world,' writes James Heisig in Make-Believe Nature, 'prepared to offer its voting citizens the choice of putting their nation's economic progress, their personal and corporate wealth, second to the protection of nature.'

We have been so manipulated and dislocated from our original states of 'slow being' that we are convinced that the only way to become whole is to fill things up with unconscionable amonuts of stuff. Indeed, we are positively encouraged and expected to do so.

Yet, if we could manage to clear away just some of the clutter....

'...Frugality', writes Henry Skolimowski in Living Philosophy, 'is not a depressing abnegation and self-denial but an act of positive manifestation of new qualities.' 'Economism... impoverishes us as individual, existential beings, cheapens us with regard to what we can become, it robs us of our spiritual heritage.'

True progress is understanding and coming to terms with the ramifications of unbridled consumption (of which obesity and our blatant lack of wisdom are but two obvious symptoms); it is embracing a metaphysik as the foundation of our economik, and acting accordingly ourselves, each and every one, without having these measures imposed on us like unruly juveniles. The greatest mistakes a civilization can make are primarily metaphysical, in confusing the concepts of 'big' and 'great'.

'...Self-limitation is the wisest and most fundamental step of a man who has obtained freedom, wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 'It is also the surest path towards its attainment.'

Wisdom begins with insight into limits.