Essays in Idleness

When foresters, farmers, and fishermen, are put in ownership of the land and the seas, and left in freedom to do what seems best (which includes all-round profitability), the world mysteriously gets better and beauty proliferates. When, instead, bureaucrats are put in charge (“public” or “private,” it hardly matters), the world grows vile, ugly, and tyrannical. The definition of productivity is systematically narrowed by worthless people of the bureaucratic mind-set; and poverty is expanded to include everything else. Statistics multiply. I do not care whether the factota are “socialists” or “capitalists.” In either case they are joyless, tedious, and a danger to every human being who is not a revenant of complacency. Everything he does can be conveyed digitally, or on paper.

Well, I am inculpated with being a tad severe. This, by a person who also accuses me of unseriousness. Relevancy and efficiency are both found missing from my analysis of the world. I am, of course, guilty as charged. Relevance is invariably irrelevant, efficiency is inefficient, and I have no use for statistics. Rather I prefer things to be joyful, and interesting, so that my critic may add the word “dangerous” to my descriptors.

My technique, for forming opinions on anything at all, is by word association. When I was fifteen I fell in love with an enchanting German maiden, named Sylvia. I last saw her a little more than half-a-century ago; but she still playfully commands my imagination. By word association, my country notions have been formed around “Silviculture.” I’ve come to detest identical organisms growing in rows. This is what the factota of commodities are doing; but whenever possible, I like to patronize the farmers.

I could complain that the factota are irrelevant and inefficient, but this would play with words. In reality our modern “factory farms” would produce much more, and much more delicious, if our food were raised more labour-intensively, and in all four dimensions of space and time, rather than just the one. There would also be more employment, and happiness, with fewer additives and poisons, and no need for fertilizers except for what the farmer could supply himself.

The increase of atmospheric carbon is anyway helping us along. With Sylvan delight, I look upon our agrarian future.