Starvation is Logical (to change the world, change the logic)

Sunday 12th August 2001

By the time you finish this sentence, someone will have died a horrible death that could have been easily prevented for the cost of the sheet of printed paper that you are reading from. This much is common knowledge, although we often shut it from our minds in order to cope with being alive in such times. What is not commonly acknowledged is that the pitiful state of the majority of humanity is not an accident, not an abberation, not the unfortunate but correctable result of a few bad apples in charge of the pharmaceutical manufacturers or the arms dealers. The most foul horrors of the modern world are logical: they follow perfectly rationally from the organisation of our society, of all societies on the planet. We live in a social system in which profit is the most important of all imperatives, and, this being true, human suffering is always eventually and necessarily an irrelevance.

The horrors of the modern world are not an accident; they are a necessary consequence of the logic of our social system. Starvation, terrorism, rape, war and famine. None of them are accidents, none of them simply the product of 'evil'. These are all logical consequences of the current organisation of our world. To change it we have to change that logic.