The idea of progress : What happens when we stand aside from progress ? Can we live without progress ?

I am going to talk about the notion « The idea of progress ». Progress can be defined as an improvement or a development. There is different types of progress, like social progress, technological progress, medical progress and more. The goal of the progress is to improve our life conditions, to make our life easier, so it appears to be positive and beneficial. But what happens when we stand aside from progress ? Can we live without progress ? To answer at this question i will use documents seen in class.

To begin i will talk about a picture seen in class which shows a man who lives in a yurt not far away from New York, in a forest. this picture shows that his lifestyle is not really impacted by the progress. For example, he uses a chimney as a fireplace, he burns wood to warm up himself. This man fed up with living in the city, maybe he wants to go away from the consumer society or he wants to preserve the planet. This man looks happy but not everyone can be like him. The majority of the people would miss the trendy and fahsionable things, the technological devices, like phones and computers because they are dependant on them ,and generally, the things related to the consumption. So we've seen with this document that the life aside from progress isn't suitable for everyone.

The second document a testimony of two persons. The first talks about Irving king who is a café owner and who assisted to a power outage in Touranga, in New Zealand in February 2011. The consequence of this power outage is that he had to throw all of his food away. Because the food can't be chilled or heated without electricity. He can't work, all of his engine works with power, so he had to work through, it was an economic disaster for him. The second testimony talks about Marcelo Wong who assisted to a power failure in Sao Paulo in November 2009, when he lefts his shop, the lights started to blink for a couple of seconds, the train service stopped, the electric-buses stopped on the streets and the trafic lights weren't working. It was a chaotic situation, he never saw this in 15 years. One of his friends used a mobile phone to confort his kids as they were crying. It was a panic-striken and a traumatic situation. The two testimonies show us that the world is made by engines that have been created by the progress and if we decide to stop it, we will have difficulties to work and live normally, it will be complicated and disabling.

The third document is a scene of the movie «into the wild», named «the magic bus». In this scene, Chris walks in Alaska, in the snow and he found a disaffected bus. It was unexpected that a bus would be here. This bus became his new home, but after a while, he became to feel lonely even he was happy, so he decided to leave this bus because he couldn't be happy anymore because he needs other persons to share his happiness as he read in a book. Before the scene, Chris lefts his parents from two years and he decided to go away to flee the poisoned civilization as he say, to find his true self, to kill the false things in him and to start a spiritual revolution, we can consider that Chris led an extremist lifestyle. So the movie « into the wild » show us that we can't live when we are extremist, when we reject entirely the society, and that we need a little bit of progress and social life to be happy

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