#荘子 — Public Fediverse posts

> Henry David Thoreau said,

“All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

An on-line article with Harper's(?) had Socrates say this line about Progress in an imagined dialogue with Steven Pinker.

#Thoreau 's quote from #NeilPostman has be thinking of the #WellSweep story by #ChuangTzu or ##ChuangTze #荘子

> What others discard, he champions. But the last person to be a Confucianist is Ku Hung-ming. He is more native to Chuang-tze and Taoism than to Confucianism.
> A rebel who preaches monarchism; a romantic who accepts Confucianism as his philosophy of life; an autocrat who is proud to wear the sign of slavery – the queue: it is this contradiction in Ku Hung-ming that makes him one of the most interesting figures in modern China.
#CounterCyclical #KeynesStylePhilosophy #ChuangTze #ChuangTsu #荘子

> "If you had a machine here.. in a day you could irrigate a hundred times your present area. The labor required is trifling as compared with the work done. Would you not like to have one?.. It is a contrivance made of wood.. heavy behind and light in front. It draws up water.. in a constantly overflowing stream.. it is a #WellSweep
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59709/pg59709-images.html#Page_147
#ChuangTzu #荘子 #TheWellSweep #TheMachine
#Deforestation ? #Erosion ? other reasons ? One wonders after reading of the #PowerLoom