Farmer Motivational Quotes

When I rise up let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall let me fall without regret like a leaf.

A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.

If the farmer is rich, then so is the nation.

A hunter is no greater than what he kills. A farmer is no greater than what he reaps. A fisherman is no greater than what he baits. A sculpture is no greater than what he fashions. A warrior is no greater than what he conquers.

the husband decides he will motivate his wife to become more respectful by acting in unloving ways. This usually proves about as successful as trying to sell a pickup to an Amish farmer.

Leaders are farmers; they cultivate human beings by adding values to them till they are fully grown as successful people for harvesting.

To a farmer dirt is not a waste, it is wealth.

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans.

Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow.

Life is govern by principles not by how you feel.Just image a farmer who does not sow his seeds & decides that he is going throw them on the roof because he feels so, well he is sure not going to have a harvest.

Writer Brigid Brophy exposes [their motives] with great precision: "Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. These slogans have a long history. After being used to justify slave traders, ruthless industrialists, and contractors who had found that the most economically 'realistic' method of cleaning a chimney was to force a small child to climb it, they have now been passed on, like an heirloom, to the factory farmers. 'We mustn't be sentimental' tries to persuade us that factory farming isn't, in fact, cruel. It implies that the whole problem had been invented by our sloppy imaginations.

In December 1790, with other options foreclosed, Hamilton revived a proposal he had floated in his Report on Public Credit: an excise tax on whiskey and other domestic spirits. He knew the measure would be loathed in rural areas that thrived on moonshine, but he thought this might be more palatable to farmers than a land tax. Hamilton confessed to Washington an ulterior political motive for this liquor tax: he wanted to lay “hold of so valuable a resource of revenue before it was generally preoccupied by the state governments.” As with assumption, he wanted to starve the states of revenue and shore up the federal government. Jefferson did not exaggerate Hamilton’s canny capacity to clothe political objectives in technical garb. There were hidden agendas buried inside Hamilton’s economic program, agendas that he tended to share with high-level colleagues but not always with the public.

In August 1917, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscription, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union (WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Oklahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which became known as the Green Corn Rebellion.

One Archeology and Decipherment Two History: Heroes, Kings, and Ensi's Three Society: The Sumerian City Four Religion: Theology, Rite, and Myth Five Literature: The Sumerian Belles-Lettres Six Education: The Sumerian School Seven Character: Drives, Motives, and Values Eight The Legacy of Sumer APPENDIXES A. The Origin and Development of the Cuneiform System of Writing B. The Sumerian Language C. Votive Inscriptions D. Sample Date-Formulas E. Sumerian King List F. Letters G. Dit lla's (court decisions) H. Lipit-Ishtar Law Code 1. Farmers' Almanac SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Religion and Higher Learning.—Religious motives entered into the establishment of colleges as well as local schools. Harvard, founded in 1636, and Yale, opened in 1718, were intended primarily to train "learned and godly ministers" for the Puritan churches of New England. To the far North, Dartmouth, chartered in 1769, was designed first as a mission to the Indians and then as a college for the sons of New England farmers preparing to preach, teach, or practice law. The College of New Jersey, organized in 1746 and removed to Princeton eleven years later, was sustained by the Presbyterians.

In the case of food, if the argument is valid that we need some kind of genetic modification to help feed the world’s growing population, then I believe that we cannot simply dismiss this branch of genetic technology. However, if, as suggested by its critics, this argument is merely a front for motives that are primarily commercial—such as producing food that will simply have a longer lasting shelf life, that can be more easily exported from one side of the world to the other, that is more attractive in appearance and more convenient in consumption, or creating grains and cereals engineered not to produce their own seeds so that farmers are forced to depend entirely upon the biotech companies for seeds—then clearly such practices must be seriously questioned. Many

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own.

Anson laid bare his ulterior motives for favoring the removal of Japanese farmers, but like all strategic racists, he also at least partially subscribed to the racial antipathies he endeavored to exploit. From here, motives become more attenuated as persons adopt particular ideas depending not on their material interests but on how these notions protect their self-image and, for the privileged, confirm society’s basic fairness. For instance, the dominance of colorblindness today surely ties back to motives, not on the fully conscious level, but in many whites being drawn to conceptions of race that affirm their sense of being moral persons neither responsible for nor benefited by racial inequality. Colorblindness offers whites racial expiation: they cannot be racist if they lack malice; nor can they be responsible for inequality, since this reflects differences in group mores. Colorblindness also compliments whites on a superior culture that explains their social position. In addition it empathizes with whites as racism’s real victims when government favors minorities through affirmative action or welfare payments. Finally, colorblindness affirms that whites are moral when they oppose measures to promote integration because it’s allegedly their principled objection to any use of race that drives them, not bias. Colorblindness has not gained adherents because of its analytic insight (that race is completely disconnected from social practices blinks reality); rather, it thrives because it comforts whites regarding their innocence, reassures them that their privilege is legitimate, commiserates with their victimization, and hides from them their hostility toward racial equality.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

These georgoi in turn shaped the ideals, institutions, and culture that gave rise to the polis. Unlike any prior civilization, the culture of the Greek polis combined citizen militias with the rule of law. That involved having a broad middle class of independent small landowners that met in assemblies where the votes of these nonelite determined laws, and foreign and domestic policy. These smallholders gained in status as population growth in the ninth and eighth centuries forced an agricultural revolution. Labor-intensive farming of marginal lands came to replace the Dark Age pastoral economy. This required a growth in private landownership, which motivated georgoi to assume the risks involved in cultivating land that was unproductive using traditional farming techniques. These farmers created the ritual of hoplite warfare to decide disputes in a manner that did not contradict their agrarian agenda. The georgoi and their agrarian ideology became the driving force behind the hoplite revolution during the early seventh century.

Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group. This leads foragers to be vigilant for early warning signs of people who position themselves above others. This includes dominating or bullying individuals (outside the household ot immediate family), bragging, seeking authority too eagerly, ganging up with other members of the group, and otherwise attempting to control others' behavior. Foragers would readily support the motto fo the early American general Christopher Gadsden: "Don't tread on me." Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren't our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt different norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment. This "cultural flexibility" also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

You’ve approached the opportunity before you at a leisurely pace, but now it’s time to grab it and go for it with gusto. By meeting this challenging situation head-on, you’ll discover that you have some powerful gifts and skills that you were unaware of. If one way isn’t working, try another; and don’t get stuck in any single approach. Spend a day or two with no plans or agenda, guided only by your intuition—whether a day of activity, quiet reflection, or a combination. Take full responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions, rather than blaming others or life circumstances. GREAT BLUE HERON Take some time for self-examination, reflecting dispassionately on your goals, motivations, actions, feelings, strengths, and limiting beliefs. Only you know what’s best for you, so follow your inner wisdom and guidance rather than the dictates and pressures of others.

Farmers are at the core of the livelihood of the world population, without them,the livelihood of humanity is compromised.

Abdulaziz wanted settled farmers whom he could tax rather than wandering nomads whom he could often not even locate. He wanted to replace the divisive tribalism that motivated the Bedu with a unifying Islamic identity, and, above of all, he wanted a dependable military force.

Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates in the great distance it has to travel; there it is a grain of powder inclosed; here it burns away in the open air and consumes without effect.

Among the golden fields, the farmer stands as a testament to the indomitable spirit. Their unwavering efforts, like a symphony performed in concert with the elements, resonate with the echoes of generations past and dreams for the future.

It is interesting to note that Mesopotamian legal codes guaranteed property rights to an even greater extent than they guaranteed what we now call human rights. For instance, a person had the right to sell him- or herself into slavery or pledge his or her liberty as collateral for a loan. This seems cruel and exploitive, but it may have been efficient. A study by the economist M. Darling of the rural economy of the Punjab in modern times suggests a disturbing thing about human nature—people work harder and produce more when they are in debt.2 Darling found that crop yields for farmers in debt typically exceeded yields from unencumbered farmers. Farmers in the Punjab may have faced foreclosure, but for the ancient inhabitant of Ur, the motivation was even greater. Debtors were often forced to sell themselves into slavery.

The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn’t going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city. Minnesota is our last granary. They’ve had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They’re not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven’t been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They’ve been spending more time fixing old tractors that can’t be fixed than plowing their fields. I don’t know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don’t know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.” There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching ‘consumers.’ We’re giving loans, not alms. We’re supporting ability, not need. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!

The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn’t going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city. Minnesota is our last granary. They’ve had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They’re not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven’t been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They’ve been spending more time fixing old tractors that can’t be fixed than plowing their fields. I don’t know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don’t know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.” There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching ‘consumers.’ We’re giving loans, not alms. We’re supporting ability, not need. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!” He

Most times, you will realize that value is relative. Just as the rain is convenient to a farmer and convenient to a hunter, so is life. Some will like you; others will loathe you. Some will applaud you; others will criticize you. Some will stand with you, others will backstab you. Learn to accept these realities, and you will not be fazed by unfavourable conditions.

I wanted to be somebody who made plans and had friends and knew when the farmers’ market was in the neighborhood. I wanted to be spontaneous and informed. I wanted to somehow just know when the Chuck Close exhibit was at the Met and then have the motivation to go. As opposed to suggesting, yet again, that we have sandwiches and watch old movies on TV—and not even toasted sandwiches, because that’s just extra work for nothing. I wanted to be that guy. Or perhaps I merely wished that I wanted to be that guy. Wanting to want something isn’t the same as wanting it. I suppose what I really wanted, then, was to give more of a shit, because about certain things, I simply did not.

Tyson experimented with the model of owning farms outright and staffing them with well-trained workers. This seemed like a natural fit for Tyson, because it left the farm within the company’s control. But the limitations showed up quickly. It was hard to motivate hired hands to do the work, which involved hauling loads of dead chickens out of a barn where the ammonia fumes were so strong they burned the eyes. Hired hands just didn’t raise the best birds, no matter how much you paid them or what kind of incentives you provided. They didn’t have skin in the game. Owning farms also had another downside: Chicken houses were a terrible investment of the company’s money. The buildings served only one purpose, and they lost their value quickly as they wore out. A quick set of calculations revealed that Tyson Feed and Hatchery would never have the kind of capital it would need to buy all the land and build all the houses required to supply itself with chickens. To counter these problems, Tyson settled on the model of using independent contract farmers. A farmer who owned his chicken houses was deeply motivated to care for the birds. He had a mortgage and debt from the chicken houses hanging over his head. It made a man get up early in the morning, and it kept him going until late at night.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing [amoral aristocratic radicalism], never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing, never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

Those who came up with the innovations were individuals already active in agriculture who looked deliberately and systematically to improve their businesses; the changes were decentralized, not centralized; and the changes were led by practical men, not by scientists or governments. The innovations involved tinkering, trial and error, or recognizing a new approach and transferring it to a different environment. There are two possible reasons motivating these innovations. The first is that they were supply driven - innovation took place for the sake of innovation, because someone had discovered a new process. The second is that they were demand driven - innovation resulted from the drive by farmers to expand their production and to increase their incomes. The evidence is entirely consistent with the demand-driven hypothesis. The nature and the timing of the innovations all is consistent with the idea that innovation was a response to a problem, the problem being to increase output and/or to reduce costs and so to increase incomes. Innovation was the response to business opportunities, not the cause.

The farmer grows food to feed the people.

Every farmer knows this, you can't continue irrigating when nothing comes out after a while. Otherwise you're wasting water. Similar is to love, if you pursue someone that can't respond to the amount of energy you provide towards them, then you need to let go.

If we grow more food, there will be enough food to feed everyone.

A farmer can toil harder when a respite is promised at the end of the day and a feat at the end of the year. In the same manner, a human can live ferociously because death is promised at the end. “Teacher, what do you mean by the feat and rest? What is the relationship between?” The teacher answers, “forgetfulness, of every labor and sweats, and of himself in that condition.” Winter becomes bearable by the presence of forthcoming greens, marriage by children, letters by knowledge, urban by nature and canticle by beauty.