A Guide For The Perplexed - E.F. Schumacher

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"While the logical mind abhors divergent problems and tries to run away from them, the higher faculties of man accept the challenges of life as they are offered, without complaint, knowing that when things are most contradictory, absurd, difficult, and frustrating, then, just then, life really makes sense: as a mechanism providing and almost forcing us to develop toward higher Levels of Being." (135)


"...faith in modern man's omnipotence is wearing thin. Even if all the new problems were solved by technological fixes, the state of futility, disorder, and corruption would remain. It existed before the present crisis became acute, and it will not go away by itself. More and more people are beginning to realize that the "modern experiment" has failed. It received its early impetus from what I have called the Cartesian revolution, which, with implacable logic, separated man from those higher levels that alone can maintain his humanity. Man closed the gates of heaven against himself and tried, with immense energy and ingenuity, to confine himself to the Earth. He is now discovering that the Earth is but a transitory state, so that a refusal to reach for Heaven means an involuntary descent into Hell." (139)