What’s wrong with the world? Rationality! A critique of economic anthropology in the spirit of Jean Gebser

Peter Pogany

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a multidisciplinary thinker whose ideas about human consciousness and the future inspire the following five vantage points for the heterodox critique of contemporary economic anthropology: (1) Characteristic attributes of consciousness and those of the environment surrounding the individual are equivalent, eliminating the possibility of single-minded, seamless, rational control, especially during macrohistoric phase transitions; (2) Diaphaneity as a mode of deep and comprehensive understanding (an approach that excludes latching on to any selectively focused explanation) will be needed to deal effectively with emerging global resource and environmental problems; (3) Costs in the form of irreversibly accumulating inaccessible energy shadows our evolving civilization, which our cultural conditioning portrays as pure progress; (4) Rationality, as the most laudable motivation for individuals, business firms and nations, has led to an unfounded techno-fetish; and, for various reasons, it fuels accelerated movement toward collective self-destruction; (5) Signs of chaos (not the harmless and controllable kind found in standard economic literature) corroborate the notion that we have entered a new period of macrohistoric phase transition as interpreted by the thermodynamic comprehension of universal history.

Keywords: Jean Gebser; global economy; universal history; resource constraints; entropy law; bifurcation; chaos theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B29 N01 P00 P51 Q01 Z10 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-11-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-hpe and nep-pke
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/26870/1/MPRA_paper_26870.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27221/1/MPRA_paper_27221.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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