Industrializing the Poor...good or bad idea?

I think your point of view has a built-in belief that modern life is better than traditional life. I'm not telling you what I thought. I didn't like it that much. I like, for example, having toilet paper. I like being able to drink water without getting violently sick. I don't like having flies all over everything all the time. I like having air conditioning and refrigeration. I am definitely Westernized.

I'm telling you what these particular people told me. They told me their food was better than my food. They told me they'd been to Bangkok. They'd been to Europe. They've got degrees, they've had office jobs. They told me their medicine could cure things that Western medicine couldn't cure. They told me they lived the way they did because they thought it was better. And, really, I started to agree with them. They told me that we're throwing away everything good in life for some conveniences and some improvements and a whole bunch of stuff we don't need and a whole bunch of stuff that actually hurts us, hurts our families and makes us weak.

These people aren't providing resources to Western countries. They're subsistence farmers sustaining their families and neighbors in one of the richest, most fertile regions of the world. The reason they don't do more is because they don't need to. They know how to say, "enough." That, in fact, was their #1 criticism of the West. We are ruining our lives because we can never say, "enough."

 

Word.

 

Nice post!

 

Industry today is most prevalent in the Third World and completely decadent in the First, so I don't know what you guys are fucking talking about.

 

I mean bumping third world countries up to our status.

 

Very poor choice of words. So you mean, making poor countries wealthy.

Well, anyone who doesn't see the obvious benefit of that is a First World hippie ideologue.

 

They're talking about agrarian nations of which there are many.

 

Standing,

No, I wasn't contending that the place you visited wasn't genuine. I'm very heartened to know that these places exist. The !kung bushmen are probably the most famous example of people who have been able to retain a high quality of life through ancient ways of life, but they still have to contend with the influences of the outside world. Still, the prospering, autonomous indigenous community is the exception to the rule.

It seems you have some very great experiences with this stuff, as do I. Personally, I've also lived and experienced the high quality of life that can be had with very meager means. The problem is that, in practice, these places are easily sullied by the influences of industrialization.

A point I was trying to make in my post previous to my response to yours was that these societies don't exist in a bubble. They are very vulnerable to exploitation for resources, political gain, and labor.

Often(usually?), these societies become unwilling and voraciously consumed participants in industrialization. When outside entities come in without regard for the indigenous societies, their activites strip resources, introduce negative influences(disease, alcohol, improper nutrition, etc), and, when they are finished, leave the area in a condition where survival by traditional methods is no longer viable. Look at Africa for diamonds, India for labor and goods, China for goods and labor, Malayasia for seafood, Tibet for political strife, S. American for timber and manufacturing plants with less strict enviro laws. All these places have been used for resources without fair and sustainable renumeration to the communities that are affected.

So, if we could just "leave these villages alone" so to speak, they could probably maintain a very good quality of life. The problem is that industrialized nations, by definition, need a source of resource above and beyond what can be provided internally. So, western countries go shopping at the cheapest place possible and without regards to the environment or those who live in it.

I don't personally see this exploitation stopping anytime soon. That is why I think that the whole idea of happy villagers in a bubble is a romantic fallacy. Maybe I'm just more jaded than you?

Yes, the western world has no sense of "zen affluence." We always want more, but very little is needed to live well.

Cheers

 

Great post, Ahimsa. I better understand what you're getting at.

I really don't know. I know that the people in Thailand that I spent my time with pretty much worshipped King Bumiphol. They believe that he has been the power that has kept the bubble for them. They believe he has done this by making strategic concessions in the larger cities. Also, the people themselves have resisted much of the intrusion of international business. One of the great helps, besides the vigorous Thai love for tradition, is the fact that no one born outside of Thailand can own Thai land. This prevents corporate farming companies from turning all of the land-owning farmers into wage-earners. Also, Thailand does not charge a property tax on farm land and residential land. This keeps farmers from becoming buried in debt.
The Thai believe they have chiefly King Bumiphol to thank for this. Now that he is very old, there is a great deal of concern about exactly these issues. They don't have much faith in the heir apparent.

 

Well, countries like America, Canada, Germany exc. are called Industrialized countries. The industry is available to mostly everybody and theres a lot of it.
So I actually did word it right.

 

I agree. I think Cherea was trying to reword the argument so as to make a particular stance indisputable.

 

No, industrial goods are available in First World societies (for now). Industry has actually been stripped away from the lives of people in those societies in favor of consumerism, debt, burgeoning deficits, increasing inequality, service jobs without stability, benefits, or unionization, financial speculation, and inflation.

 

My particular stance being that the 800 million people who are starving in the world as we speak are not as particularly happy as First World romantic primitivists would like to believe?

 

Its just what were called. We, along with Canada and a lot of europe, are considered Industrialized.

 

Women are considered the weaker sex.

 

No, i mean their name. Their class. In my old history class there were 3 classes of country.
Industrialized, developing(or something like that), and poverty(or something like that).
Thats just their classes.
I'm obviously not explaining this very clearly...

 

You are. I have heard the terminology before. What you don't seem to understand is that it's a misnomer.

 

Blahhh. This doesn't matter. Its just a name.

 

I think, Cherea, that there is a way of provide 800 million starving people with a means of self-support that does not involve spreading globalist consumer culture and modern middle-class lifestyles all over the world.

The idea is that in the attempt to (or in the name of) helping those who are starving, whole ways of life are being forever eradicated.

No one's saying that people should starve. But using those people as an excuse for the global expansion of corporate imperialism is wrong.