The Dirty Truth About Industrialization

There is a tendency in some circles to bemoan the industrialization of the world. How does the song put it? "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"... what a vivid image!

Now here's the real story. For all of human history from the beginning of civilization on, every society on Earth used slavery to accomplish their goals, and for a very simple reason -- do you want to build your pyramid, Cheops? So despite the fact that as Frederick Douglass put it "there is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him," slavery nonetheless remained an entrenched human institution for thousands of years. It was, so they say, a "necessary evil."

Until when? Until the Industrial Revolution. With the development of machines that could do the physical work that captive humans were doing, slavery was an evil that was no longer necessary. And amazingly enough, right at this time for the first time in history abolitionist movements popped up at various points along the globe independently of one another. A perceptible shift in the zeitgeist that led (ostensibly) to the end of slavery. And why? Because of industrialization. Big sooty factories and sludge pipes in rivers. Tell the Lorax he can kiss my ass.

Superstitions

"To attempt to be reasonable amongst unreasonable men is itself an unreasonable endeavour." - proverb

I was driving down Red School House Road when the black cat suddenly darted out in front of me. I braked, swerved, and managed to avoid hitting it. As I continued to drive, I recalled the old saw about black cats crossing your path and as a preventative measure I pulled the lucky cigarette out of my pack and lit it.

Make your own comparisons, contrasts and conclusions. Battling ancient superstitions (the black cat) with modern ones (the lucky cigarette) is all well and good but superstitions are still superstitions. We are a superstitious (and cowardly) lot, humans, with such an advanced capacity for reason but still as robotic and programmed as one of Skinner's textbook pigeons. This is why thousand of years into our development we are still living in the Dark Ages.

The truth is I don't believe black cats are bad luck; I once had a black cat and it wasn't until she left my path that my luck tailspun. The truth is that I don't believe in the power of the lucky cigarette either; all cigarettes are bad luck, a locus for bad karma and negative thought-patterns. So what sympathetic magic was I attempting to invoke on the twilit Red School House Road? Grateful that I had not stained my soul with this animal's death, I chose to stain my lungs with smoke and hasten my own.

On the way home I thought, I must write about this. An urge, a compulsion. A drive, if you'll forgive the awkward attempt at double-meaning and pun.