RR Part Three -- The People Who Know Things

Wendy Tremayne, author of The Good Life Lab bailed out of the corporate world to live like a pioneer, basically, but with all the advantages of technology. One of the concepts she elaborates in her book is what she calls acculturated knowledge. That's the knowledge of navigating society, having a job, being a citizen. In other words, it's not actual practical knowledge.

Many people--really billions all over the west--are several degrees removed from producing anything at all that's needed for their own survival. They don't have a garden or animals that they use for food. They couldn't get clean water, etc... Their survival depends on the corporate, commercial culture, and more subtly on the system of incentives, i.e. money, that keep its cogs and treadmills turning.

In the West, the people who dole out the incentives and maintain the system (i.e. the corporate state) generally reap the (very greedy) lion's share of rewards, even though it's the people who have actual knowledge who add value to materials, produce goods, and perform vital services. The knowers are quite rare. Consider, for example, if you use very broad terms to define "scientists and engineers", that category of knowers (many of whom have no practical knowledge), they amount to less than 2% of the population of the United States.

The knowers are an ideal fulcrum for a new Reformation because the knowers are civilization. They're a potential real fault line between the parasitic imperial system of the Western world and the people. Why haven't the knowers asserted their power within this current debt & death system, as they did in the medieval Guild system? (Look at the Grange as a great example of a group of knowers who avoided their power.)

In one of my previous posts, I wrote about Conan the Barbarian and "the riddle of steel", which provides some answers. From the perspective of an individual that's struggling against "the system", society, civilization is a game, it's a trick a con game. Accepting it at face value in our time, means plodding along the treadmill as a consumer or an employee, or it means running and owning a business, which really means keeping your enterprise plugged into the financial and tax systems.

A quest for truth, and for the good, reconnecting with the gods makes the civilization game apparent. It renders the incentives of the game ridiculous. It could kill the Empire one person at a time, but even a quest for truth, a higher consciousness could go awry.

Consider the reaction of two different groups to this quest: the Hutterites and the Neocons. The Hutterites left Western society and its customs to live in their version of a Christian commune. The Neocons became grifters, predators and manipulators. These choices are reflected in mythology in the story of Cain and Abel, or of the perpetual struggle between the Sky God and Saturn, or the philosophical struggle between being and seeming, or conflicts between the people of the land and the people of the sea, producers and traders.