Unplug Me
So ... I've been reading some literature on the subject of Distributism, and I really think I'm resonating with a lot of it. I'm starting to ask some very serious and potentially life-changing questions.
What is Distributism?
I'll try to explain it in a way that actually makes some practical sense - most of the explanations I've read have been dry, economic theory.
Distributism is a system in which as many people as possible are owners, not just laborers; wealth and private property are distributed widely, not merely owned by a lucky few.
I'm just starting to grasp some of these concepts, but the one that startled me the most was this: true "wealth" consists in having three things:
1) Raw resource (grapes, for example)
2) A means of production (winepresses, for example)
3) Labor
Everyone has #3, except for maybe the handicapped. But in our society, who has #1 and #2? I certainly don't. Most of you don't, either. The ones who do have these things usually go by the title "CEO," "President," "Owner," etc., and they have visibly more wealth than you.
Don't ask me what most CEOs claim as raw resource and means of production, though. I'm just beginning to realize that most companies today are not producing actual, tangible goods (most people just stare and scratch their heads when I tell them I work as an "applications developer for a third-party logistics company" - but this is just a symptom of the modern disease).
I think the idea here is to get families back to owning land, working the land, and producing actual, tangible wealth.
Almost no one owns land today. I know I don't. Oh, sure, I have a modest house with a nice backyard for the kids to play in - but I don't own those things. You see, I pay property tax. Yes, that's right, the government penalizes me and makes me pay them an annual fee for occupying the particular plot of land on which my house sits. We have a word for that today: leasing. Renting.
I have a feeling that if I didn't pay my property tax, I'd find out pretty soon just how much of an "owner" I really am.
Beyond that, since I have no raw resources, nor the means of production to turn those resources into something marketable, I have nothing to sell to society except my labor. So I search until I find a true owner who does have resources and means of production, and I ask him if I can sell him my labor.
We have a word for that, too: slavery. At least, in the classic sense of the word. We tend to think of slavery in terms of our most recent historical context: the black slaves on the plantations. They didn't get their own houses and land to live on, like most of us do. And I'm not in any real danger of being tied to a pole and whipped by my boss, or of having the owner of my company drop in on me to rape my wife, as sometimes happened in the days of yore.
On the other hand ... it's not like most wage-slave workers aren't abused. I have friends who work at companies where they have mandated 50-hour work weeks, but since they're salaried employees, they get paid for 40-hour work weeks. Don't want to work 10 extra hours a week for free? You may get fired. And don't think that there isn't another guy right behind you who would gladly take your place, even though it means 50-hour work weeks (I lost a job once because my co-worker was willing to work overtime hours and not charge the company for it; I couldn't keep up with him, and eventually I became no longer necessary).
I have made a pact with the current economic system. I will be given the paper money (with no real gold or silver to back it up, by the way) necessary to sustain myself and a small family, modest health and dental care, the occasional vacation and personal day, and a few paid holidays.
In exchange, I promise to sell my labor for 40 hours a week, helping someone else produce a product, over which I have absolutely no ownership (in fact, whenever I begin a new job, I have to sign a piece of paper that says my employer legally owns all ideas that come out of my brain while I'm working for him; if I invent some totally revolutionary technology while working for him, he owns the rights to it, and I can't sell it to anyone - in fact, I can't even copy the code onto a floppy disk and take it home without being charged with stealing company property).
In addition to selling my labor, I will also pay the government a penalty fee called "income tax," because apparently working is an offense for which I can be legally fined.
I promise to do this until I am 65 years old, at which point I will be finally released (sort of) from this slavery, and given a modest retirement pension (if I plan right).
Some of my retirement money will come from the younger working class who will, as I do now, pay a "social security tax," because - as was said - after working for 35-40 years of my life, I will have no tangible ownership of a real product that I can claim as my own.
I will have nothing to show for my work except the paper money (which really is just paper) that I started collecting at the beginning of my career, and even then, I won't have much of it, so the next generation will have to help support me. They will pay a penalty fee for the fact that I worked for 40 years; yes, I know, I already paid my fines and fees via "income tax" for working those 40 years, but so will my children. Apparently the fact that I go to work every day is so heinous an offense that it will merit a monetary penalty even after I quit working, to be exacted from someone other than myself.
In 40 years, the government will still expect me to pay a leasing fee for the property that is supposedly mine.
If I am like most working American men, I will work hard during those 40 years, above and beyond the 40-hour work week, to ensure that I do have a sizeable "nest egg" when I retire. I will send my wife off to work as well, because while I'm busy socking away money into a mutual fund (and making the owner of Mutual-Inc rich in the process), the kids need to eat, wear clothes, get braces, get an education, and go to college someday.
So, with both myself and my wife sold into wage-slavery, we will have to send our offspring to a daycare (which will cost more money) and to public school, where they will be taught to hate our conservative values and to disrespect our authority. They will be taught how to have sex "safely" from the time they are in 3rd grade, and if one of them ends up pregnant and wants an abortion, they will be counseled how to do this without having to tell either me or my wife about it - because, as they are being taught, their parents are stupid dolts who don't anything about "real life," and need not be respected or obeyed (or even included in "the loop").
My wife and I will come home every day from work absolutely exhausted, with nothing to show for our work. We will be too tired to prepare a meal, so we will order out for pizza, or Chinese, or perhaps we will all go out to our favorite restaurant, where we will be served such ridiculous portions that we will all be forced to either commit the sin of gluttony or the sin of waste.
In either case, we will continue to pump our bodies full of processed foods (whether purchased at a restaurant, or in boxes and cans from the store) that are making us sick and overweight. We and our children will continue to get fatter (as will everyone around us) because the calories we take into our bodies every day would require an entire day of hard labor to burn them off, but in fact we tend to spend the entire day in the sitting position: sitting at desks at work, sitting in front of the TV at home, sitting on couches reading, sitting in the car on trips, sitting at the theatre, sitting at the sports arena, sitting, sitting, sitting.
When my wife and I finally decide to do something about the weight problem, we will - if we are typical Americans - pay even more money and sacrifice even more free time to join some sort of gym, wherein we will spend 5-10 more hours per week in a room full of half-dressed men and women, working on machines specifically built for the purpose of making us exercise our muscles.
The kids will stay home during this time and entertain themselves by watching TV shows, which will further confirm in their minds the ideas they learned at school: Sodomy is normal, fornication is as routine as brushing your teeth, parents are stupid, men are pigs, the Catholic religion is something to be laughed at and mocked, the "enlightened" are the ones who are tolerant of all faiths, etc.
When the weekend comes, the few days during which I am supposedly able to have leisure time, relax, and recover from the week's hard work (which, again I point out, yields no tangible product or benefit for me), I will run around like crazy from place to place, trying to accomplish all the little necessary things that need to get done, but which I have no time to get done during the work week because I'm too busy working as a wage-slave.
My leisure time and my wife's leisure time will be spent grocery shopping, mowing the lawn, painting the house, cleaning rooms, taking out trash, planting flowers, washing the car, paying bills, and maybe even doing a few things I want to do, like going to movies, visiting friends, reading a book, etc. In other words, all activities which (with few exceptions) will wear me out even further.
When the family has free time, we will inevitably spend it apart, because the 5-day work week has taught us how to be strangers to each other, so that when we are finally all put together in the same room, we don't know what to do. We are bored, because we are boring, and we are boring because technology has stolen our imagination. If we do choose to do something together, it will inevitably be something which distracts both of us from having to interact, such as watching a movie, going to a concert, attending a baseball game, etc.
All of this will one day end in that long sought-after retirement, when both my wife and I will be free from wage-slavery (assuming we're still together). Of course, by that time, we will have spent 40 years growing apart, and the kids will have grown up and left the house.
Faced with an empty home, no one to talk to but each other, and no 40-hour work week to keep us busy, we will go crazy. We will both seek to fill the days with things to do apart from each other: join a golf league, find a book club, take up stamp-collecting, take up yard work, etc. - anything that gives us an excuse to avoid interacting. We will probably be so desperate for a change of scenery that we will sell everything and move to Florida, where we will live out our days trying to entertain ourselves with exotic distractions, and hardly ever seeing our children and grandchildren.
This is the American Nightmare, which most of us are grateful to be participating in - we have so much more than our ancestors who lived in the Dark Ages, and we are infinitely better off than most third-world countries. Or so we say.
*************************
The Distributists have a slightly different vision, and I have to say, it seems mighty tempting - even with its potential difficulties.
The "American Dream," according to this new vision (actually, a very old vision, and not just a vision, but an actual practice), might look something like this:
My wife and I own a chunk of land and a modest home. We actually own this land and house, and do not pay anyone a leasing fee for trying to own something. We work the land together (I, of course, in the spirit of true sexism, insisting on doing the more physically difficult tasks myself), and our children help us.
We grow most of the food that we eat, minus the preservatives and chemicals. Perhaps we own a cow or two, and maybe a pig. Obviously, we wouldn't be eating a lot of meat, but neither would we be eating heaping plates of fresh-from-the-box pasta alfredo, Super-Size bags of McDonald's, Baskin Robbins ice cream, stuffed-crust Pizza Hut, etc.
A mostly vegetarian diet, combined with a days' worth of manual labor, and we might just begin to see healthier hearts, stronger muscles, and slimmer waists - without having to pay money to jump on artificial machines and spend hours letting our eyes take in visions of immodest dress.
I would have to be a jack of all trades, knowing how to grow food, harvest crops, raise animals, slaughter animals, make cheese, can veggies, tan hides, stock up for winter, butcher a pig (do you currently have any idea which part of the pig bacon comes from?), make butter, store ice for the summer, etc.
That is to say, I would have to actually have useful skills that would be directly applicable to my survival and welfare. I would have to have real-world knowledge about living and material things. Imagine that.
My children would be around their parents pretty much all the time, helping with the chores, not just because they were told to help, but because they have a vested interest in making sure things get done. If Johnny doesn't milk the cow tonight like I asked him to, nobody in the family gets to drink milk tomorrow morning - including Johnny.
When the days' work is finished, there would be visible results and benefits: food on the table, security for the future, improvements to the house and/or land, etc. Without the Internet or TV to suck our brains dry of any imagination, we would have to spend our leisure time together as a family, having real (not artificial) fun: making up and telling stories together, playing musical instruments and singing, dancing, playing outside, etc.
The children would be taught by their parents - and not just abstract book-knowledge. In addition to learning the Holy Faith from the two people best-equipped to teach them, the kids would also learn the basics of education (reading, writing, etc.) - and a trade, or trades. I would pass on to my sons the family traditions - in Latin, the word is tradere, which means to "hand on," and, at first glance, appears to be the very word from which we get our term "trade." In teaching my sons a trade, I will be handing on the tradition to them - as a good father ought to do.
The girls would learn from their mother how to do essential things like make clothes for themselves, their brothers, and their father; they would learn how to prepare the meats, fruits, and vegetables that I and my sons bring into the home as the tangible fruits of our labors. They would learn how to preserve foods so that our family would survive the winter.
I dare say that no one would ever be bored.
Ideally, we would live in a small community of people doing the same things we are. There would be occasional interaction with our neighbors - we would help each other out at harvest time, etc., but the majority of the company we would keep would be with each other and with our extended family. None of the modern plague of the father running off with "the boys" every night, mother out with "the girls," the kids off with their individual friends, and the family house perpetually empty.
As our children grew up and got married, they would own similar plots of land and build similar houses, with the help of their families. When my wife and I got to be good and old, it would be our children (and their children) who would help support us in our old age. They would be able to do this because we wouldn't be living 2,000 miles away in Florida.
As grandparents and great-grandparents, we would be revered and honored by our children, grand-children, etc., because having a great respect for what is old and venerable is something we would instill in our kids from day one.
They would revere the traditions and trades passed on to them because these things are necessary for their survival; this would in turn be a natural parallel to the supernatural reality - that is, they would likewise revere the traditions of the Holy Faith passed on to them, because these are necessary for their eternal survival.
As the owner of my own property and land, I would not waste most of my life working to make someone else prosperous. And my "employees" (i.e., my children) would very much have a vested interest in working for me - a real sense of ownership and responsibility.
How many of us have this today? Our corporations keep trying to create this artificial sense of ownership and responsibility for the employees, but we know better. TechCorp, Inc. breaks into the top 500 businesses, and everyone in the company gets a nice email from management, sincerely thanking them for their hard work in bringing the corporation this far. Everyone is told they ought to feel proud and have a real sense of accomplishment for being a vital part of a successful organization.
Bull.
I'm not a vital part of anything. If they fire me tomorrow, the corporation lives on, on 99% of the corporation doesn't even know I'm gone. Aside from this congratulatory email, I see no tangible benefit from the corporation's success. Neither does my boss, or probably even his boss. The owners and shareholders do, but I certainly do not.
I'm just a wage-slave.
And I'm raising my children to be wage slaves as well.
Welcome to the System, son, here's your Social Security Number. Please fill out this form and step to the left.
*************************
Now, I know what you're going to say. The Distributist vision is no utopia. There would undoubtedly be new challenges and difficulties. The question is, which set of difficulties do I want to deal with?
At the least, I would like to live in an economic system that encourages life. On my own farm with my own land, it is to my material benefit to have as many children as I can. More children means more labor, means more production, means more real wealth for everyone involved.
Currently, my boss could care less if I have another kid. It doesn't increase my output, so he's not going to pay me any more money. Thus, the more children I have, the less wealth I will have. Each new child is another parasite to help drain my resources without contributing anything materially to help me.
No wonder modern man wants to kill his children before they are born. They are a liability, and this economic system has made them such.
There really is no sense of family togetherness in our modern system. When my kids turn 16 and get work permits, are they really going to embrace the idea of turning over their paychecks to be deposited into a family bank account? Whereas, on the farm, the work they do on the land yields tangible results that cannot help but benefit everyone.
In that system, the children learn very early that they are a vital part of a community - one would think they would tend to grow up a little less self-centered and individualistic, no?
And another thing: wouldn't this system tend to align more properly with the order of creation? God said "six days shalt thou labor, and on the seventh shalt thou rest," but here in modern America we work for five days, and rest for two (if you can call that "rest").
For all of the difficulties it may present, it does seem like Distributism would be a lifestyle much more conducive to sanctity and natural values. Can our modern system offer anything like this, wherein we and our children will learn - by force of habit - to respect hard work, cherish a day of rest, value moments of leisure, spend time together as a family, value the unique contribution of each family member, cultivate imagination, revere traditions and the handing on of knowledge, respect elders in the community, etc.?
No, our modern system teaches us, also by force of habit, to sit around on our rears, always look out for Number One, waste our leisure time doing nothing of any lasting value, grow distant from our families, always be seeking after what is new and modern, despise what is old and outdated, view the elderly and the newborn as afflictions, etc.
Now, the question is ... how to go about getting unplugged from this Matrix-like world of artificiality, and get back to the real world, where wealth is tangible, love means labor, and Faith is cultivated in the context of venerable tradition?
What is Distributism?
I'll try to explain it in a way that actually makes some practical sense - most of the explanations I've read have been dry, economic theory.
Distributism is a system in which as many people as possible are owners, not just laborers; wealth and private property are distributed widely, not merely owned by a lucky few.
I'm just starting to grasp some of these concepts, but the one that startled me the most was this: true "wealth" consists in having three things:
1) Raw resource (grapes, for example)
2) A means of production (winepresses, for example)
3) Labor
Everyone has #3, except for maybe the handicapped. But in our society, who has #1 and #2? I certainly don't. Most of you don't, either. The ones who do have these things usually go by the title "CEO," "President," "Owner," etc., and they have visibly more wealth than you.
Don't ask me what most CEOs claim as raw resource and means of production, though. I'm just beginning to realize that most companies today are not producing actual, tangible goods (most people just stare and scratch their heads when I tell them I work as an "applications developer for a third-party logistics company" - but this is just a symptom of the modern disease).
I think the idea here is to get families back to owning land, working the land, and producing actual, tangible wealth.
Almost no one owns land today. I know I don't. Oh, sure, I have a modest house with a nice backyard for the kids to play in - but I don't own those things. You see, I pay property tax. Yes, that's right, the government penalizes me and makes me pay them an annual fee for occupying the particular plot of land on which my house sits. We have a word for that today: leasing. Renting.
I have a feeling that if I didn't pay my property tax, I'd find out pretty soon just how much of an "owner" I really am.
Beyond that, since I have no raw resources, nor the means of production to turn those resources into something marketable, I have nothing to sell to society except my labor. So I search until I find a true owner who does have resources and means of production, and I ask him if I can sell him my labor.
We have a word for that, too: slavery. At least, in the classic sense of the word. We tend to think of slavery in terms of our most recent historical context: the black slaves on the plantations. They didn't get their own houses and land to live on, like most of us do. And I'm not in any real danger of being tied to a pole and whipped by my boss, or of having the owner of my company drop in on me to rape my wife, as sometimes happened in the days of yore.
On the other hand ... it's not like most wage-slave workers aren't abused. I have friends who work at companies where they have mandated 50-hour work weeks, but since they're salaried employees, they get paid for 40-hour work weeks. Don't want to work 10 extra hours a week for free? You may get fired. And don't think that there isn't another guy right behind you who would gladly take your place, even though it means 50-hour work weeks (I lost a job once because my co-worker was willing to work overtime hours and not charge the company for it; I couldn't keep up with him, and eventually I became no longer necessary).
I have made a pact with the current economic system. I will be given the paper money (with no real gold or silver to back it up, by the way) necessary to sustain myself and a small family, modest health and dental care, the occasional vacation and personal day, and a few paid holidays.
In exchange, I promise to sell my labor for 40 hours a week, helping someone else produce a product, over which I have absolutely no ownership (in fact, whenever I begin a new job, I have to sign a piece of paper that says my employer legally owns all ideas that come out of my brain while I'm working for him; if I invent some totally revolutionary technology while working for him, he owns the rights to it, and I can't sell it to anyone - in fact, I can't even copy the code onto a floppy disk and take it home without being charged with stealing company property).
In addition to selling my labor, I will also pay the government a penalty fee called "income tax," because apparently working is an offense for which I can be legally fined.
I promise to do this until I am 65 years old, at which point I will be finally released (sort of) from this slavery, and given a modest retirement pension (if I plan right).
Some of my retirement money will come from the younger working class who will, as I do now, pay a "social security tax," because - as was said - after working for 35-40 years of my life, I will have no tangible ownership of a real product that I can claim as my own.
I will have nothing to show for my work except the paper money (which really is just paper) that I started collecting at the beginning of my career, and even then, I won't have much of it, so the next generation will have to help support me. They will pay a penalty fee for the fact that I worked for 40 years; yes, I know, I already paid my fines and fees via "income tax" for working those 40 years, but so will my children. Apparently the fact that I go to work every day is so heinous an offense that it will merit a monetary penalty even after I quit working, to be exacted from someone other than myself.
In 40 years, the government will still expect me to pay a leasing fee for the property that is supposedly mine.
If I am like most working American men, I will work hard during those 40 years, above and beyond the 40-hour work week, to ensure that I do have a sizeable "nest egg" when I retire. I will send my wife off to work as well, because while I'm busy socking away money into a mutual fund (and making the owner of Mutual-Inc rich in the process), the kids need to eat, wear clothes, get braces, get an education, and go to college someday.
So, with both myself and my wife sold into wage-slavery, we will have to send our offspring to a daycare (which will cost more money) and to public school, where they will be taught to hate our conservative values and to disrespect our authority. They will be taught how to have sex "safely" from the time they are in 3rd grade, and if one of them ends up pregnant and wants an abortion, they will be counseled how to do this without having to tell either me or my wife about it - because, as they are being taught, their parents are stupid dolts who don't anything about "real life," and need not be respected or obeyed (or even included in "the loop").
My wife and I will come home every day from work absolutely exhausted, with nothing to show for our work. We will be too tired to prepare a meal, so we will order out for pizza, or Chinese, or perhaps we will all go out to our favorite restaurant, where we will be served such ridiculous portions that we will all be forced to either commit the sin of gluttony or the sin of waste.
In either case, we will continue to pump our bodies full of processed foods (whether purchased at a restaurant, or in boxes and cans from the store) that are making us sick and overweight. We and our children will continue to get fatter (as will everyone around us) because the calories we take into our bodies every day would require an entire day of hard labor to burn them off, but in fact we tend to spend the entire day in the sitting position: sitting at desks at work, sitting in front of the TV at home, sitting on couches reading, sitting in the car on trips, sitting at the theatre, sitting at the sports arena, sitting, sitting, sitting.
When my wife and I finally decide to do something about the weight problem, we will - if we are typical Americans - pay even more money and sacrifice even more free time to join some sort of gym, wherein we will spend 5-10 more hours per week in a room full of half-dressed men and women, working on machines specifically built for the purpose of making us exercise our muscles.
The kids will stay home during this time and entertain themselves by watching TV shows, which will further confirm in their minds the ideas they learned at school: Sodomy is normal, fornication is as routine as brushing your teeth, parents are stupid, men are pigs, the Catholic religion is something to be laughed at and mocked, the "enlightened" are the ones who are tolerant of all faiths, etc.
When the weekend comes, the few days during which I am supposedly able to have leisure time, relax, and recover from the week's hard work (which, again I point out, yields no tangible product or benefit for me), I will run around like crazy from place to place, trying to accomplish all the little necessary things that need to get done, but which I have no time to get done during the work week because I'm too busy working as a wage-slave.
My leisure time and my wife's leisure time will be spent grocery shopping, mowing the lawn, painting the house, cleaning rooms, taking out trash, planting flowers, washing the car, paying bills, and maybe even doing a few things I want to do, like going to movies, visiting friends, reading a book, etc. In other words, all activities which (with few exceptions) will wear me out even further.
When the family has free time, we will inevitably spend it apart, because the 5-day work week has taught us how to be strangers to each other, so that when we are finally all put together in the same room, we don't know what to do. We are bored, because we are boring, and we are boring because technology has stolen our imagination. If we do choose to do something together, it will inevitably be something which distracts both of us from having to interact, such as watching a movie, going to a concert, attending a baseball game, etc.
All of this will one day end in that long sought-after retirement, when both my wife and I will be free from wage-slavery (assuming we're still together). Of course, by that time, we will have spent 40 years growing apart, and the kids will have grown up and left the house.
Faced with an empty home, no one to talk to but each other, and no 40-hour work week to keep us busy, we will go crazy. We will both seek to fill the days with things to do apart from each other: join a golf league, find a book club, take up stamp-collecting, take up yard work, etc. - anything that gives us an excuse to avoid interacting. We will probably be so desperate for a change of scenery that we will sell everything and move to Florida, where we will live out our days trying to entertain ourselves with exotic distractions, and hardly ever seeing our children and grandchildren.
This is the American Nightmare, which most of us are grateful to be participating in - we have so much more than our ancestors who lived in the Dark Ages, and we are infinitely better off than most third-world countries. Or so we say.
*************************
The Distributists have a slightly different vision, and I have to say, it seems mighty tempting - even with its potential difficulties.
The "American Dream," according to this new vision (actually, a very old vision, and not just a vision, but an actual practice), might look something like this:
My wife and I own a chunk of land and a modest home. We actually own this land and house, and do not pay anyone a leasing fee for trying to own something. We work the land together (I, of course, in the spirit of true sexism, insisting on doing the more physically difficult tasks myself), and our children help us.
We grow most of the food that we eat, minus the preservatives and chemicals. Perhaps we own a cow or two, and maybe a pig. Obviously, we wouldn't be eating a lot of meat, but neither would we be eating heaping plates of fresh-from-the-box pasta alfredo, Super-Size bags of McDonald's, Baskin Robbins ice cream, stuffed-crust Pizza Hut, etc.
A mostly vegetarian diet, combined with a days' worth of manual labor, and we might just begin to see healthier hearts, stronger muscles, and slimmer waists - without having to pay money to jump on artificial machines and spend hours letting our eyes take in visions of immodest dress.
I would have to be a jack of all trades, knowing how to grow food, harvest crops, raise animals, slaughter animals, make cheese, can veggies, tan hides, stock up for winter, butcher a pig (do you currently have any idea which part of the pig bacon comes from?), make butter, store ice for the summer, etc.
That is to say, I would have to actually have useful skills that would be directly applicable to my survival and welfare. I would have to have real-world knowledge about living and material things. Imagine that.
My children would be around their parents pretty much all the time, helping with the chores, not just because they were told to help, but because they have a vested interest in making sure things get done. If Johnny doesn't milk the cow tonight like I asked him to, nobody in the family gets to drink milk tomorrow morning - including Johnny.
When the days' work is finished, there would be visible results and benefits: food on the table, security for the future, improvements to the house and/or land, etc. Without the Internet or TV to suck our brains dry of any imagination, we would have to spend our leisure time together as a family, having real (not artificial) fun: making up and telling stories together, playing musical instruments and singing, dancing, playing outside, etc.
The children would be taught by their parents - and not just abstract book-knowledge. In addition to learning the Holy Faith from the two people best-equipped to teach them, the kids would also learn the basics of education (reading, writing, etc.) - and a trade, or trades. I would pass on to my sons the family traditions - in Latin, the word is tradere, which means to "hand on," and, at first glance, appears to be the very word from which we get our term "trade." In teaching my sons a trade, I will be handing on the tradition to them - as a good father ought to do.
The girls would learn from their mother how to do essential things like make clothes for themselves, their brothers, and their father; they would learn how to prepare the meats, fruits, and vegetables that I and my sons bring into the home as the tangible fruits of our labors. They would learn how to preserve foods so that our family would survive the winter.
I dare say that no one would ever be bored.
Ideally, we would live in a small community of people doing the same things we are. There would be occasional interaction with our neighbors - we would help each other out at harvest time, etc., but the majority of the company we would keep would be with each other and with our extended family. None of the modern plague of the father running off with "the boys" every night, mother out with "the girls," the kids off with their individual friends, and the family house perpetually empty.
As our children grew up and got married, they would own similar plots of land and build similar houses, with the help of their families. When my wife and I got to be good and old, it would be our children (and their children) who would help support us in our old age. They would be able to do this because we wouldn't be living 2,000 miles away in Florida.
As grandparents and great-grandparents, we would be revered and honored by our children, grand-children, etc., because having a great respect for what is old and venerable is something we would instill in our kids from day one.
They would revere the traditions and trades passed on to them because these things are necessary for their survival; this would in turn be a natural parallel to the supernatural reality - that is, they would likewise revere the traditions of the Holy Faith passed on to them, because these are necessary for their eternal survival.
As the owner of my own property and land, I would not waste most of my life working to make someone else prosperous. And my "employees" (i.e., my children) would very much have a vested interest in working for me - a real sense of ownership and responsibility.
How many of us have this today? Our corporations keep trying to create this artificial sense of ownership and responsibility for the employees, but we know better. TechCorp, Inc. breaks into the top 500 businesses, and everyone in the company gets a nice email from management, sincerely thanking them for their hard work in bringing the corporation this far. Everyone is told they ought to feel proud and have a real sense of accomplishment for being a vital part of a successful organization.
Bull.
I'm not a vital part of anything. If they fire me tomorrow, the corporation lives on, on 99% of the corporation doesn't even know I'm gone. Aside from this congratulatory email, I see no tangible benefit from the corporation's success. Neither does my boss, or probably even his boss. The owners and shareholders do, but I certainly do not.
I'm just a wage-slave.
And I'm raising my children to be wage slaves as well.
Welcome to the System, son, here's your Social Security Number. Please fill out this form and step to the left.
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Now, I know what you're going to say. The Distributist vision is no utopia. There would undoubtedly be new challenges and difficulties. The question is, which set of difficulties do I want to deal with?
At the least, I would like to live in an economic system that encourages life. On my own farm with my own land, it is to my material benefit to have as many children as I can. More children means more labor, means more production, means more real wealth for everyone involved.
Currently, my boss could care less if I have another kid. It doesn't increase my output, so he's not going to pay me any more money. Thus, the more children I have, the less wealth I will have. Each new child is another parasite to help drain my resources without contributing anything materially to help me.
No wonder modern man wants to kill his children before they are born. They are a liability, and this economic system has made them such.
There really is no sense of family togetherness in our modern system. When my kids turn 16 and get work permits, are they really going to embrace the idea of turning over their paychecks to be deposited into a family bank account? Whereas, on the farm, the work they do on the land yields tangible results that cannot help but benefit everyone.
In that system, the children learn very early that they are a vital part of a community - one would think they would tend to grow up a little less self-centered and individualistic, no?
And another thing: wouldn't this system tend to align more properly with the order of creation? God said "six days shalt thou labor, and on the seventh shalt thou rest," but here in modern America we work for five days, and rest for two (if you can call that "rest").
For all of the difficulties it may present, it does seem like Distributism would be a lifestyle much more conducive to sanctity and natural values. Can our modern system offer anything like this, wherein we and our children will learn - by force of habit - to respect hard work, cherish a day of rest, value moments of leisure, spend time together as a family, value the unique contribution of each family member, cultivate imagination, revere traditions and the handing on of knowledge, respect elders in the community, etc.?
No, our modern system teaches us, also by force of habit, to sit around on our rears, always look out for Number One, waste our leisure time doing nothing of any lasting value, grow distant from our families, always be seeking after what is new and modern, despise what is old and outdated, view the elderly and the newborn as afflictions, etc.
Now, the question is ... how to go about getting unplugged from this Matrix-like world of artificiality, and get back to the real world, where wealth is tangible, love means labor, and Faith is cultivated in the context of venerable tradition?
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