The Purple

So it has been a while since there were any posts on this blog. Mainly I've been watching economic events unfold much as foretold without the least bit of satisfaction. Nothing much to report. The world has always had people who lived outside of Babylon and I've often wondered to what extent the comings and goings of the chaos of Babylon affected them. I've read David Hansen's The Other Greeks which views ancient Greek civilization from the view point of its homesteads rather than the politics of its city states. Someone living on a remote estate many leagues from Athens or Thebes ... how much did all the political goings on affect them after all?

When we took up permanent residence on this particular piece of ground some eighteen years ago, there was no internet, there was no WalMart (in our town), an hour's minimum wage bought four gallons of gas, and so you'd imagine that life would be very different here now than it was then. It's not.

A couple of days ago I bottled some wine that had been aging in the three liter bottles that served as carboys for the project. The vintage is of some Concord or Fredonia or some such grapes and can only be described as purple. One of the funniest lines I ever heard delivered on a sitcom was years ago when I still occasionally caught such things. Well, not so much the line as the way it was delivered and contributed to the story. The program as Frasier and when he and his croonies had been thrown out of the coffee shop, they went to a piano bar. David Hyde Pierce (Niles) , a consumate commedian, sits at the bar and picks up the wine list and says, "This might not be so bad, let's see what's on the wine list. I will have ......" Here he drops the list with a resigned look on his face "..... the white."

So this product of the backwoods vinter's art is affectionately called "the Purple."

Some of it at least will end up on the storage shelves in the basement and find its way behind the quarts of green beans and jars of jam. It will be forgotten. Then one day years from now, maybe even many years from now, we will be shifting his or that and take up the the bottle as a curiostiy with it's masking tape label from 2009, so many years ago.

Over the glass of wine we will reflect on all that has happened since that bottle was put away down there. We might talk about how that was the time before the health care reform, or the time just before the other economic shoe fell and wiped away the remnant of the ghost-like economy. We might be telling the next generation how before they were born people still got about by means of personal cars still powered by fossil fuel IC engines. Or we might have more interesting things to talk about.

At any rate, here outside of Babylon, will it have made much difference? No, not likely.

Nanotopia

Folks who are from very flat climes will come here to the mountains and break into a jittery sweat, loosen their collars, and glance about nervously. "Can't ... see ... out!" Always being able to see 35 miles to where the earth meets the sky gives them some sort of geographic claustrophobia when they are in the crags and hollows of mountain land. Not that we can't see that far and farther from our mountain tops, but everyday life is a bit more limited on the scenery. For example, in the photo above as one approaches the entrance to the Center of the Universe garden, the view is the high ridge across the county road, a line of sight of not more than 2000'.

So I suppose that what I have to say here would more readily occur to someone who lives in terrain isolated by geographic features much as the bayous and fjords isolated one community from another although they were only a few miles apart as the crow flies. The habitable land around here is a narrow valley and the hollows that radiate from it with such picturesque names as Dollar Hollow (the two words rhyme), Outlaw Hollow, Troublesome Hollow, Crooked Branch Hollow, and Snowball Hollow. This last one so named because it is so deep a notch between mountains that you'd sometimes find snow there in June that had not yet melted. Not so many miles from here and not so high in the mountains the ridges between hollows are also named because they are habitable. Here the ridges are not named because no one has the audacity to try to live on one. Our house is located on the ridge between two hollows and our most productive land is in the bottom of those hollows. We are audacious even by mountaineer standards.

This sense of isolation tends to shape one's thinking. When we were discussing world events and the very partisan patriarch of this community saw that we libertarians were not of the same mind as he was, he dismissed the point by gesturing to the great ridge of the Eastern Continental Divide just to the east of us and then in the direction of the TVA lake less than a mile to the west of us (you can't actually see it because of yet another ridge) and said, "Well, I'll tell you. It doesn't really matter to me because I'm not interested in anything that goes on in the world except between that ridge and that lake!"

Being then as I am used to communities whose boundaries are clearly demarcated by natural obstacles, it was easy to visualize the source of the current recession/depression debacle the world faces. Imagine, if you will, 100 families (although here there are not nearly so many as that) isolated back in this hollow and leading a self sufficient existence as a community. We must imagine that they have little interest in trafficking with the outside world because I want this community to serve as a microcosm of the larger world.

Each individual family would normally budget to take care of its own young and its own elderly, but in the community as a whole there are bound to be instances where someone cannot do for themselves. As long as this number is small, it's no problem. Each family could contribute a percent of two of its production for those who due to illness, accident, disability or whatever cannot well do for themselves. At the core of it people everywhere and in all times have been decent and the genuinely destitute have always been taken care of. Our community, our world in the microcosm goes on unabated.

Let's suppose times are good in this hollow. Good harvests, able craftsmen, diligent workers, and a modest frugal standard of living. There's half again as many goods as are really needed so as people age, the community decides that there is no point producing more and more food and goods, rather they let the oldest people quit working and vouchsafe a portion of the community's goods for their support. As a motivation for this, for there to be something to look forward to, each person contributing to the support of these former workers accumulates credits toward their own time of common support to be redeemed when they reach a certain age and decide to put away the plow or hammer. About ten of the families in this hollow of 100 families goes into this pension system leaving 90 families to produce all the goods.

Still the hollow has a surplus, so in addition to pensioners who have left the workforce early, some people take up thinking and advising as full time occupations. The rest of the hollow gives them a portion of surplus goods as way of stipend and like everybody else the thinkers and advisers contribute a portion of that stipend to the pensioners against their plans to one day quit the workforce altogether and be pensioners themselves. Let's say ten families take up the advisement business. Now 80 families produce all the goods and services for this 100 family hollow.

Some families notice that people get nervous about whether they will have enough corn, potatoes, hay, or firewood for the coming season and others get nervous that they are producing too much of those things. So these families go to the former and agree that at harvest time, they will guarantee to buy the surplus produce at a fixed price expecting to sell it to the latter when they need it. Note that they don’t ever actually take delivery of the goods rather only agree to a guaranteed price. This arrangement works for them and soon they don’t have to produce goods themselves but can live from the difference in the guaranteed buying price and that actual sell price.

Eventually twenty families are earning their living this way. They also contribute to the pension system and expect to receive pensions from it one day themselves but they also enter into long term contracts with the produces of the goods in the hopes that these contracts themselves will be even more valuable in the future and they will prosper materially all the more. Now there are 60 families that produce all the goods for the hollow and 40 families that share in the consumption of those goods but don’t produce any themselves.

Some more families eye those long term contracts and realize that they may or may not be valuable in the future. So just as our latest twenty families set up a system to guarantee the delivery and price of real goods, ten more families begin likewise trading in the long term contracts themselves. For a portion of the goods involved, they agree to guarantee the value of the contracts over time.

Fully half of the hollow is now engaged in some sort of activity not directly involved in producing goods and services and yet they receive their portion of those goods and services for those activities. They also pay into a pension system that promises them more goods and services when they reach a certain age or become disabled.

This half of our hollow’s population that no longer lives by direct production of goods finds itself put upon to deal with other aspects of daily life as well. So they offer to some of the producers, who by now are working longer, harder hours to keep up production, a portion of their ample goods to take care of such things as cooking their food, washing their clothes, and taking care of their children and elderly. Twenty people drop out of the workforce to attend to these things and they remain in the pension system and contribute a portion of what they receive to the upkeep of the wards of the hollow and expecting the same for themselves in time.

With less than one third of the people occupied with producing all the goods for themselves and everyone else, the land remaining as woodlots has been over harvested, the pastures over grazed, the farmland over cropped and so finally production begins to wane.

But this is no problem. This hollow has great wealth in the form of its pension system and the amount of goods promised by futures contracts and guarantees. When the people realize that they have set themselves up quite well (on paper), they begin to apply for the pensions and profits they have due them and this includes half of the remaining people who are actually producing the goods.

So now 85 families show up at the gates of the remaining 15 families and demand their portion of the goods available. Their portion is small. Quite small.

What happened to all the prosperity that the people thought they had? Why, the total amount of the pensions, contracts, guarantees, and stipends amounted to years and years of goods for every family there. Where did it go?

Do you live in Microtopia Hollow? Well, for today (or this week or this month) take note of what you consume. You get up in the morning and use water and energy to shower and put on clothes. Then you have breakfast. Then you use motor fuel to go to work. Etc. Pay close attention for the day what it is that you consume. Likewise glance at what those around you consume on a daily basis: food, clothes, water, fuel, housing, machinery, all the things that make up the verities and realities of our material existence.

Then look at what you and those around you produce. Do you know even one person materially and directly involved in producing the things you consume on a daily basis?

I can think back on the street where I grew up and catalog every house (it was a short dead-end street) and tell you what the head of the household did for a living. Next door the man was a welder at a metal fabricating plan. On the other side the man was a bus mechanic, next house was an appliance repairman, next one a glass cutter. Across the street the woman worked in a thread factory, next was a saw sharpener at a wood milling plant, and the next worked at a local weaving mill. And so it went. It was rare then to know anyone NOT involved in the direct production of some tangible good or service. But now of days consider the people you know and what they “do” for a living. How many of them are involved in the direct production of any of the things that makes up what you all consume on a daily basis?

One of the cheesy advertisements that continually appears on the freebie internet services reflects this. It is a (useless) outfit that wants to glean and refer people for online degrees from various sources. It has a dozen icons for you to choose among and click. Want to move up in the world? How do I become a: medical billing specialist, social worker, criminal investigator, health care manager, graphic designer, project manager, public relations specialist, counselor, author, accountant…? Glance over this list once again and recall the last time you had need of the services of any of them. If we based such solicitations on what we consumed rather than how we hoped to idle away our lives, the list would read: How can I become involved in: supplying cloth, growing food, supplying fuel, making tools, making shoes, supplying dish washing detergent, milling lumber, etc.

Does it not strike you as significant that the list of things we aspire to do for a living and the list of things we consume and depend on daily have so little common ground?

The things that actually sustain us and make our lives comfortable are supply by a tiny percent of the workforce, less than 5% I’d say.

The microcosm of this allegorical Micotopia Hollow demonstrates why the world is now facing a deep economic depression. For years now the number of people involved in actually producing goods and services, the real goods and services we need day to day, has been dwindling while the number of people who base their personal economy and personal fortune on activities that produce no real goods has multiplied. Moreover, all those people have come to rely on investments, savings, stipends, pensions, and entitlements as if those things somehow magically caused goods to spring into existence.

Students of Eleuthronomics will instantly see the etiology of the problem. It is viewing money, no matter what the source, as a sort of magic talisman that can cause goods to come into existence. Alas, this hallucination is the basis of the entire current handling of the looming depression. If we just create a lot of money into existence and then initiate a lot of government spending, then the creation of goods will follow the newly minted money. But it has never happened that way. Did you know that there was a “Great Depression” in 1920 - 1921? The government did nothing or interfere with its course and it was over in a few months and led to very prosperous times for the rest of the decade. When conditions for the next depression appeared at the end of that decade, the solution was to stimulate the economy by massive creation of money and government spending programs. The result was that the Great Depression lasted for longer than a decade.

This all came from ignoring the fact that in a healthy economy people produce things and money is created to represent those things that are produced. In a dying economy money is created as a sort of promise for the future in hopes that people will produce things in pursuit of it. Yet the belief that money is a magic wand that can bring food and clothes and medicine into existence is very strong and pervasive. I read a blog recently where an award winning essay concerning the homeless was quoted and contained the lines:

“The sad thing is that we have enough money to go around, we just want to have some luxuries, even though homeless people can’t even fulfill their needs.”

It gave me a feeling neigh onto despair to realize how wrong headed are the efforts to deal with the rising economic crisis. True enough if you had a rare $1000 bottle of wine, you could sell it and buy ten pairs of boots for the homeless. But only if you did it in isolation. If every expensive bottle of wine were put up for sale all at once, the price of it would drop to nothing. And if everyone wanted to buy boots for the homeless all at once, the price of a pair of boots would soar. That is, there is no way to translate a bottle of wine into several pairs of boots, you cannot on a wholesale level trade luxuries of the few for the necessities of the many.

The way to provide the homeless with more of the necessary goods is for as many people as is possible to be engaged in producing them because in the end it matters not a wit whether the person is homeless, disabled, a retiree, a pensioner, has savings, has stock investments, or is independently wealthy. The hard mechanics of the economy doesn’t care whether the person has a sense of having earned what they feel they have coming or whether they are standing hat in hand, eyes downcast, shuffling their feet and asking for a handout. They are all alike coming to the few producers of the necessities of our daily existence and asking for their share of the goods while they produce none themselves.

This is what the world in general is facing. It is full now of internet entrepreneurs, executives, bankers, coordinators, pontificators, graphic designers and project managers. Like Microtopia Hollow, their numbers have risen to the vast majority of the population while those that produce what is actually consumed on a continual basis has shrunk. Yet in all the economic blather you hear now of days, note how many times you hear the phrase “consumer spending” and how few times you hear “producer creating.”

My solution? I don’t have one. Not for you anyway. Each of us is in our own Nanotopia, our own very small world, our own households. If we are producing some real goods and services that are of direct benefit to the folk in proportion to what we are consuming, we will prosper. But if we are consuming the goods and services but providing none of it ourselves, we will quickly find ourselves at the gates of the few producers with our hand out expecting our share. And it will be meager indeed!

This is the freeman’s bailout plan. Make sure that in your own Nanotopia, your own circle of endeavor, that some real, tangible good or service useful to the folk has been produced by your efforts and by your encumbering the Earth.

The Telegraph Operator

Hot tea is not something that you can reliably expect to get at eating establishments in the South. None the less, it was what was on my mind that chilly December day just before Christmas as I was shuffling about town taking care of this and that business. Then it occurred to me that the strip mall across the highway had one of those mega Chinese buffets. The odds were that they had plenty of that very good Chinese restaurant tea so I went over and on entering was immediately greeted by the hostess who in very heavily accented tones asked “One?”

Well, why not try it?

“Cha zhi, qi.”

All it elicited was a puzzled look. Maybe I left out a word.

“Cha zhi yi, qi.”

Deeper puzzlement.

“Just tea, please.”

“Ah, tea, ….. Chá,” she said the word with a much more elegant rise in her voice. I gotta learn how to do that some time.

“You want tea with buffet?”

“No, just tea, please.” It was mid afternoon and the place was nearly empty. She brought the tea herself rather than trouble a server.

“Ni hao.”

“What? Oh, nì haô …. ah ….. “ I hoped I hadn’t insulted someone in her family.

Well, it’s fun to try anyway. Now the tea had my undivided attention. Some cheapie Chinese places have abysmal tea that seems as if they picked it up from reject store brand at the Mart. Others have some type of trade product that is just marvelous. This place was of the latter type. What with annoying the hostess and the fragrance of the hot tea, I seem to have missed seeing the fellow seated across the narrow aisle who it seemed was also only having the tea.

His garb first caught my attention. I don’t get out much and so I’ve largely ceased to much notice the outlandish things people wear now of days, but this man’s starched white shirt with the sleeve protectors, string tie, and green eye shade were remarkable.

We struck up a conversation. Comments on tea lead to talk of the times and at length, with a long sigh, he said he was still hoping the economy would turn around and get back to normal. He had been looking for a job in his field for some time to no avail. Since I know, as we say here abouts, just about everybody and his brother and might be able to help him out, I asked him what sort of job he was looking for.

Telegraph operator.

It caught my interest so keenly that I suppose it was easy to lay logic aside for the moment. You see, in my misspent youth I was quite the Ham Radio enthusiast … back when proficiency in Morse Code was not only a requirement but a matter of pride and accomplishment. Well, we say Morse Code when it properly ought to be called Vail Code since it was the invention of Morse’s partner Albert Vail. Morse’s idea was thoroughly impractical. He spent, wasted actually, five years compiling a dictionary assigning every word in the English language a numerical value. His idea was to transmit a series of pulses and the receiver would mark those pulses on a strip of paper and the operator would count the marks and then look up he message in the dictionary. Morse’s devices were also impractical. The original receiver was a pencil attached to a metal bar that was pulled by the electro-magnet. A moving strip of paper recorded a series of notches drawn by the pencil. Vail, and his possibly even more brilliant assistant Baxter who recorded all this, were annoyed that the pencil had to be changed every few messages and so he devised a fountain pen to do the writing. The left and right motion of the receiver’s arm sloshed ink all over the place and this was corrected by making a receiver arm that bobbed up and down writing a series of dots rather than going left and right writing a series of notches. Vail immediately grasped the significance of this. The superior vertical motion of the receiver enabled the operator to distinguish dots and dashes, not just the number of notches. He then devised an alphabet made up of these dots and dashes. Morse resisted the notion , naturally enough, I suppose, since he had all that time invested in compiling his dictionary. This resistance delayed the deployment of the telegraph for years.

The first telegraph company opened for business in 1858. The operators who were around the receivers all the time soon learned to hear the song of the clicking and clacking and found they didn’t have to look at the scribed tape at all! They could read the messages in their heads as soon as they heard rhythm of the sounding brass. Cli-cli-click clack cla-cla-clack cli-cla-cla-click soon registered in their head as “STOP”.

Within a few years the system was greatly enhanced by use of skilled professional code-men who could read the clattering message by sound alone. And no slackers they were either. During my time in Ham Radio one had to demonstrate proficiency at 20 word per minute to qualify for the highest class of license. The norm for those old time operators was 55 words per minute!

It was this that first tugged at the edges of my sensibilities. The man across the aisle from me was removing his eye shade and rubbing his temples as he talked about how the economy would never straighten out until people like him were back at work. He had been hoping to buy a carriage and pair and he was talking about all the people that had a part in those trades, wheelwrights, harness makers, liveries. His being out of work affected a lot of people. But all I was thinking was that he was a bit old. Most of those operators were quite young and a full third of them were women. That women were paid exactly the same as men as telegraph operators is testimony of the demand for their skill. For a while.

You see, the manual telegraph operator had his (and her) heyday from the late 1860’s until the early 1880’s, scarcely a span of fifteen years. The cliché scene in the western dramas where the sheriff goes to the Western Union to send off a telegram to Sacramento and the operator is a middle aged man in starched shirt, string tie, and green eye shade probably didn’t exist. The operator was more likely 20 years old and quite likely a woman. At any rate, no one kept the job until retirement because by the mid 1870’s inquiring minds came up with a system to duplex, then multiplex messages on the same wire and the equipment to transcribe it automatically.

The profession of telegraph operator was quite short lived. Nor is this an isolated example. Two more icons of Western dramas are the Pony Express rider and the cowboy on the cattle drive. From the time the first cattle drive was organized until rail access made them obsolete forever was scarcely eight years. And most of the cowboys were Black or Chinese, not Clint Eastwood. And how long do you suppose the Pony Express was in business? A total of fourteen months!

A consideration of our own lifetimes shows that things are not much different as far as how quickly and easily things come and go. I once worked as an electronics bench technician, a skill and body of knowledge utterly obsolete in this day of disposable devices.

I recalled reading that the top New Year’s resolution this year was to improve one’s credit score. How long has it been that we (collectively) have been concerned about such goings on? When people today talk about the prospects of hard economic times, it is always with the wish that things will get back to normal. What’s normal? Being able to earn a private fortune flipping houses that you bought with unlimited credit and no down payment? Playing an ever rising stock market? Selling satellite television systems? Being a professional life coach? All those things have sprung up like a crop of mushrooms on the lawn and now are fading away. Forever.

It was just occurring to me that the telegraph operator was a specter from the past, that sort of thing happens this time of year and you have to expect it. And sure enough when I glanced his way again, all I saw were people shuffling about the restaurant as the evening trade began to pick up. He was gone. But was he? Just like him here was a sampling of people from our current time all expecting and hoping that times will return to exactly what they were for the past ten years so they can earn a lot of money to spend on the things that were available during that time. As well too that they should be seeking employment as telegraph operators in order to buy that carriage and pair for all the good it is going to do.

Times have changed. We’ve been in an idiom and a paradigm for ten or more years now. When can we find a time in history where such things have lasted more than a score of years?

Are times about to be ’bad’? If you are looking for work as a telegraph operator in order to buy a carriage and pair, yes, I suppose times are not going to be kind to you. But for those who are ready to move on, this is the most marvelous of times.

. .-.. . ..- - .... . .-. --- ...

Choice, the Best Sauce

This is from the comments of the previous post: Question: what advice could/would you give someone who truly has the desire and the will to walk away from Babylon?

I don't know. I don't know your circumstances, proclivity, resources, history, etc. It would be all too easy to suggest something or begin a diatribe that would be completely moot. So I must reduce the answer to the most basic tenet of the freeman's way of things.

The above photo is a view down the cathedral-like corridor formed by the 14' high stalks in one of the patches of corn. On the left side and about midway from top to bottom you will see one ear of corn still upright and several others behind it drooping over. When the corn is completely finished for the season, the stalk begins to turn brown and the ears droop over so that the husks form a raincoat to allow the corn to dry in the October sun. Very soon we will begin harvesting the corn, allow to to finish drying, then shell it from the cobs and put it way for kitchen use.

We actually have enough of this kitchen corn left over from last year to do us for the current year. You never know when there is going to be as bad year, so we will put most of this aside against the possibility. During the year the corn will be ground into meal as needed to make our staple food, cornbread. A variation of that is to soak the corn in lime water to make masa for tortillas and tamales. But the natural food staple of our culture is Appalachian style cornbread which along with the dried beans we also grow gives a balance of starch, protein, and fat.

These corn patches, this year one for white corn and one for red corn, are tucked away on a rather narrow shoulder, maybe 70' wide, on the hillside above the mountain hollow in a place few would deem as a place for agriculture in these modern times. The seed has been saved from crop to crop for many years now. The ground is prepared with a horse and a 100 year old plow. The ground is kept fertile by application of stable manure and leaf mold. In other words, if we padlocked the gate to this farmstead and never had any trafficking with Babylon ever again, we could still grow corn and beans in perpetuity, worlds without end, amen.

Now many of the people who read this blog, or other writings like it, turn away in horror and disgust and what they perceive as a call to recluse oneself in some remote niche of the world and subsist on a mirthless bowl of corn meal gruel all of one's days. Said people miss the point entirely.

What is this low tech, low input, subsistence economy all about, what does it mean to us? It is much like Jack Sparrow's remark to Elizabeth Swann when they were marooned on the island and he told her what the Black Pearl really was, it was freedom. Like that to us our centuries old agriculture represents for us a choice. And having a choice is the very essence and foundation of our escape from Babylon.

So this is my answer to the anonymous commenter, To walk away from Babylon, you must have choices. Alas, it is likely you don't even if you most certainly think you do. Babylon, as with any exploitative and controlling system, can only exist by limiting and eliminating your choices. After all, if you actually have choices, you may in fact choose the things that benefit and enhance you and your family rather than things that benefit Babylon.

Babylon must eliminate your ability to choose. It does so with the help of two effective ploys. First it will offer you false choices in order to distract you from the fact that you have no real choices at all. A desperate maneuver of failed parenting is when a child is adamant that he does not want to go somewhere, you say, "We need to get ready to go now, do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red one?" The hope being that the child will become absorbed in choosing which color shirt to choose and forget for the moment all his objections about going in the first place. The Nazis used this tactic to control the Jews they intended to exterminate and it is hardly less dishonorable when anyone uses it. Yet this is part and parcel the essential operations of Babylon.

For example, people are always asking us what sort of alternate electrical energy we are using, because, after all, if you are going to escape from Babylon, you surely don't want to be connected to the grid! It's a false choice to choose, say, solar electric or grid electric. If you "escape" being tied down to a monthly electric bill, you are saddled with the expense of a depreciating and deteriorating electric system you own. What is more, the amount of electricity you can feasibly realize with a home solar set up is so small that you must curtail your electric use severely if that's all you use. You will not, for example be running an electric range, electric hot water heater, electric clothes dryer, and electric furnace or heat pump on a home solar electric system. So if you are willing to live within the limits of the amount of electricity you can generate with such a system, it is such a tiny bit that it is not much expense or dependence to get it from the grid to begin with. It's a false choice. Our household is set up so that it is not dependent on electricity at all. Make no mistake, we enjoy our electricity. We like watching DVD's, using the computer, listening to the radio, running the electric dehydrator, and the convenience of early morning and late evening activities because of the electric lights. But we also are equipped to live without it. Which we have done. Ours is a true choice, it is to use electricity or not as is prudent by the circumstances. Switching from being dependent on the grid to being dependent on the makers of batteries and solar panels is not a true choice since either way you are dependent.

The second way in which Babylon enforces its no-choice policy is when there really is a choice you might make, Babylon convinces you that you really don't have that choice at all. To be able to raise any of our own food we have to borrow money for land, right! You have to go to college, right? Gotta have wheels, gotta have a credit card, right?

Wrong. Those, and many more, are all things Babylon chants over and over until the idea that you could do without them entirely is just beyond belief.

So I bring up my corn field in way of illustration of what a real choice looks like. We produce (and even prepare, grind and bake) our staple bread with no input at all from Babylon. So we always have the choice to eat that instead of what Babylon offers. We also buy wheat in bulk and make wheat bread sometimes, but if (when, as it happened this year) the transportation cost or scarcity of wheat makes the price beyond the pale, we can look at it and say, "No, not going there, we will just go home and have our cornbread and beans." Likewise we sometimes buy food from stands and stores, and on a few occasions we eat out. But we always have the choice, and if we need to, we can enforce that choice for months on end. We've heard many a Babylonian say, "A person has to eat, so no matter what we've got to get money to buy food, or else use the credit card!" No choice.

Your escape from Babylon begins when you can say, "No, I have a choice. Oh, I can dine around Babylon's table if I choose, but if the Babyonian terms and conditions are odious, then I don't have to."

That's what my cornfield means.

It's just an example. Your choices may vary. So let's go back to the beginning. What can you do? Examine the verities and realities of your existence and ask yourself plainly and honestly where you are devoid of choices. This and this alone tells you exactly where you stand. Is it the gas pump and car payment or else you are destitute with no way of earning your livelihood? Is it the Mart and agribusiness or you starve? Is it the mortgage company and real estate agent or you'd have to live under a bridge? Is it the University and its degree else no one has the least bit of credibility in you? Etc. etc. Then you are devoid of choices and this defines your thralldom to Babylon. Its policy of eliminating your choices has been most effective.

There is another curious aspect of this matter of choice. To the untutored it might appear as if it is a continuum, a matter of degrees, and so it is all a matter of balance. But it most certainly is not. There is a trigger point, a breaking point, where you are free of the stranglehold of Babylon.

I recall a conversation some years ago that was the inspiration for a post on this blog. Like so many who employ the "matter of degrees" argument, my disputant insisted that we both alike were dependent on trafficking in Babylon's coin, that ultimately I could not escape it any more than he could. The difference, which he never understood, was that the need for it controlled what he did the next morning. He had no choice. He had to put gas in the car on the morrow and go to the job or else the disaster of his personal world loomed. I on the other hand had a choice of whether I attended to the matter of Babylon's money that day, or that week, or even that year for that matter. Babylon's hold was broken. Just as I could decide to go home and eat cornbread and beans or else buy something at Babylon's markets, I could choose to bestir myself to do Babylon's dance for a few of its coins ... or not. Oh, eventually I would have to pay the property tax and and buy some kerosene. But I had weeks or years to decide how I'd like to do it. In that time many things change, many opportunities arise, and many circumstances come and go. I don't have to do it right now, you can't rush me, you can't dictate to me, you can't write the rules for me to follow. It is not a continuum or matter of degrees, it is a matter of having to do it right now under someone else's conditions and to someone else's advantage, or rather to do it in my own time, under my conditions, and to my advantage. That's what it means to live in a world of real choices. It is what it means to live free.

So, my anonymous friend, the thing you must do is provide yourself with choices. Look at your situation cold in the eye and tell where you have been backed into a choiceless corner. Then see beyond Babylon's false choices and blather that you have no choice and step to a place in each instance where you an say to Babylon, "No, not this time, I don't have to."

And most of all, don't look at the lives of the really free and see us as hulking down on a dark mountainside swilling down a bowl of mirthless gruel. No indeed. When we choose to have it, our humble fare is a feast unrivaled. It is partaken with a fine and savory sauce far beyond anything offered in Babylon's finest. That sauce is choice.

The Cause, not the Occasion

Since the last post the world has changed considerably. I might have quite a few things to say about that, many of them on the order of I told you so or you heard it first here.

For many years I have expounded Eleuthronomics trying to explain that money is an abstract, it does not actually exist in the material world. Alas, like John the Baptist in the wilderness, I have been but a reed shaken by the wind. I wonder how many, if any, found occasion to reflect that our construct world of tokens was not the same as real goods and services. The latter has real value, the former can evaporate in a trice.

In the past few days that is exactly what has happened. People look about dismayed and say, "Where did all that money go? Where did the $2 trillion that was in retirement funds at the beginning of the year go to?" It didn't go anywhere. It never existed. It was only a promise of goods to be enjoyed, not the goods themselves. As it happens, the promise is no good.

So once again, blips on a computer, bits of paper, and even metal coins are NOT are not real, they have no value. They are only a promise and now of days people's promise seems to mean less and less.

Do not confuse tokens and promises with real things, no matter how insignificant they may seem in the scheme of things. For example a few years ago during July, as with every July, I went out to the blackberry patches I'd been scoping out since blackberry blossom time in May. Blackberries are real. They go into jam which we have on hot biscuits during the winter. By the time berry season is over in late August, there are cases of pint jars of blackberry jam that will grace our toast and biscuits all winter whether there is money or not, whether the stock market is up or down, whether inflation rages or there are shortages or the whole world as we know it comes tumbling down. That's the difference between something real and something token.

But on this particular July I was picking berries in an abandoned field beside a farm supply store. Near the end of my quota of berries I went into the store to wash my hands and, after all it's a farm store, I amused myself by looking about in the store. A cast iron pitcher pump caught my attention and being in no hurry to abandon the cool interior of the store to face the hot July afternoon, I read the specs and realized that this pump could lift water from the creek near the garden and save hauling the water in buckets as we'd had to do that first year of the present drought cycle. It was cheap too, less than $30, so I took it home with me.

You may have no idea what a thrill such a pump is to the Luddite heart. It is of nearly indestructible cast iron except for an easily replaceable leather valve and leather washer which can be made from an old boot upper when they need replaced every three or four years. Otherwise it sits exactly in the center of Great Circle garden on its cedar posts and anytime water is needed, it's just a matter of working the handle and there's all the water you want. It uses no fuel, it is easily maintained, and it will likely last for 200 years.

Now, you see, I've gotten off the subject. We were talking about the current financial meltdown. The most amusing thing about that is the way everyone is throwing up their hands and exclaiming, "Wow! Who coulda seen this coming!?" I've been reading about it for at least five years. That long ago and longer economists and others have been warning that the debt being accumulated from the housing bubble bade fair to bring the world's finances crashing down. They were called doomers, idiots, and in fact everything but a child of God, but as it turns out they were right although it did not take a lot of smarts to see so even back then if one could only look past that illusion that money is real.

But as much as you will hear about bad lending practices and lack of oversight, those things are the occasion of the problem and not its cause.

To discover the cause you'd need to come with me to the Center of the Universe. That's what we call the center of our garden because in a very real sense it is the center of our universe. I took someone visiting our farmstead there and showed them the pump perhaps hoping they would understand the lesson it had to offer. One investment of $30 and there would be a couple of centuries of water for the garden with just a little bit of effort, not much more than shaking hands with the pump really. This visitor regarded the pump for a while and then remarked, "You know, you could put a motor on that."

I closed my eyes and sighed the sigh that comes unbidden when one unveils a profound mystery of the universe to someone who can only blink and stare. It was as if I had shown him the rarest rose of the garden and he'd said, "You know, you could paint that a different color."

But the comment came honestly enough. In our modern world we only deem something a success if we can stand back idle and watch it work. If any physical effort is required, it is an outright failure. We are stewed and marinated in this unspoken bias and we are probably not consciously aware of it. The very first thing we do when seeing something so elegantly simple and useful as this pump is scheme to make it work while we just stand by and stare at it.

So we have taken this bias, or it has taken us, to the point that we are not alarmed that in this country, and in fact in most of the developed world, we don't actually make anything any more. Even our grocery store shelves are full of things processed in India and China. We import most of our oil, half of what we eat, and everything that is made. Just like my pontificator of the pump, we insist on standing by being coordinator of this, facilitator of that, consultant of the other thing, but not acutally doing anything that brings about goods and services for the people.

We accumulate meaningless tokens in the hopes that at an early age we can quit even the pretext of working and yet consume the world's goods and services unabated.

It takes only the vision to see that tokens are not real in the way, say, blackberry jam is to realize that at some time the world is not going to be willing for us to eat all its food, use all its fuel, take all its manufactured goods, and give nothing in return besides standing beside the pump and insisting someone put a motor on it.

That time is now.

Generativity

Don’t you just love the game of word expansion? If what you want to say doesn’t sound quite important enough, you just add enough suffixes to it until it sounds more pompous. I first remember getting a chuckle out of this from that form of literature best forgotten altogether, lesson plans! A child was never described as using anything, it always had to be that he utilized it.

By the time I was working with IT people many years later, it was almost impossible to keep a straight face at this linguistic inflation. You did not connect a computer so the program would function. No indeed! Who would pay you a large fee for doing that? Rather you provided connectivity to enable the functionality.

So when it came to considering the teachings of the great psychological thinkers of the previous century, I might have dismissed a great deal of what they had to say had I not been able to see past their coining of words to the brilliant thoughts behind them. Fortunately it became clear that in order to convey ideas that were new to the scope of human consideration, they often had to take an ordinary word and fill it with a new meaning. Or they would coin a word expecting the educated reader to understand its root meaning .... such as generativity.

Erik Erikson formed an elegant bridge of thought between Freud’s very earthy, mundane references and Jung’s abstractions. He described the unfolding human personality as an epigenetic cycle whereby the personality undergoes eight crises which determine the individual’s orientation toward the word and toward themselves. “Crisis” is one of those words Erikson filled with a specific concept and rather than its ordinary meaning. He was depending, perhaps, on his readers to have somewhat of a classical education and know that this Greek loan word means judgement , discrimination. Its specific medial use mean turning point.

In Erikson’s scheme the personality undergoes eight crises, or turning points. How individuals fare with each crisis leaves them well equipped to deal with the next, or else, in the modern vernacular, they carry the baggage of the previous ones with them. The crises build on one another and hence are called epigenetic.

For example, the first crisis, says Erikson, is that of trust. Erikson’s crises are often misunderstood as a sort of good vs. bad. Rather Erikson said it was a matter of balance. If the person is given over to trusting altogether (or being trusted altogether) they tend to become maladjusted and are subject to (what he calls) sensory distortion. If they trust too little, they withdraw. But if they weather the crisis successfully, neither trusting too much or too little, they attain the ‘virtue’ of hope. The curious thing about this crisis is that there are modern modes of parenting that have the parent walk on eggshells until the child reaches his majority lest they should inadvertently trample on the child’s delicate sense of trust. Yet Erikson says a person’s basic orientation toward trust is determined before the child is 18 months old

Then building on that the two or three-year-old toddler will experience the turning point of autonomy vs. shame and doubt. A toddler subject to too much shame and doubt tends to develop a compulsive personality. A toddler who is given too much autonomy tends to develop an impulsive personality. However the toddler who successfully undergoes this crisis, neither too much doubt or too much autonomy, attains the virtue of will and determination.

Now let me fast forward though the Eriksonian cycle until the person is in their early thirties or there about. From this time until they reach old age they will undergo the crisis of generativity, the next to the last in the cycle. This is the longest of the crises and the ease with which the individual achieves its virtue is determined by how much baggage and hang ups the person brings with them from maladjustments to the previous crises.

Generativity is the payload, as it were, of the human personality. In Eriksonian terms the person given to unchecked generativity becomes over-extended. The person with a lack of generativity becomes stagnant and self-absorbed. The person who successfully embraces the crisis attains the virtue of care and productivity.

Those who have read the previous ramblings of the Free Man are aware of the advocacy for a direct use economy. The concept never seems to get much traction and one reason, maybe the major reason, is that most people live in a very curious economic circumstance. In some of the oil rich middle eastern states such as Abu Dhabi none of the natural citizens has to work because of the municipality’s oil wealth. While not in exactly such a circumstance ourselves, our modern lifestyle is none the less made quite idle by the abundance of fossil energy. Almost no one is directly involved in the production of the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the house they occupy, the fuel with which they cook and warm themselves, or the means by which they travel. Instead they obtain, by one means or another, a measure of tokens to exchange for these things. Now, those tokens my come their way because they actually produce some goods or services useful to the folk in exchange for them. But they may obtain the tokens because of an endowment, stipend, pension, usury, gambling, or … only a small degree of separation from those … by doing some token or meaningless “job”. It is a testimony to our Abu Dhabi-like societal wealth that we can field an army of supervisors, coordinators, interveners, pontificators, people who can “earn” a living teaching men how to whack a small white ball into a cup in the ground and who can “earn” a living telling unattractive, corpulent women that they would be beautiful if only they had the right shade of orange on their cheeks.

Because we lump together the value of actual productivity with meaningless token busy-work and render them both into the same medium of exchange, we have made it very difficult for us to successfully deal with the Eriksonian crisis of generativity. A word we hear used often to describe the attempt at some sense of generativity is creativity.

My theme is this: Generativity vs. creativity. The view of generativity as production of something of real value is a vastly different world from viewing generativity as being “creative.”

This difference has been starkly demonstrated to me a number of times this summer. People are feeling the pinch and are putting out gardens and making tentative excursion into the world of the direct economy, and therefore into the real world of real production. At least half a score of times I’ve read or been told what a failure some of these people feel themselves to be because, alas, half the things they planted in the garden died. As a long time subsistence gardener and champion of the direct use economy, I blink and stare and ask, “What’s your point?” You have no complaint, half is really pretty good.

I think Erikson gives a very bright insight into the present scheme of things. Our human nature toward productivity is thwarted and idled by the token economy. So many people pitch about for something to satisfy the deep want to be generative and latch instead onto the concept of being creative. They imagine themselves as artiste (that’s arteeeeeest), poet, song writer, story teller, guru, ponificator of this or that. Within this paradigm reality may be safely dispensed with. If I draw some squiggles on paper and thereby proclaim myself to be arteeeeest, who’s to say otherwise? If I write some Vogon verses to go with the three chords on the guitar, who’s to say I am not a revolutionary song writer?

The meatiest part of Erikson’s teachings deal with the crisis of identity. At puberty the individual deals with identity vs. role confusion. One of Erikson’s students, Peter Blos, expanded on this theme in a number of brilliant books, some of the best ever written about teenagers. Too much emphasis on identity and the person becomes a fanatic, too little and they live a life of repudiation. Success leads to the virtue of loyalty and fidelity, that is, To thine own self be true, and it follows as the night must follow the day, thou canst be false to no man.

When I look about me I see a world of people who did not succeed with the crisis of identity. They are still looking for it. They buy an expensive convertible sports car hoping that no one will notice how silly the beer gut and comb-over look in that context, or they dye their hair an outlandish color in the guise of self-expression. This is the very picture of Erikson’s self-absorption, the generativity crisis gone wrong. And so they come to this crisis living in the frictionless world of the arteeest and poet where failure is impossible and so imagine that whatever it is they do, they have actually produced something. With this mindset, should they venture into the real world of real productivity, the lash of the taskmaster is a stark shock. Failure is the norm, even for the successful, especially for the successful.

If you have ever been around craftspeople, you cannot help but notice that the atmosphere is different. Jealousy and criticism exist, to be sure, but it is of an entirely different nature. When a horse is broken to the tack, a compound timber joint is fastened, a loaf of bread emerges from the oven, or a prize melon is lifted from the patch … there is an abatement of breath in the other craftspeople watching, aware of the heady moment when something of worth and use to the folk is brought into existence where it did not exit before. No one need say anything, reality says it all. Everyone is keenly aware that there have been hours of frustrated failure in the training ring, broken and ill fitting joints, spoiled bread, and produce ravaged by disease, pests and drought behind what they are seeing.

Creativity, as it is used in the modern vernacular, is not the same thing as generativity. The one cannot be substituted for the other.

Time waxes on and the dusk bids fair to gather soon or late. Erikson suggests that when we are done with the crisis of generativity, whether we have succeeded or failed, whether we have gained its virtue or carry the baggage of its maladjustment, we will then enjoin the last crisis - integrity or despair. The virtue at stake is wisdom and renunciation.

Or as the Apostle Paul summed it up in the integrity of his old age, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith…

Right now I am well content to be amid the wood chips and and honing oil and compost and all the other particulars of my direct-use world. I am well content to be buffeted by failures and false starts and all the other such things that warmly remind me that I indeed stand firmly in the real world. And moreover I am most content to be immersed in the care and productivity of my family.

But integrity and renunciation …. yes, I could go for that. Indeed, I could go for that.

Roads Leading Nowhere

The place here is a bit isolated. To the east the mountains rise sharply to the eastern continental divide and just to the west is a large TVA lake that is only spanned in two places, one bridge is in Virginia and the other in Tennessee. A patriarch of this valley once quipped that he didn't care what was going on the the world. He gestured to the east and to the west and said, "I'm not concerned about anything except what goes on between that mountain ridge and the lake!"

As a practical matter, to interact with the wider world we must needs cross one of the bridges spanning the lake. This most frequently takes us across the bridge pictured above. It spans a narrow spot in the lake, about 300 feet. It was built in the early 50's when the lake was filled and this year it was completely rebuilt.

We've been down to one lane for almost a year now as east bound and west bound traffic patiently waits its turn at a curious arrangement of signal lights to cross the bridge. As we've slowly traversed the bridge during this reconstruction, we've watched as the old asphalt and concrete has been removed down to the piles and replaced with an entirely new road on the steel superstructure. It has been quite a show to look out the window and down through the rebar and see the lake 30' below where the road once was!

And a very fine job it is too. This is no slacker patch-up of the bridge. The new concrete road is finished now but the bridge is still kept to one lane by the concrete barriers while the steel is being sandblasted and repainted. By the bye, this is a US highway and so the bridge is being rebuilt with federal funds. Thanks, all you out there who are paying for us to have this new bridge.

This US highway is a sleepy, rural, two-lane road that winds through the countryside which is mainly national forest and TVA land. It is twisty and serpentine and passes only though a couple of small mountain communities on its way to a sparsely populated area of North Carolina. So keeping that in mind, look at the photo again and see if you can tell what is amiss.

There's no walk for pedestrians. The old bridge had a narrow elevated walk on either side of the bridge making the lanes adequate but narrow. The new bridge has slightly wider lanes but no accommodation for pedestrians. The lake is a frequent hang out for local teens and there are lake access and parking areas on both sides ends of the bridge. With that and the camping and fishing areas close by, the bridge sported a continuous foot traffic. Now it would be quite unsafe to cross the bridge on foot and I'd think even a cyclist would be a bit nervous before gaining the other side.

The new configuration of the bridge illustrates the extent to which we are unwilling, or perhaps unable, to deal with the new reality. We are building bridges, roads, schools, houses, strip malls, offices, etc. as if the current paradigm of cheap, unlimited motor transportation will go on unabated forever and we may safely disregard any thought given to the necessity of or preference toward pedestrianism.

Our entire culture seems to me to be building roads leading nowhere. This weekend I was talking with someone whose son has just turned 18 and the talk centered around the usual checklist of where they were going to college and what they would major in and how the household would change with one (of two) children "leaving the nest." That bridge kept coming to mind. Says I, before this young man comes to the end of his studies, it is likely that the paradigm of far flung strip malls and work places twenty miles from where we live will be well on its way out of our daily lives. Likewise the 'jobs' that support that way of life will be moot.

More important is that fact that, like the pedestrian walks missing from the bridge, the skills and knowledge to deal with the world upon us will be omitted entirely. We are occupying ourselves earnestly preparing to live in a world that will not exist.

We keep building roads leading nowhere.