You Must Be Kidding

OK there’s a financial crisis going on.  We all know that.  All over the medias, Twitter, the blogs (including mine) there’s talk about that.

There’s criticism of capitalism, socialism is pointing it’s nose again, to the delight of some and the damn of others, we’re all asking questions about what went wrong, how the governments, banks and big corporations all have failed miserably.

But what about you? Me?  Where are we in all this?

I mean yes this might seem as a stupid question because we all take for granted that all these systems and theories theoretically should have one final goal: to make our living conditions, yours and mine better.  But the problem is that it’s so much taken for granted that nobody talks about it anymore.  We’re all so busy taking about big global or national issues that we have forgotten about ourselves.

Let me illustrate this better.

One of the first articles of the European Constitution that was rejected by the French a few years back stated that in case of disaster, the first priority would be to rebuild everything needed to do business, even before saving lives (in a flood for example)(I cannot find this article even though I did read it a few years back.  If someone can point me to a reference I would be very grateful).

At least, here it was clear and simple, business took precedence over human life.

The more I think about it, the more I think Gorz suggested a better way of looking at things.

He reminds us that we have the technological knowhow and infrastructure to feed every single person on the planet.  Anything that comes after this is a matter of choice.  What do we want to choose?  Accumulated wealth?  Senseless depredation of natural resources?

Gorz chooses another perspective.  Given the technological power available to mankind right now we should have at our disposal the luxury to take something else in consideration: the better wellbeing of each and everyone of us.  In other words he puts you and me at the center for the economical system and to me that makes sense.

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Tags: business, capitalism, crisis, criticism, Gorz, human face, socialism, talk, Twitter

This entry was posted by Francois on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.