Tools for Conviviality

Learning thus becomes a commodity, and, like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce.

Our present tools are engineered to deliver professional energies. Such energies come in quanta. Less than a quantum cannot be delivered. Less than four years of schooling is worse than none. It only defines the former pupil as a dropout. This is equally true in medicine, transportation, and housing, as in agriculture and in the administration of j

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values.

I will argue that we can no longer live and work effectively without public controls over tools and institutions that curtail or negate any person’s right to the creative use of his or her energy. For this purpose we need procedures to ensure that controls over the tools of society are established and governed by political process rather than by de

Social control does not accommodate community participation and becomes the function of experts. Educators define how people are to be trained and retrained throughout their lives–shaped and reshaped until they fit the demands of industry and are attracted by its profits. Ideologues define what is right or wrong.

Staffan Linder points out that there is a strong tendency for us to overcommit the future, so that when the future becomes present, we seem to be conscious all the time of having an acute scarcity, simply because we have committed ourselves to about thirty hours a day instead of twenty-four.

People could be so frightened by the increasing evidence of growing population and dwindling resources that they would voluntarily put their destiny into the hands of Big Brothers. Technocratic caretakers could be mandated to set limits on growth in every dimension, and to set them just at the point beyond which further production would mean utter

Polarization

New power meant a new relation to time. The lending of money against interest was considered “against nature” by the Church: money naturally was a means of exchange to buy necessities, not a capital that could work or bear fruits. During the seventeenth century even the Church abandoned this view–though reluctantly–to accept the fact that Christian