Very interesting article. I haven't been approaching this primarily through economics, but I also tend to view systems that harden against circulation as ultimately anti-life—whether in education, organizations, or the symbolic order itself. Particularly when the primary function of a system shifts from facilitating contact with reality to excluding deviance and protecting itself from the Real.
Separately, because it's a separate issue, I think we need to consider *timing*. When you grow a field or even a stand of emmer wheat or barley, it all becomes available at once. Immediately the process of rotting / waste to vermin etc. begins. However, you can store it. This requires self-restraint. For a perpetually hungry population feeding their endemic helminths and trying to survive, there's a temptation to gorge and lay down fat on your own body. If you do,however, and if that grain is a significant part of your annual caloric credit, the individual dies and maybe the village disappears.
The only alternative is village-level curation (damp, rot), protection (freeloaders, pests) and self-restraint. This requires a governmental structure. In an anarchy, the food gets eaten by September.
By the winter solstice, the anarchy has starved to death. In the natural selection of ideas, the idea dies with the community.
This is gorgeous to read, even though I was annoyed with you for time-travelling into the future and harvesting part of the ethical framework of my second half-written novel!
There was a state before differentiation though, possibly even quite a settled state. Forests of oak, hazel and pistachio produced more high-protein food per unit of area even than modern farming with GM and fertilisers.
Human beings created and then curated them, simply by uprooting unproductive saplings. Wild pigs, deer etc. were attracted by mast and were also caught and eaten. There was no need to kill them all and gorge / dry meat / lose it to rot, as was done with the megafauna in older times. The food source kept the game happy and gradually the game became tame. In some areas, this was the beginning of your flocks and later herds. Transhumance was perhaps only needed on thinner grasslands.
Very interesting article. I haven't been approaching this primarily through economics, but I also tend to view systems that harden against circulation as ultimately anti-life—whether in education, organizations, or the symbolic order itself. Particularly when the primary function of a system shifts from facilitating contact with reality to excluding deviance and protecting itself from the Real.
Yes, from my own limited vantage point I suspect you’re seeing it clearly.
I talk about these forces in terms of entropy and syntropy.
I expound upon them to the Hebrew terms of elilim and elohim. I’ve glossed them in the brief lexical entries linked below if you have interest.
https://ebyonim.substack.com/p/entropy
https://ebyonim.substack.com/p/syntropy
https://ebyonim.substack.com/p/elilim
https://ebyonim.substack.com/p/elohim
I do! Thank you so much, I will have a look.
I’m grateful for your interest and readership, Anri. Please feel free to leave feedback or critiques if the proverbial Spirit moves you.
Separately, because it's a separate issue, I think we need to consider *timing*. When you grow a field or even a stand of emmer wheat or barley, it all becomes available at once. Immediately the process of rotting / waste to vermin etc. begins. However, you can store it. This requires self-restraint. For a perpetually hungry population feeding their endemic helminths and trying to survive, there's a temptation to gorge and lay down fat on your own body. If you do,however, and if that grain is a significant part of your annual caloric credit, the individual dies and maybe the village disappears.
The only alternative is village-level curation (damp, rot), protection (freeloaders, pests) and self-restraint. This requires a governmental structure. In an anarchy, the food gets eaten by September.
By the winter solstice, the anarchy has starved to death. In the natural selection of ideas, the idea dies with the community.
This is gorgeous to read, even though I was annoyed with you for time-travelling into the future and harvesting part of the ethical framework of my second half-written novel!
There was a state before differentiation though, possibly even quite a settled state. Forests of oak, hazel and pistachio produced more high-protein food per unit of area even than modern farming with GM and fertilisers.
Human beings created and then curated them, simply by uprooting unproductive saplings. Wild pigs, deer etc. were attracted by mast and were also caught and eaten. There was no need to kill them all and gorge / dry meat / lose it to rot, as was done with the megafauna in older times. The food source kept the game happy and gradually the game became tame. In some areas, this was the beginning of your flocks and later herds. Transhumance was perhaps only needed on thinner grasslands.