What Does Self-Sufficiency Mean? I think the big thing that needs to be promoted is that people take full charge of their own lives rather than having experts to it because right now we are encouraged, at every turn, to turn our lives over to experts. We are not supposed to think about ways of preventing health but rather consult nurses and physicians. They are the experts and do not try to doctor yourself even if all you need is an aspirin. Go to the doctor because you never know. It might be something serious like a brain tumor instead of just a little headache. Well, with about one-thousand dollars worth of testing, they can determine that. Lawyers are notorious for saying that people do not really know all the ins-and-outs of law, they have to hire experts. Just because you know how to win an election I do not know how that makes you an expert in legislation, but we are supposed to believe that. Education is much the same way. The real place where learning should begin is at home. The child should be very basically educated in a number of things before he gets into first grade. But, all too many people can been persuaded that you are not supposed to teach your child anything because it would confuse the works that the teacher has to teach the child who is more advanced at his age and his grade level, etc., etc., etc., so it is psychologically damaging to teach your child anything until he gets into the first grade. That is kind of a bad news situation. It was not one-hundred years ago that families took care of burials of their own and were responsible for the moral education of their children and they accepted those responsibilities. They were more in touch with all the aspects of life. Indeed, they were more grounded in things that the world produced for them. There are youngsters who can grow up to be age of twenty-one and never have seen a cow in the flesh and know absolutely nothing about putting a seed in the ground and how to get it through to some place where you can get some food off of it. They know nothing about that—really not able to even care for themselves in many basic ways. We have part of the education of our children here the “Erdkinder” program which is a German term for “Earth Child or World Child,” where we get them involved in farm-type activities: learning how to do some carpentry, how to provide the basic things for themselves, how to survive in the woods, for instance, in each of the Four Seasons. Those are the things that nine-year olds just naturally seem to have an affinity for is learning those kinds of things. When they feel that they are able to care for themselves, in some basic way, it gives a great sense of competence which is a great boost to their self-esteem. We have to do that sort of thing ourselves. We have to give that to our children because they cannot really get it from experts: too expensive and they do not know how and they would not have the time anyway. When we feel that we know the things that we need to know in order to survive, we feel much safer. Otherwise, people are very nervous every time there is an economic downturn: people panic. How are they going to survive? People do survive and if you have a place where you can work on the land such as in a community such as ours where we own farmland, you are not dependent upon somebody else. It is not to increase the idea of independence, but rather a matter of survival and accomplish the things that we need. I think that our very civilized world has become so specialized that people are kind of in a state of helplessness in event of emergency. I think we are far less prepared today to survive a depression than people were back in the twenties when we were just essentially one generation away from the farm. We have to increase an awareness of the fact that people do live off the land and have been doing that since time immemorial instead of being just some link in the economic chain you begin to learn all the different aspects of it. But, specialty does have its place and it does keep the cost of things down. One of the people in the community here specializes in making shoes. He probably has learned to produce more shoes cheaper than if everybody had to figure out how to make shoes by themselves. But, that does not mean he would be exempt from knowing how to process the food that he buys and cans it for the wintertime and things of that sort. It is a matter of getting back to basics. I think however advanced civilization becomes in the future, the Brotherhoods would insist that everybody knows that basics, that everybody goes through the “Erdkinder” situation, know how to operate a farm, how to take care of animals, and how to put machinery together and make it work in a way it is supposed to. That is the basic training almost like when you get into “Boot Camp” or get into the Army, there are certain things that you have to know basically and then, presumably, you are able to fend for yourself a little bit better. I think that is what everybody needs to know for the next seventy centuries or so. (01-1983)
	Return