mandarine

Through the very excellent soil and health library website, I have discovered a fascinating author, tackling the contradictions of our industrial model 80 years ago, and forty years before Ivan Illich.

This author is Ralph Borsodi, and his social and economic insight is very sharp ; extremely sharp when you think that he had come to his conclusions in the 1920s.

I will be telling more about the author as I carry on reading his works, and there will be several quotes finding their way into my blog, for there are views I could not express better.

[…] the idea that mankind’s comfort is dependent upon an unending increase in production is a fallacy.

It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life. Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind’s most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve–the two things which he should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort. When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them.

in This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi, 1930

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