We’ve wandered together through why we need to deschool society, and how we might do so in a great degree of detail. Now, it’s time to return to Illich’s stated goal: “break the spell of this economy and shape a new one.” In order to assist us in this grand endeavour, we will turn to E. F. Schumacher and his heart-opening book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Really Mattered. First, let’s sum up where we are:

This advertising agency sells the idea that we cannot fulfil our own, native needs and thereby rise higher in terms of our ability to understand independently (that is, based on our own, lived experience) the patterns within both self and the world. If we believe the lie that we are born not able to fulfil our own needs, then inevitably this pollutes the environment, polarises our relationships, and renders us psychologically impotent, because these are not different things. We are each other’s environment: physically, culturally, spiritually. So it is that a study of economics which centres people begins with an appreciation of the impact we have on our shared environment:

Such are the results of a schooled society: this collective paradigm within which we live. Now we intend to take one step further, for our current paradigm is not only schooled, it is schooled at scale. We are globally domesticated. However, evolution reminds us that domestication has two effects: it decreases natural resilience, but it also breeds diversity (think of the number of different dogs living on your street alone). If we can honour our diversity, and use plurality as a means of fostering resilience and independent creativity, we can perhaps overturn some of the myths currently causing large-scale cultural myopia.

Illich recalls the old Greek myth of Prometheus–so often referenced in high technology circles as the hero who stole fire from the gods–but focuses instead on the part about his brother Epimetheus, who falls in love with Pandora, staying with her even once evil is released into the world, and therefore staying in loving relationship with the hope that remains in her amphora.

Illich recommends we call such people “Epimethean”. E. F. Schumacher will describe them as “home-comers”. Whichever word you prefer–or feel free to make one that recasts your own self-image in more loving relationship with the environment you inhabit, which habituates you–it’s time to turn to economics (literally meaning ‘home management’) and think it through again based on all we’ve learnt together, in dialogue, over the years in which we have run this program.

Schumacher begins with what he considers one of our most fateful modern errors: the belief that the problem of production has been solved. He claims that this belief stems from a philosophical and religious change in our perception of humanity’s relationship to nature.

Schumacher’s book is a masterpiece because it uses the language of economics, while simultaneously illuminating the metaphysical assumptions inherent in how we model and perceive the world. The distinction between capital and income is immediately relatable to any economist, but his simple insight that we treat as income the irreplaceable capital provided by Earth reveals in one stroke the means by which the spell of modern economics (which we are trying to break) is cast.

Using language relevant to the nature of the problem goes to the heart of what it means to place education once more in proper relationship to meaningful environments. Schumacher begins his work with a quantified argument–based on the use of fossil fuels and the growing population–to make a qualitative point that indicates the very crux of the matter, much like Illich:

Schumacher specifies three categories of natural asset which we mistakenly treat as income, as if it were not irreplaceable: fossil fuels, the tolerance margins of the planet, and ‘human substance’, another point at which he and Illich agree fundamentally. He advocates that we each take personal responsibility for new methods of production and new patterns of consumption:

The phrase “interest ourselves” provides a neat way to avoid putting blame on individuals instead of where it rightly belongs (largely, multinational corporations), while not denying the agency each one of us has to participate in the kind of society which cares for people and the ways in which we form each other’s environment.

“We often hear it said that we are entering the era of ‘the Learning Society’. Let us hope this is true. We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us; for, assuredly, we have not come about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves.”

Much like Illich outlines the four myths of school, Schumacher–having described the mistaken belief that we have solved the problem of production–takes on the “dominant modern belief that the soundest foundation of peace would be universal prosperity [...] This has an almost irresistible attraction as it suggests that the faster you get one desirable thing the more securely do you attain another. It is doubly attractive because it completely by-passes the whole question of ethics: there is no need for renunciation or sacrifice.”

In particular, he quotes Keynes, who wrote the somewhat unbelievable words, “For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

We know already from Illich that the school (advertising agency) is responsible for instilling this sense of necessity which we do not have the inborn capacity to solve ourselves. Schumacher is here showing how some of the ‘greatest’ thinkers trained in such schools report that ethics is not merely irrelevant, but actually a hindrance. In order to untangle this, he breaks up the belief we have about the link between prosperity and peace into three fallacies:

1. Universal prosperity is possible
2. That its attainment is possible on the basis of the materialist philosophy of ‘enrich yourselves’
3. This is the road to peace

The first claim leads us to the question, “Is there enough to go round?” which begs the deeper question, “What is enough?” Who can tell us? “Certainly not the economist,” writes Schumacher, “who pursues ‘economic growth’ as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of enough.” Lacking any appropriately modern ethical source, Schumacher demonstrates how the growth in demand which results from everyone having ‘more’ raises questions around two key factors: the availability of natural resources and the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied (which disproves the second point above). Looking once more at the the ill-conceived essay of Keynes, Schumacher suggests that:

Here is the small seed we each need to sow in the manure of our own experience. It is not a universal question of manipulating others (or our shared environment) for their own salvation. It is the particular, simple, and straightforward question: “What is enough?” Schumacher reminds us that:

Again, Schumacher is careful not to remain only in the metaphysical, but to discipline his language with practical suggestions legible to scientists and economists working in his day and age. In particular, he suggests a need for methods and equipment which are:

In other words, we need convivial tools for spontaneous use within opportunity webs. The link here to Illich’s thinking goes deep, for Schumacher will later write (as he examines Buddhist philosophy):

Nor are Illich and Schumacher alone in this. Gandhi pointed out that machines which work with us and lighten the load of certain strenuous and repetitive tasks are acceptable, but there is a great ethical danger in larger, more expensive machines which “concentrate power in a few hands and turn the masses into mere machine minders.” This same wisdom may be found in all the great traditions of humankind, and we know of no more succinct statement of this urgent ethical idea than Chapter 80 of the Tao te Ching, appropriately entitled “Freedom”:

“Above anything else,” Schumacher writes, “there is the need for a proper philosophy of work which understands work not as that which it has indeed become, an inhuman chore as soon as possible to be abolished by automation, but as something ‘decreed by Providence for the good of body and soul.”

This is all wonderful on the individual level, but how are we to create an economics of permanence which are the foundations for peace? Permanence can only be dogmatic in a world entangled with time and its many changes. There can be no permanent foundation to anything–just ask Ozymandias–unless what we are speaking of exists outside time. How are we to find the strength for this seemingly impossible and timeless journey? Gandhi described it well, pointing out that only the soul has a timeless nature, and is therefore permanent, which attracts and founds eternal wisdom. Even more importantly,