Schumacher

I began reading the book Small is Beautiful : Economics As If People Mattered by E.F.Schumacher yesterday, and it is as if thoughts and covictions which I could not previously explain were presented coherently before me...every other word out of my mouth was an exclamation of "yes", or "exactly". Every frustration I have ever felt about our modern economic system, every twinge of guilt I have felt for my own materialistic greed and envy, every horror I have had at the sacrifice of quality and reality for the sake of quantity and utility, every revulsion towards consumption without moral accountability is perfectly and thoughtfully addressed by this book. I have already dissected my poor copy with marks and circles and exclamations and brackets. I fear the book will be illegible to any later readers.

If you have ever felt nausea at the sight of a Walmart, or guilt for consuming animals which have been treated without righteous regard, or been saddened by the endless monotony of GAPS, and Staples, and Targets, and McDonald's, or wondered when the threshold of "enough" is reached, then please please read this book. It is convicting, practical, applicable, and inspiring.

The following passage is an excerpt:

"If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of every day existence."