You have to hand it to Borsodi. He looks at the economic devastation around
him in 1933, people walking around shell shocked and penniless, and outright rejects it. Where everyone sees a savage
business cycle, he sees a savage economic model. Where others queue for
breadlines, he buys farmland to grow his own food. Absolutists are
easy to admire, of course, but unlike most of them, Borsodi doesn't substitute
ideology for logic. He embraces the scientific model and applies it
over and over until he finds a way out of his mess.
Borsodi makes three arguments in the book. The first is that an economic system
that can't eliminate unemployment is immoral and impractical. Snip:
..."all these victims of unemployment are alike in this respect, that they
are periodically unable to support themselves and their families through no
fault of their own because of their dependence upon what they earn as a cog in some part of the complex machinery of our factory-dominated civilization."
...But what is even worse, our social reformers in slightly different words
tell him virtually the same thing. There is nothing particularly wrong,
according to them, with the complex industrial system which had formerly
employed him."
"The unemployed, if they can't be given work here and now by our industrial system, should not be asked to live half hungry, half naked, half cold, while waiting for business to pick up. Above all they should not be fed upon promises of blissful security in the distant future - after our reformers have finished tinkering with he industrial system and remolding all our institutions nearest to their heart's desire."
"We have dotted the landscape with our factories. We have filled the cities with skyscrapers. We have covered the continent with a network of rails and roadways. But in spite of all these things, we have been unable to furnish the American people security even as to such bare essentials as food and clothing and shelter."
Given the degree of change he's about to propose, a rejection of some of the most fundamental underpinnings of the economy are needed. Of course, he's helped by the fact that in many people's minds, those underpinnings have already been shaken to their core.
Check out his use of mechanical metaphors: "Machinery," "Cog," "Tinker" "Complex" "System." Borsodi has a love-hate relationship with machines, and one that's important because it marks an inflection point in the way Western society views technology. Up until WWI, technology was almost uniformly seen as a force for good. In fact, on the eve of its first big battles, some people wrote that technology would end the war faster because people could kill so much more effectively. Though WWI gives rise to the first tech-driven dystopic views, they don't cross into the economic sphere until the Great Depression.
In "Flight" Borsodi takes not just a middle road, but a completely DIFFERENT road between the utopic and dystopic views. He says that the way we USE machines is economically irrational. That instead of using machines in factories, we should bring them home -- to farms -- to make our own goods. Machines in an agrarian setting? We're all ears...
Tomorrow's post: Borsodi's economic argument for machines at home.
