Quinn Related Quote Saturday

"By disembedding humans from The Community of Life -- the basis of Takerism and civilization -- the only way to reconcile this condition of estrangement is through a God who gives freedom with one hand and offers salvation with another."-- Doug Brown, Pg. 123, Roadmap to Sustainability

Delusions

Ended up grabbing Doug Brown's Roadmap to Sustainability off the shelf this morning. I've probably done this a couple dozen times now. It just goes to show that thought is nonlinear, atleast my thinking anyway. I ran across this quote by Gandhi:

"The ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be a delusion and a snare."--Gandhi

This delusion runs The Economy.

Headed to the Bookshelf

There are times when I'm reading a book and I will notice a different author has said something similar. I will then head over to the bookshelf, pull down the book, and look for the quote. This morning it happened.

As I said before, I've been reading different parts of Walking on Water for inspiration. While at it I ran across this excerpt:

I ask a student to give an opinion. She says, "We need wild salmon."

"Why?"

She's fast: "Diversity is strength."

"Why is that important?"

"Wild communities with the most diversity are the most stable. If there is some disaster, they're more able to recover."

"Why do you care about that?"

She thought, then came back with, "The strength that diversity gives is not only to the physical world, but also to the mental and emotional world. Everything has a lesson for our human communities, not in any woo-woo way of talking fish but in the way we have always learned how to live in a particular place. Observing and cooperating with everything around us has been the basis of our species evolution and our personal development. More diverse habitat means more lessons, which means more chance of our own survival within that paritclar habitat." [Derrick Jensen, Pg.106, Walking on Water]

I open up Doug Brown's "Roadmap to Sustainability: Interpreting Daniel Quinn"

This is not what Q [Daniel Quinn] means by the Community of Life. The Community of Life and community-through-diversity are not subjective states of being that make people or living things FEEL good. The diversity in the Connunity of Life is an objective criterion essential to maintaining the community. Community is structural and material component of the life process, as is the biodiversity that correlates with it. Humans have difficulty understanding this. And there is a reason for why they don't get it: once humankind stepped out of the Communtiy of Life, or more precisely believed that it did, then in its divorced state as Taker civilizations, it alienated itself from the objective dimension of communtiy and began to liken community to a feeling of "sameness"-to a subjective feeling of belonging together as humans in which diversity became suspect. Community for the Taker way became a means to retrieve what was lost and abandoned in the civilizational process of divorcing itself from the true Communtiy of Life." [Doug Brown, Pg. 17, Roadmap to Sustainability]

So, diversity is what we're after. And it's something that we rarely ever talk about. We're in trouble.

Working Defintion of Capitalism

Occasionally I make my way over to the bookshelf and pull down Doug Brown's book "Roadmap to Sustainability: Interpreting Daniel Quinn." Today was one of those days. I'm trying to understand why we value products over people.

"Our working definition of capitalism is 'individuals competing to get ahead.' In other words the essence of the market and profit-driven system is competition, along with the relentless pursuit to eliminate it."[Doug Brown, Pg. 41, Roadmap to Sustainability]

I'll see where this leads me.