Manifesto of the Non-Industrial World

We call ourselves the Non-Industrial people of the world.

The industrial world disgorges hourly wages, work weeks, equipment maintenance, oppressive governments backed by arms and prisons, offices, factories, tariffs, and shipping. It worships Progress. Progress is our Nemisis. We deeply love our traditions. Ancient traditions nurture our people, we have relished life for eons.

We are many of the people Michael Phillips met in Cuba, Puebla Mexico, Guatemala, Mali, Cameroon, Nepal, Afghanistan, India and Laos. We begged him to understand that we don't want the industrial world. Some of us graduated from Harvard and Oxford; we begged from him the same thing.Michael listened to us. Listen to what Michael writes. Please.

What we do want? Most people misinterpret us because of what we want. We enjoy cheap durable fabrics (denim), good metals, music (tapes and tape recorders); pens, adding machines and so forth. For several millenia we have bought and traded items we wanted in trade-type commerce. We want to continue trade commerce. You misinterpret us and think our commodity tastes show a desire for industrial commerce. Blue jeans don't equal trucks and roads. They don't. Let us buy some commodities, don't force industrial commerce on us as a requirement.

We also crave health and freedom from many horrible plagues, childhood and maternal illnesses and deformities. Don't tie our health necessities to acceptance of your religions (missionarys are still common in most of the world demanding religious conversion in return for medical care) and to your ideology of industrial commerce. We will chose how we build and use health facilities, by ourselves. We don't understand any need to build roads, telephones and dams to open a clinic.

Do you hear what we are talking about?

Please stop building roads and saying we need them to get schools and clinics, it's not true. The roads destroy our long established social systems. Stop saying you need to build dams to generate electricity to have radios and TV and a central government. The dams are destructive to our rivers, we don't want your kind of plutocratic government and we are happy with tape recorders and batteries.

The same goes for all the minerals and resources you mine and extract. We might not be using those resources if your weren't here, but your extraction destroys our hills, rivers, flora and fauna. Stop! We don't want the jobs your mining brings. The hourly 9 to 5, 40 hours a week, year-round work is not for us.

We also don't appreciate the legal structures that your "best and brightest" think tank geniuses claim should be crammed down our throats to become modern. They like property laws, we don't. You force property laws on us. What happens is that a few of our young people go off to urban areas, save money and come back to use property laws to buy the center of our villages and try to make themselves important. Very destructive. Very.

There are probably many good arguments why you shouldn't continue to treat us as "pre-industrial" people. We are Non-Industrial people. We want to stay that way. The main reason you should leave us alone is out of respect for the diversity of human life.

You have countless reasons why you are right and we are wrong, stupid, backward and ignorant. Please, if you can't understand what we are saying, please in the name of your own Gods, just leave us alone.

 

Michael Phillips, Jan. 2002