
Posted on February 10, 2012 at 07:42 PM in Wailing Wall | Post a comment |
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Posted on February 9, 2012 at 07:50 PM in Energy | Post a comment |
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Posted on February 8, 2012 at 06:44 PM in Politics | Post a comment |
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Posted on February 7, 2012 at 06:43 PM in V3-Day | Post a comment |
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Author Simone Perotti's Passaparola:
Thinking, examining and making changes.
Good day to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s Blog. My name is Simone Perotti. I’m an author who worked in a company for 19 years before deciding to spend all of my time writing and sailing. I became a sailor in order to survive before my books began to become successful and to this day I continue to be a sailor, a skipper if you will, as well as a sailing instructor. I also clean boats and I do anything else that is related to the sea. Everything we do in life we normally do for one of two reasons, either for love or because we are forced to, in which case, any downsizing will no longer be the result of a personal choice as it has been for many people in recent years, in fact more so than what we may think, but rather the result of necessity since the great promise made by the System, namely that we would all leave the countryside and eventually even the factories to live in the city, and we would all have a collar and tie, a desk, a motorcar, a house and a middle class life will never materialise and is never going to happen. The system is no longer in a position to drain all the working resources to which it once had easy access, so it cannot provide what it promised and it can no longer provide wellbeing as promised so, in other words, it was either just one big lie or at least a serious error of judgement. The most serious and most unpleasant thing about the way things stand at the moment is the fact that the main role players in this system, the ones that actually conceived it and developed it are not doing any soul-searching whatsoever. I would perhaps still be prepared to accept the errors that were made and accept that it was all done in good faith … but now, unfortunately, things have become all too clear and what we need to hear is someone saying “We made a mistake!” We cannot accept a system such as this capitalist system that promises wellbeing for all and is then unable to deliver what has been promised, so our current capitalist system needs to be reviewed, and that’s something that people like Berlinguer, Pasolini and many others were already talking about back in 1977.
But no one listened to them. The time has come to do some serious soul-searching, yet neither Monti nor anyone else is doing any soul-searching and this is not a good thing. People cannot simply be expected to accept a change of direction without the leader admitting that mistakes were made in the first place.
There is no question that this downsizing has to take place and it is going to involve taking 1, 2, 3, 4 or perhaps 10 steps backward, which is obviously not going to be a painless process. When something is done for love, the motivation is strong and there is a certain amount of conviction involved. However, something that is done through necessity is different. These things have to be done without delay, immediately, even though these steps backward are going to be difficult for everyone that hasn’t been able to plan for them. Those people who have been living in a more sustainable manner for some time already, trying to consume less and spending less time at work because the extra income was not actually essential for living, in other words, those who have thought about the problem of consuming less, being more free and not having to work quite as hard, but doing just what is necessary in order to live, are now going to be far better off. The system needs to be changed because it is unsustainable and because there is another way that has to be looked at. It seems to me that our intellectuals and our economists have not made any attempt to come up with a new, workable system. We went from being a monarchy to being a Republic by first developing the political theory of Republicanism, a move away from feudalism and other earlier systems, by developing a new concept of organisation, but this is the first time in history that we will be changing from one system to another without anyone having sat down and theorised first, except perhaps for a few marginalised and vilified downsizing theorists who have given this some thought.
In any event, we have to change, even in the absence of any sort of guidelines, and this places the onus squarely on the shoulders of individuals who, as individuals, have to think it through, examine the options and then bring about change.
Getting back in touch with reality
Downsizing does not mean sitting on the couch and doing nothing all day, or not working simply for the satisfaction of being a lazy slob. Downsizing is a new model for development, not a plan for involution or non participation in the daily liturgy of an economy that is condemned to either grow or collapse. It doesn’t mean not having anything else to do and indeed not wishing to do anything at all. What it means is doing just enough and no more, consuming only what is actually necessary and no more, envisaging a kind of development of our Country that is based on different things since our Country has no energy resources or mineral wealth, and based on other things that are far more important, such as our landscapes and our many abandoned villages that need to be recovered. New construction is not possible because we don’t have the room, so we have to recover our earlier and even ancient buildings that are just sitting there waiting to be renovated, inter alia also in order to protect the land from the landslides and ground collapses that are increasingly becoming regular events. What we need to do is to clean up this Country so as to turn it into a garden and to clean up our seas. Simply cleaning up our coastline and our seas will keep tens of thousands of people busy for a good long time, while turning this Country into a veritable mecca for tourism and the hotel trade. We need to produce electricity in a different manner because things simply have to be powered by energy other than that obtained by burning hydrocarbons. There are many things that need to be done, but the problem is that no one is currently developing any plans without any philosophical flights of fantasy.
For me the choice was very simple. I worked for 19 years and I even had a pretty good career. I began as a temporary worker and in the end I landed up as a manager. I was very fortunate. I worked very hard and I believed everything that I was told, namely that if I worked hard and gave my all I would reap the benefits of the widespread growth. At a certain point, however, one day I simply realised that this was not so. I was working extremely hard, as a matter of fact all I was doing was working and I no longer had any time left to do the things that are important to me. The money that all my hard work brought in was needed to purchase useless things and indeed, more often than not, I was driven to spend money that I didn’t even have, using credit facilities to purchase things that I had to have in order to impress heaven alone knows who. This system was not bringing me any wellbeing at all, so at that point one has to do one’s sums and ask oneself “Is what I am doing making me feel good? Am I happy?”. I believe that life is like a recipe and a good recipe does not consist of only one ingredient, it needs many ingredients that are well mixed and well balanced and although this is merely my personal opinion, that was no longer my situation. I’m standing here wearing 4 or 5 jerseys, one on top of the other, because my house is ice-cold since I don’t have any central heating. All I can do is burn wood in the fireplace and that’s how I keep warm, standing a metre and a half away from the fireplace. As I move away from the fire, the house is ice-cold, but this has no effect whatsoever on my happiness or unhappiness, it’s simply a choice that I have made.
Every time I need to buy something, I tie myself to a cost that involves me becoming a slave and since these are not the things that make me truly happy, I would rather live with the problem of feeling cold in winter or having to resort to putting in a major effort to chop wood in order to warm myself up. I have realised that this kind of hard work is not something that is to be avoided at all costs, but rather something that is to be welcomed because all that lack of hard work that I perceive as being a comfortable office in Milan, or a hyper-heated home that swallows up tons of crude oil on a daily basis, that way of life, that lack of effort is not an indispensable resource and, if anything, everyone needs to do a good bit of hard work in life because that is what keeps us in touch with reality.
It was possible to change lifestyle. It would have been enough to spend less, reduce your personal consumption and it would have been enough to live in a place where homes cost 300 Euro per square metre and not 6-thousand Euro like in the big towns and where, just in passing, it costs you far less to do the shopping and where you are not obliged to eat out in restaurants 4 times a week and spend 6 or 7-Thousand Euro a year but you can cook at home instead. Here in La Spezia I eat fish morning, noon and night because that is one of the things that costs less and it is absolutely doable. My electricity bill for two months amounts to 15 or 18 Euro, I produce a good part of what I eat and yet I can still do far more, especially since I have just begun. This is just the beginning of a whole new life. I’m finding it hard, by all means, and over time I will learn to do other things even better, but it is by no means impossible. The only life that is impossible is the one that they tell us we should live, life in a big town doing jobs that we certainly would not have chosen if we had followed our true passion, earning money and seeking certainty. But how on earth can you seek certainty in a life in which the only real certainty is that we will die by the time we get to 90 years of age? Am I going to die any earlier just because I changed job? I too will die at 90, but at least in the meantime I will have tried my best to live because the other option would be death. These are our fears, fed by the advertising and disinformation, which would have us believe that if you leave your job, you’re screwed and if you opt out of the System you will never be able to go back.
Taking back our time
The rarest commodity around is time. Time, however, has one particularity, namely that while it is said that even money comes and goes, time goes and that’s it. Seneca knew this only too well two thousand years ago already, as did the pre-Socratics, the philosophy that has attempted to steer mankind in certain directions over time, and universal culture. We are the only ones that don’t appear to have realised this yet so, as if we had all the time in the world, we seem to continue to waste time from morning to evening throughout our life, doing things that don’t matter, in an attempt to live our lives in the most original and authentic manner possible, as if we have so much time to blow anyway and the time will come to do the things that really count. But the truth is that the perfect time will never come because that time is now. From now until then, assuming of course that that time will indeed come, we will have wasted time and this simple concept is reason enough for us to seek to change our own way of life. Since I stopped going to the office every day and began living on very little, I have tried to make the best possible use of my time. I live in a very different way and I feel a lot better for it because I now have lots of plans and lots of dreams to fulfil. The time at my disposal is now spent entirely on fulfilling those dreams, it is all for me and for the people that I love, who I can now finally go and visit. How sad are those telephone conversations, often with our best friend rather than a mere acquaintance, as and when we contact each other and the half of our conversation goes something like this: “Hi, how are you? It’s been too long, but you know how it goes…we really should get together again one of these evenings and spend some time together”, knowing full well that it’s not going to happen because we spend all of our time in the company of people that we never chose in the first place, more often than not with work colleagues that have been imposed on us and that we would dearly love to strangle with our bare hands but don’t, thank the Lord.
All that time is a treasure that we have wasted and that should make us lie awake at night, just thinking about how guilty we are of wasting so much time. One of the most urgent things that we have to do, crisis or no crisis, is precisely to take back control over our time and to try to live what we have left of our short time on Earth to the fullest because the truth is that we may not live to be 90, we could just as well die tomorrow due to illness or some other perfectly normal cause, something that actually happens to many. Furthermore, there are certain people walking around who are extremely superstitious and refuse to talk about such things. Now I don’t know where these people come from, perhaps from the Middle Ages, but those of us who, I trust, are modern people, can calmly discuss the fact that we could realistically die at any moment and we know not when that moment will be. The Gospel warns us to “Stay alert for ye know not when nor whence…”. Now I’m not Catholic, in fact I’m anticlerical, but I must admit that that is great book that we should somehow listen to.
Goodbye all and spread the word!
Posted on February 7, 2012 at 07:26 AM in Information | Post a comment |
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Posted on February 5, 2012 at 08:25 PM in Wailing Wall | Post a comment |
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