Publisher's Synopsis
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.
