Crisis has come to mean that moment when doctors, diplomats, bankers and assorted social engineers take over and liberties are suspended. Like patients, nations go on the critical list. Crisis, the Greek term that has designated ‘choice’ or ‘turning point’ in all modern languages now means ‘driver, step on the gas’. Crisis now evokes an ominous but tractable threat against which money, manpower and management can be rallied. Intensive care for the dying, bureaucratic tutelage for the victim of discrimination, fission for the energy glutton, are typical responses. Crisis, understood in this way, is always good for executives and commissars, especially those scavengers who live on the side effects of yesterday’s growth: educators who live on society’s alienation, doctors who prosper on the work and leisure that have destroyed health, politicians who thrive on the distribution of welfare which, in the first instance, was financed by those assisted. Crisis understood as a call for acceleration not only puts more power under the control of the driver, while squeezing the passengers more tightly into their safety belts; it also justifies the depredation of space, time and resources for the sake of motorized wheels and it does so to the detriment of people who want to use their feet.

In only a few decades, the world has become an amalgam. Human responses to everyday occurrences have been standardized. Though languages and gods still appear to be different, people daily join the stupendous majority who march to the beat of the very same mega-machine. The light switch by the door has replaced the dozens of ways in which fires, candles and lanterns were formerly kindled. In ten years, the number of switch-users in the world has tripled: flush and paper have become essential conditions for the relief of the bowels. Light that does not flow from high-voltage networks and hygiene without tissue paper spell poverty for ever more people. Expectations grow, while hopeful trust in one’s own competence and the concern for others rapidly decline.

Development has had the same effect in all societies: everyone has been enmeshed in a new web of dependence on commodities that flow out of the same kind of machines, factories, clinics, television studios, think tanks. To satisfy this dependence, more of the same must be produced: standardized, engineered goods, designed for the future consumers who will be trained by the engineer’s agent to need what he or she is offered. These products – be they tangible goods or intangible services – constitute the industrial staple. Their imputed monetary value as a commodity is determined by state and market in varying proportions. Thus different cultures become insipid residues of traditional styles of action, washed up in one world-wide wasteland: an arid terrain devastated by the machinery needed to produce and consume. On the banks of the Seine and those of the Niger, people have unlearned how to milk, because the white stuff now comes from the grocer. (Thanks to more richly endowed consumer protection, it is less poisonous in France than in Mali.) True, more babies get cow’s milk, but the breasts of both rich and poor dry up. The addicted consumer is born when the baby cries for the bottle: when the organism is trained to reach for milk from the grocer and to turn away from the breast that thus defaults. Autonomous and creative human action, required to make man’s universe bloom, atrophies. Roofs of shingle or thatch, tile or slate, are displaced by concrete for the few and corrugated plastic for the many. Neither jungle marshes nor ideological biases have prevented the poor and the socialist from rushing onto the highways of the rich, the roads leading them into the world where economists replace priests. The mint stamps out all local treasures and idols. Money devalues what it cannot measure. The crisis, then, is the same for all: the choice of more or less dependence upon industrial commodities. More dependence means the rapid and complete destruction of cultures which determine the criteria for satisfying subsistence activities. Less means the variegated flowering of use-values in modern cultures of intense activity. Although hard to imagine for those already accustomed to living inside the supermarket, a structure different only in name from a ward for idiots, the choice is essentially the same for both rich and poor.