I'm gonna call this the popularity pyramid scheme. It applies to a lot of areas of life. In regards to permaculture, I'm adapting the phraseology that one of the foremost permaculture designers in the world had a sentiment about, what he called a crisis identity which may also be, I would assume, translated, to identity crisis, but I think it works both ways.
It's clever both ways. So the sentiment, to paraphrase, was that having the experience of working with people in the overdeveloped world versus the so called third or fourth world, I'm using my own words here, but basically I don't like to use the word developing countries, because that's very denigrating and backwards in my mind.
The traditional societies that are struggling to resist modernization, colonization of all kinds. To me, that's not undeveloped. It's more developed in many ways, spiritually and ecologically.
Of course, that's why we look to the past for the ancestral ways of horticulture, foraging and whatnot.
This juxtaposition between the mindset and the sense of self and identity in the modern world versus the pre modern or the modern adjacent, I'm trying to find better words to describe it, but Daniel Quinn called it the Takers and the Leavers in terms of domestication and civilization, being sedentary versus being nomadic.
That's one way to look at it, for the purposes of this point about what happens to the individual mind and self concept and ego identity, that psychological invisible structure, that architecture of the individual mind.
It's manipulated in the modern world, I could say, western world, but that's inadequate as well. So I will just say modern.
In a village based society that's not distorted by Internet culture, your aspirations to develop into becoming something, a phenomenon, a brand, a star, something aspirational, far beyond the humble, traditional limits of your ego within a small unit of people, a cultural unit and ethnicity rooted in the landscape that you subsist within, in my mind, ideally within walking distance, not even mediated by motorized travel.
Obviously, there's gray area with riding animals or riding bikes, but that's for another time.
The main idea is that the aspirational pathway that modernization has created for anybody who is rebooted, reprogrammed, to join the global matrix, the global rat race, to go to the city to find more lucrative employment than just working the land locally, which probably statistically speaking, you would never be able to own because of all of the conquest and colonization of the whole world.
So the natural order of humble villagers working the land together with modest dreams and aspirations tucked within the human ecology, and the ecological social psychology of that small area.
That small unit may be interfacing and trading with other people, maybe traveling at times, seasonally and whatnot, but for the most part, being pretty well anchored to a place and a place where your aspirations, at most, I would say, would be to be the most memorable servant of the community and of the land.
Maybe I'm being romantic about it, but the disconnection that grows from wanting to seize power and wanting to build an empire, it's a little more benign than it was in more ancient times of war and conquest, being more of the norm.
Now it's more about the popularity contest and the pyramid scheme of everything becoming a means to an end.
Everyone becoming a means to an end of your cropped selfie and your tags and likes and all those things that happen on social media, which I don't want to spend too much time talking about.
Just put it all in one category of which is the infrastructure of ego empire building, that popularity pyramid scheme.
If I wanna be number one, I wanna be on top, I wanna be king of the hill...
How ever you wanna look at it, that's a crisis identity, identity crisis, if you will, in the sense that once you start to get hooked on and addicted to that process of aspirational thinking to grow your ego and your influence and your revenue base, revenue sources, to grow far beyond where you're dwelling, subsisting.
That's a pandora's box, and it often leads to the objectification of everything in your reality.
And you attempt to become more than the Earth needs you to be, or your community needs you to be.
Folklore and all kinds of wisdom traditions and spiritual teachers, they would say, keep your ego like a bonsai tree, and things will be simpler, easier, better, safer, more fulfilling, et cetera, et cetera.
We’re supposed to learn that, but yet we seek to become more than someone or something, very, very humble.
So to me, there's a natural tendency to want to assert yourself and become something and become somebody.
But on a more horizontal, less pyramid like structure... or if it is a pyramid, it has a very low plateau, so it doesn't go to the sky and beyond with no limit.
That's problematic in most wisdom traditions of managing the individual ego, or even the group ego, which could lead to dehumanization, conquest and domination latterly, across the landscape. It's very easy to develop a sense of superiority as an individual, as a group.
It doesn't take much to look around and say, we're better, or we're stronger, or more resourced or whatever.
So I feel like there's a kernel, there's a seed of potential corruption within every individual, within every group.
But luckily, I would say, mostly due to pre civilized geography and an ecology of our deeper ancestral societies, their aspirations to conquer and to dominate were inhibited by geography and by a lack of technology that could create massive asymmetrical warfare.
There could be a surprise attack to all of the more primitive people who had more primitive weapons.
That's all a reference to guns, germs and steel, an exploration of that process.
But we're really struggling, I think, as a species now, with that inflated ego at all scales, wanting to climb this popularity pyramid.
Whether you're a warlord or a pop singer or a corporate CEO, whatever it is, that impulse to grow beyond what I would think to be a healthy, limited scope of power, influence and wealth.
It's obviously not being well kept in check. And the problem for permaculture, it requires a lot of manual labor.
It doesn't have to be toil, it doesn't have to be 8 hours a day.
It doesn't have to be monotonous or even repetitive beyond sometimes some things like picking fruits or harvesting seeds.
There are times when tasks can be tedious, but for the most part, you can diversify the chores in a day in a permaculture garden to where you're getting a very well balanced system of stretching and holding, postures and lifting, and the gamut of all types of movement, exercise and flexibility training without high stress. Without high strain. Maybe if you are hunting in a very elegant manner, you're gonna even get more cardio and more dynamic training.
But a lot of time is spent as an individual working the land, even if it's not at an industrial scale or pace.
But because of that, you're not scaling up into the infinite possibility of realms of becoming a very inflated personality.
Although you could do some of what I'm doing, which is try to make those processes of manual labor in the garden, make them into media and content that is hopefully engaging and does lead to some exponential growth of your reach, in your brand, in your voice, your photography, videography.
If anything, I'm building an empire of teaching people to destroy all empires and shut off everything and just go back to the land the ends justify the means for me use the tools critiquing ego, empire building, and, while simultaneously doing exactly that, but hopefully transmutation of the energy towards something more of a collective good.
But that embeddedness and that depth of relationship, very visceral, very in the weeds.
For those people who are seduced by the aspirational Internet culture, at best, they'll be distracted by that aspiration while they're doing the work, if they're doing the work. But at worst, they'll never do the work because it's beneath them.
They don't wanna break a nail. They don't wanna get their hands dirty, and their time could be better used to be live streaming and just being a talking head or something like that.
There's nothing wrong with what people are doing that makes the cream rise, and they become popular.
They become stars. I mean, I'm an artist, musician, everything, I had my aspirations.
I'm a little more humble about it, but it's very incompatible for most people to be highly aspirational, and then have a self concept that says oh I'm, gonna be somebody that's way more important than my villager neighbor, lineage or tradition, that aspiration to leave the land...
Some people are forced out of the land to go to the city and be slaves, or be indentured servants, or be wage slaves, whatever it is.
Some people are forced, literally by gunpoint, to have to take that order.
Land is taken away. Some people still have the option to stay on land that is relatively sustainable, subsistence farming, village type environments.
They may be seduced by an aspiration to modernize themselves.
I don't wanna take away people's right to education and to explore opportunities presented by the modern world.
This is not some kind of eco fascism, just an exploration in the philosophy of these choices that we now have, the choice to seek to become more than a humble, villager, and to leave the village in decline for it to collapse. For its population to start to crumble, and then the knowledge, the languages the practices the cultures even begin to deprecate, and then get either lost forever into the wilderness, if it's there, or just paved over and turned into a parking lot or a factory farm or a mine.
So the loss of the ancient ancestral ways, to wanna preserve that means asking people to spend more time doing manual labor on the land, in the land at a human scale, without over reliance on fossil fuel based heavy machinery, to dig swales and to plant trees and to work with basic hand tools in the garden.
Asking people to do that requires, to some degree or another, a sacrifice of the aspiration to transcend all of that manual labor and become nothing but a floating socialite on the Internet, propped up by that pyramid, which it's always a pyramid.
That's why I really wanna hammer that in, that it's a pyramid where there's a lot of people at the bottom, a lot of resources being burnt at the bottom, and a toxic legacy and a legacy of enslavement.
So that a very few number of so, called influencers, or stars, or pundits, or politicians, warlords, ceos, they have a platform, they have this outsized power.
And to me, in terms of permaculture, too much concentration of anything in one place is what we call pollution.
So there's a social psychological personality brand, pollution, centralization and concentration, and all these cults of personality.
So however you wanna look at that social pyramid popularity contest, the aspiration to become more than your neighbor or your parents or whatever, once it gets so far out of scope, to where you're no longer in service to building the soil, where you actually live, where you recycle your own nutrients and turn them into fruit trees and gardens.
And you build things and you grow materials for things. All of those very humble and very local aspirations get lost into that abyss of modernity, that endless seeking of ego aggrandizement, and to whatever extent the Internet is capable of shedding light on people's struggles to survive and exist, if that leads to commercialization of some sort that helps them protect their land and continue their language in their old ways...I'm all for that, and I don't wanna take that away.
Obviously, that can be very dangerous and can be very corrupted. But I don't have the authority to speak on that.
I will just say that it's a discipline because I am speaking from experience.
I was a very aspirational person. I would never have said, oh, because I wanna be popular, because I wanna be the king or the top of anything.
It would have been because I wanna be successful so that I can train people, I can teach people, I can possibly be some kind of positive role model, and I can scale that out, and I can empower other people to do what I've done and greater and more in terms of being warriors for the Earth.
That's the goal. It's not a humble goal. It is does require climbing that popularity pyramid game.
There were times where I felt like I was close to selling out, or starting to behave like I was selling out, even if I didn't even have the opportunity to sell out.
It is a disgusting personality disorder to think too much of yourself and then to view other people as instruments for your building of scaffolding to climb that pyramid, it's really nasty.
And a lot of people, they rise and fall, and they learn that the hard way, and they say, be nice to people on the way up, because they'll be the same ones on the way down.
You may be the headliner tonight, but tomorrow you may be the opener.
So how do you treat people? How do you treat yourself?
I can speak from the experience of having this arc of being very aspirational, very non humble goals, even if I thought they were goals to be of service, they were still rooted in ego and energized by the same machinery of ego.
So for me to have to own that and then have to evolve and say, now that I spend the majority of my time in a very humble relationship with gardening and Earth, I actually care less to really hype myself while doing it.
I care less about that. But it's also because I'm older, and I've decided to let some dreams go fallow and die and be cold, compost some old dreams and let more humble dreams emerge as the result of growing out of that compost.
I don't wanna steal anyone's thunder. By all means, if you have a passion, you wanna rise to the top, and you have the means, and you have the will, and you're luckier than me, then I hope you plant some seeds along the way.
And I hope that these few words of mine help to make it easier to shrink the ego, to fit back in within a very natural matrix, a more humble matrix of what would a traditional eco villager would aspire to do from one day to the next, even if they wanted to be the best at some something.
Or even if they wanted to stand out and be outstanding and be rewarded and awarded and honored for their great work or their great influence.
What would those goals be? And how can we live more in alignment with those types of goals so that we're always building soil?
We're not degrading the environment. We're reducing our ecological footprint, using less energy, creating less of a toxic legacy personally as a group, and then foster those values collectively.
To me, that makes a lot of sense in the world we live in.
There's no excuse. There's no, I didn't know better. Everybody, I think by now, knows better about how we should be living more elegantly on Earth.
Permaculture gives for me the best tool kit for that. Nothing's come to compete with it in my lifetime, so I'm still inherently an advocate for it.
But as romantic as I can be about that tool, permaculture, unfortunately, is it not popular.
Because it requires you to go back to the land in a very unmediated way, in an often unglamorous way, where there's muck and manure and compost and all of the trial and error and all of the humility that's created in that process. It’s very humbling to go back to the Earth.
It is the balancing of those impulses. It's important to, with whatever influence I have, I wanna influence people to not be so aspirational to where they're inflating beyond the scope of being able to still continue to appreciate the beauty and elegance of being an instrument at the tip of the spear of growing food for you and your people, and healing the land and working the land.
But if that's beneath you, you're already too high on that popularity pyramid scheme.
Don't let manual labor in an eco village ever be beneath you.
That's my advice. That's my public service announcement.