American prisoners and persons on parole or on probation number over 7 million; Americans in danger of losing their homes number in the millions; and, the U.S. unemployment number is above 15 million. These numbers will grow indefinitely unless the U.S. Army of Quick Profits and Political Naivety increases its inflow of desperate recruits.
But, wait a minute, the tax burden created by soldiers and war machinery is even greater than that created by prison and welfare!
What to do with all those millions of people? Well, the biosphere is under assault; desertification and drought are predicted to ravage the agricultural sector, peak oil will ruin the industrial agricultural model, and an ailing economy cannot continue to subsidize agriculture.
The solution? Take a few weeks to train millions of Americans to grow food in desert-like conditions using permaculture-agroforestry techniques and command the national guard and the U.S. army to help build swales, cob or adobe houses, and temporary wells. The crime rate will plunge, the land will heal, carbon points will be scored, and the participating farmers can be taxed in the form of an organic food tax that will feed millions of “normal” Americans.
If this sounds a little too idyllic, that’s because it does. What’s missing is not a vision of sustainable agriculture but a vision of a sustainable and unifying culture. Without such a culture, any large-scale permaculture project dooms its permaculture-participants to a life of resentment, violence and possible rebellions. Since a permaculture vision does not afford governments the luxury of pacifying people with drugs and media, and, assuming that modern American prisoners will refuse to convert together to a single religion for the sake of unity, some other form of entertainment and enjoyment must be provided, something low-tech and yet so pleasant, seductive and ‘addictive’ as to wipe out competing traditional cultures.
When will our scientists develop such a culture? But it is already developing, growing, flourishing among Americans who are learning to laugh at everything sacred, learning to speak up in the face of authority, learning to live without hope in politicians and promises, learning to enjoy childhood and childishness, and learning to nurture body, mind, community and nature more than all their ancestors did.
Problems related to population growth, sexuality and the compulsion to own things and people must be pre-empted by the culture itself. The concept of property is childish and has served its historical function; in a utopian project it has no place among adults. It is not a question of going back to earlier forms of cultural expression, as those forms evolved into what we presently suffer; to go forward we need a culture in which ownership is a joke, in which raising children and playing with them is central, where laughing is essential, where everything is a good game and men and women soak their minds in the threefold visionary ecstasy of the body’s atomical oneness with nature, of consciousness’s imminent nothingness, and of the flow of consciousness across generations.