Economics of Good and Evil by Sedlacek Tomas; Havel Vaclav;

Author:Sedlacek, Tomas; Havel, Vaclav;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE AGE OF THE ECONOMIST: THE DEBT AGE AND THE FALL OF ICARUS

Aristotle considered excessiveness to be people’s main weakness. Each characteristic (even good ones), if taken to extremes, becomes harmful. Thus overwhelming love threatens to become suffocating jealousy, healthy care for oneself can become unbearable selfishness, where everything except for me and my interests loses legitimacy. For this reason, Aristotle is frequently called the philosopher of the golden middle way. The only characteristic, Aristotle writes, that cannot in any way be taken to extremes or overdone is moderation. It is moderation, however, that we lack; in recent times we have been too tempted by wealth, just as Icarus was tempted to fly too close to the sun.

Perhaps our era will go down in history as the Debt Age. In recent decades, our debt has risen not out of shortage but out of surplus, excessiveness. Our society is not suffering from famine, but it must solve another problem—how to host a meal for someone who is full. A saying used in Slovakia expresses this well: The eye would eat, but the belly is full. In ancient Rome, when riches and tastes overcame the capacity of the stomach, the conflict between the hungry eye and the physically over-full stomach was solved by their legendary vomitoriums. In our society, this is considered unaesthetic—so we created new provisions to solve that problem.

The problem of our part of the world is how to eat and at the same time not to eat (while, of course, for the fundamental part of our history and today, part of the world goes hungry). We created fat-free cream, butter without butter. We remove the most nutritious parts from our meals.47In this context, it is also interesting to mark Jesus’s words:

Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?48

These words speak with the same audibility to our overfed generation as they did in the times when there was worry over what to eat—the worry that one will have too little to eat. Our worry today is also what to eat—-but the worry comes from exactly the opposite side—we worry we will have too much to eat.

The more we have, the more we want. Why? Perhaps we thought (and this sounds truly intuitive) that the more we have, the less we will need. The more things move from the set of need to have into the set of I have, the more the set of I need to have should shrink. We thought that consumption leads to saturation, the satiation of our needs. But the opposite has proven to be true. The more we have, the more additional things we need. It’s enough to compare all that we did not need twenty years ago (computers, mobile telephones) with that which we objectively need today (ultralight laptops, new mobile phones every two years, permanent and fast connection to the mobile internet).

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