Unlike Coin

The next principle of successful self-sufficient living is what I sometimes refer to as Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. That is, don’t mix paradigms, don’t deal in unlike coin.

It’s a popular modern concept of the totally self-contained homestead that provides all its own food, water, fiber, building materials, fuel and other energy as well as enough surplus to secure modern goods and services such as tools, medicine, motor transportation, etc. But if we pitch about to find such as homestead (or community) to use as our example, where is it? Alas, it doesn’t exist.

At the time in human history when farmsteads were more or less entirely self-contained, they supported very modest housing very modestly heated, a very few changes of clothes, limited access to water, no means of personal transportation for everyone on the farmstead, no plethora of books and such, and certainly no computers, refrigerators, air conditioners, microwaves, power tools, etc. Heavy machinery has only been in widespread use on farms for scarcely 60 years and we have no examples of its long term sustainability, oil depletion not withstanding. In fact since the advent of oil dependent farm machinery, most farms have been eliminated with the remainder growing monstrous in size and in a constant state of flux and change.

Most folks looking into the self-sufficient life stumble on this concept. If the previous caution about exotic solutions is the one that causes most aspirants to self-sufficiency to fail, this is the one that causes them the most confusion. The economic concept of unlike coin is like the riddle the Sphinx asks of those entering the realm, it is Connan the Barbarian‘s ‘Enigma of Steel’ without which answer Crom will not allow you to enter Valhalla.

Advocacy for the self-sufficient life is almost universally met with “But wait, you’re using a computer so you are dependent just like the rest of us!” At this point the Sphinx devours the pilgrim and Valhalla shuts its gates.

The successful modern hardscrabble lives in two worlds and keeps them distinct and separate in his mind and actions. This is quite easy to do, in many ways easier than living in just one of the worlds alone, so long as you realize one important principle: The two worlds use different currencies. Avoid mixing the paradigms and do not try to traffic in one world with the coin of the other.

The farmstead is the source of our food, water, heating and cooking fuel, building materials (timber and stone), and the majority of our medicine. It has the potential for being the source of our fiber as we have done spinning and we’ve raised experimental beds of flax. It’s coinage is soil fertility, organic material, skills and strength, water, and management.

From outside the farmstead we get luxury foods (tea, chocolate, etc), computers, books, DVD’s, motor transportation, energy for gadgets and conveniences, and such. The coinage is cash (for us, never debt).

Now what if our trafficking with the outside world were cut off? We’d forego all those things in the above list. No more tea and chocolate, no more movies, and we wouldn’t drive anywhere. We’d shift the food from the freezer to canning, salting, and dehydration (a short step for us) and we’d coordinate our activities with natural daylight to save on the beeswax and tallow. We’d finish up that ram pump project or install a foot valve on the base of the line to the hand pump and use less water. But we wouldn't starve or freeze.

We do all of those things some of the time already so the transition wouldn’t be stark. We’re on the electric grid, but electricity use is optional in our household. Goods and services we can’t create in a direct use economy for ourselves are part of our everyday existence but we don’t utterly depend on them.

When a job of work that we think we might like doing is available, we work it for cash. We also have cottage industries the products of which we sell in the cash marketplace. Then with Caesar’s coins in our pocket, we indulge in the goods of Caesar’s world. But we don’t try to buy an independent life with those coins. That’s a false bargain. When there are no jobs of work to do and sales of cottage products wane, we indulge less or not at all.

Nor do we use the fertility of our land nor the strength of our backs to buy goods in Caesar’s world. That would an even falser bargain. The two economies exist side by side but do not admix.

In a documentary made in the 1970’s Helen Nearing is explaining the basis for their homestead economy while she is picking their cash crop, blueberries. She explains that the few quarts of blueberries she sells every year buys garden tools, seeds, and pays the taxes and insurance. That is, it makes the homestead operation self-sufficient. She adds as an aside, “Couldn’t buy a truck with it, though.” Yet they had a truck. They kept the self-sustaining homestead economy separate from the rest of their economic dealings.

The house we live in is made of timber and stone and no labor was hired to build it. It is wired for electricity but was not built to be dependent on it. It is heated with wood and is cooled because it is in a mature oak forest. It is sustainable without input from outside. The disreputable old bottom-feeder vehicles we drive are not sustainable. They require gas and oil and replacement parts (not in that order) from outside which we can in no wise obtain without cash. But the beauty of this economic system is when we can no longer get the gas and oil and parts or the cash with which to buy them, we won’t need the vehicles in the first place! We’d still need the house and so we made sure in our design that it would not depend on continuous input from the outside.

So as the homestead develops, the homesteader must separate his doings into (at least) the two economies and not mix them if at all possible. If you build a suburban type house, it is part of Caesar’s economy and you’ll need a plan on how you are going to maintain it with Caesar’s coin separate from you homesteading plan. The homestead won’t support high property taxes and energy for a heat pump. If your animals require continuous purchased feed, they are part of Caesar’s economy and best to view them that way. What’s the plan for keeping them going indefinitely?

It is quite a different thing to stop for a spell and have a glass of Babylon’s wine and listen to Babylon’s song and go on … quite a different thing from being Babylon’s slave. Only the Free Man walks in both worlds without shackles.

Think Horses

As a basis for successful self-sufficient living this post isn’t an advocacy to use horses as draft animals. While horses are certainly more conducive to success than heavy machinery, the use of anything but human labor should be approached only after careful examination.

Rather think horses is from the old saw about any type of diagnostic work, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. That is, default to the common, most likely explanation rather than the most bizarre, exotic and unlikely.

If I were to rank order the things that undermine the success of the subsistence homestead, the thing that would be at the top would be the tendency toward the exotic. Faced with the prospects of some homestead task, growing gardens, raising animals, building a house, providing fuel and energy, etc, and realizing that the homesteader does not possess the skills, work hardness, and patience to see the task through; it is so easy to muse about bypassing the task by means of something exotic. For example: Faced with providing fodder and grain for livestock the ordinary, well established method of doing so is by raising a plot of corn. The would be homesteader quickly sees that it’s a lot of work and requires some knowledge and skill. The Appalachian expression “a hard row to hoe“ did not come about for nothing.

But wait! Didn’t I read somewhere that sunflowers can be used effectively for animal feed? Yes, that’s the ticket. I can’t grow corn, but instead I’ll muse about raising sunflowers. Sure, someday I will have a large field of sunflowers and that will feed all my animals. No, I’m not making this up. Someone a few years ago actually proposed this as the underlying basis for their homestead. Needless to say, they are still buying all ConAgra feed for their animals.

If there is a common, much used, ordinary solution to a hardscrabble subsistence need and the homesteader can’t or won’t do it, substituting an exotic solution will not help. If you can’t succeed at the ordinary, it is even less likely that you will succeed at the exotic.

Now I thought that relying on raising sunflowers for livestock feed when the person had never even raised a hill of corn in her life was an extreme example, but since that time I’ve heard far more amusing stories even to the point of relying on mushrooms, chicory weed, and dishwater to feed farm animals when the erstwhile husbandmen had not been successful at cultivating grass nor grain to feed the animals.

This phenomenon takes many forms. Market gardening failed so the gardener notices one day that a braid of 12 perfect garlic bulbs sells for more than $12. The internal cash register begins to ca-ching! Why at four big bulbs at least per square foot of garden space, let’s see, 100’ by 100’ garden, ten thousand square feet is, oh my gosh, $40,000 income! Typically the aspiring garlic grower has yet to grow a stalk of garlic for their own kitchen so what they don’t realize is that garlic takes very fertile soil in very good condition. The bulbs in those perfect braids of garlic were selected from the farm run of harvested garlic with 20 bulbs going for commercial garlic powder and minced garlic with only one or two suitable for braiding. Then the garlic grower himself doesn’t get the $1 a bulb retail price but more like ten cents.

Want to find out what using alternative heat would be like? Cut some firewood and put on an extra sweater in the winter and see what life is like with the heat pump or furnace turned off. Too much drudgery and inconvenience! And not nearly exciting enough to the imagination. Rather plan on a complicated solar collector with underground storage, which never seems to materialize even after years and years while the ax and saw lay rusty and unused.

Having never raised a pig or a goat, there are dreams of raising alpacas, ostriches, emus, and food grade chinchillas. Having never raised corn or wheat, the homestead’s grain needs will be met by raising amaranth or emmer. Having never built a garage or a doghouse, the homestead housing will be made of old soda bottles or egg cartons.

The homesteader who has not succeeded with the ordinary is very unlikely to succeed with the exotic. Some research into honeybees brings the aspiring apiarist into contact with Top Bar Hives. Having raised bees in both the ordinary Langst hives and TBH’s, I can attest that the latter requires a great deal more skill and knowledge than the former.

Sometimes it’s not an exotic animal or crop per se but an exotic breed or variety that is going to make all the difference in the small holder’s mind. Can’t raise an ordinary sheep, but if it were the rare South Albanian Flat Nosed sheep, well, that would make all the difference between success and failure. Fact is, it won’t. Raising sheep or any animal is 99% the same no matter the breed. Two unfortunate myths go along with the mystique of the rare breed:

1). It cost just as much to feed a “good” animal as an ordinary one
2). If the animal is bred for top milk, meat, wool, (etc) production, then even under less than ideal conditions it will do better than an ordinary one.

Highly specialized breeds of plants and animals were developed for highly concentrated fertilizers and feeds. On a hardscrabble farm where much of the fertilizer is low concentrate compost and much of the feed is forage, these highly specialized breeds and varieties will do much more poorly and often fail outright. A highly specialized breed will not spell the difference between success and failure on a farmstead.

What about a milking Devon cow? They are supposed to be triple purpose: milk, meat, and draft. You could have only a few of theses and not have to have separate oxen, dairy cow, and beef cow, no? No. A milking Devon would give milk if managed by a very experienced dairyman, but not as well as a dairy cow. It could be slaughtered for meat, but only by an experienced cattleman and it still would be inferior to a beef cow. It could be trained to pull the yoke, but only by an experienced drover and it wouldn’t work as well as a regular ox nor horse or donkey. Such triple use animal would only perform in the hands of a homesteader skilled already in dairying, cattle raising, and draft animals. It won’t make up for lack of those skills and experiences.

So to succeed at self-sufficient living, don’t view the exotic and out of the way projects as substitutes for ordinary knowledge and skills. Pace yourself to the drumbeat of horse’s hooves, not zebras.

It's Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature

Do you remember the ad for that God awful modified motor oil they sold for butter substitute where Mother Nature would get angry when she mistook it for butter? Not likely, She might mistake it for motor oil but never for butter.

So here's the first principle of Eleuroculture which will greatly increase your odds of succeeding with a direct use economy: Don’t fight your land.

That might sound painfully obvious and yet that’s what most people do. Agribusiness does it as a matter of course. It decides what crop it is going to grow or what livestock it is going to keep and it then mangles and twists the land to suit it. The energy and cash input required to do that is beyond the means of the hardscrabble homesteader.

If the homesteader is Hell bent on growing a certain crop or keeping a certain animal, he must needs find land suitable for that purpose. However if the homesteader already has land, he must ask for its cooperation in whatever horticulture or husbandry he is going to attempt.

Get to know your land. Sit on it and observe it quietly and listen to what it has to say. Find the ears to listen.

If you have no grass, don’t attempt to keep a cow. If you have no browse, don’t attempt to keep goats. If the climate is very dry, don’t try a fish pond. If it never gets cold in the winter, don’t plant apple trees. If it never gets hot in the summer, don’t grow sweet potatoes.

To be successful changes in your land must be slow and subtle, which is to say, sustainable. Only ask the land to produce what it can naturally produce. Homesteaders make the mistake of getting livestock the land cannot support and hoping that through the seasons they will somehow make improvements on the land so that it can support that menagerie. It never happens.

Putting more animals on the land than the land can carry is not sustainable or is the would be homesteader taking advantage of the benefits of the direct use economy because hauling in foodstuffs for the animals is only another way of buying the meat and milk and eggs with cash. It is like trying to heat your house by burning old soggy leaves in the furnace, it works fine so long as you have plenty of coal or oil to continually kindle the fire.

Assess what the land can naturally carry and then grow only those crops and keep only those animals. If you want to keep a cow but don’t have grass, grow the grass first. If you want to grow strawberries but there isn’t enough organic material in the soil, compost it or grow a green manure crop first.

But what of the notion that keeping animals or growing plants even in an unsustainable agribusiness manner at least gives the homesteader some skills and practice? I’m afraid it doesn’t. The motto of the most successful language teacher I ever knew (and I knew a good number) was Se aprende lo que se practica (One learns what one practices.) Growing corn with a mechanical seeder and chemical fertilizer offers no skills that are useful in growing corn from the natural fertility of the soil using hand tools. Basing a homestead on unsustainable practices puts the homesteader farther away from a direct use economy than if he had done nothing. He will have dug himself a hole in terms of finances, condition of his land, culture and mindset that he will have to fill in just to start from zero again. Alas, most homesteaders who make this rum start eventually throw the shovel in the hole out of frustration and abandon the whole process.

You must cooperate with the land in other ways too. Don’t become enamored with an underground house if you own a swamp. Don’t design a house around wood heat if you have no access to trees.

So first and foremost adopt an attitude of cooperation with Nature which means not attempting to bend and twist your land to do things it is not naturally suited to do.

Reading Assignments

For anyone interested in a more thorough study of self-sufficient living, here is a very brief reading list. Keep them together as two groups of three:

First Group:

You Can't Live on Radishes by Jerry Bledsoe
ISBN: 0962425540

Small Farm in Maine by Terry Silber
ISBN: 0395379113

Far Out isn't Far Enough by Tomi Ungerer
ISBN: 0413545806


Second Group:

The Fat of the Land by John Seymour
No ISBN number, last printed in 1962

The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing
ISBN: 0805209700

Payne Hollow by Harlan Hubbard
ISBN: 0917788664


These six books all have in common that they are documentaries of a self-sufficient life rather than instructional discourses on how to homestead. At last one of the authors, John Seymour, also wrote how-to books, some of the very best available: The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, The Self-Sufficient Gardener, Forgotten Arts and Crafts and many others.

Read Payne Hollow itself and do not rely on Gene Logsdon's nor Wendell Berry's writings about Hubbard. You would miss the point entirely.

There is something very illustrative about these two groups of books, and the clever mind even never having read them will be able to guess what it is. But not why. That's what I'm going to cover in the next posts.

A Direct Use Economy

For the purpose of this series of posts, the terms homestead, subsistence farm, self-sufficient, and hardscrabble all refer to an economic system of direct use.

It’s a novelty and curiosity now of days when the economy in general is an all cash economy (or cash equivalents). Many if not most people now consume nothing or nearly nothing they have produce themselves rather the entire economic basis of their lives is earning cash and then buying virtually everything they need with that cash. So unfamiliar are most people with the realities and verities of a direct use economy, that they must needs pause and reflect to clear their heads of the conditioning of a cash economy in order to not misapply some idea that does not obtain.

The essence of the direct use economy was summed up by Helen and Scott Nearing when they wrote, “…we grew our food and ate it, we cut our fuel and burned it, we built our house and lived in it.”

The direct use economy is not the same thing that Gene Logsdon calls the Pastoral Economy and the Amish Economy, although it shares a great deal of commonality. Nor does it necessarily have anything to do with communal economies which might be cash based or direct use based with the same benefits and shortcomings of either.

Cash economics and direct use economics don’t mix well’ it is exceedingly difficult to define the one in terms of the other. It is almost as if the two economies were Rowlings’ wizard world and muggle world. We can say for example that a patch of beans yielded four pounds of dried beans which could be had at the supermarket for five dollars. The temptation is to say that all that work of saving the seeds, digging the bed, planting and mulching the bed, eliminating pests and varmints, picking the beans, shelling them and drying them … all that labor is only worth five dollars. The cash economy has a tendency to view it this way. From the perspective of the direct use economy, that five dollars was hard come by. One needed the time to earn it, the transportation to go to the job and the transit time. Also needed were the work clothes, meals out, disruption of the direct use homestead flow of things, time to decompress and recover from working away. The earning of the five dollars also meant that the soil was not improved, no seed beans were saved, and health was not improved through exercise. There were no hulls to feed the pigs, no haulms for the rabbits or compost pile, and no fixing of nitrogen in the soil. There is no family time of shelling beans while catching up on the summer’s rental movie. Moreover, there are no skills honed and improved and passed along against that time when direct use might be out of grim necessity.

Either economy, cash or direct, carries on under momentum. To pause the one to engage in the other takes a great deal of effort. So seen from the vantage of the direct use economy that five dollars is hard gotten and ill spent.

Hardscrabblers who also have dabbled in selling produce off farm have all commented how the light and effortless the toil is to provide for their own table, but the same produce seems to take on leaden shoes when it wanders past the farm gates. It’s the difference between the two economies. It is like the fairy gold that so delights those who have stumbled onto the spirit world, but it turns into stones or dirt when they return to the ordinary world.

The cash economist often stumbles over mistaking an alternate economic system for economic absolutism. After all, we didn’t make the jeans we are wearing nor forge the hoe so a direct use economy isn’t possible after all, is it? To understand this we must needs rank our requirements by urgency. We must needs have replacement clothes periodically. But good peasant garb will last for years and in the meantime we can be open to opportunities for obtaining the clothing, making it, or obtaining the cash to buy it. Likewise with tools and utensils, they last long enough that we might not need replacements for …..well, forever!

But food? The need is much more pressing. Without an alternate plan for getting it, without an alternate economy, only a few days makes getting food an inevitable priority. No time to think about it, no time to muse over it, no time to wait out the best opportunity. In a cash economy this means going off to get money is equally a priority. Fuel for heating, cooking, and transportation are the same, as is transportation itself if it is necessary to obtaining the cash.

The posts that follow deal with the ideas, modes, and models that can be observed to greatly increase or decrease the likelihood of obtaining one’s good directly rather than depend on an unstable and uncertain cash economy. That is, they deal with homesteading.

The Testimony of the Mad Free Man

It is not the usual purpose of this blog to be so nuts-and-bolts but I feel compelled to make a stab at addressing the concept of homesteading. What is presented here might still seem largely schematic and philosophical, but I hope a case can be made that scheme and philosophy is really all there is. Without scheme and purpose all the minutia and details are useless. And I begin to suspect more and more that there is some urgency to it all.

When I first began looking into the self-sufficient life, it was for the purpose of self-determination and freedom. Economic considerations were secondary but as time has passed, economy and solvency have played a larger and larger role. Economy now bids fair to give way to survival. Perhaps, only perhaps, not so dramatic as life or death, but certainly the difference between breathing the free air and a sort of half-existence if dark shadows lingering on the horizon prove to be the portents of change that seem to so many to now be inevitable.

We have a tendency to view human history as a continual rise from primitive origins that by its very nature can only be forever on the rise. Just before the oil shocks of the 1970’s and the peak in our domestic oil production came, for example, the world of Star Trek which showed a future full of powerful gadgets and free of disease and poverty. Faith in this future vision is strong, and it is quite often I hear from people who where not yet born when it took place, “After all, we put a man on the moon. Surely we can find alternatives …“ But 40 years after watching the original Star Trek on a small black and white television, there are still no anti-matter engines nor dilithium crystals. Everything we have accomplished in the way of technology and lifestyle depends directly on fossil fuels without which it all comes to a halt and ceases forever.

For example, consider a solar electric system or a wind generator. Any such equipment made today is made using fossil fuels to refine the metals, make the plastics, transport it, etc. Without continued input in the form of fossil fuels, for this technology to continue indefinitely the wind generator or solar system must create enough surplus energy in its lifetime to make another one. At present, it can’t.

So unless the Vulcans land on earth soon to share with us the wonderful technology that will solve all our problems as they did in the science fiction paradigm of our times, our present Age of Oil is not the inevitable and logical step to even greater and higher things, but rather an insignificant blip in human history, quickly over and quickly forgotten.

The advent of Peak Oil (and what must quickly follow in its wake, Peak Water, Peak Grain, etc.) have lead many to view the only really viable future for human kind as an agrarian based subsistence living, and a hardscrabble one at that. That is the examination and evaluation of self-sufficient subsistence homestead living is of such keen importance.

I can’t teach anyone about homesteading. I doubt very much that anyone can. I can, however, point out the areas of solid footing to speed one on their way. By contrast it is also necessary to point out the pitfalls and missteps that might, due to our upbringing and conditioning, might seem intuitively logical until they are put to the test.

Put another way, it reminds me of theNecronomicon where in The Testimony of the Mad Arab he tells his readers:

“And if I do not finish the task, take what is here and discover the rest, for time is short and mankind does not know nor understand the evil that awaits it.”

Beag is Beag

An old Gaelic grammar I have advises the learner from the onset to approach the study beag is beag (little by little) rather than attempting an ceum mhor (a big step).

It is all too easy for me living out here far from Babylon to forget how the other half lives. Those who get a passing glimpse of the hardscrabble life look at our modest means of livelihood and wag their heads in disbelief. How can you get any work done with your back and those few pitiful tools? Beag is beag, that's how.

Babylon and Baylon's mindset have no patience for this. For Babylon it's an ceum mhor all the way! "Git 'er done" today, this morning. How fast and how completely you do something trumps all else. There have been some good discussions about managing hayfields with a scythe on a couple of other blogs and the mindset of Babylon rears its head quickly. A scythe!! You can't mow my several acres with a scythe!

That's right. I can't. Becasue what you have in mind is mowing it all in one day, before noon if possible. Git 'er done! The hardscrabble farm doesn't operate that way. Mowing is held to a minimum by rotational grazing and other methods of management. But the fields are watched closely and there is an eighth acre (100' x 50') that is just the opportune ripeness, mow that and leave the rest for another day. It takes about an hour to do well and that's a pleasant dance with the scythe before the day gets hot. Next day the hay is turned or teddered with a fork, then the next day or so raked up and stacked or stored in old fibre sacks. None of it takes very long.

Every project that looks major to the Babylonian eye is simply a series of small, light steps to the hardscrabbler. The road is 2000' long. Rather than have the expensive, intrusive, rock trucks come on the place and destroy my timber bridge, we take two rocks, just two, every time we are at the rock pile or creek, and place them in some spot where it looks like it might be needing attention. The steepest part of the road, about 70', needs a better defined drainage ditch on either side. Rather than spend a day doing that, or worse still, getting a tractor to do it, we place a shovel and mattock by the road and each trip to the garden or to check the mail or feed the dogs, we dig one or two feet of the ditch. It's almost done and no one remembers working up a sweat about it.

When I commuted to town long ago, there was a great scree of broken slate in one spot beside the road. I had 13 three gallon buckets in the back of the van and each time I passed, I filled them up with slate and put it on the road just where it was needed most. In a couple of years great ruts and holes were filled all without expense that wasn't being spent anyway and all without it being a big project.

After the fall hard corn harvest, any time we are seeing a movie on the DVD player, everyone grabs two or three years of corn and shells them into bowls. Soon the whole crop is done without anyone working much hard at it and no machines are required.

To the Babylonian there appears to be no work at all going on at the hardscrabble farm. Lazy people, never seem to be doing anything and never finishing a job! And the Babylonian should know, they dash on ahead to git 'er done and by that effort become hopelessly snarled in debt, anxiety, overweight and bad health, and the confusion of pitching about in frustration at the 80 things that seem to be needing done at once.

Babylon screams with impatience in the ear saying "Do it now, get it done, don't leave it hanging, no matter what the cost: debt, your health, your tranquility, all are up on the table in a bid to take the big step.

We sip another glass of herb tea and watch the exhausted impatience our Babylonian acquaintences. No hurry. No worry. It will get done beag is beag.

Jedermann

Along with Babylon's plunder of the world's resources and human lives to support and maintain its monstrous lifestyle of consumerism, there is the curious phenomenon of the Prophets of Babylon. Much unlike the prophets of old who wore clothes of camel's hair and were fed by ravens, these prophets sit at the despot's table resplendent and bejeweled, greasy of finger and generous of girth, burping from the excess of the feast between vacuous exortations that the despot should not be oppressing the folk (pass another platter of fatted goose [erp!]).

Amid the clink of wine glasses and the rustle of silk one hears these prophets, peace activists, pronouncers of "truth to power", call for an end to the very despotic actions that fill their glasses and leave their hands soft from lack of labor. They call for world equity. Yet when the first step toward that world equity is a step away from the bench at the despot's table, they remain placidly seated explaining that they are doing their part. They are only filling their glass 15/16th full of wine and waving on the proffered platter of roast pork for for thirds and instead taking the far humbler roast partridge in solidarity with the common masses of the world. And besides, all that effort and bother of getting up from the table would interrupt the discourse they'd been weaving, "Now, Your Majesty", as they wave a drumstick in gesture, "you really should cease these hostilities against the people" [munch][burp].

The Prophets of Babylon are like enfuriated stock character who is going to give the antagonist what for if it weren't for his friends pinning his arms and restaining him, "Oh, just let me at him!!" But when they release their riled and bellicose companion, he halts wide eyed, adjusts his jacket, and looks around self consciously, "Ah ... well ..... yes....." Sure, there's nothing the prophet wouldn't do to bring about world peace and equity, ah, .... it just takes me, ....., ah, black thumb, don't you know ..... ah. They stare wide eyed and slack jawed, dropping the drumstick to the gilded plate and wiping their ample greasy fingers on the skirts of their silk robes, eager to get back to their empty discourse and looking about desperately for an excuse to dismiss the unwelcome intruder to the despot's feast .......... Jedermann!

English has the curiosity of having separate words for the concept of each and every. Most languages don't. It's a very useful distinction but it somewhat muddies the concept conveyed by, for example, the German word jeder which at the same time means each and every. Jedermann, then, is every man but also the common man and the average man.

So the Prophets of Babylon want world equity and they are quick to point out that it may take some considerable time to achieve, conveniently leaving them seated at the despot's table all that considerable while. But if they were successful, if the despot suddenly repented in sackcloth and ashes and set things aright, and the world's goods and the world's work were evenly distributed in an equitable world commonwealth, what would be the lot of the average man, the lot of Jedermann?

There are two things about Jedermann I want to emphasize above all others and so I am going to mention them here and also toward the end of this post. 1) My construct of Jederman is the average of the world's goods and the world's effort to get those goods. This average is greatly skewed because the top 20% of the world's population uses up more than 82% of the world's goods and yet does less than 5% of the world's work. 2) The averages as they exist are based on the use of rapidly depleting fossil fuels. Once those fuels are in an earnest decline, the average goods available goes down rapidly and the average work required to secure them goes up.

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This chart divides the world's population into five equal groups and shows what percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product each fifth of the world uses. "Domestic" in this context being tautologous, of course. The distribution of the world's goods is like martini glass with a very few people using nearly all the goods in the world. So the average is still a great deal more than the vast majority of the people of the world have. What does Jedermann have at his disposal? Let's take the thing that is arguably the root cause of most of the armed conflicts in the world today, especially Iraq. How much gasoline does Jedermann get? It comes to about a quart a day. If there are four people in Jedermann's family, that family has a gallon of gasoline at their disposal. Not so bad, thinks you? Most of that gallon of gasoline has to go to produce food, textiles, building materials, transport and preserve them. There's very little left over for the family car, maybe on average six or eight ounces a day. And that family car? There are about 600 million cars in the world and over six billion people. So Jederman's family of four can have the use of one car every other day and have about a pint of gasoline in it for each use.

But wait, the average price of gas world wide is near $5 a gallon. How much money does Jedermann's family have to spend? That's tricky. Obviously a pound bag of rice at Kroger's or Walmart is going to cost more than a pound of rice in Madagascar so how can we compare incomes? It's an elusive puzzle. Some have come up with a formula for Purchase Power Equity but applying the principle soon becomes meaningless. Obviously the family in Madagascar isn't starving to death so a calculation of how much it takes to purchase a day's food there vs. a day's food in, say, London is a self equalizing equation. But in terms of actual cash, it turns out that the percapita income of the world is around $640 a year. Jedermann's entire family could only purchase a gallon and a half of gas a day if they devoted their entire income to it (which of course they can't do).

How much water does Jedermann get to use? To get an idea, in the US we use per person 60 times average water use in the world. In fact to move along in introducing you to Jedermann, take your typical use of clothes, electicity, metals, plastic, sugar, meat, paper, building materials, and most other things and reduce them not by the Babylonian Prophet's 15/16th nor even by half or by a factor of four, but rather by a factor of fourty to one hundred. Then you will have closer to what the world average is.

This is only half the story. This is what Jedermann gets to use. I'm sure many are thinking like Geoffry Rush's character in Mystery Men ("Ja, ja, ve have heard all zis before.")

The other half of the equation, the one left out because it is just too horrible for sedentary and idle activist to contemplate, is how hard does Jedermann have to work, on the average, to earn his allotment of goods?

Most of the work of the world is still done by hand labor. Some of the very small amount of gasoline, coal, and electricity that are Jedermann's lot night be diverted to doing some of his work, but his allotment of those things isn't very great. So it comes down to this, Jedermann can power his labor with fossil fuels for about two hours a week. Then the machines grind to a halt and he must roll up his sleeves and work with his back. Oh, some of the work will be done by draft animals, but not so much of it. And working draft animals is no vacation!

Thus Jedermann is rather lean and work hardened and fulfills the first exhortation after the fall that "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."

When Jedermann shows up at the despot's feast, he is like the handwriting on the wall because if the peace activist and 'truth to power' prophet's pronouncements are ever heeded, he must trade his plate of rich food for a sup of pottage, his silk robes for working man's tunic, and soft girth for a hardscrabble life of honest labor. If the Prophets of Babylon took the spectre of Jedermann seriously, when he appeared they would be like Belshazzar when "the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.."

Because, you see, the one thing that an equitable world can in no wise afford is a Pilsbury Doughboy peace activist. The equitable world would give him a basin in which to wash, send him half a mile to fetch the water for it, house him only under such a roof as he could make himself from what was at hand, set more than 7/8th of his table with only what he could wrest from the ground himself. It would hand him a hoe and send him to the fields to tend the potatoes each dawn for the common good until he was hard an lean.

An equitable world would lay the blame for the horrors of the world where it belongs. A trip across country to attend a peace conference would be measured in how many children were bombed to secure the petroleum to make that trip possible. It would count how many bowls of food had to be snatched away from the hungry each time someone elsewhere in the world was idle long enough to give a sermon or write a book about how many people are starving because someone was snatching away their bowl of food.

Now keep in mind that these averages we have explored are averages. Most people work much harder for far less than that. The averages include a very great deal of goods provided by the misuse of the environment and unsustainable fossil fuels and once we can no longer do that, the average work goes up and the average amount of goods goes down.

Of all the inequities in the world the most grievous is the idle prophet speaking out for Jedermann and yet unwilling to live like him. Yes, the equitable world would hand the prophet a hoe and send him to the field. An honest prophet wouldn't wait to be sent.