An inventor brought his plans for a new device to an engineer, who looked at them and said, "What you've got here is systemically flawed, which means it'll destroy itself after just a few minutes of operation."
"Not if it's well-made," the inventor replied. "Every part must be made of the finest materials and to very exact specifications."
The engineer had the device built, but it destroyed itself after only four minutes of operation. The inventor wasn't discouraged. "You didn't do what I told you," he said, "You've got to use much finer materials - the finest available - and make the parts to the most exact specifications."
The engineer tried again, and the new model worked for eight minutes. "You see?" said the inventor. "We're making tremendous progress. Try again, using even finer materials and more exact specifications." The new device worked for ten minutes. The engineer was told to build yet another model, using still finer materials and still more exact specifications. The new model lasted for eleven minutes.
The inventor wanted to go on and on in this way, striving for perfect parts, but the engineer refused, saying, "Can't you see that our returns are diminishing here? It's a waste of time to try to make a dysfunctional design work by improving its parts. Bring me a viable design, and I'll guarantee you a device that'll work for years, using parts made from ordinary materials, to ordinary specifications." - Daniel Quinn, "Beyond Civilization", page 170
The moral:
If the design is broken (as it is in the case of agricultural/industrial civilization), no amount of refinements can make it serviceable.
Tribalism, which, in Daniel Quinn's presentation, is living by the principle of pooling resources, individuals taking only what they need from those pooled resources and leaving the rest, is the social design which nature has given mankind. Just as living in pods works for whales, and living in herds works for bison, living in tribes works for humans.
I am convinced that if this species is to survive as even a token presence into the next age of the earth, it will be using the tribal model.
Does that mean that we will be hunter-gatherers? Maybe. Or maybe nomadic herdsmen, or maybe nomadic scavengers (mad max?), or perhaps even semi-nomadic horticulturalists, as some tribes in the Amazon river basin.
But the cornerstone of modern civilization, the idea that "growing all your own food is the best way to live", is and has always been set directly against the natural order, and therefore is broken, and anything built upon it is destined to fail. This way produces food surpluses which then have to be guarded which then requires payment be made to the men who spend their otherwise productive time guarding the food surplus. You don't have to extend this too far to see that feudalism is right around the corner.
If members from this forum do want to build a society of some sort, it will have to be based on the tribal paradigm. Agriculturalism just doesn't work. Permaculture, however, is a way of maximizing the work that nature already does, for the benefit of human society
