INHABITING HOBBITON: Recovering Tolkien’s Lost Metaphorical Lesson for Society

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West.  Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure.  If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

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“Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.”

“Darkness must pass.  A new day will come.  And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.”

• R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien’s Shire and Hobbiton were not simply places to set his hobbits, but rather complex social experiments.  The hobbits were exceedingly happy and joyous people.  Why?  They were keepers and hoarders with an excess for all, none wanted.  Where elves were overly objective in resplendent immortality, hobbits were openly subjective and thrifty while maintaining excess resources, not money.  This was a society on a deflationary path toward cultural demonetisation.  This is demonstrated when Bilbo’s will was read, as the relatives cared for little more than having at all his knick-knacks.  This was the divide that Tolkien saw between civilisation and non-civilisation, wealth and squalor.  His tiny people were as powerful as any of those proud warriors of the plains, because they were completely emboldened as integrative members of a high value and trusting society.  The greatest gift to humanity in life is in mutuality and friendship.

DEFLATION AND NATURAL DEMONETISATION

I theorise that certain patterns of price deflation can sometimes correlate with a natural communal demonetisation.  Experts classify price deflation as resulting from decrease in economic activity, or demand and growth, which is itself not perfectly correlative as it flatly ignores alternative economic interactions.  They then equate all price deflation with “stagnation,” and therefore economic strife.  This is blatantly false on its face.  They use this concocted concept of stagnation as an argument for artificially inflating prices by printing more for banks to loan out at interest, thus devaluing the money and stealing from everyone.

This is actually simple wealth extraction by money printing, no different from legalised counterfeiting.  They use this power to control all publicly-traded corporations and most institutions in society.  However, nobody is asking how good life is in any of this.  The economy is artificially sour currently as I write this but what are the blessings of a rambling economy to the average person?  How good was life when the GDP was high?  Were people not living paycheque to paycheque, or just above it?  The majority were lucky to have that, it seems.

Without artificial price inflation, there is natural deflation, which derives from people saving and the accrual of actual material wealth, both public and private.  The natural deflation is a measure of the value subsumed back into communities as mediated by population growth.  Across generations of this familial and communal material accrual throughout a nation, there is a genuine overflow of charity through reinvestments into community.  Caution is to be used in construction of such charity, that it maintains especial accountability.

Communities with lots of internal material wealth, without need for many external material additions, spend less money.  So the value of their own money appreciates, as do their labour and assets.  Of course, this is all relative to their relationship with the World, but what it actually signifies is Freedom and goodness, which is to say internal trust and communal faith.

TRUE DEMOCRATIC POWER

The two-party and multi-party systems, as defined in most centralised Western nations, are anti-Democratic on the national level.  Inevitably any legitimately “democratic” power is removed, either surreptitiously or overtly, through the waxing and waning of these parties, mimicking a manual pump train-car.  Meanwhile they are all owned by corporations.  The stock markets themselves abuse ownership of society in a tipped game.  They pretend there is an opportunity for everyone to take part.  However, those who win the most do so from the losers.  The corporatist banks sit in the gutters awaiting to swallow everything, and they do.  So, what is there to do?  How can fairness be accomplished?

The only way to have a long-term democratic system is to encode it into the foundation of the organisational structures of society.  Nations must establish common sense and practical incorporation laws to benefit the workers foremost as well as the consumers, which is to say the stakeholders and not those third-party “investors” in the eternal group bondservant, “stock.” Benefit the people involved instead of the disinterested people living in mansions thousands of miles away from their many bonded slaves.

LOCAL MERITOCRATIC LEADERSHIP

The requirement for real local leadership translates into meritocratic processes built into the structure of society.  These worker-owned cooperatives can use various measures of executive performance objectively measured in worker-owner terms.  Whatever leadership forms will be organic and proven in pragmatic decisions with true and meaningful competition, not underhanded or meta-communal for ulterior purposes.  Behaviours are the truest indicators of partisanship and intention.

Cooperatives allow social organisation to work for itself again, instead of international tyrants.  Cooperative organisation enables natural productivity and resource management.  It achieves the moderation in economy healthiest for society and culture.  It stops the constant exploitation of the populace by countering planned obsolescence and the creep of economic dependence.  It proves humanity by openly engaging public economic discourse with the only boundaries being used against the abusers, in defence.  It strangles corporate governmental overreach, by atomising domains of human power appropriately into the individual, familial, and communal hands with which they belong.  Worker-owned cooperatives put power back into healthy human hands and assure society.

Enough people leave corporations, to form and join cooperatives aligned to their benefit, and it would eventually force national capitals and monetary policies back into worker-owned hands naturally.  Then the questions on the national levels solve themselves.  All these unnecessary wars stop when people disengage from the attrition inherent of the current predatory economic systems.

SUMMARY

Frodo and Bilbo sailed across the sea to a mystic land, as honoured beings.  This represented an elven, or spiritual, afterlife uncommon for most hobbits.  Tolkien conveys the deeper bond and affection shared by the two hobbits through this mutual heaven.  They both proved themselves worthy of a godly trust, as “ring bearers.”  The trust in commonality makes something new in itself, as all relationships do, but their relationship was educational and aspirational in the writing of their memoirs.  The materiality of the hobbits was the backdrop for the rise of the Spirit, in historical and cultural terms.  Any material wealth is ancillary for those with wealth in Spirit, which is the foundation of hobbit strength.  Frodo and Bilbo had the superhuman faith necessary to be ring bearers.  The lesson is that while great hatred tears everything apart, only great love heals the bonds of humanity.