Ben Chu at Aeon Magazine:
Yet it’s futile to deny that the impulse to self-sufficiency – to economic unsociability – also reaches very deep into our psyches and our history. What’s most striking about autarky is its adaptability as a programme and an ideology. It can appeal impressively across seemingly opposing political, social and ideological lines. It’s been adopted, at various times, by political movements on the Left and the Right, by believers and atheists, by nationalists and cosmopolitans, by fascists and communists, by rich states and poor states, by imperial powers and the colonised, by environmentalists and industrialists. It can be justified by the objective of peace or the demands of war. Any unit – from the individual, to the household, to the village, to the city, to the nation – can apparently aspire to self-sufficiency. It can be borne of a backward-looking nostalgia – a desire to turn the clock back or preserve the status quo – or of a belief that it’s a progressive and necessary programme to build the future. Like a historical El Niño weather pattern, the drive for self-sufficiency keeps returning, unpredictably but, also, seemingly inevitably.
more here.
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