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.
Continue reading “TULIP BULB SOCIETY”
