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APPENDIX A
Economic
Survey
The questions in this and the following Appendixes are as important as the answers. They presuppose a concern with the Capitalist Mode of Being. This Survey focuses on Canada, but it could have focused on any country -- the United States, England, France, Spain, Italy, etc. Canada has been chosen for several reasons:
Despite all these "advantages," Canada came within a fraction of a percent from breaking up? Apparently, many Québécois want to separate from Canada -- culturally, politically, and economically. Why? The Appendixes seek to probe, question, and challenge the Rule of Capitalism in "democracies." The Heideggerian way of looking, seeking, understanding, investigating, and analyzing,2-3 is used. What is implied in the Appendixes is that the economic being of the citizen in a place X can be threatened by the Capitalist Mode of Being in place X. The conceptual understanding of the essential character of economic developments in a place like Canada helps unconceal the true essence of Capitalism -- in Canada and elsewhere. What has been forgotten4 by politicians and economists is that questions about the economy are not just questions about government finances, big business profits, or universal big banks, but, much more importantly, questions about the citizen's economic being -- the citizen's existence, the citizen's freedom, the citizen's options, the citizen's life. Today, Canadians and Americans are more indentured than ever. What is important, what is asked about,5 is not what politicians, economists, or bankers think, but what the citizen's economic being is.
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See UN Human Development Report 1996; ranking based on the UN Human Development
Index. 2 This method of inquiry follows Heidegger's concerning the question of Being; see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, 1962, at 24-28 (The Formal Structure of the Question of Being), especially 24 ("Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. . .'").3 For a philosophical insight into the Heideggerian way of questioning ("the concept of 'question'" as "reference to a self"), see Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, edited by Don Ihde, 1969 and 1974, at 223-235 (Heidegger and the Question of the Subject; originally published in English under the title "The Critique of Subjectivity and Cogito in the Philosophy of Heidegger," in Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, edited by Manfred S. Frings, 1968, Quadrangle Books, Chicago).4 Ibid., at 225 ("[f]orgottenness"; "[w]hat is important in the question is that it is ruled by the questioned -- by the thing about which the question is asked.").5 Heidegger's expression; see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1962, at 25. |