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In the old days (and by that I mean early industrial revoloution and before), the things that were made were generally necessities. As the ability to mass produce grew, it was quickly discovered that production could easily outpace need. The stratigy of the industrialist changed from filling a need to creating one.
King Gillette did not set out to change the way people shaved. His goal was to create a product that he could sell a lot of. He was a salesman for the Crown Bottle Cap Co. (those are the guys that made the first bottle caps, just like the ones you still see today on the top of your beer bottle). The companys owner pointed out to him why the enterprise was so successful. The caps could be used only once, and then they would be discarded, unlike the bottles, which (as many of us old guys will remember) could be returned and refilled. The caps would always be in demand simply because they couldn't be reused.
Gillette sat down every night and thought hard about what he could invent and manufacture that would be disposable. Well, he settled on the razor, and the rest is history, as they say. After a lot of great salesmanship (everyone probably already knows this, but for those who don't, Gillette actually gave away the razors so that people would try them, hoping that they would like them and have to buy replacement blades eventually), everyone started using them, even though they weren't such an improvment over the straight. The appeal was probably the novelty of the device at first, and then the cost was surely a factor for boys growing up and just starting to shave.
But the initial money savings, disappeared over the years, and before anyone knew it, they were stuck with it. My Father was born in '35, and he never used a str8, and he never saw his father use one either. The skills that would have been passed from one generation to the next were lost. What once was a tool that had been in every household 75 years ago is now just a relic, even though it is a better tool than any of it's current replacements.
But the change is not just in how we shave, it's in how we view the world. Something that was once a valued posession has been replaced by something that will be thrown away. The jobs we used to have as crafstmen and artisans are replaced with assembly line jobs manufacturing more disposable items, manufacturing garbage. The men who toil on these assembly line jobs became disposable. No longer are they tradesmen who an employer values for his skill, his loyalty, and as a fellow man, but they are little more than the soft parts of the machines that they tend, easily replaced and quickly forgotten. Is it any surprise, in light of this, how the governments of the industrialized world sent, literaly, millions of young men to their certain death in the battlefields of Europe during the First World War?
By not valuing an object, we discount the work that went into it. To discount the work, we trivialize the worker. to trivialize the worker, we devalue human life.
Support what lasts, value human life.