Tools for Conviviality

The establishment of more schools in Malaysia or Brazil teaches people the accountant’s view of the value of time, the bureaucrat’s view of the value of promotion, the salesman’s view of the value of increased consumption, and the union leader’s view of the purpose of work.

New opportunities for the progressive expansion of lay therapy and the parallel progressive reduction of professional medicine are rejected because life in an industrial society has made us place such exaggerated value on standard products, uniformity, and certified quality.

In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the

Polarization

That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly.

It must be shown that this menace is imminent and that the effects of compulsive efficiency do more damage than good to most people in our generation.

This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined, constantly improved, accumulated and fed into a process, now called “decision-making.” This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people.

To recognize the nature of desirable limits to specialization and output, we must focus our attention on the industrially determined shape of our expectations.

Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image–practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river traffic in Thailand.