Intangibles in the Big Picture: The Delinearised History of Time

The so-called "TINA syndrome" provides the fundament, the actual rock, on which the political, economic, military and other elites and establishments of the Anglo-American world and European bloc have built their church. Inscribed over its entrance stands the motto: "there is no god but monopoly and maximum is his profit". On this basis, continuous attacks on the very concept of intangibles are launched, most prominently against time-consciousness. Especially singled out is time-consciousness based on appreciating and/or priorising the long term over the short term, as well as placing the interests of the social collective over the interests of any individual member of the collective. In this book, it is argued that Humanity has been on the wrong track since Sir Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica at the end of the 17th century, and that the scientific research enterprise developed since then has taken the world on a merry chase to nowhere. Without exception, the assaults on time-consciousness, and on cognition of what happens in and through the passage of time, take the form of a denial of the principle of Nature as the Mother of all wealth. The denial of this principle has always encountered resistance. Some resist by breaking the attacks down and responding to selected cases. For example, the contributors to the book Underdevelopment and Social Movements in Atlantic Canada (Toronto 1979), following precisely this tact, act according to the principle that "the movement is everything…" This places the struggle of the people for livelihood where it belongs, viz., at the centre of economic theory and practice. However, these writers' version of this approach is silent about long-term or final aims. Their work actually priorises t = "right now" over longer-term views of the role of time in social-historical processes