Cleverness

Jane Jacobs's characterization of the doubleness of cheats in Dark Age Ahead hints at a connection between lying and the unbridled wish for more of the same:

Greed becomes culturally admired as competence, and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness.

Pages later one can own a wanting more that is not a wanting more of the same:

The key to postagarian wealth is the complicated task of nurturing economic diversity, opportunity, and peace without resort to oppression.

And one is invited to do so with clever competence.

And so for day 121
14.04.2007