Is it you Reap what you Saw?
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 22, 2009
Is it you Reap what you Saw? (May 21, 2009)
Society lived in harmony and communicated better when it was the entire community responsibility to cater for the village. There were people who sawed and there were people who reaped; the two tasks never mingled in the same project. You may saw wheat and reap carrots in another field; you may saw wheat in one field and reap wheat in another field. There was a deep sense that legalizing individual properties for agricultural production carries the seed of jealousy, of inefficiency, of detachment from the spirit of community, of alienation to the customs and traditions, and from community celebrations.
The elders communicated their expertise and supervised the tasks. Saints were created for each week and every month as reference date to when to saw and when to reap. Idioms were coined for easy retention as guiding rules to the community survival.
The class of nobility created a form of individual properties where people could work the land allocated to nobles, saw and reap it, pay the expected tax on production and die of famine if the harvest did not suffice the family to survive the season. This mean scheme was meant to relieve the noble from the day to day control and management of the land because the nobleman had other more important political business to cater for in the Capital or the county main city. At first, the individual farmers were ecstatic that they will finally reap the better part of the labor of their sweat, which means the labor of their wives, sons, and overtime work.
Production climbed, money flowed in the pocket of the nobleman, wholesalers flourished, and illiteracy peaked because there was no time for the offspring to go to school, and people died at an earlier age because of too much work and no time to relax and relieve the aches and pains.
Does that sound familiar today? You open your private enterprise and there is no difference between day and night, Monday and Sunday. Family is neglected because a small sacrifice early on will reap ten times the benefits expected. No one in the family is happy, divorce cases increase, suicide increases, heart attacks increases, and depression attributed to weak characters that could not sustain the pressure of competition.
Have you noticed the wealthy class ever been penalized for poor sawing policies? Governments come to the rescue as in prehistoric community systems. Only the middle class enterprising slaves pay for their failures either in sawing or reaping.
Since private property was legalized and iconized in an ideology as the best alternative to improving productivity the world has gone amuck. As long as we are indoctrinated that we reap what we saw then society cannot progress in a sustainable manner. The idea that individual properties are our own responsibility has never worked; quickly you discover that banks want to exercise their responsibilities, that the municipality wants a share in the responsibility, and your neighbor has a say in the responsibility of the property. They all share the responsibility at your own labor and expense because the modern legal economic system wants individual to shoulder the burden of the community and not the way around.
The elders are dead and the community facilities that replaced the elders’ wisdom are detached or infusing general knowledge that are of no use to carrying on the tasks properly. We are facing global problems that require global resolution within an archaic system of individual properties and individual responsibilities of a biased capitalist system to the upper classes. This cannot go on to sustain life on earth. The alternative system of communal life can be regenerated and lessons learned when the upper classes are duely punished for the messes they created. We can soar high after we cater for the nitty gritty of daily miseries and tribulations. We are back to basics in preparation for the larger jump to global solutions.
Adonis Diaries 
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