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- Employment, as a tool for measuring the success of a society and its economy, is overrated. Being employed — even so-called good employment with a salary and benefits — is no guarantor of a good life; often, almost always, it strangles a good life. I am not claiming that there is, as of yet, an alternative to employment, in practical terms. What I am questioning is employment as a telos — as the creative end-goal or highpoint for a (human) Being.
- Nietzsche: “If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, — if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won’t be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state — let us be honest with ourselves — these are adversaries.”
- Existential thinking should be factored into social-science as a means of correcting the quantitive, capitalist bias of most contemporary social science. Gross Domestic Product fails to account for — fundamentally cannot account—the phenomenological experience of the individual. Busyness, brokenness, emotional indifference — these are more than byproducts of economic growth: they are the primary consequence. Profit is a byproduct of the destruction of bodies, minds, nature. Corporate balance sheets should be required to show what has been destroyed in order to produce a profit.
- The word ‘development’ is a clever form of doublespeak. Development often means a mass commodity…
