This week’s wisdom courtesy of EF Schumacher, 1911-1977.
I raise the question of the proper size of cities both for its own sake but also because it is, to my mind, the most relevant point when we come to consider the size of nations.
The idolatry of gigantism that I have talked about is possibly one of the causes and certainly one of the effects of modern technology, particularly in matters of transport and communications. A highly developed transport and communications system has one immensely powerful effect: it makes people footloose.
Millions of people start moving about, deserting the rural areas and the smaller towns to follow the city lights, to go to the big city, causing a pathological growth.
— EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)
Extraction. The city is the center of an extraction economy. An economy that is truly sustainable for the long term would have to be reversed: where cities are thought of as adding to the value of the people on the land, rather than extracting people and other resources from the world to serve nothing but consumption of those resources.
If humans actually were intelligent, it might work, but when you see the Yeast in all of human society, you see the mindlessness of it all. Dieoff starts in the middle of the Petri dish.
Be the Fringe.