Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Mammon's PeachWhy we submit to environmental and economic degradation

In Compromise, Hell!, Wendell Berry surveys the numerous ways in which we ruin our land and local economies, and he asks why we do it:

� This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so. We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all -- by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians -- be participating in its destruction? � How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing. � [T]his destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. � Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the "free market" and "free enterprise," but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods. There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify.

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It yet did not get.
 
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