Tao Te Ching
Progress
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork? (Stanislaw Lec)
A mixed bag in many ways, the myth and symbolism of progress has become pervasive, unquestioned and devastatingly harmful to society, the environment, and personal happiness. In medicine progress has saved countless babies and sick people but also condemns others to spending their children’s inheritance on hospital bills that only delay the inevitable and more days, months, years in painful suffering instead of dying peacefully but sooner. Progress with machines has made transportation easy but has also created horrible pollution, mass weapons of war that have killed millions, and deprived many of meaningful work.
The internet has made access to information readily available but has also contributed to more car accidents, sophisticated brainwashing techniques, and filled everyone’s space up to an extent that they no longer have time to think and contemplate. Progress has become a religious belief and with its tools of entertainment venues, movies, TV, and Las Vegas pleasure domes captivate our attention but waste away our precious lives in mindless, meaningless activity. Just because something is new and “better,” doesn’t mean it’s good or beneficial.
On the other hand, "progress" has brought billions out of poverty, greatly expanded life expectancy; dramatically decreased poverty, infant, child, and maternal mortality. Deaths from famine have decreased from 1400 out of every 100,00 people in 1870 to almost 0 today. Although income inequality has risen to a major political focus, global inequality has significantly decreased, overall wealth and wellbeing have tremendously improved.
Quotes (93)
“A seed that sprouts at the foot of its parent tree remains stunted until it is transplanted… Every human being, when the time comes, has to depart to seek his fulfillment in his own way.”
“No society can prosper if it aims at making things easier. Instead, it should aim at making people stronger.”
“Moral progress results in freedom from inner turmoil. The surest sign of the higher life is serenity and external circumstances and people should not have the power to cause you any disturbance.”
“What passes for learning in the world never ends. For every truth found, two are lost.”
“Progress on the Path is a reconstitution of our belief in a fictitious self, a transformation of ego being into real, authentic being.”
“We have been kept back from scientific progress by a kind of enchantment and reverence for antiquity, for the authority of those considered great in philosophy, and by general consent.”
“All good activity in life depends on discretion, the highest virtue — that natural tendency toward the most rational and sure actions.”
“All systems either of preference or of restraint... retards, instead of accelerating, the progress of the society towards real wealth and greatness; and diminishes, instead of increasing, the real value of the annual produce its land and labor.”
“We many acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age in the world has increased and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.”
“If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery (gunpowder) with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.”
“There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.”
“Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.”
“When a man can do better than everyone else in the same walk, he does not make any very painful exertions to outdo himself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.”
“If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled it will burn… the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, the volcano will break out and flame up to heaven.”
“The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity.”
“I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; only in man’s improvement in himself.”
“man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he is now; it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress”
“Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities.”
“Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex”
“A political party has never accomplished anything for humanity. Individuals and geniuses have been the pioneers of every reform and of progress.”
“All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”
“Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways.”
“Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.”
“Restlessness is discontent—and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”
“Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.”
“[The child's] great task is freeing himself from the parents... only after this detachment is accomplished can he cease to be a child and so become a member of the social community.”
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
“The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.”
“What is your ‘civilization and progress‘ if its only outcome is hysteria and down going? What is ‘government and law‘ if their ripened harvests are men without sap? What are ‘religions and literatures‘ if their grandest productions are hordes of faithful slaves?”
“We had made a religion of our belief in progress—a baseless dream—but because we had made a religion of it, our disappointment has shaken our faith.”
“The remains of the old must be decently laid away; the path of the new prepared. That is the difference between Revolution and Progress.”
“Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.”
“Things do not grow better; they remain as they are. It is we who grow better, by the changes we make in ourselves.”
“Change is one thing, progress is another. Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indubitable, progress is a matter of controversy.”
“scientific progress without a corresponding moral and political progress may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about.”
“in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.”
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
“the social change from co-operation to competition is spoken of as progress... [but] we are not all deceived by the illusion of progress... 'the object of human life is not to waste it in a feverish anxiety and race after physical objects and comforts, but to use it in developing the mental, moral, and spiritual powers latent in man' (Basu)”
“Authentic religion ends stops when it believes it has found truth and ceases the search.”
“The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself. With that very simple view… a new light – inexhaustibly harmonious – bursts upon the world, radiating from ourselves.”
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
“a previously unheard of intoxication, a drunken desire to lean and make progress, to pursue the bluebird with (as I afterwards discovered) is called Spirit.”
“Progress in knowledge, science, comforts, and power is only progress in means; if there is no improvement in ends, purposes, or desires, progress is a delusion.”
“I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead... history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of man to understand, control, and remake himself and the world.”
“How can man progress if he is forbidden to question tradition?”
“It is difficult rather than easy conditions that produce achievements… where life was easy, natives remained primitive… the harder a time a country has had, the more brilliant its record as an originator of civilization.”
“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.”
“They thought they would improve on Nature by turning dry prairies into wheat fields, and produced deserts; chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda... the free press is everywhere the servant of its advertisers, of a pressure group, or of the government.”
“devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress [believe] that the Kingdom of Heaven is outside you and in the future. ”
“As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.”
“Just as alchemy led to the science of chemistry, astrology to the science of astronomy, or in the way that ritual dances led to the art of dramatic performances, man, by first obeying his inner urges—the powers of depth consciousness—felt his way toward the mysteries of life.”
“The principle enemy of freedom is illusion... the illusion of the importance of the sie or quantity, the illusion of our technical superiority, the illusion that we don't dare to think. and there is the illusion related to all these illusions—the illusion of progress.”
“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.”
“Every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.”
“On the day that you were born, you began to die. Do not waste a single moment more!”
“People complacently view the world as a place where 'progress' grows out of turmoil and confusion. But purposeless and destructive development invites confusion of thought, invites nothing less than the degeneration and collapse of humankind.”
“The progress of man... depends largely on his ability to accept superficial paradoxes, to see that what at first looks like a contradiction need not always remain one.”
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
“You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets?”
“When these organizations work for their own expansion, they have already started rotting. The aim should be to increase other people’s benefits... if you want your organization to grow, there is attachment and that pollutes”
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress.”
“Demian is an example of the artist's miraculous power of surviving a mental earthquake... It is a question of self-realization. It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result in freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos. This is Hesse's conclusion.”
“‘Progress’ is a process best described by the phrase ‘two steps forward, one step back.’ When we’re in the ‘one step back’ phase, it’s extremely hard to see the bigger picture that we’ve actually made one step forward. This tends to give historians a much more optimistic view of life and civilization.”
“Life is like a relay race. We receive a baton from those who have gone before and pass it on to those who come after us—either diminished or increased.”
“Evolution doesn't mean progress. Which is more conscious, the butterfly or the flower?”
“Our ideas about success are based on unexamined assumptions. Fixation on these subverts our best efforts leading either to counterfeit success or true frustration.”
“The region of the world that should be naturally rich has made itself poor by repeatedly letting the past bury the future and the region that is naturally poor has made itself rich by letting the future bury the past.”
“When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens.” 
“We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited by others... peace and properity are growing and could someday encompass the globe.”
“The only kind of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through it... long term gains with short-term setbacks... Pulling us forward are ingenuity, sympathy, and benign institutions. Pushing us back are the darker sides of human nature and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
“They were all enamored with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology!”
“There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.”
“When you can't describe a powerful experience in words anymore, it's a sign of progress. It means you've at least dipped your toes into the realm of the ineffable vastness of your true nature, a very brave step that many people, too comfortable with the familiarity of their discontent, lack the courage to take.”
“The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. Whoever believes in progress believes that geographical discoveries, technological inventions and organizational developments can increase the sum total of human production, trade and wealth... I can become wealthy without you becoming poor; I can be obese without you dying of hunger.”
“Ending a war is easy. Creating peace is hard... We know that war demands sacrifice. But we fail to see that the demands of peace are greater still.”
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