Bald Explorer & Chimneysweeps

is money a system of superiority?

On a comment thread of Cosmology & the Course, I’ve had a lively exchange with Winston Smith on decentralizing economics. He recommended this video by Richard Vobes, who goes by the Bald Explorer:

If I’m understanding him correctly, Vobes is saying that as a sovereign, no one can make you pay anything—like taxes—unless you consent. As an example of mutual consent, he posits a householder and a chimneysweep in a bygone era. The chimneysweep needs a bit of money, you need your chimney swept, so you barter and he agrees to go up your chimney for a few ‘sovereigns.’

This was an apt example to make my point. The book that was the start of my post 9-11 ‘awakening’ was The Culture of Make-Believe by Derrick Jensen. His thesis is that it’s not the violence of war that undergirds civilization but the systemic violence that invisibly weaves through our everyday lives. Derrick writes:

Real chimney sweeps did not dance. They climbed the insides of flues twelve by fourteen inches or smaller and scrubbed or brushed away the soot by hand. Young and tiny children were especially useful because they could get into smaller places, leading to the popular advertising slogan, “Little boys for small flues.” … an early nineteenth century investigation could not discover even a single child who had voluntarily entered the trade. They were all either orphans or indigents sold by parish workhouses to masters of sweeps, children of famished parents sold to same, or kidnap victims. Because land was dear and children cheap, the going rate to purchase a child ranged from a few shillings to two guineas—”the smaller the child, the better the price,” for obvious reasons. One field hand in the American South cost as much as several hundred of the “climber boys.” …

Because the children were expendable—I mean this word precisely—they were often sent to clean even hot flues: the children’s safety and well-being were worth even less than heated meals served at the proper time. Climber boys who hesitated to ascend hot chimneys were beaten, or if they ascended partway and started back down, had straw lit beneath them to force them up. These practices were routine. As historian Georgina Battiscombe wrote, “Forced screaming and sobbing up dark, narrow chimney, their skin scorched and lacerated, their eyes and throats filled with soot, these small children—Ashley found a child of four-and-a-half working as a climbing boy—faced suffocation in the blackness of a chimney or perhaps a slow and painful death from cancer of the scrotum, the climbing-boys’ occupational disease.”

Vobes mentions barter as an option for the chimneysweep and cooking him a meal. They were kept intentionally malnourished so they’d continue to fit into flues and had to beg for food because the master sweeps neither paid nor fed them. Derrick concludes that even after a machine that cost four pounds was developed to clean flues, boys were cheaper and the practice continued for many more years.

---

Today, of course, this violence is outsourced. Derrick is unflinchingly honest:

I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for ‘comforts and elegancies’ which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.

Vobes encourages viewers to dress like a sovereign, perhaps not with a cape but with a cravat. While he balks at paying taxes, he doesn’t question the validity of his money, earned from making videos for corporations. His labor has made the rich richer, the same as all corporate jobs from McDonald’s to McDonnell-Douglas. It does nothing for those who make his cravats or computer or video equipment.

After I read Jensen’s book, I went through a complete identity crisis between my belief that I was a good person and my new knowledge. I would wander the aisles of Safeway, unable to buy anything, and abandon my empty cart. My youngest daughter was born to a different mother. The other two were decked-out boutique toddlers; she wore hand-me-downs. They got Lunchables; she got hard-boiled eggs in waxed paper bags. They took gymnastics and ballet; she played in the dirt. And yet now she’s the one who uses a CO2 tank to bubble her water because SodaStream is made in the occupied territories and she won’t buy Sabra hummus or any other Israeli product. That’s my girl!

---

In the video, I explain how coinage and taxation were used to co-opt people into the conquest of neighboring lands, creating cognitive dissonance between caring for your own family while participating in the enslavement of others. But taxation was a means to an end, as the biblical story of Joseph illustrates. His extraction of the seed grain of Egypt led to the famine where independent farmers were turned into sharecroppers for the Pharaoh. Taxation is chump change compared to the mortgage where the bankers usurp the properties and charge us 30 years of labor with dual incomes.

I explain how my caret system doesn’t replace imperial money and the government welfare system that exists now. The only thing it takes away is the ability of bankers to create money out of thin air by lending what they don’t have. It instead creates a supplemental system of reciprocity that allows people to make an honest living equal to the cost of housing by serving the community.

The imperial currencies are backed by slave labor, as I explain in my book’s first section called Pieces of Slave. We are servants to the rich, or serve those who are servants. In return, our labor buys far more of someone else’s labor who’s in or from another country where life is held cheap. Otherwise we couldn’t afford to spend our time in unproductive labor that doesn’t grow or make anything.

---

I’m speaking in generalities here of how the system works, not about anyone’s choices as better or worse. We don’t have good choices to make. Yet I suspect that the belief in our own moral superiority keeps this system of exploitation going. Winston asked how my caret system would support a family with three disabled children who needed extra care and couldn’t work. Would they become useless eaters to be disposed of?

I asked Winston why he thought that, even though he cared about disabled children, other people needed to be forced to. Is it not human nature to care for one another, especially in small groups where we know the people? I think this hidden belief that we are good but other people have to be forced is the trick behind wokism, socialism, communism, Marxism and democracy. It prevents small scale sovereignty because we don’t trust others to be as compassionate as we are unless they’re forced.

Winston, from my experience, is humble, sincere, curious, respectful and appreciative. I’m not saying that he thinks of himself as morally superior. Good vs. evil, however, is the seminal story that tricks us into thinking bigger is better and people need to be controlled by the ‘good’ people. We can’t claim our own sovereignty without giving the same to others, even if that means letting them make their own mistakes.

And I’m picking on Bald Explorer’s economic plan but we really agree in principle: you are king and so am I and so is everyone else. And I do think we should dress like a king, whether that’s a cravat or hot pink velvet boots ;-) I didn’t wear mine out for my birthday but I did claim my sovereignty with a glittery birthday crown on a funky miniature golf course. And then my daughters and I had a dance party, where they made me put them on for a rendition of Roxanne. That’s claiming your inner king!

---

Responds to Russell Brand's interview of David Harvey called Marxism on the Rise: Can It Really Defeat Capitalism? I define capitalism as a system that favors the accumulation of capital, which can be good or bad depending on who owns the assets. I propose that Capitalism favors greed and Marxism favors need, but a different paradigm favors community sovereignty. If the community owns the assets (capital) that back the money, people can own the products of their own labor, which then go back into the community. I reference Elizabeth Warren's book, The Two-Income Trap, to show why the problem isn't overconsumption, and I cite Ivan Illich on why institutionalized welfare steals what makes us most human—our generosity, as anthropologist David Graeber confirms.

And on a different Note, Winston recommended this speech by Hitler, which is remarkably prescient about how the economic system works and how a small group of ‘guests’ can control a nation: