Uneven Development

'We should consider it a universal responsibility of human beings to learn to turn their capacity for directing our attention away from ourselves-this permanent orientation towards new possibilities, towards new ventures-back in the direction of the vast, balance-sustaining rhythm of the natural order.'

---Gadamer.

_________________

The imbalance, the one-sidedness of the modern world, the topsy-turvy world that doesn't just lead to an inversion of our usual orientation, our "up" and "down", but to a forgetting of these distinctions. In the friction-less world of late capitalism everything can be traded for something else; commoditification is preceded by the process of things being made commensurable. 

'Formal equality,' our abstract models of exchange maintain. But old Edgeworth didn't take into account money, credit, time or uncertainty. Aren't we really in an asymmetric world where those with the time, (better) information and capital (itself accumulated over time) are in an unequal situation with regards the rest? 

Debt, and the structure of property that sustains it, means there will always be fundamental disparities, uneven developments, the damned and the saved. Ruskin saw this back in 1862: the rich are rich because they can command labour, wealth is a form of control. The tide will raise all boats? Really? It's more likely that the coming Tsunami will sink us all.