A friend of mine is an agorist. I'd never heard of it before. Agorism.
Wikipedia says, [Agorism] holds as its ultimate goal bringing about a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges – a free market.
GK Chesterton advocated distributism.
Wikipedia says, The ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals.
I don't know how much I believe in politics anymore, but I'm certainly no friend of our current economic system. I like what Houellebecq said. I can't remember the exact words. In Platform. The main character, Michel, says something about how he doesn't believe in having loyalty to anything other than an individual. That resonates with me. So, Agorism, Distributism, whatever, they're all good and nice, but they're ideas, not people.
4 comments:
Yeah, Chesterton thought everyone ought to have an acre and a cow. Obviously in our day as well as his that required some translation, but I've met lots of Chestertonians whose main focus is the continuing propagation of distributism in various forms. Most of them are home schooling their children. I'm afraid I would like to distance myself from that lot, as much as I think GK had a decent idea there.
Agorism sounds very optimistic.
I wish that I could have an acre. I would build a house that was half under a small grassy hill, with the exposed wall as a window two stories high. This house is exactly like the Vitamin Lady's House, that has always been a mystical memory for me.
I would also grow all my vegetables, compost as much as I wanted, have a composting toilet, a rain barrel, an outdoor dog and cat, and share my harvest with my friends and neighbors at a bi-annual harvest sharing barbeque at a nearby buffalo ranch collective (since everyone only has one acre, the ranch has to be a collective).
I think Dave would likely take to raising sheep and keep a couple of alpacas around for good measure. His films about shearing them would be beautiful. especially in the long sunlight.
Not all acres are as pristine though - only twenty miles away is a gas plant collective, a tailing pond, and a pulp mill collective. Our groundwater might be polluted, and there is nothing we can do, even in GK's ideal. Our doctors still dont let us tell them about more than one symptom at a time, so they miss diagnosing our illnesses and we might die of minor diseases, or else major ones that could have been cured early on. In an attempt to move forward, We take to filtering our water with sand and hoping for the best. We remain unsure of where agorism really fits in any of this.
Umm... me too.
I was at a concert recently at a venue run by an agorist. It's a beautiful business. A business that doesn't feel like a business. It feels like a step in the right direction.
I've got a better picture in my mind of the future as I think it could be, and as I want it to be, than I've ever had before. But I don't trust the ideologies that promise to take us there.
Maybe in politics we should start with specifics and work our way out a little more often.
Forrest,
I think your post is just so so -I dunno, perfect/beautiful/profound.
I admire your writing. A lot. So much.
BAH!!! What a great post.
Jon,
I too think Chesterton had a decent idea with distributism. I really like it -as far as political ideologies go.
I echo that BAH!!!
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