THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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II. Non­Euclidean Present and Future, the Problem of Technological Contact
Plans must also be spurred on
There is no inner urge as such to invent something. A mandate is always necessary for this which pours water on the planned wheels. Every implement presupposes
exact needs and has the precise aim of satisfying them; otherwise it would not be there. Hunger started everything off at this very point, the earliest implements are those
for hunting and fishing, the former also served as weapons. The plough, the invention of spinning and weaving, pottery: even if some of this was covered with ornament,
the latter was never primary, or it served a useful purpose itself, as a supposed magic symbol. And to this day the inventor, even as a dreamer, is a practical man. At
the same time he is more conscious than any other intellectual maker of not being a wheel that rolls of its own accord. If the English mines had not been in danger of
flooding, then Watt, like so many others before him, would have watched the hissing kettle in vain, a legendary kettle anyway. And without a social mandate the image
of the knitting machine or chain towing would not have flashed into the mind of any inventor, out of inner vocation for instance. It would not have flashed through his
mind without a mandate any more than the invention of artificial raw materials or even of atom bombs today. Unrecognized inventors are therefore, in a particularly
clear way, those who come too early or also, as in the stagnant business of the West today, too late. Here there are only two kinds of ideas, those which can be bought
and those which cannot be bought; the latter do not really exist even as blueprints. An inventor cannot do anything superfluous, nor has one ever had it in mind to plan
such a thing.
Late bourgeois curbing of technology, apart from the military kind
The bourgeois mandate to invent has been characteristically waning for a long time. Before the last crisis too much was produced for capital to be able to cope with it.
Famine began, not because of crop failure as in