The Requirement to Become An Independent

Is the Delusion Of independence

One of the minorities in America that has always felt vastly cheated by American democratic procedures, even when it was a majority, was never a parity, and then eventually the modern minority that it is, is the farming community, and the small communities that were developed around servicing them, sometimes called small town America.  Of course, today many of those small towns have grown up and the farms are no longer isolated to a great extent.  But this rural community, often termed conservative is, I believe, totally misunderstood, and this misunderstanding has been imposed  upon them in such a manner that they misunderstand themselves, or believe they are conservative.

Part of the issue, of course, in terming rural needs as conservative is that they are sometimes thought of as able to “live off the land” and as “conservationists of nature.”  It is certainly myths they like to propagate about themselves, but that did not originate with them.  One tin soldier never walked away successfully.  The only way to successfully walk away is together.  And yet they seemingly lived in isolation.  The American farm, much more than American industry, in actuality destroyed the American landscape and took the Native Americans’ communities land. and ability to survive, away from them.  And the rural farmer and the rural community remains (overall, but everything in this brief survey is from the perspective of the general tendencies) the most adamantly unaccepting of what some are calling “climate change”.  City (and now suburban) dwellers focus their attention on the captains of industry polluting the environment, which of course they often do.  But rural communities are the captains of polluting their own lands and just as unwilling to admit it as are many industrial polluters—it is too the advantage of the polluter to continue to ignore his effects upon the environment.

What is interesting to me is that the modern concept of harm to the environment (although the environmental harm that farming and husbandry create has had those  point at its excesses as far back as near the very beginnings of agricultural civilization).  Nevertheless, Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring is often considered the godparent to modern environmentalism, and yet the book was not about air pollution but about land and water pollution which was becoming very obvious by the time Ms. Carson began studying it in the 50’s.  Well, obvious to her.  Ms. Carson was an oceanographer and began noticing fish populations becoming sick and traced ocean pollution to freshwater pollution to land pollution, primarily chemical land pollution in rural farming practices’ overutilization of  chemical insecticides and fertilizers.Of course replacements in the insecticides and fertilizers were made, but the changes were merely cosmetic.  So one might make note that mere cosmetic changes to energy sources will lead to no greater benefit than changing the types of insecticides and fertilizers.

Of course I could continue along this line, but the focus of the present is that not only can the country boy not survive, he has continually made his own survival on the land in the “country” less tenable by perpetuating harm to his environment making that environment continually more difficult to live upon and the demise of many of its architects of practice from the rural life. So the first “conservatism” of rural life, is, and always has been, a very progressive attack upon his own environment.

One of the great attractions to the Americas, especially to the United States, was the idea that one could earn more, have more, and become a landowner.  And one of the great programs from very near our beginnings was to invest in land grants (and sometimes land speculations that often backfired and consequently led to the continual business panics–even the great depression began as over extended land speculation in the newly drained Everglades in Florida.  The America procedure was however a weird combination of land speculators hoping to profit and free land homesteading to those who would develop the properties.  To the government, the settlers were the first line of defense against Natives, but then their protection counter defeated the defense and required an offensive approach  by the government.  This of course was the root cause of the battle between the colonists and the crown and led to the revolution against Britain.  The more settlements there were, the further those settlements expanded westward, the more expensive the colonies became, the more Britain needed to invest, the more the British authorities wanted to recoup the expense of the colonies.  If the British tried to eliminate expansion (which at times they briefly did), the colonists demanded an end to such policies and demanded British support, if the British attempted to tax the Americans for their expense at supporting the expansion, the colonists claimed that the taxes were “unfare” (taxes are fares, they are not “fair”.).  Those that pay the fares claim they are unfair fares, and that principle continues to today.

When I moved to Germany, and earlier when we spent my elementary years in the Orient, I noticed that people lived in villages and transported themselves to their fields, which were individual, but they did not separate their living quarters from their neighbors. I am not quite clear exactly why America did so.  But as one travels through rural America (although modern highways bypass the scene) one finds farms in isolation where the farmers live and small towns built where the people who supported the farmers lived, but not the farmers,as I believe mostly existed (and still mostly exists) elsewhere in the world.  

One example that somewhat parallels this development is the Israeli kibbutz (predating the nationhood of Israel). The kibbutz settled on the outskirts and were considered a “defense”, but they were a community that could be such a defense.  Similarly settlements in the West Bank are not in isolation, but primarily by groups of settlers.

Exactly why this became the American pattern however is slightly more complex.  But the myth of the American “rugged individualist” who moved to the west is just that, a false retelling that entered into the consciousness.  At first of course, the colonists settled in communities near the coast and they walked to the fields that were near, but outside, the settlements.  But there was just so much damn land to be had.  Europe was mostly inhabited, and getting a piece of land for one’s own fiefdom was both scarce, and or required a lot of money to purchase. Of course one way was to get a title or grant from the ruler.  And so these early Americans began to get land grants, originally large land grants.  And the more they expanded to these large land grants, the more isolated they became.  The isolation of the individuals required the development of market towns.  But then an attraction of the American continent was again, so much damn land available.  So after the initial land grants, these large barons needed to have “kibbutz" to protect their flank because all this damn land that was available to settle was, just as in Europe, not available to settle.  And so they offered land,often free, to those to move west to settle their flank and protect those large landowners from the much larger areas of land that they had granted to themselves.  And these smaller land grants to the west were also grants of (to those moving upon them) much larger than what they would otherwise have ever been able to have, though small in comparison.

And so just as the large land barons, these smaller farmers moved onto separate properties as if they were themselves barons.  This created the peculiar American farm system where plots of land were lived upon as if the individual farmers were indeed barons of their land.  Of course the land was not a large plot of land (in general) and the grant to the land (and there were various methods of the grants throughout the history of these grants, sometimes predetermined plot sizes, sometimes whatever one could develop, sometimes marking off their own plots and filing claim deeds to the land–what Donald Trump’s grandfather did in Washington state and Alaska, but not to farm).  But the isolation of the very farms from each other required the larger landowners to the east to need to maintain a military presence to protect the farms to the west who were granted the farms to protect the farms of the barons to their east.  This would remain the American pattern until such grants finally ended.  Oklahoma was the last large grant, but homesteading plots didn’t really end until the 1920’s, although it was not until 1976 when all government sponsored homesteading ended, except in Alaska where it ended ten years later.  More or less though, at that time the government itself claimed all the unclaimed land.  

Lest you say the first homesteading act did not occur until 1862, there were many homesteading opportunities and homesteading grants, and land speculators who would subdivide homesteads to the west, much as suburban developers in later times would buy large plots of land and then subdivide them into individual homes.  The homesteading act did not begin the march of homesteaders to the west, but it did pave the way to homesteading ten percent of all of the land in continental America.  

But this is where the myth of the rugged individual totally falls apart.  No one actually settled any western lands individually.  From the beginning groups of settlers moved from the coast westward and eventually all the way to the pacific.  In the beginning, runaway indentured, or runaway apprentices (such as Ben Franklin) did not run across the continent but to a settled community.  The individual had little chance of success beyond settled environments.  But not because of “hostile injuns”.  The natives would more likely  aid, and or embrace. the individual who was of no threat to them, it was the matter of the large groups that wanted to take large chunks of their environment that made their own survival difficult, because, as we began with, these settlers were intent on making the environment supportive of only themselves, and therefore they wreaked havoc upon the land so that the land would support only them.  (And those who might purchase any excess after marketing long distances became accessible with railroads. )

Like all barons, these farming barons began to view themselves as independent and that they should not be subject to control by another.  So of course they began to think their success was their entitlement.  Unfortunately, small plot farming is really hard work, and not often profitable and with no labor (but their own offspring) it could take years to slowly clear the land to even be able to produce any excess upon these small barons’ plots of land.  And sometimes they didn’t make it, either they gave up, or they perished in the struggle, or their heirs simply thought it more beneficial to sell their claims, so some farms did grow larger.  Another way the farms could grow larger, and probably one of the prime ways, if not the prime manner, was the farms foreclosed.

Alone in their little kingdoms, I suppose they could have no longer needed any gods.  But in these alien kingdoms without subjects but their offspring, God became the “force of authority” the father could use to demand the labor of his offspring that he needed to survive. To achieve the obedience necessary, he needed to project the moral authority of god that granted to him, the father, the obedience necessary.  God is always turned to in order to lend credence to authority. In fact, gods (as opposed to spirits) were created to lend credence to authorities who needed to present other-worldly authority as confirmation for their worldly powers to  be authorities.   And the small fiefdoms granted to these “individual family farms'' created a concept of independence and an entitlement to that independence, and to those properties. Property, in a sense, had never been publicly available to be private to any but a few.  Those few needed their entitlement to be supported by deed,  contract, king or god. Or all of the above. But since such privacy to property entitlements transferred the property from the community to the individual.  Under such a transfer there was a necessary condition of enforcement of the individual right which became twofold—the authority, as we said, that conferred the property right to the individual supported by the authority of the state and the god of the state.

There is a popular bit of nonsense that having private property gives rise to independence and without the right of private property freedom ceases to be. I would tend to suggest the opposite is true.  Private property requires support for its existence that creates a tyranny or authority that grants unfreedom as a licensed entitlement to being free to…exploit.  Exploit the land, as well as to exploit those that the entire system of private property requires to support itself.  Private property was never meant for all, it was meant to have private, rather than communal, access to resources.  Private access to resources is meaningless in and of itself unless the entitlement includes the labor of the very community that was to be included within that entitlement.  

The ability to have a home of one’s own, that is only a hundred years old. But unless one really does “own” his home—no mortgage and no government requirements for maintenance and no connection to an electric grid or a community power grid—then no one actually owns his private property, but remains a part of the apparatus of the community (the state) and the very concept of his entitlement is conjoined with sacrificing individual freedom to the authority of the state and grants enforcement powers to the state that deny the very freedoms that private property supposedly grants to the individual.  Without support the castle crumbles, therefore the entitlement is built on a foundation of quicksand and defended by a minefield of authoritarianism that will continually struggle to maintain its delusion of being the pathway to freedom when it is only a pathway to authoritarian sacrifices upon multi-layered platforms of authorities granting and controlling the entire scheme of “ownership”.

This delusion of freedom, that must be equated with the authoritarian response that prompts private ownership’ with the enforcement of authoritarian powers, creates confusion, especially as individuals, unaware of the delusion of owning anything free of authoritarian support for that support, comes into conflict with the reality of the private property structure.  The individual knows he lacks authority to defend his private ownership and must have the state to enforce that entitlement.  One must register and be granted from the state whatever property he claims.  The tenuousness of the entire system thus creates a tensiveness to balance the state’s grant of private property and the individual’s belief that grant  gives him his small fiefdom of authority. So from the beginnings of American democracy there has been a denial to the unentitled and a regulatory practice of authority over the entitled that has caused a flirtation with increased authoritarianism.

But the rural homeowner who built his lands into something that sometimes resembled independence of the family began  a false sense of entitlement that continually created a conflict between his very need for the state to grant or license that entitled land and a rejection of the right of the state to interfere with his entitlement.  For the large landowner, for the business owner that he feels his entitlement includes the same entitlement to labor as it does to the resources, he is master (king) of his domains and there is little doubt that whatever he is entitled to is his.  When the state grants to the business  the entitlement to do business there becomes a need to insure that those who labor upon whatever is entitled  is part of that entitlement.  No business survives without this dual entitlement.  No king survived with no subjects, but they often fought for what those entitlements were.  There is little difference that these modern corporate leaders' feelings of what they feel they are entitled to, including their entitlement to the labors of those to perform the necessary work to make their entitlements fulfilled.  There is little difference also in their attempts to gain a greater share of the “marketplace” than any king who desired to expand his own kingdom.  There is little difference in the divisions of a corporation into smaller grants under their umbrella as in the king entitling dukes to support  their attempt to expand their own kingdoms.  Of course many will dispute this as untrue.  So let me rephrase and say I see little difference, and if you can actually show me that there is actually a difference, I welcome you to explain what that difference is to me.

But for the small farmer, the conflict became the small duke who needed the government to protect him not only from the larger barons who attempted to reduce his own influence over his individual entitlements, but also protect him from poor harvests that his own wastefulness of his entitled properties, but from the very state itself that granted him his entitlements.  So the family god became the god that helped him not only maintain what he presumed was his, but against the godless immorality of those who sought to take what he thought was his from him, and just as the duke who feels the king doesn’t support him enough and often blames the king and joins allegiance with a foreign king against his own king, generally with lesser benefits, the farmer often protested against the state, often suffering from his own protest by joining those the state was attempting to protect him from.

So it is not so much that rural America was conservative in the sense of wanting to defend hearth and home or relying on gods to inform his own moral authority, but he progressively grew to believe in the sacredness of his own individuality and saw the government as interfering with that individuality and sacredness that the state had initially granted to him.  Never being able to accept the government’s role that allowed his individuality to survive (to do so would deny that individuality) he often became bitter that but for the very state that allowed him to survive, and he often  projected the state as being antagonistic to his survival even though that survival depended on the support of the state.