Why changing culture to sustainable must come first, only then pursue efficiency, technology, and laws.
Germany and Japan seem wonderful cultures today. Not so much in 1944, when they were committing among the most grievous atrocities ever. Everyone else wanted to stop them. Nobody considered stopping them by making them more efficient, advancing their technologies, or promoting legislation within them passed by their people. No allied general or politician promoted changing them by offering new technologies or helping them innovate.
Making them more efficient would have accelerated them, as would technology and home-grown legislation. First the culture had to change. Then—when pursuing something constructive like democracy, not destructive—then make them more efficient.
Technology isn’t good or bad. Like sharp knives and fire, technology augments the values of the people and culture using them.
No, I’m not creating false equivalences. I’m not comparing polluting with Nazism or Japanese imperialism. I’m pointing out obvious cases where you can see that efficiency doesn’t change systems, it accelerates them. When you’re outside a system you don’t like, you can see that effect. When we’re inside a culture, we think of how those things will help us, so we figure they’re good.
Imperialists love technology, innovation, and laws. They help them appropriate others’ land, life, liberty, and property.
By contrast, sustainable, free, abundant cultures aren’t particularly efficient. They’re abundant in mutual support, health, security, family, community, and freedom. Living sustainably doesn’t mean living in the Stone Age any more than practicing Christianity or Judaism means living in the Bronze Age.
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