Time Magazine: “What if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something?”
March 16th, 2010I don’t agree with a lot of the woowoo in this article [cheap fuel cells powering off grid shanty towns?], but it’s still a good article and it describes a lot of things that Becky and I implemented in our own lives years ago.
You’re probably sick of seeing this repeated on Cryptogon, over and over, but here it is again: An understanding of food is a gateway to potentially much better realities. In other words, there’s no chance for a woowoo utopia, or anything approaching it, without understanding food. (And money, but that’s a whole different can of worms.)
Everyone needs food. Only the dimmest bulbs on the strand aren’t seeing that the industrial food system represents a clear and present danger to individuals and the environment. As the state stupidly tries to crush suppliers of delicious, nutritious and safe food, people become radicalized. For our purposes, radicalized means increasingly seeking out and paying cash or bartering for outlaw meat, raw milk, free range eggs, heirloom vegetables, etc.
Why does the state respond to people who sell homekilled meat in the same way that it responds to people who violently attack the state? If you think it has anything to do with public safety, you’ve already read too far. Stop now. Turn the TV back on.
It’s because ubiquitous, small scale agriculture represents a greater threat to state power than armed resistance. Small scale and underground food economies defund the state’s ability to kill and imprison people. Where’s the state when you hand over cash, a bottle of homemade liquor, or some other fungible thing for your goods at a farmer’s market or a farm gate? The state is far away, slowly dying as your network strengthens.
The person who feels empowered by supplying and/or consuming delicious, nutritious and safe food and then witnesses the state’s fascist response, thinks, “If the state is my enemy when it comes to something as basic as food, in what other ways does the state threaten my security?”
That’s it. Lesson learned. The floodgates are open.
Small scale agriculture is the foundation, the baseline requirement of any positive shift outside the useless political system. Small scale agriculture is netwar, and more effective at neutralizing fascism than violently attacking the state. So, start with food, and maybe some of the woowoo utopia stuff will follow. I wouldn’t count on it, but I’ve been wrong before.
Note: My commentary is a bit of a let down, like a lot of material on Cryptogon. So, if you give the article below to someone, make sure to disassociate it from Cryptogon. For most people, this piece is much better read without my commentary attached.
Via: Time:
Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.
But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.
It’s important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today’s information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn’t mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.
Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.
Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.
Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”
Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.
This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls “resilient communities,” which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call “broadband socialism,” in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today’s libertarian revival endures, it’s easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.
We see this individualism in the rise of “freeganism” and in the small but growing handful of “cage-free families” who’ve abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.
The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.
kevin, i think your commentary is valuable because you emphasise the importance of food as the starting point for a complete change in mindset and behaviour. the essay is definitely onto something, he drops enough good lines to sustain the narrative. he seems to be prodding the Business-as-Usual, middle-class American public to wake up from their long slumber and take a good look around. i think primarily he is trying to present ideas that are likely to be frightening but without coming across like a doom-sayer. fair enough. whatever works. can we get this guy to team up with Orlov for a travelling roadshow? 😉
While I can understand your discounting the leading comment on this one, as it will cause the people still living the brainwashed “benevolent state” dream to tune out, I would never send it on without those additional thoughts attached.
Primarily because the mate and I are also members of the “radicalized” class, trading our farm fresh eggs with cousins for raw honey over international borders (Germany/Belgium), buying our unpolluted grass-fed beef a quarter steer at a time from a farmer here in the village, raising our first two happy, healthy pigs this year and acquiring our raw dairy from the same farmer in the village.
While we still depend on the standard economy for a number of important nutrient-dense commodities that we can’t produce or acquire locally, such as coconut oil and cod liver oil and the like, we are nonetheless well past 90% weaned from the clutches of industrial aggro-culture.
Despite the abundant evidence that our lifestyle choices have led to improved health and the disappearance of chronic problems we each suffered while still living stateside, trying to discuss the “radical” nature of what we’re doing here on the old farm — as social “dropouts” of a sort — with the rest of either family and roughly 98% of everyone else we know is rather like lecturing primates on the importance of bananas that haven’t been sprayed with pesticide.
In the end, to most of them, we’re just a couple more lazy wackos who don’t want to deal with day jobs. And all the principle in the world doesn’t do a whit of good when you’re dealing with the cradle-to-grave indoctrination that passes for “knowledge” in the modern age.
But at least we can take occasional solace in such comments as the ones you appended above. It is one of the very few times we are actually able to enjoy the satisfaction of reading an opinion that mirrors our own “unacceptable” views… =)
Please don’t you dare consider dropping or curtailing comments in any way!
Cryptogon (and Farmlet) work for me largely because of three things: your choice of stories, your agenda-driven synopsizing of them, and especially your commentary. My only whinge about the site is that we don’t hear more from you.
Thanks for what you do.
i have purchased a couple of books recommended here about starting your own farm/self sufficient life style. can anyone recommend a place to learn hands on? somewhere to work or volunteer? i’ve heard of the wwoof program and i am looking into that. thanks.
also is there any way to see the full library of recommended books? thanks.
Kevin,
What are drinking or smoking?
Why would I ever divorce your commetary from this article? Its kind of you in a nutshell of sorts.
I also believe in the power of food. POWER OF FOOD. That has been, among many, my reason de etre for many a year now.
Between my Mose Miller who gives me grass fed meat, milk and cheese and the occasional vegetable that hasn’t survived in my growing of it, I live off of the food I’ve grown and preserved. Not always, but I’m going that way, more and more.
I am grateful that I don’t have children. I see my sister’s choice to never say No to her children. And wow, between the two it is night and day. One always wanting and getting from Mom, and the other, doing their best to work, be a contribution to the world.
I’m thinking that when July comes round, any and all who think and live outside of the boxes built in the way of our current world WILL be the ONES WE NEED MOST.
http://www.hermes3.net/2010.htm
the power of food~ absolutely the highest force of persuasion.
I recently discovered a most alarming food agenda coming to to theater near you.
check out the possibilities of what codex alimentaurius
would give the power of food maxim supreme teeth.
What everyone else said, Kevin: your commentary is spot on, and the story benefits from your framing.
The example you and Becky are setting is one that a lot of us follow, partially follow, or aspire to follow. Your blog is contrarian, counter-mainstream-cultural, and therefore extremely valuable. That’s why we all keep reading. Keep up the good work.