This week’s wisdom comes from EF Schumacher, 1911-1977.
Strange to say, under the influence of laboratory science many people today seem to use their freedom only for the purpose of denying its existence. Men and women of great gifts find their purest delight in magnifying every mechanism, every inevitability, everything where human freedom does not enter or does not appear to enter. A great shout of triumph goes up whenever anybody has found some further evidence – in physiology or psychology or sociology or economics or politics – of unfreedom, some further indication that people cannot help being what they are and doing what they are doing, no matter how inhuman their actions might be. The denial of freedom, of course, is a denial of responsibility: there are no acts, but only events; everything simply happens; no-one is responsible. And this is no doubt the main cause of the semantic confusion to which I have referred above. It is also the cause for the belief that we shall soon have a machine to foretell the future.
– EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)
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