Quality Of Life
As a British charity, I do not know what Solar Aid’s program efficiency is. I do know their purpose, using solar energy to help impoverished communities become more self-sufficient. In my view this is the best type of humanitarian cause, one that permanently addresses the quality of life of a community. Sufficiency is an important [...]
I don’t suppose George Orwell needs much of an introduction; who has not heard of the book 1984? In essence, the book depicts paternalism gone amuck. Paternalism is a product of civilization. That makes Orwell’s following quote about human nature quite ironic. Metadata is from Quotationary by Leonard Roy Frank. “If human nature never changes, [...]
This is the seventh entry in a series on the liberty of production. Previous entries established that over the course of history and prehistory culture has gone from emphasizing the liberty of production, the freedom of devoting our labors however we choose, to the liberty of consumption, the freedom of buying whatever we want. The [...]
This is the sixth entry for a series on the liberty of production. Previous entries contrasted the liberty of production with the liberty of consumption in a historical and prehistorical context. We started out naturally with the liberty of production as a natural right for all, but over time relinquished some of this right for [...]
This is a fifth entry in the series on the liberty of production. The previous entry about the first monumental liberty trade-off revealed that this occurred when going from nomadic foraging to stationary agrarian cultures. We gave up some of our choice for how we would labor for some greater choice in the stuff that [...]
Continue reading about The Second Monumental Liberty Trade-off
This is the fourth entry in a series on the liberty of production. The previous entry equated the adaptability of early foragers, enabling them to migrate over the globe, with the liberty of production, choosing how we wish to “earn our keep.” This entry takes a look at the Agricultural Revolution, touted as a huge [...]
Continue reading about The First Monumental Liberty Trade-off
This is the third in a series about the liberty of production. The purpose of this entry is to follow the advice I often give in Systems out of Balance: making an empirical assessment requires some type of baseline information for comparison. The baseline information in this case, as is often the case in Systems [...]
OK. I should have paid more attention to a comment made at the beginning of this series that the quote “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” by Thomas Hobbes was prefaced by “life of man.” Hobbes was describing what the natural condition of humans were like, but it makes more sense to talk about short [...]
The quote by Thomas Hobbes implying that the natural condition of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” came at the end of a long run-on sentence/paragraph that began with referring to the warlike nature of humans. Thus, there is really no doubt that Hobbes thought humans were naturally violent, and that will become [...]
Thomas Hobbes wrote that, without some of the advantages provided by a nation state, the natural condition of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” This entry focuses on the term “nasty.” I take some license with all the terms to focus the meaning on particular misconceptions about the natural life of early foraging [...]