TULIP BULB SOCIETY

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

Yesterday morning I dropped my daughter off at the home of a friend. Her mother designs and maintains landscapes and gardens for the wealthy and on their sun porch there were five cases of tulip bulbs that had been delivered for planting; Firespray, Blueberry Ripple, VanGogh, Guinevere and I’lle de France. I took the opportunity- as I am known to do- to share with them the illustrative tale of the Tulip Frenzy. Three hundred years ago those five cases of bulbs was probably worth more than the entire neighborhood in which they lived and today they are casually left on someone’s porch by a guy wearing brown shorts, working the better part of his adult life in exchange for an equally arbitrary and nonsensical object- money.

It is incomprehensible to the modern American to conceive of a world without money. It is the primary driver of human activity and it has become the leading cause of stress in adults.

The further we drift away from the primary reasons for our existence as named in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the more likely we are to become “crippled, stunted, immature and unhealthy” which yields a “crippled psychology and a crippled philosophy”. If ever there was a definition of our era, this is it.

Money was designed to simplify commerce- it is a tool, not and end. Once it transcended it’s original purpose and became and object of human accomplishment and meaning, supplanting the the reason for our existence with it’s own directives, we began down a path that could only lead to ruin and collapse. There is no alternative at this stage, no way to “go back” to a time when things were different unless there is a wholesale rejection of this societal falsehood that has stripped us of human dignity and any chance at a life actually worth living.

This morning it rained and so we put off chores and stayed inside. I brought a variety of sunflowers into the kitchen and my eight year old and I seeded the desiccated blossoms on the counter top for hours. We talked the entire time, learned the best method, culled the damaged and empty shells, separated them by variety and heated up tallow to mix in the seeds creating a fat and laden feed for the chickens. We picked out the fattest ones for replanting in Spring, packaged up several pounds for further drying to use as snacks and in breads this Winter. Most of our time is spent together engaged in the production, harvest and storage of food and in sharing the labors. During that time- as our physiological needs have been met by the labors of our day to day lives- we engage in the soul satisfying aspects of love and belonging, which in turn feeds our esteem both for ourselves and each other, allowing us to pursue self-actualization.

We don’t use those terms, nor do we particularly think about what we are doing, but it is the natural outcome of following a course that is set on the basics of human life. Feed yourself, provide shelter, procreate, nurture, care for and support one another, think aloud and share our experiences and thoughts, celebrate our success, console our failures, encourage each others dreams and hopes and move through life in harness. At no time do we worry about money, beyond the requirements imposed upon us by the current culture- taxes, fuel, legally required insurances and the occasional treat to those things that we cannot do or produce ourselves. All of these things we provide with the excess of our production. We make enough maple syrup to offset our fuel needs, our cattle produce enough meat and calves to take care of the taxes, our fruits and vegetables provide for our clothing, detergents, and household goods, timber and firewood provide enough to take care of luxuries like coffee, olive oil, Internet service and electronic devices- the list goes on.

We do not work for money, we work for sustenance and self-worth, the principles in life and if we do it well the interest that pays off is the additional production. By learning to live with less, with a different set of goals and desires than before, we have become wealthy in way I don’t think I could have ever envisioned before. I spend the majority of my time with the people I love and respect the most, I live where I work, my office is the outdoors through every season and in all weather daily observing, hearing, smelling and touching an authentic reality rather than one made by man, my thoughts are filled with long term goals that extend beyond my own lifetime and my quality of life is based entirely on my own concept of liberty, not the demands and instructions of those who neither care for, nor wish me well.

The modern global economy is as fraudulent as the Dutch Tulip Frenzy and it is entirely dependent upon the participation of the public to remain effective. The choices we make about whether to participate in it or to withdraw our support by failing to believe in it are the fulcrum upon which the levers of power rest. The number of people who try and maintain this bankrupt status quo for their own ends are insignificant. Their hegemony in the world is the result of not of their superiority or intelligence, but of the sloth and ignorance of the greater mass of men. Perhaps we are headed for a neo-feudalism and a Dark Age, that the impending collapse will result in a barbarism never seen before, but it is just as likely that it will end the way the Dutch reign of seafaring global trade vanished with their wealth of tulips bulbs, in a blossoming that continues to this day in the soil of Springtime gardens.

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Dutchman

Tulip Mania:

At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble),[3] although some researchers have noted that the Kipper- und Wipperzeit episode in 1619–22, a Europe-wide chain of debasement of the metal content of coins to fund warfare, featured mania-like similarities to a bubble.[4] The term “tulip mania” is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble (when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values).[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Backtable
Backtable

“Money was designed to simplify commerce – it is a tool, not and end. Once it transcended it’s original purpose and became and object of human accomplishment and meaning, supplanting the the reason for our existence with its own directives, we began down a path that could only lead to ruin and collapse.”

And so it shall, because we’ve been chasing this pipe-dream since the 1600s. The very “idea” of America at the outset, long before anyone from Europe landed here, was one of “growth,” a place where Englishmen and others from Europe could leave behind the staid, institutionally built-in limits to personal wealth and seek fortune elsewhere.

We’ve never really deviated from this mantra. Once here, if you felt community was encroaching you could literally pull up stakes and move, seeking autonomy (“freedom”) and riches elsewhere.

There were occasional movements, efforts of warning so to speak; The Puritans, The Founding Father’s writings of republican ideals (sacrifice of personal wealth in service of the commonweal), The Quakers, etc., but John Locke and Adam Smith were far more influencing (and prescient ) in their liberalist ideals that, “The good of the individual is for the benefit of the many.” As a card-toting Libertarian, I agree. To a point.

Americans have always been driven by the need for individual success. It’s our singular, most recognizable characteristic, and it is also the one that ensures our destruction as a nation, or at least as the nation we recognize today.

The entire edifice has been “sold” to us, the idea that each and every person has a chance to “succeed.” Reality, of course, is far different, such that Pareto’s Law would tell you 20% of any population will control 80% of the wealth (and applying the law to that same 20% means that 4% will control 64% of the wealth, and so, until we arrive where we are today.)

Meanwhile, geography ran out and we turned to technology. Technology became the determining factor to independence, from the railroads, to the automobile, the airplane, the computer, and for lack of a better definition, “obscene” wealth.

Only again, it is a small percentage who will actual make large amounts of money from technology, with the rest of us relegated to chasing money by multitasking and having our lives consumed with the mundane and trivial omnipresence of it: Instead of freeing up more time, as originally envisioned in Popular Mechanics et al, technology has simply enabled us to cram fives time more work into the same space, all to chase the elusive dollar…to support more stuff in pursuit of…the elusive dollar.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Procrustes, “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.”\

We’ve become alienated, disaffected from humanity – we’re no longer “part” of it but rather individuals moving through it, each seeking a cut of the pie and dreaming of the day we “make it,” which depending your station in life runs the gamut from hitting the lotto to selling your company for multi-millions, and for the rest, anything in between.

I read an anonymous post once that I thought was insightful: “I feel poorer because this country is no longer what my ancestors believed in. They did not come here for money, they came for freedom. Now everything is measured in money and little else.”

Maybe, but instinct tells me this was never the prevailing reason most made a dangerous journey across the Atlantic. People came because they wanted a better future and that meant greater material wealth. We’ve been on this quest ever since.

The problem today is that we’ve come so far along the path to individualism and the pursuit of wealth, that coupled with technology, it has alienated us from one another to the extent that what little “shared destiny” that may have existed, if ever it did, is now gone.

M. Stanton Evans wrote, “Men without values are more than willing to trade their freedom for material benefits.” We’ve been beaten down with so many examples of how values no longer matter, particularly at the highest levels of leadership (the irony of THAT title), that Evans may as well be speaking for just about everyone anymore.

I suspect moving forward there are one of two likely outcomes: A.) The country devolves into a feudalistic oligarchy, with the elite living in heavily fortified compounds and the rest of us “on the outside” struggling to get by (in some respects we’re already there), or B.) Secession.

I think maybe a combination of both but I don’t see either as preferable, simply because A. isn’t sustainable, and B. leads to Balkanization and power struggles.

Regardless, HSF, I don’t think the American psyche will ever give up its pursuit of the almighty dollar. It’s what keeps chumps returning to Vegas and the masses addicted to materialism. It will always be “growth at any cost” until the costs simply implode the system.

Lysander
Lysander

@ HSF and BT…Both comments well done. Being a gloomy Gus kinda guy, I am starting to believe that TPTB have a lot more wealth that they can loot from this country, as in absorbing private pensions plans, cutting Social Security, more taxation, selling off the national parks for resources, sell off the seaports, sell off the national highway system, oil rights, etc.

They can keep this going for a long, long time. So I conclude that the scenario Backtable suggested is most likely; that of, in his words, “The country devolves into a feudalistic oligarchy, with the elite living in heavily fortified compounds and the rest of us “on the outside” struggling to get by”.

The Powers That Be are smart MF’ers.

Dutchman

@Backtable: “The problem today is that we’ve come so far along the path to individualism and the pursuit of wealth, that coupled with technology, it has alienated us from one another to the extent that what little “shared destiny” that may have existed, if ever it did, is now gone.”

Good post.

In the early days of the Republic the goal was freedom. However as more and more goods and services became available, the goal then became money. You could buy everything with money, without the need to be productive.

Wip
Wip

Lysander

There’s a difference between a smart mind and a criminal mind.

ed pell
ed pell

Hello HSF.
A city boy I am so impressed at the depth of your philosophy and knowledge. I am threatening my wife to move to the country and farm. I don’t think I’m strong enough for a lot of the work, but I like bison, pigs, cats, dogs, chickens. Tractor work or heavy lifting is probably beyond me now. I like the little horses, but never cottoned to big horses.

I did see a guy who had a mushroom farm in a truck container. How do I get started? Any thoughts? edpell

Phaedrus
Phaedrus

You are so eloquent.

Francis Marion
Francis Marion

Nicely put HSF.

@ Backtable – well written. You should be penning articles here. There are a few others as well. It is why I keep coming back. Introspection is hard to find these days….

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