The so-called "TINA syndrome" provides the fundament, the actual
rock, on which the political, economic, military and other elites
and establishments of the Anglo-American world and European bloc
have built their church. Inscribed over its entrance stands the
motto: "there is no god but monopoly and maximum is his profit". On
this basis, continuous attacks on the very concept of intangibles
are launched, most prominently against time-consciousness.
Especially singled out is time-consciousness based on appreciating
and/or priorising the long term over the short term, as well as
placing the interests of the social collective over the interests
of any individual member of the collective. In this book, it is
argued that Humanity has been on the wrong track since Sir Isaac
Newton published his Principia Mathematica at the end of the 17th
century, and that the scientific research enterprise developed
since then has taken the world on a merry chase to nowhere. Without
exception, the assaults on time-consciousness, and on cognition of
what happens in and through the passage of time, take the form of a
denial of the principle of Nature as the Mother of all wealth. The
denial of this principle has always encountered resistance. Some
resist by breaking the attacks down and responding to selected
cases. For example, the contributors to the book Underdevelopment
and Social Movements in Atlantic Canada (Toronto 1979), following
precisely this tact, act according to the principle that "the
movement is everything..." This places the struggle of the people
for livelihood where it belongs, viz., at the centre of economic
theory and practice. However, these writers' version of this
approach is silent about long-term or final aims. Their work
actually priorises t = "right now" over longer-term views of the
role of time in social-historical processes. People's deepest
desires to see Justice prevail and Injustice sent packing are
generally aroused, positively, by their apparent stand on the side
of "labour" against "capital"; a great deal of hope might well be
vested in these stands. Has this hope, however, been misplaced?
Analysis of these authors' collective work from 1979 (as the Soviet
Union began its final slide to oblivion by invading Afghanistan),
and its source in theories of "regional underdevelopment"
(formulated at the Cold War's height in the late 1950s), suggests
this may be the case. Especially disturbing is the outlook
underlying that theory, and specifically its extreme pragmatism and
welter of contradictions and inconsistencies. These disclose a
position entirely at odds with the proclaimed mission to establish
the truth of matters under investigation. In order to maintain a
position in what they see as the mainstream today, some of these
writers have taken matters further, adapting to fit the cut of
current discourse in the early 2000s some of the concerns raised in
the earlier work. En route, however, they make a major concession
to the disinformation of the Canadian fisheries department that
"there are too many fishermen chasing too few fish". Disguising the
concession as an appeal for "ecological sanity" in the face of a
pending environmental crisis of raw material food supplies during a
period of still-excessive capitalization in the coastal fishing
industry, those putting forward this argument decline to challenge
the claims by the government and the largest fish processors that
the problem at bottom is a shortage of raw material, a defect in
Nature. As, however, the problem is actually one of how Humanity
has arranged its affairs when it comes to extremely fundamental
matters like food-gathering, this concession, no less than any of
the other more direct attacks on time consciousness and on
cognition as a source of reliable information, forms part of a far
more general and sweeping assault on the very concept of human
agency. This assault challenges the fundamental notion that no
human social problem is without some human social solution. The
fact of the matter is that the essence of human social agency lies
on the path of pursuing knowledge. Whosoever would increase
knowledge is bound to disturb the status quo, but even so, a person
must increase his knowledge of the truth.
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