Posted By Urban Garden Magazine On November 17, 2010
Image copyright Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto
As the old saying goes, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. We cannot substantially improve the world until we understand what the world actually is.
The world looks like a map of countries, governments and cultures, a jigsaw puzzle of various tribes in various states of development. There are better and worse governments, more liberal and more repressive cultures, divergent modes of social organization, and so on.
This is how the world looks, to be sure, but this is not what the world actually is.
When we were young, the reality of the world was very clear to us. We needed very little outside help to understand and experience the world as it actually was. We did not need maps, fairy tales (religion) or scary stories (propaganda) to tell us that it’s brighter by day than by night, or that chocolate tastes good, and a skinned knee feels bad.
Remember for a moment the enormous effort that was poured into you as a child, to plant allegiance in your innocent chest to your local tribe, through sports, politics, religion / culture as a whole.
Why was that done? What was the purpose?
Every intelligent person understands that the God he was trained to believe in is just one of thousands of gods accepted as real the world over and that every child must believe that his own God is the one true God, and disbelieve in every other deity.
In the same way, although we were always told that our own countries and cultures are the best, we also know, as intelligent adults, that every other child is told the same thing, and that it is utterly impossible for this to be universally true.
Why is so much effort poured into indoctrinating us? Why is it so important for us to develop this fetishistic allegiance to our local tribe, our local fantasies, our local priests, our local leaders?
The ‘why’ is a fascinating story, and it can very well be called, ‘The Story of Our Enslavement.’
Why We Are Trained
Human beings want to dominate and exploit the resources around them. At first, we mostly hunted, fished and ate off the land, but then something magical—and terrible—happened to our minds.
Unique among the animals, we became afraid of the idea of death, and of future loss.
This was the start of a great tragedy, and an even greater possibility…
When we became afraid of death, of injury, and imprisonment, we became controllable—and so valuable—in a way that no other resource could ever be.
The greatest resource for any human being to control is not a natural resource, or a tool, or an animal or land—but other human beings.
You can frighten an animal, because animals are afraid of pain in the moment, but you cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, or with the possibility of future torture or imprisonment, because animals have very little sense of tomorrow. You cannot make a cow fatter by punishing it with torture, or force a sheep to produce more wool by intimidating it with possible death. You cannot swing a sword at a tree and scream at it to produce more fruit, or hold a burning torch to a field and demand more wheat. You cannot get more eggs by menacing a hen, but you can get a man to give you his eggs by threatening him.
This is the essence of the world that we live in—and this is what we are looking at, when we regard a map of the world. We are not looking at countries, or cultures, or religions…we are in fact looking at farms.
Farms holding people, owned by other people.
The reason that so much effort was poured into propagandizing you as a child is that propaganda is the fertilizer of human farming – in every sense of the word. Human farming has been the most profitable—and destructive—occupation throughout history, and it’s now reaching its climax. Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock.
Some people get confused because governments provide healthcare and water and education and roads, and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work. Nothing could be further from the truth. All farmers provide healthcare and irrigation and training to their livestock.
Some people get confused because we are allowed certain liberties, and thus imagine that our governments protect our freedoms. But all farmers plant their crops a certain distance apart to increase their yields—and will allow certain animals larger stalls or fields if it means they will produce more meat and milk.
In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms not because he cares about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits.
Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?
The History of Human Farming
There have been four major phases of human farming.
Egyptian
The first phase, used in ancient Egypt, was direct and brutal human compulsion. Human bodies were controlled, but the creative productivity of the human mind remained beyond the reach of the whip, the brand and the shackles. Slaves remained woefully underproductive, and required enormous resources to control. They could produce pyramids, but not movies or microchips.
Roman
The second phase was the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted some capacity for freedom, ingenuity and creativity, which raised their productivity. This increased the wealth of Rome by adding to the tax income of the Roman government. With this additional wealth, Rome aggressively expanded into an empire, eventually destroying the economic freedoms that fed its power, and collapsed. No doubt this does not seem entirely unfamiliar?
Feudal
After the collapse of Rome, the feudal model introduced the concept of ‘free range’ livestock, combined with taxation. Instead of being directly owned, peasants farmed land that they were allowed to retain as long as they paid off the local warlord. This model broke down due to the continual subdivision of productive land, and was destroyed during the Enclosure Movement, when land was consolidated, and hundreds of thousands of peasants were kicked off their ancestral lands, because new farming techniques made larger farms more productive using fewer people.
The increased productivity of the late Middle Ages created the excess food required for the expansion of towns and cities, which in turn gave rise to the modern Democratic model of human ownership.
Democratic
As displaced peasants flooded into the cities, huge stocks of cheap human capital became available to the rising industrialists—and the ruling class of human farmers quickly realized that they could make more money by letting their livestock choose their own occupations.
Under the Democratic model, direct slave ownership has been replaced by the Mafia model. The Mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends thugs around once a month to steal from the business ‘owners.’ You are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity—and thus the taxes you can pay to your masters.
Your few freedoms are preserved because they are profitable to your owners. You are more productive when you feel free, and since voting allows you to feel free, you are welcome to it—as long as you only vote on who your master is, not on whether you should have a master at all.
The great challenge of the Democratic model is that increases in wealth and freedom threaten the control and power of the farmers. The ruling classes initially profit from a relatively free market in capital and labor, but as their livestock become more used to their freedoms and growing wealth, they begin to question why they need rulers at all. Ah well. Nobody ever said that human farming was easy. Keeping the tax livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes has been a three-phase process.
Phase One: Indoctrination
The first phase is to indoctrinate the young through government ‘education.’ As the wealth of democratic countries grows, government schools are universally inflicted on children in order to control the thoughts and souls of their future livestock. All children bond with their educators. As women became liberated from the constraints of housework due to developments in, and the availability of, labor saving devices, government-paid intellectuals encouraged them to enter the taxable marketplace. With both parents working outside the home, governments can then take over the early education and indoctrination of children. Within less than a generation, taxes have increased to the point where two parents working take home less money than one parent working in the past.
Phase Two: Division
The second phase of livestock control is to pit citizens against each other through the creation of dependence while appearing to foster independence. It is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force—and where it can be achieved, it remains cripplingly underproductive, as can be seen in North Korea. Human beings do not breed well or produce efficiently in direct captivity.
If human beings believe that they are free, however, they will produce much more for their farmers. The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on the payroll of the governing farmer. Those who become dependent on the existing hierarchy will then attack anyone who points out the violence, hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership.
Freedom is slavery, and slavery is freedom?
If farmers can get the livestock to attack each other whenever one of them brings up the reality of their situation, they don’t have to spend nearly as much effort controlling them directly.
Those who become dependent upon the stolen largess of the farmer will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership—and the intellectual and artistic classes, always and forever dependent upon the state—will say, to anyone who demands freedom from ownership: ‘You will harm the herd.’
The livestock are kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility for the destructiveness of the system to those who demand real freedoms.
Phase Three: Fear
The third phase of livestock management is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened livestock cling to the ‘protection’ of the farmers.
The Future?
This system of human farming is now nearing its end.
The terrible tragedy of the present system has occurred not in spite of, but because of past economic freedoms. The massive increases in wealth throughout the 19th century resulted from economic freedoms—and it is this very increase in wealth that has fed the size and power of the state.
When the livestock become exponentially more productive, there is a corresponding increase in the number of farmers and their dependents. The growth of the state is always proportional to the preceding economic freedoms. Freedom creates wealth, and the wealth attracts thieves and political parasites, whose greed then destroys the economic freedoms.
In other words, freedom metastasizes the cancer of the state.
The government that starts off the smallest will always end up the largest. This is why there can be no viable and sustainable alternative to a truly free and peaceful society. A society without political rulers, without human ownership, without the violence of taxation and statism.
To be truly free is both very easy, and very hard. We avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is painful to see it directly. We dance around the violence of our dying system because we fear the attacks of our fellow livestock. But we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see.
Wake up.
To see the farm is to leave it.
Words: Stefan Molyneux
Many thanks to Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio. www.freedomainradio.com [1]
Article printed from Urban Garden Magazine: http://urbangardenmagazine.com
URL to article: http://urbangardenmagazine.com/2010/11/human-farming-the-story-of-our-enslavement/
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[1] www.freedomainradio.com: http://www.freedomainradio.com
[2] Image: http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20
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