Karl Hess: Toward Liberty - Clip 6: Alternative Technology

Today, more and more people wanna live in more independent self-reliant, less institutional way.

The kind of tools and techniques that

are chosen to support that way of life have been given a name:

"Alternative" or "Appropriate Technology"

You can have a free society.

The tools and techniques appropriate to that

will be of a certain kind.

Not a certain kind in the sense of the behind technology or low technology,

but be a certain kind in the sense that they can be developed

and deployed, maintained by the people involved

so the justice there, their politics is participatory,

so is their material base.

Some people think appropriate technology means

making your own candles and wearing a lot of beads

and saying "wow" a lot.

It would seem to me it's the other way around - appropriate technology means that you gotta know more than all those people in MIT.

They can make a gadget that is just plain dumb!

And there's always GM and the US government to support it.

If anybody says that I'm a leader in alternative technologies,

I would tell they're absolutely wrong. I'm neither a leader nor a follower, I'm a practitioner.

And all the people that I know who are involved in this take it as one of the most important points

that there are no leaders - only practitioners.

My teaching - if it is indeed teaching - is about an attitude, it's called "beginner's mind".

What it means simply is approaching every problem... open, like a child.

With no pre-conceptions, trying to understand the problem wholly,

and then using the entire universe of knowledge for the answer.

The world demands of people that they know more and not less

about their entire environment. The environment isn't just trees and bunny rabbits.

The environment is ideas, the environment is machines, the environment is just a (central real living ?).

To the extent that you think anything is too complicated for you,

or too worrisome, "it's too boring", "I don't wanna get involved with that",

you become - intend to be victimized by.

This does not mean that everybody has to know everything,

but it certainly suggests that you should know something about most things.

A lot of people look at today's huge commercial mass production technology,

and they (think ?) it'll always be here.

My feeling is that's the way the cockroach must have once looked at the dinosaur.

It looks up to this thing and then says:

"Oh my God! That thing is too big it'll be with us forever and the best we can do is just (dug ?)."

And the same thing I think is true of the big technologies - like a dinosaur:

Big tail, swishes around, knocks everything over but the brains is the size of a pea - and it too shall pass.