The Way It's Always Been
(and probably always will be)
Reportedly someone once asked Gandhi, "What do you think of Western civilization?"
He quipped, "I think it would be a good idea."
Another time he observed, "The real strength of India [of the age-old Vedic civilization] lies in her villages."
It used to be easy for us New Yorkers and Londoners and Chicagoans and Parisians to shrug off remarks like these. ("What do those people know, anyway?")
It used to be easy, until people like Dr. Theodore Roszak and E.F. Schumacher (a British economist, no less) pointed to corruption and pollution and started writing books like Where the Wasteland Ends andSmall Is Beautiful—telling us what those people knew all along.
"The cultivation and expansion of needs," says Schumacher, "is the antithesis of wisdom…the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate cause of strife and war."
The people on these pages make use of simple technology—things that really save time and labor. They just don't care for technology that saves you little and enslaves you a lot. They have enough of everything, but over profit margins and migraine headaches they prefer peace of mind and freedom of soul.