Would a panel of the wise—Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and Socrates—conceivably approve of our current way of life?
[W]e have a wide latitude of choice within the limits set by the flow of solar energy. It is possible in principle to create an agricultural civilization founded on yeoman farmers instead of exploited peasants or slaves—that is, the kind of small-hold, egalitarian, salt-of-the-earth farming society that Thomas Jefferson envisioned for the United States. I have imagined such an agrarian civilization, which I call “Bali with electronics.” In short, we can have benign and culturally rich societies without energy slavery. True, these societies may not offer the kinds of permissive freedoms that many enjoy today; individuals will have to find their freedom within the prevailing moral framework, not apart from it. But in return they will get back the autonomy, agency, and integrity that were lost in societies given over to distraction and consumption.
‘But aren’t you dichotomising?’ I have not invented that hateful thing, a dichotomy. Some people are just against what they call ‘dichotomising’, feeling it is ‘simplistic’. But such a view is itself simplistic. There are, after all, different types of dichotomies. Some are inevitable, such as between plants and animals – even though there exist microscopic life forms that defy such categorisation. Some are entirely spurious. Elsewhere I have quoted whoever it was who said that ‘there are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t’. Dichotomising has its problems.
Given the scale of the fiscal interventions in 2020, if the political will had been there, it would not have been unreasonable to talk about a new or at least a renewed social contract. There were elements in the giant flow of money that were undoubtedly novel.
For “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.”
The three main building blocks of human experience are time, emotion and sensation. The brain must account for all three factors in order to encode information from the outside world.
The muscles, bones, ligaments, feet, hands and nerves, etc., are agents for carrying out the mandates of the mind.
If someone firmly believes ‘I am a smoker,’ they will not be able to stop smoking. If they lack self-belief that they can stop smoking, they may or may not succeed in the long term.
