LOGIC

“Is man the master of nature or its child? Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.” 

― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered

“In capitalism economic activity, success, material gains, become ends in themselves. It becomes man’s fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself. Man became a cog in the vast economic machine – an important one if he had much capital, an insignificant one if he had none – but always a cog to serve a purpose outside of himself.”

"We live in an economic system in which a particularly good crop is often an economic disaster, and we restrict some of our agricultural productivity in order to "stabilize the market," although there are millions of people who do not have the very things we restrict, and who need them badly. We have reduced the average working hours to about half what they were one hundred years ago. We today have more free time available than our forefathers dared to dream of. But what has happened? We do not know how to use the newly gained free time; we try to kill the time we have saved, and are glad when another day is over. Could it be that the middle-class life of prosperity, while satisfying our material needs leaves us with a feeling of intense boredom, and that suicide and alcoholism are pathological ways of escape from this boredom?"

― Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from Freedom

Logic for Freedom

These are the outstanding questions that arise when we look at the human aspect of freedom, the longing for submission, and the lust for power: What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature?  What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat?

― Eric Fromm: Escape from Freedom

Logic for Self Sufficiency + Weapons

Hard-work alone does not guarantee survival as there is very little meaning to have the capacity to produce but lack the necessary means to protect what you produce. The need for weapons is undeniable.

"As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other's throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade. Therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale."

― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Logic of Job

The purpose of working for the sake of working. Do you live to work? Or do you work to live?

Logic of Money

The purpose of securing money for the sake of getting more money despite diminishing marginal utility.

"The conventional wisdom of what is now taught as economics by-passes the poor, the very people for whom development is really needed. The economics of gigantism and automation is a left-over of nineteenth-century conditions and nineteenth-century thinking and it is totally incapable of solving any of the real problems of today. An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods."

― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Logic of Education

The purpose of an education

“One may look in vain for historical evidence that the rich have regularly been more peaceful than the poor, but then it can be argued that they have never felt secure against the poor: that their aggressiveness stemmed from fear; and that the situation would be quite different if everybody were rich. Why should a rich man go to war? He has nothing to gain. Are not the poor, the exploited the oppressed most likely to do so, as they have nothing to lose but their chains? The road to peace, it is argued, is to follow the road to riches."

― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Logic of Religion

The impossibility of aligning Logic with Faith. The courage to face up to the limitations of human intellectual capacity and accept our ignorance beyond certain dimensions. Just like the way we accepted our own physical limitations of not being able to fly freely like a bird and not get too upset over being born without wings.

Logic for Technology

“If we feel the need of machine, we certainly will have them. Every machine that helps every individual has a place,' he said, ‘but there should be no place for machines that concentrate power in a few hands and turn the masses into mere machine minders, if indeed they do not make them unemployed. It is moreover obvious that men organised in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomaniac governments which pre-tend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry. The trouble about valuing means above ends - which, as confirmed by Keynes, is the attitude of modern economics - is that it destroys man's freedom and power to choose the ends he really favours; the development of means, as it were, dictates the choice of ends.

Obvious examples are the pursuit of supersonic transport speeds and the immense efforts made to land men on the moon. The conception of these aims was not the result of any insight into real human needs and aspirations, which technology is meant to serve, but solely of the fact that the necessary technical means appeared to be available."

― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Logic for Purpose

The purpose of having a purpose. Everlasting issue which one struggles with to seek justification for existence.

"...the need to “belong” so compelling: the fact of subjective self-consciousness, of the faculty of thinking by which man is aware of himself as an individual entity, different from nature and other people. its existence confronts man with a problem which is essentially human: by being aware of himself as distinct from nature and other people, by being aware—even very dimly—of death, sickness, aging, he necessarily feels his insignificance and smallness in comparison with the universe and all others who are not “he.” Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance. He would not be able to relate himself to any system which would give meaning and direction to his life, he would be filled with doubt, and this doubt eventually would paralyze his ability to act—that is, to live."

― Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom

Logic for Power

Power over one own self (self preservation)  vs  the Power over others.

Between the 2, only the former does not violate the "Humanity as an End in Itself" principle

Logic for Anarchism 

"We taught the world a lesson. Whatever else, we were able to show that it is possible to live without government because there was none and yet the collectives worked, everything worked, everything functional, by mutual agreement."

"The rich said that there were 500 workers too many. The workers said that there were 5 too many. After the 5 disappeared, there was work for everyone. One day, town of Membrilla went from poor to rich ~rich because they have all the bread it wanted while before there was always hunger. They proved they didn't need the police, they didn't need the rich, they didn't need priests to live well. Unemployment was fought by increasing jobs or just by hiring extra workers and dividing up the work between everyone."

― Vivir la utopia (Documentary) ~ Humanity as an end in itself

Logic of Capitalism

System of valuing money (Control through fiat currency) over real wealth / humans through monopoly of land and the creation of artificial scarcity.