Continued from
Here:
But why even discuss our rulers and would-be rulers? The things they say, the things they promise, are just so much destructive wind. The only thing that has ever made them even slightly interesting to me is that I can't ever decide which is more scary; the ones who never do the things they promise, or the ones who actually
do those things. IE, bureaucrats tend to scare me more than politicians do. Either way, "duty," to them, is just wind. A threat, at most. Nothing to be taken seriously.
Yet duty is a part of an honorable and civilized life. A person who genuinely possesses no sense of duty must not have a friend in the world. What good is life, if you genuinely have nothing in it toward which you feel some sense of obligation? I certainly don't deride the idea, I just don't believe other people can impose it on you. You can only impose it on yourself - and should.
Coincidentally, over at
Sipsey Street Mike posted a piece on "Tribal Duties" yesterday, that seemed to fit similar thoughts I was trying to force into coherence:
How do you manufacture a strong community that protects, defends and advances the interests of its members? You build a tribe. Tribal organization is the most survivable of all organizational types and it was the dominant form for 99.99% of human history. The most important aspect of tribal organization is that it is the organizational cockroach of human history. It has proven it can withstand the onslaught of the harshest of environments. Global depression? No problem.
...
The solution to this problem is to build a tribe. A group of people that you are loyal to you and you are loyal in return. In short, the need for a primary loyalty to a group that really cares about your survival and future success.
So how do you build a tribe? A strong tribe, in this post-industrial environment*, isn't built from the top down. Instead it is built organically from the bottom up. A simple tribe starts with cementing ties to your extended family, a connection of blood. The second step is to extend that network to include other families and worthy individuals. A key part of that is to build fictive kinship, a sense of connectedness that leads to the creation of loyalty to the group.
Something that's sadly lacking in our society is the notion of voluntary association - I mean association in a group more serious than the Boy Scouts or Kiwanis Club - a group that forms itself around the ideal of mutual benefit, maybe even mutual survival. A tribe, for lack of a better word. Not one you're born into and "owe" allegiance because otherwise Unca Sugar will hurt you, but one you form yourself or earn entry to.
Hmm...sounds a lot like a
gulch.
Duty is a rational and essential part of any complete human's life. But for duty to be legitimate, it must be voluntarily assumed. If I start a family, for example, I have a duty (a whole damned series of duties) to my spouse and children. If I form or join an alliance of friends for mutual support, I have a duty to fulfill my promises to that group. These are obligations I bring on myself, and they may bring me aggravation and hassle but if everybody else is doing their part they also bring me joy.
But I have no duty whatsoever to anyone - anyone at all - who tries to impose such duty upon me. No government, no organization, no self-proclaimed spokesman for any viewpoint, even one with whose aims I might generally agree, can put any obligation on me at all. They can only try to persuade me. Or, in the case of a government, they can try force. The first I may listen to, and I may be persuaded or not. The second is pretty nearly certain to carry unintended consequences, and the more so the more I seem to be going along. >:-(
I really don't know what the story is here. These folks spent considerable money on fencing materials. The fence is not completed, nor is the little patio they started behind the trailer, and hundreds of dollars worth of materials lay on the ground untended. As far as I can tell the area has never been inhabited past scattered camping trips. The trailer is too small for a bathroom and there's nothing like a septic field, but also no outhouse. It looks like they got interrupted in the middle of their project and just never returned. I've never seen anyone around it. It just sits on a ridge, hidden from almost all angles.
Unlike the other trailer I showed you, there's substantial dollar value just laying around here but untouched by visitors. These solar panels are more than enough to keep the batteries up so that they won't discharge and sulfate. As you can see, local theft is not a big problem at the moment or this place would be stripped. I assume somebody local watches out for it, but I don't know it's true.
I went over to my neighbor D's place to ask of he had some plastic and could he help me cover the fruit tree. He was pretty skeptical of the utility of this, but agreed to go along with the joke. So a little later in the afternoon he and my other neighbor J showed up. By this time the wind had come up, and D asked, "Do you have a plan?"
Well, the rain stopped and the overcast cleared out. A little cool, but no serious wind yet. That'll come later today, no doubt. In the meantime, the boys wanted to know what the hell I was doing listening to Leslie Fish in the scriptorium when I could be going for a walk with them.
Dotted here and there in the desert there are little dwellings where nobody dwells. Nobody ever seems to bother them: Most of the folks you'll meet here have a very serious attitude toward property, including that of others. Most of these folks are heavily armed. This place, for example, is owned by a guy who's been out of the country for as long as I've known about it. His brother, however, lives fairly nearby. It looks abandoned, but it's not. Approach with caution. Better still, don't approach.
Of course that doesn't mean things are entirely safe unattended. The wind has a way of pulling things to pieces, given time. And there's lots of time here.
A few weeks ago a commenter on an earlier post facetiously asked if I was (or maybe if I was styling myself as) Edward Abbey's long-lost brother. Not hardly - I am aware of the man, but until recently knew and cared almost nothing about him. In the sixties and seventies, ecology scolds were ever-present and generally quite annoying in a self-righteous way: I ignored them and hoped they'd ignore me. To me, he was just one more.
