SB: a long rant on the topic of off topic rants (apologies in advance)

[Strawnet@aol.com]

WARNING - This can be considered off-topic (and long) if you are looking 
for technical information on how to build your straw bale house today - 
and not off-topic (IMHO) if you would like your grandchildren to be able 
to do same...

Typical of my style of dealing with all of the lists to which I am 
subscribed, I have only been scanning this list and making note of things 
of interest to me and ignoring the rest - and resisting the urge to jump 
in with tidbits of information or points of view that I'm sure others 
will provide.  Whenever I see arguments over issues becoming 
personalized, another part of me wants to jump in and restore civility to 
the debate.  Especially on this list.  I've written before about the 
history and nature of this list and why it is that I feel strongly that 
this should be a place where--in spite of the insanity and cruelty, the 
selfish and proprietary nature of much of the world driven by 
competition, greed, the cult of experts, and all that--we can create the 
world we would rather be living in.  We don't need to tolerate abusive 
behavior here, whether it is abuse of each other, abuse of information, 
or abuse of the spirit that lies at the heart of the efforts that so many 
of us are struggling to move forward against the current of a 
degenerating mainstream culture.

We can argue about all manner of things here, and I have also said in the 
past that I don't think many of these discussions should be considered 
"off-topic" because they are central to the values that drive many list 
members to be here in the first place. Further, they lie at the heart of 
the biggest barriers to achieving the goals that so many of us have for 
attaining shelter in a way that adds something of value to the world and 
is not just a series of lowest impact compromises leading to the least 
damage one can do. I hope that many people are on this list also because 
they care about more than just satisfying their own immediate personal 
needs. Not that this isn't important - it is. But there is much more that 
falls into the category that I think of as enlightened self interest - 
understanding the degree to which your well being is tied to the well 
being of others and to the whole system.  They do not teach this in 
school or talk about this on tv, and it seems to be political suicide 
today to talk about such things as the commons.  But this is the critical 
stuff of our future viability as a species, as a society, as a nation, as 
communities of people at any scale. It is not unrelated in my view, to 
the building of straw bale houses or any other positive activity that 
moves us toward instead of away from sustainability and hope.  We need to 
get this at a cellular level!

I know and appreciate that there are people on this list, perhaps the 
majority today, who are here to find out technical information on how to 
build straw bale houses.  Some, probably considerable, percentage of you 
are annoyed by these things that are off that particular topic - it is 
why you subscribed and because there are often things of value to you in 
that pursuit in among the rest, it is why you stay subscribed.  And, 
having said that, as so many people have said in the past, the delete key 
is your friend, and I'd add that the archives have several lifetime's 
worth of technical information and advice you can search to see how many 
times your particular need has already been covered here, when you are 
feeling totally disgusted by these forays into other topics.  

This latest set of rants - and their focus on democratic versus 
republican forms of government, and the nature of our personal 
implication in the deteriorating ecological, economic, and social 
systems, is one of those things that has become the constant background 
for viewing and doing the work that I do.  I can no longer separate these 
issues from anything related to building, technology, commerce, work, my 
personal choices, or my hope of living in a civil society.

In Garret Hardin's classic story of the Tragedy of the Commons, he 
reveals the flaw in our economic system that is based on the belief that 
freedom in the commons will lead to a good end.  The oversimplified story 
is of a village with a commons - the village green - on which many 
farmers each graze a cow.  The commons is big enough to support this 
level of grazing indefinitely (sustainably).  Then one day, one of these 
farmers does a simple totally rational calculation in which he sees that 
if he were to put another cow in the commons, the cost to him would be 
his fractional share of the potential overgrazing but his benefit would 
be nearly a whole cow.  Making a rational decision he puts an extra cow 
out in the commons.  Before too long, other farmers notice that there is 
an extra cow in the commons and they do the same calculation, come to the 
same conclusion and put extra cows out to graze as well.  Of course in 
very short order, the commons are overgrazed to the point of destruction 
- they will support no one's cows and everyone loses.  All the result of 
each individual making a perfectly rational decision that appears to be 
in his own best interest.  This is the system we have in a nutshell - the 
capitalist system. And what it does is amass wealth by privatizing profit 
and socializing or commonizing costs and impacts.  In another of his 
essays, Hardin discusses the two essential questions to ask whenever 
economic decisions are being made:  Who benefits?  Who Pays?  If you can 
tease out the answers to those two questions, you will always know what 
is going on and why things are being done the way they are being done.

The current system, in a fittingly oversimplified description, has the 
third world, the working class, the children and all future generations 
and other species paying and those of us fortunate enough to live in the 
right places with enough rights and privilege, benefitting.

And frankly the debate over what form of government we started out with 
is moot, in my opinion, because we have neither a republic nor democracy 
today. The Third College Edition (1994) of Webster's New World Dictionary 
demonstrates amply this problem (see #4 below - lets not forget what 
other nations have called themselves republics, including The People's 
Republic of China...): 

Republic... 1a) a state or nation in which the supreme power rests in all 
the citizens entitled to vote (the electorate) and is exercised by 
representatives elected, directly or indirectly, by them and responsible 
to them. b) the form of government of such a state or nation ...2 any 
group whose members are regarded as having common aims, pursuits, etc. 3 
a state or nation with a president as its titular head  4 any of the 
constituent territorial and political units of the U.S.S.R., Yugoslavia, 
etc. 

Democracy... 1 government in which the people hold the ruling power 
either directly or through elected representatives; rule by the ruled  2 
a country, state, etc. with such government  3 majority rule  4 the 
principle of equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment, or the 
practice of this principle  5 the common people, esp. as the wielders of 
political power.

Oligarchy...1 a form of government in which the ruling power belongs to a 
few persons  2 a state governed this way  3  the persons ruling such a 
state.

Kakistocracy (had to go to the Compact Edition of the Oxford English 
Dictionary for this)...The government of a state by the worst citizens.

As I understand it, we started out with a republic (the founding fathers 
were not perfect and knew it - they were, after all trying to form "a 
more perfect union" - they didn't think women had the same rights as men, 
they didn't fully trust ordinary people to be able to make informed 
decisions and hold all the power, so they created various controls over 
who qualified as "the electorate" and which officials would be directly 
elected and which indirectly i.e. the Senate, and many owned slaves, etc. 
Yet they knew a great deal about power and its abuse and they tried to 
create a system of government that avoided the concentration of power in 
the few. And they were almost all opposed to the idea of corporations, 
whose abuse they had seen first hand, as this legal fiction of artificial 
personhood was created by the British government as the vehicle through 
which the wealth of the colonies and conquered lands could be transferred 
to England.  I believe that our founding fathers would be engaged in the 
second American Revolution if they were here today, to strip corporations 
of their almost unlimited power and their freedom to exhibit the worst 
kind of citizenship with virtual impunity). Corporate America is far too 
much like the British Empire of their day and they would recognize it in 
a heartbeat. They were brave and serious enough to risk everything, 
including their lives to create a country based on a government of rights 
and responsibilities, freedoms and obligations.

We then moved toward becoming a democracy as Senators became popularly 
elected officials, women and minorities were given the right to vote, 
poll taxes were made illegal, etc.  Today, however, we are much closer 
every day to both oligarchy and kakistocracy.  And when I use the term 
the kakistocracy, I am not using it to refer to ordinary citizens or even 
our elected officials themselves, but instead to the worst of citizens - 
the corporate citizens, whose vote counts more than any of ours as 
individual citizens in our current political systems. We are being ruled 
by people who are market fundamentalists - people who believe in the 
total economy - the view that everything is economic - everything has a 
price, everything of importance is or should be for sale. Our current and 
recent governments have already given away our rights to local economic 
sovereignty and in fact to national economic sovereignty.  But it isn't 
just economic sovereignty that has been lost.  The WTO, NAFTA, FTAA are 
all undemocratic, supranational corporate agreements that have the power 
to override any national, state, local laws or regulations - regardless 
of their purpose of protecting public health, safety, welfare.  We will 
have to undo this theft of our rights and responsibilities.

Here are things that you can read to gain a view of reality quite 
different from anything you will ever get from reading the Wall Street 
Journal, the New York or LA Times, your local newspaper, Newsweek, Time, 
etc. or watching CNN or any of the network tv channels, or listening to 
most radio stations:
-The Ecology of Commerce or jump right in to Natural Capitalism (by Paul 
Hawken and Paul Hawken and Hunter and Amory Lovins)
-False Dawn by John Gray (a book that will clear up any questions that 
you ever had about the lunacy of "free trade" and makes very clear that 
global free trade and democracy are rivals not allies - the best book 
I've found on this topic)
-Earth In Mind by David Orr (a book that remains at the top of my list of 
must read books about where we are and why and what we must change - its 
about education and everything else)
-Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change - a brand new 
book by Guy Dauncey which lays out where we are and what options we have 
for turning things around in a very straightforward, well-researched and 
documented way - scary as hell and yet doesn't lead to despair unless you 
are a cynic.  
-If God Had Meant for Us to Vote He'd Have Given Us Candidates by Jim 
Hightower.  He has others worth reading too, but this is a good one to 
start with. This hilarious, insightful book has more wisdom and truth in 
it than any political book I've read in years and it will make you want 
to puke when you read the truth about some of our fearless leaders.  

That's a good start. I'd also recommend Life Is a Miracle by Wendell 
Berry, and if you can lay your hands on a copy, The Idea of a Local 
Economy, an essay by Berry that was in the Spring 2001 issue of Orion 
magazine, which I have reread three times and it just gets better.  All 
these people are out of the box and if we care about our kids and their 
kids, we need to get out of the cultural/political/economic box that 
we're being sealed into everyday, and see that we have a hell of a lot 
more work to do than just figuring out how to build straw bale houses.

We need to take back our citizenship, and our power, and I'm not talking 
about just taking back our rights but also taking back our 
responsibilities.  I have to say that I am enraged by the constant talk 
about our rights - property rights, the right to consume, the right to 
profit, the right to pollute, the right to dominate the world, the right 
to be free of shame and guilt for our excesses. I want to hear about our 
right to be responsible, to live within our means, to live within real 
limits - the flip side to privilege? We have invented an economic system 
that is suicidal and benefits the few at the expense of the many, the 
present at the expense of the future.  We need to create something else. 
And we need to start doing it and seeing it and making connections.  
Wendell Berry ends the Idea of the Local Economy by saying "A total 
economy for all practical purposes is a total government. The "free 
trade," which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings 
"unprecedented economic growth," from the standpoint of the land and its 
local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, is 
destruction and slavery.  Without prosperous local economies, the people 
have no power and the land no voice."  What Berry is saying is that we 
need to become responsible for creating this different future, for the 
viability of our local communities, our local economies.  This is a very 
different politics than republic versus democracy. And it is a global 
politics based in the primacy of local economics, local ecology, local 
community - meaning that both experts and corporations need to be 
accountable to local outcomes - not free to move capital and wealth 
around the world in pursuit of the highest return on investment 
regardless of the lives, communities and ecosystems destroyed in the 
process. 
This means of course that we too must be accountable and take that 
responsibility.  This shift can only come from each of us understanding 
sufficiently the large issues to begin to make our choices based on 
enlightened self interest, make the changes that we must make in our 
lives to take back the right to really be responsible for what we do.  We 
were never given the right to diminish or eliminate the rights of others. 
 That is a myth.  And to think that our excesses in the false name of 
"rights" do not come at the direct expense of the rights of others is a 
fraud. I have little tolerance these days for the complaints of people 
who are incredibly well off and free, and who know little of real 
political abuse or terror or oppression, but choose to whine about their 
loss of rights.  

And as I have said before about such things - this should not be viewed 
as a burden but as a gift.  We have incredible privlege and opportunity 
in the U.S. as in much of the developed world.  What we do with it is our 
choice.  But we are all more fortunate by far than probably 80 or 90 
percent of the people we are sharing this planet with. Just being on this 
list is evidence of that.  So let's get on with the work we do, the 
things we pursue, our interest in things like straw bale construction in 
that larger context. And let's be grateful that we have the opportunity 
to do so.



David Eisenberg
Director
Development Center for Appropriate Technology
P.O. Box 27513
Tucson, Arizona 85726-7513 USA
(520) 624-6628
(520) 798-3701 Fax
David@dcat.net
strawnet@aol.com (direct personal e-mail)
www.dcat.net

The future is not out there in front of us, but inside us. - Joanna Macy


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