At the leadership

The reason for the shemitta (relief) of debt and for supporting the impoverished in society is not about the direct support of the poor, it's rather about the politics of extractives vs creatives. 

It's through the management of debt that the extractives manage to maintain strongman rule. 

The edicts to serve God are directed at the leadership, not the general public. 

A couplet

Shabbos and sheviit form a couplet. 

The one is about the internal, spiritual, creative power each of us has within him or herself; the other is about the foundation of the material things God gifts to us. 

Their own sustenance

One crucial element in the laws of sheviit is that during the sabbatical year the entire population actively participates in their own sustenance. During that year people have to return to first principles, to remember how to fend for themselves. It is a year where people return to a more primitive way of life, as the complicated, interconnected institutions of a complex society cease their function. 

The objective of the year of sheviit is to disperse the excess and to digest it so as to make it no longer alienable. To accomplish that dispersal properly the population needs to be capable of receiving the excess and to make it inalienable in themselves. That inalienability is achieved through the population having to perform their own daily harvesting. 

It removes the mystique of the expert and returns the responsibility for each person's welfare to the person him or herself.  

Plain and simple and direct

An economy engaged in production that was plain and simple and direct would likely be able to undersell all its competitors. 

China is such an economy, and it is beating the pants off of the over-fed, under-exercised economy in America . 

Not their product

People need to get clear about what is not their product, not just, as the Puritans did, how not to consume too much. 

Esthetically appealing

Foremost, the cultural underpinnings of the sova way of life must be propelled by the engineers, architects, and designers. 

The framework the Bible lays out is obviously a legal and a spiritual one but the Bible also indicates the need for cultural and institutional under-girding of those laws, and that is where the engineers and the designers come into the picture. 

The values of simplicity coupled to the values of resiliency, when embodied in esthetically appealing artifacts, can convey and demonstrate how the social order could bend toward a sturdier moral plane that is both elevated and more generally accessible. 

Moral precepts are best promoted when they are embodied in beautiful things. Engineers and designers could accomplish such promotion by thinking in novel ways about how to fashion the materials of our abundant lives.  

The law of the land

The basis of carnality for the territorial jurisdiction and sovereignty is the home. 

The law of the land is the law of the homeland. Citizens belong to each other by virtue of their having to join together to defend their several, individual family homes as well as their joint, collective homeland. 

• What is the basis of that carnal connection? 
• How does the household work as an arena for hormonal bonds to grow? 
• What is it about proximity that makes neighborliness the best basis for social, political and even ideological connection? 

Technology and techniques

Self-actualization is what people do to establish their greater selves, which greatness is the antidote to alienation. 

The economic side of such personal self-actualization comes through the design and employment of technology; the political side of personal self-actualization comes through the design and employment of techniques. 

Techniques are the dis-embodied standards and practices that constitute the elements of institutional life. Techniques apply to people and spiritual things while technology applies to capital and material (non-spiritual) things. 

Institutions are constituted of technology and techniques, and they are sustained by the human impulse to ‘make something of themselves.’

Something sacred is decaying

Honor must have meaning. 

Honor defends the sacred. 

When the culture has a flaw in its system of honor, when the code of honor becomes suspect, it is because something sacred in the culture is decaying. It is not the honor that is decadent but a sense of that for which the culture has erected a code of honor to defend which is in decline. 

A society in decline is a society in which what is sacred to that society is evaporating and becoming meaningless. Words like sacred, glorious, sacrifice, in vain, hallowed, courage, honor – when they are over-used or used by cowards parading as leaders or to paper over a stupid national enterprise that is meaningless whether or not it is won or lost, these words become emblems of a culture in decline, a culture deserving of scorn. 

When the code of honor of a culture supports a trust that was held as sacred but that is no longer vibrant, the code of honor in such a society shifts from the powerful to the powerless. Cultures in decline glorify their lack of power, not their exercise of it. So it was in the case with the Jews, the Christians and now the Muslims. The religions survive, and they preserve some sacred object, even when their adherents have lost the impulse of history and the power that goes with it, but the religions lose their sense of honor. Honor goes not to the defender of the established order who did his duty upholding the values of that order; honor goes rather to the victims of that order who defended it to no avail at a loss of their interests, if not their virtue. 

Power dynamics will be more fluid

Shame-and-honor societies conceal from public view the authentic sentiments of their people. 

Duplicity is the standard by which people engage with each other. It is unsafe for people to take firm positions on any matter so long as it is unclear who will be the dominant power in the situation. 

The social situation cannot stabilize the way it can in societies that govern on the basis of authority because the personal power dynamics in any given situation will almost always be more fluid than the dynamics of law and the alliances based on the expression of delegated power, which is the essence of authority. 

Alienation & humiliation

The alienation from a lack of personal authority which members of Middle Eastern societies feel is the basis of the unrest and instability in the region. 

The problem is less the loss of power such social systems afford the ordinary citizen as much as the scale of the societies and the distance the ordinary member of society feels from the center of power. Honor societies work reasonably well in situations where the tribal chief who holds the power of the tribe is directly linked to each member of the tribe. Once the society becomes anonymous, though, the exercise of power in an honor system results in the feelings of alienation and disaffection that destabilize those societies. 

Western technology and values is the agent of that massive increase in the scale of these honor societies. With the advent of Western technology therefore comes the breakdown of the infra-structure of custom that theretofore afforded every member of society a particle of honor, and now, bereft of the customary access in the societies to the loci of power, result in alienation. 

The manifestation of alienation in societies where political control rather than economic control is what has been shorn of the ordinary citizenry is what we call humiliation. 

More clever than responsible

Authority as a system for exercising and distributing power is well suited for the delegation of decision-making necessary for the factory system and the industrialization that comes with modernization and the introduction of technologies that enable large-scale societies to take shape. 

Where the fundamental mode of exercising and distributing power is honor and not authority, decision-making gets delegated not to the most meritorious but to the most loyal. As a result large-scale economic systems that entail the development of bureaucratic systems of management cannot operate properly in such societies. And where decision-making is not delegated – where the superior decision-maker takes the decision into his own hands – the situation is just as bad. The decisions that are made tend to be whimsical, centered around the reputation of the honor ruler rather than on whether the innovation or the new technology is being well deployed. Such systems of power distribution tend to come off as capricious and dysfunctional. They are victims of an ill-considered reformist impulse. 

The social planners had come in from the West to introduce Western style technology and organization, only to destroy the indigeneous customs and practices without at the same time installing alternative modes of conduct that would be more compatible with the demands of the Western style institutions they were bringing to the area. Before honor societies can embrace technological innovation and the miracles of high-rise buildings and massive transportation systems and systems of finance and social organization, etc., the societies must transform the basis of power throughout the under-structure of custom in the community and alter it from honor to authority; and that, they have resolutely refused to do. 

Instead, the wielders of power in these societies are using the instruments of (and the symbols of) technological modernity to defeat in the West the under-structure of custom that is sympathetic and welcoming of Western systems of authority. It is easier to acquire a new technology and to relate to a new social system when the objective is destructive rather than constructive. 

The Middle Eastern prestige wielders have divined an insidious way to appear powerful and knowledgable without having to acquire the niceties of the modernist knowledge systems. They learned how to fly the plane but not how to take off and land. They pride themselves in being clever rather than in being responsible. 

Corruption is viewed as not improper

Corruption in an honor/shame system is merely the logical extension of the personal prerogatives of the power holders. 

Because the power accrues to the person and not to the office, the culture views corruption simply as just another instance of the exercise of the power the functionary needs to exercise for the sake of his own status in the system. 

Corruption in the honor/shame system is viewed as not improper. 

Honor is jealous of authority

The honor/shame society not only does not promote authority, it squelches the public space where authority flourishes. 

Honor is jealous of the authority the people could wield. 

When He removes His stewardship

Production is the metamorphosis of raw materials into wrought materials. Reproduction is the preservation of what was instilled into the wrought material that made it high or low quality and gave it life. Hence quality is what makes a thing good or bad, what envigorates and enlivens the thing, what is worth preserving in the face of the entropic forces in the environment that lead to its decay. 

When Plato (in The Republic) distinguishes between the object, given to decay, and the form, able to be preserved, he is addressing the knowledge of good and bad. The form, which embodies the quality of the thing, is that which can be preserved and kept from the environmental forces of decadence and degeneration. 

When the Old One prophesizes apocalypse He is predicting what will happen when He removes His stewardship and submits His charges to the forces of decay and destruction that are part of the natural environment. 

What is worth preserving

Once we enter the zone of abundance, the issue of the value judgments we make revolves around what is worth preserving,  the point of the value judgments is to know what is good and bad. 

The spirit of a thing, that which gives it its excellence, can be destroyed as the material of the thing is decayed and needs to be renewed. How we know what is good and bad in order to preserve or discard its essence is a matter of covenantal partnership. 

We apply our spirits to the spirit of the Other and let thoses spirits blend in conjugal union. When it comes to the preservation of the essential spirit of a thing's excellence, the issue is not how much it is worth. The first issue is how to identify what that essence is. 

The knowledge of good and bad is about identity, about the identity of the decision-maker along with the identity of that about which the decision is being made, and, we are here arguing, the identity of the Other in the context of Whom these identities take shape. 

Knowledge as an incarnation

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad is about the incarnation of quality that comes of the performance of craft. 

The issue is the 'daas,' the manifesting of knowledge as an incarnation that allows the craftsman to know in an inalienable way the quality of the thing he is making because he knows it in his body and in the body material of his creature. 

Valuation yoked to purpose

Valuation for the sake of stewardship – the processes of identification and refinement and preservation of those qualities of the things we make that could and therefore should endure, those qualities that are given to reproduction – is valuation yoked to purpose, valuation in the context of telos as opposed to primos. 

What makes people start/stop to act?

Economics analysis addresses the question, What makes people start to act? Economics sees natural scarcity as the built-in  answer to the question, What makes people stop to act? People stop when they run out of stuff to act with. Because economics focuses on what makes people start to act it explains well what comes of innovation, the results of people's seeking to start to act. 

Ecologics addresses the question, What makes people stop to act? Ecologics sees loyalty and duty as the built-in answer to the question, What makes people start to act? Ecologics thus explains well what comes of institutions, the result of people's seeking to stop to act. 

Loyalty and duty

God is the universal partner. 

God always joins us in our creative endeavors. His role as the universal joiner in creativity serves to enable individuals to function as though they are in relationship. That enablement makes available to every individual, as they engage in creative undertakings, the prerogatives of relationship. 

To enter into an undertaking in the context of a relationship is to adopt the motives of duty and loyalty. It is to recognize how the seat of creativity sits in the relationship between people, not the isolated genius of solitary titans of imagination. The motive resides in the drive not so much to maximize one's own wealth as it is to live up to the agreements and obligations and responsibilities, implicit and explicit, one has cut with one's fellows and with one's covenantal partners. The strength always ultimately resides in the institutional engine and in the institutional repository of value, not any particular object or skill. 

Motives of loyalty and duty are different in kind from motives of incentives. An incentive describes how one's actions-as-behavior will result in their acquiring some thing they feel has value; a loyalty or duty describes how one's actions-as-conduct will result in their feeling valuable in themselves. 

Loyalty and duty result in value that translates easily into autonomy and dignity; material wealth translates into self-sufficiency and the ability to end relationships. The money payment for a transaction ends the mutual obligation implied in the interaction. In creative ventures the real reward is in the self-esteem that comes of having built something from nothing. 

When the social order is stable it's a good strategy to accumulate material wealth; when the social order is unstable it becomes more important to fortify one's relationships with those who honor loyalty and duty. 

That is why creative ventures do not fare well when the principals are all being paid high salaries. High individual compensation gets in the way of the formation of creative teamwork. 

The love of God and the golden rule – loving your fellow as yourself, loving the stranger as yourself – both speak to the bonds of relationship, the bonds of loyalty and duty.