Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Perplexed?

This is a pic I took of a caged Arctic Wolf in Nova Scotia.

E.F. Schumacher's philosophy was more than mere mental masturbation. Practical Action, a forward thinking development group, monitors parasites on Peruvian alpaca tits to determine the relative health and sustainability of the farmers. That's the ticket and it all started with Schumacher's philosophy and now it has a budget of 26 million pounds. That's like a billion dollars. And they manage to apply around 85% to the actual operation programs. For comparison, The Red Cross is spending 40% to pay people to decide how to spend the other 60% in places like Haiti.
I came upon this book in the Goodwill and since I'm as perplexed as I have ever been with the state of the world I shoplifted it in the hopes that I could learn something.
It's philosophy like this: MXYZ represent Minerals, Life, Consciousness, Self Awareness. Man is represented by MXYZ. A Wolf is represented by MXY. A plant is MX. A rock is M. Schumacher says calling mankind "a naked ape" is like calling a wolf "a tree that runs." E.F. Schumacher would've been a real hit with T.E.D Talks because that's a real solid statement. I've called humans naked apes before and my reasoning was that I feel that apes have self-awareness. Isn't that obvious? I've seen drunk kids less self-aware than a chimp. But I won't say it anymore.
And hold onto your hats, campers,he goes on to say that the first task in progressing as a human being is to "learn from society and "tradition" and to find one's temporary happiness in receiving directions from the outside.. The second step is a process called individuation, becoming self directed. The third and final step is seemingly to surrender to ones instinct and become God-directed or free from outside and internal direction"
I'm still perplexed.





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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.