Right Hand, Left Hand
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.
Matt. 6:3
Having outlined in the previous post the difficulty in mixing the direct use economy with the cash economy, I should disclose how one goes about transferring the assets of one of the economies to the other.
First, the object of the direct use, sustainable economy it to produce and use what we need and want with a small buffer of surplus for mishaps and miscalculations -- and to do all this with as little cash input as possible, preferably none at all.
In the real world it will be necessary to have some startup cash for each subsistence venture and likewise if we are successful, we will from time to time end up with some surplus in direct use economy which we cannot use but which might be sold. Barter is part of the direct use economy and is not necessarily surplus.
That is, the farmstead starts somewhere. You will need some tools, seeds, plants, storage, fencing, shelters, to begin with. These are most likely going to be bought with Caesar’s coin.
Also when the direct use economy gets under way, it is only natural that at some point there will be too many eggs, too many ears of corn, too much wool to be used directly, And when you get good enough at it and you are making some of your own tools and equipment, it is just as easy to make two or three as one, even if you only need one. Make three and keep the best for yourself. When the surplus cannot be used, preserved, used for animal feed, composted, or bartered to profit, then it might as well be sold. It is rarely profitable to intentionally produce things to sell for cash within the direct use paradigm, but if you find yourself in possession of a surplus that would otherwise be a dead loss, why not sell it?
After being at it for many years now I have found that the transfer of assets from one economy to the other, the exchange of unlike coin, only works when it is done like this:
If you need to use Caesar’s coin earned in Babylon for some sustainable farmstead project, write it off completely as a dead loss. It is just as if you had given it to a hard pressed relative with no prospects of repayment, bought lottery tickets with it, or flushed it down the toilet (which three are the same thing). Forget it. The purse of Caesar’s coins will not see it back. Gone. If you can’t afford to do that, if you can’t afford the grant to the relative, the lottery tickets, flushing bills down the toilet, then you can’t afford the homestead project either. Wait and work toward the time when you can.
On the other hand, if you find your overrun converted into Caesar’s coins, consider it -not profit- but a windfall. Look on it as an indulgence. Spend it on something frivolous, or a luxury.
Do not attempt to mix the assets back together again. Do not try to repay the Caesar’s purse with the surplus of subsistence assets.
If you can’t afford to withdraw the coins from Babylon’s bag without prospect of putting them back, you are not ready to transfer assets from one economy to the other. If you can’t buy the gods a drink with the unintended surplus of the farmstead, that purse weighs too heavily and joylessly about your belt.
Having outlined in the previous post the difficulty in mixing the direct use economy with the cash economy, I should disclose how one goes about transferring the assets of one of the economies to the other.
First, the object of the direct use, sustainable economy it to produce and use what we need and want with a small buffer of surplus for mishaps and miscalculations -- and to do all this with as little cash input as possible, preferably none at all.
In the real world it will be necessary to have some startup cash for each subsistence venture and likewise if we are successful, we will from time to time end up with some surplus in direct use economy which we cannot use but which might be sold. Barter is part of the direct use economy and is not necessarily surplus.
That is, the farmstead starts somewhere. You will need some tools, seeds, plants, storage, fencing, shelters, to begin with. These are most likely going to be bought with Caesar’s coin.
Also when the direct use economy gets under way, it is only natural that at some point there will be too many eggs, too many ears of corn, too much wool to be used directly, And when you get good enough at it and you are making some of your own tools and equipment, it is just as easy to make two or three as one, even if you only need one. Make three and keep the best for yourself. When the surplus cannot be used, preserved, used for animal feed, composted, or bartered to profit, then it might as well be sold. It is rarely profitable to intentionally produce things to sell for cash within the direct use paradigm, but if you find yourself in possession of a surplus that would otherwise be a dead loss, why not sell it?
After being at it for many years now I have found that the transfer of assets from one economy to the other, the exchange of unlike coin, only works when it is done like this:
If you need to use Caesar’s coin earned in Babylon for some sustainable farmstead project, write it off completely as a dead loss. It is just as if you had given it to a hard pressed relative with no prospects of repayment, bought lottery tickets with it, or flushed it down the toilet (which three are the same thing). Forget it. The purse of Caesar’s coins will not see it back. Gone. If you can’t afford to do that, if you can’t afford the grant to the relative, the lottery tickets, flushing bills down the toilet, then you can’t afford the homestead project either. Wait and work toward the time when you can.
On the other hand, if you find your overrun converted into Caesar’s coins, consider it -not profit- but a windfall. Look on it as an indulgence. Spend it on something frivolous, or a luxury.
Do not attempt to mix the assets back together again. Do not try to repay the Caesar’s purse with the surplus of subsistence assets.
If you can’t afford to withdraw the coins from Babylon’s bag without prospect of putting them back, you are not ready to transfer assets from one economy to the other. If you can’t buy the gods a drink with the unintended surplus of the farmstead, that purse weighs too heavily and joylessly about your belt.
posted by Eleutheros at 10:50 PM
17 Comments:
Spend it on something frivolous, or a luxury.
Can I spend it on a do-gooder project? An enviro conference? Actually, come to think of it, those conferences are a luxury. Where I see all my friends. Just wish they didn't hold them in those stuffy hotels. Maybe I should skip the conference and just go see the friends.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The only surplus I've got is because some folks around here refuse to eat it.
I had meant to include that as one of the things to do with the surplus that ends up as cash (this doesn't count when you do donations in kind).
But for reality's sake, make your do-gooder project a direct do-gooder project for many of the same reasons you want to be on a direct use economy.
I get two or three calls a day asking for donations. By law, at least here in the States, if you ask the solicitor what percent of the donation goes to the recipients and what is consumed in fund raising, they are obliged to tell you.
What's typical? 96%. That is 96% goes to pay for the fund raising and 4% goes to the charity or whatever. Hey, I can do better than that. I can donate 4% of everything I earn easily.
After getting that info and an oath that the fund raising outfit that's calling is only interested in doing good for the poor and downtrodden, I then volunteer to give double what they are asking, just give me the name and address of a recipient and I will give them the money directly, all the money.
The universal response?
Click!
Two or three calls a day?! Wow. If I had to put up with that, I'd be debating whether I really need a phone.
I enjoyed your post but I am having trouble relating it to the scripture reference - I thought that Matthew 6 is a directive to live to honor God rather than to live to honor oneself which is in itself a reward - e.g., "...thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."
I did not take from your post that it was about the practice of bringing attention to or obscuring how one spends or donates their money but rather that it was an instructional on the controlled intermingling of the two economies and what one's expectation should or should not be in those exchanges.
With that in mind, is the reference to "let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" merely a metaphor in support of your point that there needs to be a seperation between the two types of economies with only controlled crossovers under specific circumstances, the fact that the source is biblical a coincidence? Or did you intend for the passage to convey a deeper meaning in regard to the giving of alms (a.k.a. 'do-gooder projects')?
I only ask this because if you were pulling the verse out of context just because most people don't know where the phrase "Don't let the left hand know what the right one does" came from, it is unfortunate because Matthew 6 as a whole seems to really harmonize with what I see your attitude toward materialism to be.
I know that you've referred to yourself as a heathen before, which is sad commentary for christianity, because as a heathen you seem to be better acquainted with scripture than most christians.
It would be interesting to see the changes in this country if even just the Americans who call themselves christians would read Matthew 6 and start applying it to their lives.
Oh, it's high entertainment. I'm not on the do-not-call-list, I wouldn't miss causing the mayhem in the telemarketing community.
To wit:
"So can we sign you up for your free (nod, wink, nudge) vacation to see our Possum Hollow time share facility."
"I want to think about it for a while."
"Oh... we have to have your answer now, you were one of the very, very few people selected to participate and if you don't accept now, we will assign your place to someone else."
"You mean if I sign up, someone else doesn't get to go?"
"Uh ... that's right."
"Well, now I feel bad."
"What?"
"Yes, I don't want to take someone else's fun away."
"But ..."
"Yes, you had me convinced and I was ready to sign up and buy your time share, but if that's going to bump someone else out of the deal, no, I'd never be able to live with myself..."
"But ..."
"Oh no, I could never interfer with someone else's opportunity like that. The only way I could possibly consider is if it didn't take anyone else's place away from them."
"Oh, well, it really doesn't, not actually...."
"So you lied! I'm so disappointed in you! I could never trust you again! What else are you lying about, eh?"
EF:"With that in mind, is the reference to "let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" merely a metaphor"
It's the Biblical use that is the mataphor, not mine. The pharse is a stock idiom in Greek which is the rough equivalent of "It's so secret even I don't know about it!"
EF" because as a heathen you seem to be better acquainted with scripture than most christians."
It's because I'm better acquainted with God than most Christians. You see, He's an old drinking Buddy of mine. When He comes over for a beer, I can wait until He's had two or three and get Him to tell me what He really had in mind when he underwrote the Bible.
Alas, the answer I usually get is, "Oh, nothing in particular. Maybe after another beer or two it will come to Me."
What a Guy! You should have been here when I got Him to answer some of those telemarketer calls.
You didn't really answer my question but I do appreciate your etymological input into this post as well as others. It is part of what keeps me hanging around your fire.
..."It's so secret even I don't know about it!"
That was my sticking point with use of the verse - The post went on to talk about how conduct interactions between the two hands, as it were. Maybe it's an OCD thing - Some people need to arrange their soup cans so that all the labels point outward. I like my metaphors to match up. The way I see it they most likely do for you, hence the question.
I understand your desire to keep it light on the whole God thing - probably not much direction that you want to take tht in. I was curious on your take on what it would be like if Christians would put Matthew 6 to practice - crap or get off the pot as it were. Again maybe that's not a direction you really felt like going in, as it's about as likely to happen as America giving up our petroleum -based economy.
Thanks for the time that you invest into this blog by the way. I do find it to be very thought provoking.
EF:"I was curious on your take on what it would be like if Christians would put Matthew 6 to practice - crap or get off the pot as it were. Again maybe that's not a direction you really felt like going in,"
I don't mind what direction the comments go, "the wind bloweth where it listeth" .... or would I be turning another metaphorical soup can label the wrong direction?
EF:"Matthew 6 as a whole seems to really harmonize with what I see your attitude toward materialism to be."
You gotta be very careful about that 'hamonizing' thing. There are people in the world who think murdering 3000 people harmonizes with the Koran.
But I believe I can explain any resemblence to any harmonizing: There is a SciFi flick called Enemy Mine in which the human gets marooned on a planet with one of the bitter enemy reptile type beings. They have to work together to survive. The Drac being is constantly reading a small book, the Talman of the saying of their great teacher Shizumaat. When, out of boredom, the human gets the Drac to teach him his language and how to read the book, this is the movie script:
"Yesli raz delo,... raz va dzram da delo. Lubo da lubo."
Translate.
"If one receives evil from another,... let one not do evil in return. Rather, let him extend love to the enemy,... that love might unite them."
I've heard all this before... in the human Talman.
Of course you have. Truth is truth.
You have pointed out that I have isolated verse 3 and not taken in the whole 6th chapter. Mustn't do that either. You must take the 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters as a whole, the Sermon on the Mount.
The reason I didn't address your question as you might have expected is that the usual Christian view is that we are all barbaric heathens given over to debauchery and Satanism except that God has sent us the Gospels without which we'd never have figured out any of that and would be continually stabbing each other in the back in absence of same.
My view is the obvious. The last verse of the Sermon on the Mount is the most revealing, if, as the soup can label turned another way says, "he who hath ear to hear, let him hear". The sermon ends:
"For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."
Hearing the SotM most of the listeners must have sighed a common "Well, duuhhh!" Jesus didn't teach anything that isn't self-evident, obvious, everyone with the brains God gave a turnip already knew. The marveling that took place wasn't over the teaching, but rather that what was obvious was being said with authority, unlike what the scribes had been telling them which was, "Here's the way it is, it might not look like it's to your advantage and that it is self-serving for me to say this, but what can I say? It's what's written so do it!"
Modern theology could use a little more Duuhhh nowdays.
Like the Drac and Jesus and so many others, anyone can see that truth is truth, the evident is evident, the obvious is obvious.
But what's an old heathen to say? Read another account of Jesus teachings and see how well it harmonizes with what I have to say, and with reaity:
http://www.essene.com/GospelOfPeace/peace1.html
"You gotta be very careful about that 'hamonizing' thing. There are people in the world who think murdering 3000 people harmonizes with the Koran."
...And I guess that some might say that hitting a cat over the head with a frying pan 'harmonizes' with a Tom & Jerry cartoon too. Point taken.
"You have pointed out that I have isolated verse 3 and not taken in the whole 6th chapter. Mustn't do that either. You must take the 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters as a whole, the Sermon on the Mount."
...Be that as it may I still am unsure what point (if any) you were trying to make by using it. I sense that the verse may merely have been added for flavor, as your well-written post loses nothing in it's absence.
"Jesus didn't teach anything that isn't self-evident, obvious, everyone with the brains God gave a turnip already knew."
...He taught that we can be saved through our faith in God, not through our works. The scribes and the pharisees didn't say "Oh Duh" about that.
Thanks for the link.
EF:"...He taught that we can be saved through our faith in God, not through our works."
He taught nothing of the sort, that's a Pharisiacal teaching itself. He taught that there is nothing to be saved from. Shaking the slumbering soul to wake it from out of its mortal sleep isn't the same thing as "saving" it.
"He taught nothing of the sort, that's a Pharisiacal teaching itself. He taught that there is nothing to be saved from."
...Actually you are right on one count, I should have said God's grace is what saves us, rather than our faith. How there is nothing to be saved from I am not clear though.
EF:"How there is nothing to be saved from I am not clear though."
When the Christian religion was usurped (in the early 4th century) as a way to control and manipulate people, you had to have some way of scaring people into it. So they made it a sort of Alka-Seltzer religion. You'd have to have some years on you to remember this, but at one time Miles Labs (under the Beyer company) was having a hard time selling its product. So they discovered that the best way to sell a medicine was to sell a disease for it to cure. They came up with the Blahs, and then told you Alka-Seltzer would cure it.
The notion that there is something to be saved from is not self-evident. So the Christian religion invented being "lost" in order to have something for the religion to cure.
As far as God's Grace, well, I've seen the Old Boy after He's had a few, and believe me He's not all that graceful!
OK Eleutheros,
thank you for the friendly exchange - Sorry for taking the dialogue so far off from your initial post. I'll look forward to your next.
I've always instinctually felt the "well duh" thing about how one should live. It threw me into a big crisis at one time, thinking I must be deficient if I can't see what the Good News about salvation in Jesus Christ is all about. Now I can just look down my nose at those zealots and say "well duh".
I'll have to offer your God a drink some time. He/she sounds like a cool person.
"That is, the farmstead starts somewhere. You will need some tools, seeds, plants, storage, fencing, shelters, to begin with. These are most likely going to be bought with Caesar’s coin."
Just curious (and you need not answer directly) but if I may ask, how much did you start with & at what time (year reference)- only so I could do a quick recalculation for dollar devaluation over time?
I know you mentioned it in part, previous, but was it straight from one world to the other, or did you back away slowly........?
Deb:"I'll have to offer your God a drink some time."
Offer it. They'll be there.
Scott:
It might be difficult to pin it down. I began to accumulate equity in real property when I was 24. By the time I was 30, the place I was then living was paid off (although not the original place). Then a few years later I married Et Ux who had likewise been financially circumspect and when we combined our worldly goods, we were able to buy this farm, put in a water system, a septic system, a road, and a tiny trailer to live in all from cash. View that as tying a knot in our rope of days, and we have never slipped back beyond that, lo, these many years.
The first livestock we put on the place (about 16 years ago) was honey bees, rabbits, chickens, geese, and goats (in that order). I made all the beehives for about $10 each and paid about $30 per hive for the bees, four hives. About $25 bought a buck and three doe rabbits and I made the cages from materials on hand. 50 chicks back then cost about $20 and the feed to raise them until they could forage was probably another $20. We paid $100 to a local logger and sawyer for the materials for a chicken house (it is now the garden tool shed). The first goat was brush goat we bought for $35 and then two does to go with him for about $50 each. I think we paid something like $5 or $6 each for a dozen geese. Goats foraged, geese grazed, chickens were fed a little but mainly foraged, we foraged for the rabbits.
I paid $90 for fencing for the garden, cut the posts myself. I bought a roto-tiller with Caesar's money which turned out to be a misdirection of effort all around. Very soon I dug all the gardens with a $3.50 shovel from WalMart. That's what they cost this year, was probably closer to $2.50 back then.
Back then we had very good seed'n'feed stores locally and I may have spent $20 for seeds a year. I also spent about $100 for fruit trees of various kinds.
For the first several years that's all the money we spent to any good purpose. I'm not saying we didn't spend more, but the rest was a waste and a rum start.
Scott:" know you mentioned it in part, previous, but was it straight from one world to the other, or did you back away slowly........? "
It still isn't from one world to the other. The slowness of the backing is hard to determine because it came in a series of steps, and there was no going back from many of those rather abrupt steps.
I was rototilling one day and the cursed thing siezed up. The starting mechanism had a race of ball bearings and three or four had fallen out. A week later trying to find a handful of simple ball bearnings left me so frustrated that something snapped. There had to be a better way. So for 14 years now there have been no IC engines in my gardens at all. It was a backing away from Babylon's agribusiness ways, but it was abrupt and there was no going back.
Here I have been living by hardscrabble subsistence homeseading a good number of years, and yet .... just this summer I found myself at yet another epiphany and changed another aspect of the way I garden forever. I may describe that later if I ever get around to updating my other blogs.
I did back away slowly, but it was more like a series of jolts than a smooth transition. It's been quite a trip! Bring it on!
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