Family 171
A peasant reminder
I haven’t been using the WEIRD acronym very much lately. My head is buried in books that have taken me back to ancient Rome and Persia, and there’s another one which I am enjoying very much called The Rigor of Angels. As with my last day in the life post, I am still struggling with a varied set of first world problems that are taking up my disposable income and disposable time and giving me disposable headaches. Still, I’ve had time to wander out into the interwebz and chat with the rabble outside of this preserve of civility at Substack.
This is what has got my attention this morning. This and the fact of the escalating war in Southern Lebanon and the one still raging in Ukraine, and yeah who knows what the Houthis are actually doing today. The fickle eye of major media allows us to get disposably bored with their disposable information and say with all honesty that the LA Dodgers are interesting this season. I’m thinking about buying a jersey.
Dollar Street
Dollar Street is the map of people you can see, watch short videos of their family pix and check out their material goods. Family 171 lives in Jordan.
The family lives in Jordan. H is 60 years old and works as a driver. His wife E is 49 years old and they live with their 3 children in a rented 3-bedroom house. The family likes the peaceful and quiet environment of the house, but the only thing they dislike is that it has too many stairs. Their favorite item in the house is the blankets. The next thing they plan on buying is a smart TV. Their dream is to buy their own house someday.
I simply cannot imagine living on a budget of $600 per month, even though that’s what I made as a clerk for City National Bank in 1980. That is $2,170 in today’s money. Yesterday I watched, as I do, The World According to Briggs in consideration of where I might live in the US for under $1500 a month. It was both depressing and encouraging at the same time. There are still some places where you can hole up and survive the worst. Not that I’m prepping for prepping, but I would look for something rural in hill country in close proximity to a good sized Army base. A river would be a big plus. Hmm. Now I’ve got myself thinking.
Whenever my first world headaches distract me from doing brilliant work manifesting AWS architectures, I tend to read more books about military conflict. It makes me consider the blessings of my gated community. But I read something about the roads to Athens that reminded me of the metaphor of the shield.
The Metaphor of the Shield
Hoplites are those guys from that homoerotic movie 300 that launched a million memes about Sparta. If you remember, they collected into a formation called a phalanx in which spears protruded from just above the interlocked shields. Marching in formation made the phalanx very formidable but they did have two weaknesses. The first was being flanked, attacked from the side, but some adjustments could be made. No, the biggest threat to the unified strength of the phalanx was panic. You see hoplites are volunteers. That shield is their father’s shield. That spear was passed down, and the phalanx is comprised of ordinary peasants making $600 actual dollars per month. In ancient Greece it was a citizen militia. It was only as effective as its weakest link.
The man who asks what do I think I’m doing here. The man who stubs his toe or suddenly freezes. The man who carries a grudge or a superstition. All hoplites and all hoplite commanders knew that this vulnerability was ever present.
This vulnerability pales in comparison to the grudge of an aristocrat. It isn’t difficult at all to imagine a city under siege in which some spoiled rich bastard decides to open the back door to the enemy. You’ve seen such characters interviewed on TV hundreds of times. They tell you exactly how much they doubt the current regime. They tell you how much it needs to go the other way.
So I woke up this morning thinking how many traitors do we have in America. How many would do damage to the metaphorical shield of patriotism? How many would facilitate enemy action? How many are telling us that the system is corrupt and needs to be burned down? Probably a million. But are they the right million?
We have a lot of back doors. We can be degraded.
Beyond Hope
I conceptualize a spectrum.
All of these these states of mind can operate in the absence of evidence, yet the further you move towards conviction and trust, the more you need evidence. But I draw attention to the distinction between hope and faith.
“Faith and hope work hand in hand, however while hope focuses on the future, faith focuses on the now.” — David Odunaiya
You can hope something is going to happen without engaging the gears in your mind. You’re not far from fantasy in such a state. You’re just daydreaming or hallucinating. When you believe, you have some operational understanding of how something desired might come to be. You believe in an idea, a process, something that can be made manifest.
Faith operates by making investments of time, money, energy in your beliefs. It may be an individual enterprise or one of a community operating in collaboration or with shared methods. There’s no evidence that a rocket can make it to Mars until a rocket makes it to Mars.
When I look at Family 171, I think that they are operating on faith. Families that work operate on faith. That is the way you survive on $600 per month in today’s world.
A Stoic Conclusion
So as a Stoic operating in the WEIRD, I am very aware of the evidence of faithless bastards who would facilitate the destruction of America, or of the American Dream. I think they’ve started with dismantling sections of the American Dream based on some fantasy about socialism or new world authority, then they’d look for collaborators, especially the aristocratic bastards with grudges and superstitions. They’re ready to poke holes in shields while slumming with the hoplites, because it wasn’t exactly spears that they inherited, but megaphones.
As I’ve often said, I’m rich by the standards I grew up with. I know how my family operated on faith. I wasn’t presented with the evidence of how business in America worked. Yet unlike my parents, I never had a government job, and this forced me to understand that my paycheck came from something more intricate and immediate like operating cash flow rather than the multiyear budgets of mandated government agencies.
But somehow we have generated markets for the likes of Tucker Carlson, who seems to get weirder every day, not that I pay so much attention to his shows as I do to the opinions of reasonable friends in the legal profession. It seems to me that it takes some considerable effort to reach out and touch Nazi sympathizers, but evidently not so much. But there are more than just Nazis out there who live on tiny incomes and are losing or have lost faith in America. There are aristocratic bastards who are hoovering up their attention and feeding them propaganda that undermines their faith in law, order, civility, reason, and seemingly everything but conspiracy theories and feels. We haven’t stepped over the Rubicon into Idiocracy, but we’re going to face a crisis in patriotism long before the planet heats up enough to disrupt supply chains. (That begs the question of which supply chains (c.f. 8200)).
So as I always say, “Trust is the fundamental currency of civilization.” We are going to have to forge new networked bonds of faiths, convictions and trust. We cannot depend on hope. Just as Family 171 does not abide by hope or fantasy, we have to get real. This is our first world problem if we can remain focused on it. We need to become practitioners in evaluating the evidence that leads to trust and gain a better sense of direction when that evidence is missing or manipulated.
What Do You Mean We?
To be more specific about ‘America’, I mean its proper legal and judicial practices in compliance with Constitutional scrutiny. I mean its proper economic institutions and business practices in compliance with that law. I mean its proper open society in the context of the rights and obligations of citizenship. We retain critical masses of people who understand and respect these protocols and boundaries. Liberty is alive. But the shields cannot be taken for granted. So take inventory of what you’ve inherited. Someday you may be called upon to be some kind of hoplite. These are not the king’s knights, these are we the people.
Human beings are called upon to be loyal to South Africa and Jordan and many other places. If they can afford it, so must we.
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Once again, a stupendous piece. I greatly appreciate the wit with which you leaven your writing.