09 October 2011

Surrender

To be meshamet can, under some circumstances, mean to surrender. 
Shemitta as surrender, as a dis-arrogation-to-oneself of prerogatives that injure rather than enrich one, is a way to recognize how it is that in the realm of abundance every addition is potentially a subtraction, and that after the threshold of abundance has been passed, the marginal utility of 'more' gets not only smaller, it goes negative, and it goes negative infra-marginally, catastrophically. 
Shemitta recognizes how, regularly and periodically, the best thing a person (or a society) could do for his (or its) own welfare is to let go, to surrender, and to refresh. 

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