Words&Dirt

“One cannot maintain one’s ‘competitive advantage’ if one helps other people. The advantage of ‘early adoption’ would disappear––it would not be thought of––in a community that put a proper value on mutual help. Such advantages would not be thought of by people intent on loving their neighbors as themselves. And it is impossible to imagine that there can be any reconciliation between local and national competitiveness and global altruism. The ambition to ‘feed the world’ or ‘feed the hungry,’ rising as it does out of the death struggle of farmer with farmer, proposes not the filling of stomachs, but the engorgement of ‘the bottom line.’ The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.

In agriculture, competitiveness has been based throughout the industrial era on constantly accelerating technological change––the very principle of agricultural competitiveness is ever-accelerating change––and this has encouraged an ever-accelerating dependency on purchased products, products purchased ever farther from home. Community, however, aspires toward stability. It strives to balance change with constancy. That is why community life places such a high value on neighborly love, marital fidelity, local loyalty, and integrity and continuity of family life, respect for the old, and instruction of the young. And a vital community draws life, so far as possible, from local sources. It prefers to solve its problems, for example, by non-monetary exchanges of help, not by buying things. A community cannot survive under the rule of competition.”

–– “Economy and Pleasure,” from What Are People For?, by Wendell Berry, pg. 134-5

“Men are unreliable in many things. But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s their greed.”

––The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, loc. 5288