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| John Ruskin - from Wikipedia |
There is hardly
anything in the world that some man can't make a little worse and sell a little
cheaper and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.
It is impossible to miss a wealthy man’s disdain for
competition here, his covert assumption that even if driving down prices raises the
poor out of poverty, there may be worse things than poverty.
It might encourage the poor to clamour for more in some
uncouth manner not at all commensurate with his absurd fantasy - the
picturesque dignity of inefficient labour.
Yet on the other hand it is difficult to be entirely cynical
about Ruskin’s distaste for the dehumanising aspect of industrial production and
mechanical efficiency.
There are no easy answers to this dilemma and to my mind the
people we have to fear most are those who claim otherwise. Especially if they
have a firm grip on power and the means to manipulate popular sentiment.
3 comments:
When we lived in west London many years ago there was a small upmarket (if you accept there can be such) burger chain which used this slogan on the front of its menu. We used it as the philosophy when we later set up retail shops and never looked back.
He had a vision of the past that never really existed and a vision of the future that was impossible.
Petr - I'm sure there can be upmarket burgers because as Tesco showed, there are certainly downmarket ones.
Demetrius - I agree, he did, yet we need ideals by which to measure ourselves.
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