Our New Anahuac

I was up last night at around 3:00 AM for a night feeding with my baby Emi, short for Emiliana Meztli.

As usual, my mind started wandering, and I stayed up a few extra minutes thinking about the nature of wealth and economies. One of the reasons I normally don’t do night feeding is this reason: I find it hard to get back to sleep, and I start thinking about this nonsense. If it kept me up, I figured I would share it with you, so that you might be distracted with obtuse thoughts too! Anyway, it’s nothing I would turn in to a prof, but I think it’ll make the grade for a little post.

I started thinking about how some people choose to define wealth. I heard one guy define it as a measure of how long one could go without having to work and at the same time maintaining one’s current lifestyle. I’m not sure where he might have gotten this from, maybe from one of those wealth workshop huckster, or at least it sounds like what one of them might say. For our purposes this definition is as good as any. Wealth is production in excess of what is required for basic needs.

But what of the origins of economies? We can assume that the origins of most economies are organic, in that they arose out of the normal course of human interaction. The origins of the oldest economies, I assume, do not arise out of a collection of essays and  philosophic pontifications. They arise out of people doing what is best for them as individuals and as groups. They arise as solutions to practical situations, and they are built by a people with an existing value/preference system.

Each economy has it unintended side effects, as most medicines do. Once established, these economies ARE subject to the moldings of intellectuals, and the side effects are gamed by ambitious individuals for personal gain.

I began to think about what goals, values and preferences different economies satisfied at their origins. Bonfil Batalla, in Mexico Profundo, argues that the economies of Viejo Anahuac, were driven by a goal of offering self determination to individuals and families. Thus, families did not focus, generally, on the specialization seen in capitalist economies. Instead, families and individuals had a general knowledge and “general practice” of agriculture. Learning how to grow corn, and surrounding this corn with beans, squash and other vegetables, was an extremely efficient use and practice of agriculture, and it met the goal of allowing the individual to feel self determined and self actualized. She could grow everything she needed to survive and to prosper. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that many Chicano professionals interested in being independent go into medical and legal general practice. More streams of production/wealth/income, even today ensure a higher likelihood of self-determined success).

I started thinking about the luxury and glory that Viejo Anahuac must have produced to entice the people toward such a goal. I began to wonder what sort of need Euro-trash capitalism must have been designed to meet. I began to think in generalities about the climates that they must have had to contend with during the formation of modern economies. Ante-dated by feudalism, I began to postulate that the production of excess wealth (hoarding) must have been a response to a deficiency in their ability to produce for themselves in a steady manner. In the very beginning, I don’t think that capitalism was about the most comical discrepancy in wealth that we see today. That, in fact, was a side effect that was manipulated over centuries.

I began to think of the original aristocracies as the result of original community organizers: a response to the needs of the people.  The feeble European must have originally had great difficulty in steadily feeding his own people, and so he devised a method to cope: hoarding. Produce more than necessary when possible; entrust it to an organizer for fair distribution. Whereas in Viejo Anahuac, there was little question that the next season would produce a bounty in our beloved motherland, the European must not have had the same confidence and he must have adapted by producing and managing (excess) wealth.

They also took proportionally to greater tendencies toward piracy and invasion (theft of wealth). This way of life (hoarding and theft) became out and out a part of their culture, which resulted in what we have today: the modern gringo system. (lovely, as mija says).

Down the line, this system was gamed and the wheels of capitalism started spinning. The merchant class, the producers of the wealth, eventually overturned the aristocracy, the organizers of the wealth, and after centuries we got the beast that we have today: a system in which some may purchase a trip to the moon and others may not have enough food to eat. This sounds like a system which would come out of a society so insecure that they weren’t sure if they could feed their family next season: so why worry about our neighbor.

In the end, I began to wonder, is it possible that climate could have been the origin of the great cultural divide between the European and the rest of the world.

I don’t know, but maybe I’ll pick apart this argument at my next night feeding.