On May 12, 2020, I published this piece.
Covid part one, might be over, but this is not. It has just become so baked into our reality that we take for granted the shortages, the price increases, the lost businesses. This is part one. I have added today’s notes at the end.
A friend who hasn’t been out in two months asked me why people are finding the grocery store so upsetting. I have attempted a response, as follows:
If the mammoths didn’t show up on the hunting grounds, early man didn’t just say, “it’s okay kids, we’ll have aurochs instead!” He intuited that something had disturbed the ecosystem and that the entire structure of survival was upset, aurochs or no aurochs.
When people in the wealthy West go to the store and the shelves are empty, they are hunters on a wasted, barren plain. They may not have the words for it, but they feel it. It’s terrifying, and the store is full of that energy right now. “How am I going to feed my family? Is the world falling apart?”
I’ve always kind of enjoyed going to the grocery store – when I first got my license, the deal I had with my parents was that I could use the car if I did all the shopping. I guess it’s that basic human urge to hunt and gather, to harvest, to put up stores. I’ve long had a sense of the abundance it represents, and I know how fragile it is.
We call the store the “store” because it represents the storehouse. Once humans triumphed over the immediacy of “berries today, gods will have to manage tomorrow” and “oops, tiger ate my offspring,” they were on the path to saving, storing, and the division of labor, allowing for increased leisure or productivity depending on need and preference.
These things constitute capital investment and hedge against risk, which is a huge piece of what makes our systems so sophisticated vs., say, chipmunks, who don’t contend intellectually with any of this and just stash nuts and try not to lose them while making as many more chipmunks as possible.
The reason good economists can’t make friends at parties is that their job is to point out how things work and what the consequences are, not to argue with gravity if people want their apples to fall up this week because it would be more convenient. To paraphrase a trope, we can ignore economics, but economics won’t ignore us.
People often think of economics as money, or as something secondary to what matters most, but economics is all of human action; literally every single thing that people do in an effort to satisfy their individual needs. It’s not a construct; it’s a description. It’s not invented, it’s discovered.
The laws of economics are just the observations of the aggregated actions of billions of people over millennia as they contend with the absolute physical reality of resource scarcity, included in which is time and physical dimensionality.
It’s everything from the mammoth hunt to the first bone flute to Chartres to Sartre to Walmart to walks on the beach.
The native state of humanity is abject poverty; naked and afraid. And from those soft and scared beginnings in the trees, we have pitted our intellect against the problem of resource scarcity (a physical law of nature over which only humans, of all animals, have attempted to triumph). Our brains and creative capacity have grown in direct dynamic response to this recognition.
Just as it takes hundreds of years to build the few inches of rich loam that a flood can wash away in minutes, it takes many generations to build a sustainable and vibrant network of wealth-creating enterprises, which is the framework for the entire expansion of creative endeavor beyond basic needs. Like the illnesses that stimulate the growth of our immune responses (which is part of the tempering and strengthening of our brains), scarce resources have been the anvil on which our creative genius has been forged and burnished.
Human creativity is the supreme gift of our species, the reason life is worth living, the love-born challenge to entropy (and the only force that can stand up to it). It is entirely a result of the sublime constraint of scarcity, and our tenacious refusal to succumb to any limitation of our potential as a result of it. This is what distinguishes us from other animals.
Few people understand what wealth is: its creation, its mechanism, its importance, or the processes that annihiliate it.
The flood that washes it away does not deliver it to replenish poorer soil; it is literally destroyed.
End Part One.
Four years later, toilet paper stocks may be a little more consistent, but at what price? Feeding a family of four that includes two teenaged boys is running me twice my mortgage.
There’s no bs story I can tell you right now that takes this away.
Fortunately, that’s not what we need in order to be okay. Would you believe me if I told you this, this very thing, is exactly what we need to be okay?
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My practice is to let the pain of this fill up every corner of my being. I sit with it until it is so large that I don’t think the whole world could contain it. I let it breathe my lungs, beat my heart.
And I say to myself, “where am I feeling this pain? Is it in my chest, my solar plexus, my stomach, my face?” I find it, and I name it.
“I see you, pain, and I welcome you here. You are the portal to the pathway through.”
And I keep saying it, over and over again, until it becomes a mantra, a lifeboat, to carry me above the flood.
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What you have said makes sense, this kind of sense being rational, logical and perhaps intuitive, results in what we are experiencing today. I recall a story that mentioned a flood wiping out humanity and it survived.
Dependency on a system which isn’t inherently flexible, resilient, and adaptable however counterintuitive is intentional if ultimately the objective is total control.
Thank you for the reminder to use gorse. Gorse is one I have relied on a few times since this ridiculous, earth shattering, paradigm destroying, Covid mania began. I can use some today. Good reminder.