Back to the Future: It’s 1973 and “Small is Beautiful” again

"Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it." - E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

our small earth

Back in 1973 a man by the name of E.F. Schumacher wrote a book called “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.”  The book was a big hit with me and my friends; we were all back-to-the-land hippie types who voluntarily decided to drop out of the rat race and live a simple, ecologically sound lifestyle.  (By the way, this lifestyle is now labeled ‘voluntary simplicity’).

E.F. Schumacher

I mean, I was chopping wood and carrying water back before anyone thought to write a book with that title. We were anti-consumerists; we never threw anything away, we fixed it; we furnished our houses from the dump and yard sales; bought our clothes at the thrifts shops; grew our own food and preserved it; heated with a wood stove; well, basically lived a small is beautiful life.

I’ve never understood this thing about how bigger is better.  Why is that? What does big have to do with anything?  The sign of success back then, and today, is making more money this year than last; having a bigger house than the first one you owned; and expanding your business.  Even churches want to grow.  The sign of a successful minister is a growing congregation and the need to build a bigger church (which many times ends up bankrupting the church, because no one can really count on people sticking with a church from year to year).

This bigger is better attitude is, according to Russell Means, spokesperson for the Republic of Lakota, an attitude that goes against the natural order of things. I think he is right. If you look at how nature evolves you will see a natural progression: one does not go from kindergarten to college overnight is one way to look at it. A might oak might come form an acorn, but it takes a hundred years to reach full-size. 

But for some reason, man likes to think he can do things better than nature, so he builds big buildings and businesses and organizations and expands markets and does all of this with no regard to the human, or animal, life his egotistical desires destroy or damage.  It’s the ‘use a nuclear bomb to kill an ant’ perspective that often creates more problems than it solves.

One chapter in “Small is Beautiful” is called Buddhist Economics.  In this chapter Schumacher talks about the appropriate scale of an activity and blasts notions that "growth is good," and that "bigger is better."

Schumacher writes, “It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character."

The reason I am talking about all of this is because from where I sit it looks to me like we are moving back to the future.  Rather than change, what I see coming out of Washington is a return to the policies of the ‘70’s, you know, the ones that failed so we tried something new. For example, the welfare system that Bill Clinton re-vamped so that there was a work requirement, with childcare provided, has been re-revamped so that now, from what I have read on the stimulus bill, is going back to the old style welfare where states are going to be rewarded for increasing the welfare rolls, not decreasing them.  Back to the future, Jimmy Carter and the 1970’s, here we come.

With the collapse of the global economy, it looks to me that we need to sharpen up those skills we learned in the ‘70’s and get busy “going back to the land” in whatever form we can.

Below is a recent two part video of Russell Means talking about all of this small is beautiful stuff.  I thought it was a very good talk.  Enjoy!

 

Comments

[Stray Yellar Dawg]

The biggest difference is... now *I* am one of "the rich" who will be taxed to hell and back. Then I was a poor,hardworking student ... who thought Jimmy was just peachy... uh, er, peanutty.

In the interim... Bush gave us benefits that can be counted as income.... so my health care and my kid's college tuition are part of what makes me "rich." Though they are not "income" per se.

So, yep... it's "back to the future" alright. Only not. This time, the middle class gets screwed even worse.