Parable: For a Thousand Years...

For a Thousand Years... (parable)

For a thousand years, the people in a village built their houses the same way; by digging up mud and piling it up into walls. They had many tools for doing it; shovels, packers, smoothers…

But digging up the mud caused the water to rise, and erode the walls away, and the people had to repair or rebuild their houses, and much of their time went into the constant building.

As the years passed, the digging caused the water to rise higher and higher , and the people had to work harder and harder to keep their houses together, with less and less time for living otherwise, and raising their children, and finding their food, and dancing together…

Then, one day a child of the village got up and said; "Why not stop building with mud, and build with stone instead… the water does not rise when we dig up stone, nor could it melt away the stone, and, after all, it is the stone in the ground that is the foundations of all our houses.

One man asked, "but what motivation would anyone have then, to repair their houses?"

And another asked, "What would we do with all our shovels and packers and smoothers then?"

And the rejection came hard and fast: What would we do with the mud? How would we shovel up stone, or pack it, or smooth it? If everyone had stone houses they would just sit around and starve to death. It's good for the children to have to rebuild their houses, it makes them good citizens. Without mud, life would lose it's zest. Without mud, how would anyone know who was the best in building with mud? Why, we have always used mud… it's tradition! …

…and lastly, the local expert in building mud houses, with the biggest mud house of all said, "It's an interesting idea, but it'll never happen! Too many have nice mud houses to let anyone else build stone houses, so they would stop you somehow. It's 'Human Nature'!"

And everyone nodded.

So the village continued to build their houses with mud, working harder and faster all the time, until one day the water rose so high all the houses melted.

…and finally; the people gave up the mud and built with stone, and thus the village stands to this day!

And , Gee, they all found something else to do with their vast new spare time… like raise their children, grow better food, and get to know one another.

Key to the story:

The Mud is the money system.

The water that always rises higher is the built in, ever growing, inequality, the effects of money on human behavior, the pain and death, ecological destruction, murder and starvation that comes from using the system, the way money, through limiting our options to 'economic sense', puts our survival at risk when adaptation and adoption of new ways are required to survive.

The stone is the reality that we are really in this together, that we survive through our cooperation motivated by our desire to survive, and the work done by the leverage of technology, that we are all absolutely dependent upon the ecology we evolved from, and ultimately, we can choose to have much better lives with a lot more freedom by changing how we do things... by eliminating money and barter and overwhelming 'ownership' of 'property' (which was originally taken by force anyway, by 'right of conquest').

There is no reason to suffer under a system which puts half the world's wealth in the hands of 385 people and lets millions die in totally unnecessary poverty… AND destroys our common ecological life support system. Do we have to have the whole system crash into ruin before we learn what the village learned?