How Do We Submit? By Not Being

The Paramount Doctrine Of The Economic And Technological Euphoria Of Recent Decades Has Been That Everything Depends On Innovation. It Was Understood As Desirable, And Even Necessary, That We Should Go On And On From One Technological Innovation To The Next, Which Would Cause The Economy To "grow" And Make Everything Better And Better. This Of Course Implied At Every Point A Hatred Of The Past, Of All Things Inherited And Free. All Things Superceded In Our Progress Of Innovations, Whatever Their Value Might Have Been, Were Discounted As Of No Value At All.

For Complex Reasons, Our Culture Allows "economy" To Mean Only "money Economy." It Equates Success And Even Goodness With Monetary Profit Because It Lacks Any Other Standard Of Measurement. I Am No Economist, But I Venture To Suggest That One Of The Laws Of Such An Economy Is That A Farmer Is Worth More Dead Than Alive. A Second Law Is That Anything Diseased Is More Profitable Than Anything That Is Healthy. What Is Wrong With Us Contributes More To The "gross National Product" Than What Is Right With Us.

I See That The Life Of This Place Is Always Emerging Beyond Expectation Or Prediction Or Typicality, That It Is Unique, Given To The World Minute By Minute, Only Once, Never To Be Repeated. And This Is When I See That This Life Is A Miracle, Absolutely Worth Having, Absolutely Worth Saving. We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle.

We Have Made It Our Overriding Ambition To Escape Work, And As A Consequence Have Debased Work Until It Is Only Fit To Escape From. We Have Debased The Products Of Work And Have Been, In Turn, Debased By Them. (pg. 43, "the Unsettling Of America")

A Man's Life Is Always Dealing With Permanence, That Is The Most Dangerous Kind Of Irresponsibility Is To Think Of Your Doings As Temporary.