>Doug Henwood:
>> I'm hoping that complexity could come without authoritarianism and
>> hierarchy. I would not like to live in a "simpler" society, if that
>> meant no antibiotics or fiber optics. So, I guess I'm trying to evade
>> the forced binary, though I really wonder if I can.
>
>Well, you're missing all the wonderful inventions the 23nd
>century will bring us. Eating your heart out?
Walter Benjamin wrote: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature, writes Lotze, is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future. Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption" (at <http://iwebs.upol.cz/kw/texts/history.htm>).
Yoshie