Thoughts on being a slave: Farming

BlisteredWhippet · Intermediate Crude Joined: Feb 08, 2005 Posts: 863

I have real issues with learning organic farming. Specifically, I am afraid of becoming a vassal of the culture. I struggle with the classical social humility of being a farmer. In some ways I feel like, if I am simply a "food producer", I will just exacerbate the essential problem of the way in which we as people, as a society, interacts with nature. By simply using the Earth to grow food, and exchanging it for money, I support the whole enterprise of society. I fear becoming trapped in a role where by helping people the wrong way I add to the problem instead of helping solve it. It occurs that some people, unfortunately, should not be fed at all. I feel like I am a part of the problem when I become the one who supplies the food calories to a population that will take the energy from those calories and just continue to destroy, destroy, destroy. Know whadda mean?

Being a farmer has such significant downsides. For one thing, the dependence of the population on the farmer's produce puts him in a vulnerable position. History is filled with the appropriation of the farm and its produce in times of war, political, or economic stress. In a modern capitalist milieu, you are never the "owner" of land, you are the owner of a piece of paper. As farmer, you are adopting the modern profile of "serf". "Slave" is not a role I aspire to, especially not in the context of providing life support for a social system set on total destruction.

If the population is dependent on the farmer, the farmer is also dependent on the population. Taxation means that even the most self-sufficient must participate in the economic system. Where is freedom? Where is wildness?

Extrapolating from current conditions into the future, I imagine the project of agriculture, on a mass scale, geared toward total production efficiency at the expense of all else, becoming a huge part of the project of society. After it becomes apparent the the main problem for human life is the feeding of its bloated population, the natural effect of the last 100 years of corporate consolidation of agribusiness and the parcelling and zoning of every last square foot of arable land, means that the overall picture will be this:

There will be vast urbanized and denatured social centers of humanity, crowded into population zones and the vast, "superefficient" GMO manicured-Earth food-producing zones. Perhaps we will, by mandate, create "Wild" zones, like the park system today. Thats it. Those three zones, mapped, squared off, owned, and accounted for, will comprise the entire surface of the Earth.

Governments and corporations will evolve more specifically as entities with a singular purpose of supporting the population's eating and health habits, above all else. The population, squeezed together and detached from nature, will simply accept this new arrangement. Past Peak Oil, surviving societies will suffer the loss of diversity in possibility. The vanishing frontier, if you will. The collapse of a Greek or Roman-inspired vision of the purpose of society, culture, and government into a simplistic arrangement where the state's main responsibility is simply the delivery of food calories, water, and medicine.

The entire planet as a concept will be collapsed further and further into the simplicity of this arrangement. Our "mission" as people and as citizens will diminish more and more. We will retreat into urbanized reality, more and more dependent, weak, and less free. Computer technology will only ultimately enslave us to this system. The diminishing returns of technology will accelerate. And through it all the device of corporate industrialism will grow in power until the laughable thoughts of today about reigning in corporations will be a joke, unthinkable. There will be a great death of idealism and malaise from a loss of identity. We won't know where it went. We will only know our appetites. We will make fundamental biological, neurological, and emotional connections between our organic feelings and the mechanisms which cure them.

Thus, today's committed social actor will become tomorrow's lost soul. The free will be criminals, all. The mob will not have the choice of growing their own food by the expansion of corporate and government power. No one will own land, just pieces of paper, like the constitution. In the end, they will be spiritually empty. Their bellies will be full all the time, yet they will feel tired and hungry. They will not be able to sleep or dream. They will plug their minds completely into the system and tinker with the digital recreations of an ideal reality that more and more resembles the simple state of nature taken for granted not so long ago.

In some ways, this is an argument for the slaughter of billions of people whose beliefs in citizenship and the stewardship of government and the unchallengability of biologic destiny naturally lead to conditions of deprivation, hardship and overshoot.

All these people, with the very best intentions, with the gentle harmless personalities... alone, they seem harmless. They are charismatic in their unconscious vulnerability. But en masse, they are destroying everything.

Someone once commented on the characteristic of Evil: banality. True evil is right in front of your face. It looks unassuming. The stupidity and naivite of Bush is a good example of how Evil pools its power in the banal. Christmas is another, believe it or not. The engine of EarthRape is never humming along so efficiently as during the holiday season.

Banality is everywhere these days. It is in minds, in conversations, thoughts. It is powered by nuclear reactors and beamed invisibly throughout time and space. We are, fairly speaking, saturated in banality. Outrage has never been the same since we all started on this social project of being ingratiating assholes to each other as perfect strangers, ever since we started the project of ignoring what is good and shrivelling into our own vanity.

We need to accept the burden of pain that comes with true understanding. We must stop making excuses for banality. We must stop ignoring it. We must start acting like we have canine teeth and a belly full of hydrochloric acid instead of giant Gummi Bears. We must start acting like people with vision and purpose.

We must short-circuit social robots and rewire our own pussified minds. We must eradicate the cultural edifice within us that dissolves freedom and liberty into solipsistic legalism of contemporary cultural values. We must overturn internal and external moral and ethical systems which work to enslave us. We must stop feeding the machine.

Gideon · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Aug 29, 2006 Posts: 1140

Montequest is a certified asshole.
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Chief of Asshole Certification

americandream

In other words, we must bend the knee to no one except ourselves....it's as simple as that. i.e.....whats in it for me and to hell with what grandad Jimmy Joe did.

Pure logical self interest is a sobering restraint on one's susceptibility to cap doffing servitude.

Will that be tea and scones ma'am?
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Bugger me, I hear oil's runnin out mate!

FireJack · Heavy Crude Joined: Mar 16, 2005 Posts: 457

Its always risky trying to predict what will happen in the future, even small events can change everything.

Im crossing my fingers for a really bad worldwide growing season followed by a mass famine. It would signifiganly reduce the greatly bloated population without destroying the infrastructure too much (mabey depending on how people react). One thing for certain is that food procution will take a bigger role, how it will play out I will not attempt to predict. I intend to keep an eye out for slave plantation and thugs going around looking for workers.

eric_b

Excellent post. Perhaps after further cogitation I'll be able to add something to it, but I'm getting old and krusty.

Edward Abbey brought this up a few times in his writings I recall. He equated 'the fall' of the human species with the development of agriculture. Think about it, there's something to it. It was a big factor in selecting greedy traits (accumulation of far more food than necessary) as well as raping the land.

NEOPO

BWya....

Only one thought comes to mind when I think about Farming and slavery....... "Kill massa, Kill massa, Kill massa Kill!!!"...... Cool

Yet arent we slaves really?
Invisible chains....
Virtual fields....
Picking data like cotton while a machine with mirrored sunglasses watches over our every keystroke......

and below all of this the world is shackled to our feet patiently waiting for the scraps and drops to fall.

Ecovillage.Ecocity.Ecocountry.Ecoworld.....
Stranger things have happened.
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It is easier to enslave a people that wish to remain free then it is to free a people who wish to remain enslaved.

BlisteredWhippet · Intermediate Crude Joined: Feb 08, 2005 Posts: 863

nuhax · Tar Sands Joined: Jun 18, 2005 Posts: 62

SILENTTODD

Blistered Whippet.

Please do any of you people any have ancestors or current relatives who farm? Instead of talking psychobabble, ask people who really turn the soil. They will tell you to paraphrase a popular USA Country/Western song they love to “watch their Corn pop up in rows”.
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Skeptical scrutiny in both Science and Religion is the means by which deep thoughts are winnowed from deep nonsense-Carl Sagan

BlisteredWhippet · Intermediate Crude Joined: Feb 08, 2005 Posts: 863

SILENTTODD

billg

Recently, I wrote an article for a vegan chat forum about how organic farms are utterly dependent on the byproducts of the animal factory farm industry for soil fertilization. They get their cheap crap from factory farms who are more than willing to relieve themselves of their environmental sins. Yes, as weird as this sounds, organic farming is actually helping to perpetuate factory farming.

But...there are alternatives to the current system like veganics and permaculture. The alternatives may not reach full blossum until the current system collapses. It seems to me that peak oil will put a stress on all centralized systems. What happened in Cuba may happen here.

I think it is a mistake to condemn all farmers. By the way, who is putting food in your mouth. Unfortunately, breatharianism is not an option. Maybe, try putting your energy more into creating the kind of system/infrastructure that seems appropriate to you.

Bill G.

Ludi

Not sure what your plan is, BlisteredWhippet....

What's your plan? What actions are you taking currently?
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NEOPO

I say we start an all controlling illegal system of taxation gang and call it the federal reserve......
We will call our members "bankers" and their employees "politicians".....
Together we will convince the populous that paying us is the right thing to do and to not pay a crime.

Ok breaking from my MALCOM XMAS mode for a second.

I too have pondered the eventuality and inevitability of BWya's line of thought here.

I cannot deny that I am very VERY concerned with what may occur if the worst of the possible peak oil ramifications come to pass.

Okay minus nuclear war/M.A.D we have many other major threats to our continued existence.

A loner out on a stead is similar to rolling the dice in vegas.
An ecovillage unaware of the reality of Peak Oil and poorly situated strategically does not give much better odds IMHO.

I have heard some other "strategies" and honestly believe that the best plans being drawn up are not then posted on an internet forum.

Isaac Isamov's Foundation series - a reference book it now seems.

Paging Prof. Seldon - white courtesy phone please - Paging Prof. Seldon.

Hari Seldon
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It is easier to enslave a people that wish to remain free then it is to free a people who wish to remain enslaved.

SILENTTODD