Thorstein Veblen and maintenance...

Veblen scholar Jonathon Larson comments on Thorstein Veblen’s 1914 book, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. :

…maintenance is a chore. The only solution at a public level is to make maintenance a paid routine. Two years working as a surgical orderly taught me the very high value of organized, institutionalized, maintenance routines. Actually, there is no alternative. Better, good maintenance is the poor man’s way to prosperity. If taking care of your toys makes them last twice as long, you become materially more prosperous….

We live in a culture dominated by lies. They make us hated globally, they have successfully destroyed the greatest human achievement ever—the science-based USA industrial classes, they have turned medicine into an almost wholly corrupt scam, they have reduced education to expensive brain damage, etc. In perhaps the towering Leisure Class achievement in recent academic publishing, a guy by the name of Frankfurt wrote a book where he parses the distinction between lying and bullshitting. Hard to top the Leisure Classes when it comes to elevating vice into chin-stroking scholarship. Mere taxonomy, would snort Veblen.

Which is why I argue that the Industrial Revolution was made possible by the Protestant love for truth. You want to produce interchangeable parts, you must devote considerable time to the harsh mistress called accuracy. To survive in an accurate society, you simply must love truth—at least on the job. And so we see that industrialization in Great Britain was brought to us by the DISSENTING Protestants. It is no damn wonder that Marx never even began to understand industrialization and further muddied the waters by labeling it a branch of “capitalism”.