PART SEVEN: Reconstitution
CHAPTER XXIX

RURALITY AS HINTERLAND

About one out of every twenty-five persons who have ever existed lives today. As in the beginning, most of them are born in villages and countryside. The world is still profoundly rural and its people poor. But today the countryfolk are pouring into the ill-prepared cities of the world.1 During this century already, the urban population has risen from 13% to 36% of the total. By the year 2000 the cities may contain 56% of all mankind. An additional 2,400,000,000 souls will enter their portals. On less than 5% of Earth's surface will be packed some 3,500,000,000 persons, the same number that the whole pre-kalotic world now carries.

Do not blame the villagers. They no longer wish to starve meekly in anonymity, far from the press and camera. They want to follow their rich leaders, who have already abandoned their countryside. To the villagers, the city is at least an electric street lamp beneath which they can gather and feel the current that connects their fate with the crisis of humanity.

In the milennium man may and should reapproach his semirural Garden of Eden. But meanwhile the larger spaces of the world's land and seas should be for the uses of the developing urban man. They should be converted from breeding places for ignorant and helpless masses. From hinter-lands, the rural world should now become the ideal hinterland of the cities. The task of the century is to reduce drasticaly the rural population and to reconstruct the rural environment.

The Seven Types of Countryfolk

The world's rurality today is an ambiance in which 2.5 billion people are occupied in seven categories of activity :

1. About 55% of the villagers and other countryfolk are subsistence farmers and fishermen who could not improve their condition without government subsidies and grants. They cannot eat, clothe and house themselves on their incomes of $100 per year or less; nor can they provide, through themselves or their toparchies, health services, population controls, vocational education, or most other conditions for kalocracy.2 Only 1%, or about 4,000,000 of the Indian population constitute the bourgeoisie of agriculture.3 Full-time farmers of Japan, by and large, have minimal means of livelihood. They can manage to exist solely on their products, if they decide to lower their living standard.4

2. High efficiency producers using rationalized techniques for secondary and world markets. No more than 1% of the rural population (or about 25,000,000 workers) fall into this category. The Woytinskys, using a definition of "producers for the market," estimated that around 1950 one out of five farmers was engaged in more than subsistence agriculture.5 Translated into our terms, this would give about 40 million commercial farmers, but by "high efficiency producers" is meant farmers who use more machines and skilled labor.

These large-scale land and sea farmers and mineral exploiters are responsible for the well-being of the urban 36% of the world's people. But the competent nature-workers are limited by the myth of happy cloddishness. If they were freed to produce at will and would simply fill free public storage centers, most of the world's people would immediately and obviously become surplus, from a production standpoint. If they were set free to multiply and produce in the larger frame of kalocracy, most of the world's people would be the direct beneficiaries.

3. Services to tourists and travellers occupy 3% of the villagers. The rising material standards of North America and Europe and the miserable conditions of city life make travel attractive, but tourists services are inadequate. The people engaged in them are poorly trained. The demand for such services is rapidly increasing as communications between city and country increase and the countryfolk go back and forth between their new city home and their home villages.

4. Infrastructural services of rurality and the larger toparchies occupy 10% of the countryfolk. These include a largely incompetent and underworked officialdom, and the builders and maintainers of communication, facilities, roads, railways, waterways, and bridges.

5. Services to subsistence farmers occupy 25% of the total country population. These live also upon a subsistence level ("close to nature," as it is euphemistically put by those who do not have to live close to real nature). They buy and sell amongst themselves and feebly respond to the feeble demands of their poor customers in the rural settlements. They require increasing subsidy or must crowd into the cities.

6. Services for high-efficiency producers, for providers of tourism, and for infrastructural operators occupy an additional 5%.

7. Archetypical surviors constitute about 1% of the rural population. These are stone age peoples who use a minimum of modern implements and preserve their original tribal societies in a recognizable form.

Far from realizing on ideal state, the crowding or poorly organized peoples in rural settlements make a curse of the word "nature." Nature in itself and as a part of man's life, is in deed, a wonderful thing. Man lives by nature, he expresses himself in nature, he develops hand-in-hand with nature. But when, owing to his failures to work properly with nature, he crowds the land, ruins soil and sea, breeds narrow cultures in out-of-the-way places in fear and desperation, and cannot reach out for the goods of the wider world, he can be only a slave to nature, vicious or supine as the case may be.

The radical reform of human rurality is therefore demanded.

This may be achieved if men will only face the facts, set their goals, and push ahead towards them. The facts have been partially stated: the ideal of toparchy and cosmarchy are impossible if the present rurality is maintained. The human consensus for kalotic society would support the following ecology of rurality; the world population, if set at a limit of four billions, would consist of two billions of non-metropolitan persons. These would live in towns and country places. The two billion persons would find places in the seven basic categories of rurality as follows.

The Dual Economy

Contemporary rurality, whether in the United States and Germany (to take two plutocracies), or in Venezuela and Indonesia (to take two dystrocratic countries), lives according to a Dual Economy. To explain this Dual Economy, consider the seven categories of rurality already defined as they are. Basically, these categories collapse into two - the modernizing and the traditional. The forces of the modernizing cannot break the hold of the traditional without starving a billion people or shipping them to the cities.

A dictator of Venezuela, for instance, forbade his country people from migrating to the cities; he swept their shacks from the outskirts of Caracas; he blocked their movement on the paths and roads; he tried a few techniques to make life more attractive in the remote pampas and jungles - all to no avail; he only made himself more unpopular.

His successors let people move, and the typical events occurred: the villagers pressed into the cities without work, food, or organization, there do drink a Coco-Cola, watch the cars of the rich go by, and converse, fester, and conspire. Meanwhile efficient modern plants extracted petroleum and iron ore, and the government, taxing these heavily, got some money for various enterprises, all of them futile in the face of the overwhelming social problems of the land. "The massive construction programs in Caracas had served to attract heavy migration to the city from rural areas and, therefore, severely intensified the housing problem in the capital."6 The back-country was emptying itself (though the high birth rate there continues), subsistence farming was unpopular, and commercial farming was performing less well than it had been 150 years earier.

In the United States, the land is also emptying itself of people (though the birth rate is 20% higher there than in the cities) while the cities are growing rapidly. Almost all of the commercial production of agriculture, minerals, and fish is managed by a small proportion of rural dwellers, one out of ten; actually the term "rural" is not even applicable, since the managers of American rurality are not "rural," but live, study, think, and travel like sophisticated city dwellers. The same situation prevails in Germany where, despite the advanced conditions of rurality - the modern communications, high literacy, ample social services - the German countryman is heading into the cities.

In Indonesia, the principle of Dual Economy was discovered a generation ago.7 This was still during the colonial, exploitative period. Then, following expensive efforts at economic development, investigations by H. ten Dam and Dube in the 1950's showed that the great majority of Javans did not benefit from the programs. The efficient, well-financed, educated commercial producers enjoyed their fruits. Javans bred more children, cultivated ever tinier parcels of land, and moved to the cities - though, practically speaking, Java as a whole is now a rural metropolis.

Communist regimes have stressed from their very beginnings the need to reorganize small-scale traditional agriculture into large, mechanized, collective or state farms. Sometimes, as in the Soviet Union before World War II, the coercive and bloody methods of bringing about such reorganization have caused untold agonies with poor results. Furthermore, little progress has been made towards making rural areas extensions of the cities; grave problems (especially in planning) of transportation, leisure, capital, and non-governmental initiative have prevented such a concept from suggesting itself as practical within the foreseeable future.8 Soviet agriculture and resources exploitation cannot advance rapidly in efficiency if the rural population is supposed to be absorbed by older forms of rural operations, whether of a subsistence or collectivized type. Still communist rural system, given kalotic autonomy, are well-advanced in the aggregate of attitudes and practices of the new rurality.9

Thus today we find the Dual Economy everywhere in the world. The cities are not in a position to use the country for what it can provide for a kalotic life. The rurality has to hate itself for the denial of its kalotic existence.

Implantation of Basal Emotic Systems

In an earlier section of this treatise, the prospects of dystrocratic economy in the modern world were examined and deemed poor. A natural exit from dystrocratic economy has not been found. It is futile to wait a) until the dystrocracies rationalize their subsistence economies, b) until they change from subsistence to market economies, c) until they find ample exportable goods, or d) until they borrow enough on their poor credit or are given enough financial aid to prime their industrial pumps. These methods leave little choice. They must all, of course, become part of cosmarchic policy and be briskly executed. But any and all of the above will take 200 years to achieve basal emos for most of the dystrocracies.

The first Phase of Kalocracy must take radical steps to change rurality, principally by population controls and by what we now call Implanation of Basal Emotic Systems.

If within the next decade ample controls are placed upon the rural birth rate, the flow of migrants to the cities will be naturally slowed well before the end of the century. If large scale basal emotic provisioning is arranged, the countryfolk will meanwhile have become ready for conversion to the kalotic rural occupational categories. The method consists of setting up within plutocratic and taxocratic countries consortia of companies, pledged to capitalize, erect, and maintain at full speed and full production factories aimed at furnishing within each natural functional area in the next generation the Basal Emotic Formula to all. (Similar consortia should be established in the educational field, specialized by functional-cultural area, avoiding or dominating the toparchic school systems of the present, which largely hinder the general rapid progress of Kalotic Revolution.)

First elements of the basal emotic formula include medicine, water, food, cloth, a spot on which to dwell and a roof over one's head, warmth in the wintertime for non-tropical man, primitive sanitation - the emotic minimum for three and a half billion people. It should take ten years to provide them for every living person. They are the beginning of full emotic development, No one denies that the resources and the man power for them are available.

A proclamation of policy is called for in the beginning. The nations who are to compose the First Region, together with any other nations who wish to associate themselves with the drive, must together promise the basal emotics for all who will accept them. All people must know that they will receive these, regardless of political differences or promises of later cooperation on other matters or other obligations, but only for wanting to participate. The guarantees must be continuous and permanent.

The inculcation of attitudes of cooperation and self-help everywhere is necessary. The people bound into this new Emotic give what they can out of their labors.

Half of the Earth's people will have to tell themselves that half the way to emos is the fastest progress possible in this generation. They must not destroy the roads on which they are travelling and instead must find as much happiness as possible within this temporal framework of the possible. The true story of the present has to be told everyone; the world everywhere is presently declining in emos; except for the Kalotic Revolution there is no betterment in sight.

This self-discipline on behalf of the successive generations can only take hold if emos is immediately available in some quantity on a "cheapest-to-produce-most" formula. Because there is so much to be done, a genuine progressive euphoria will carry people along. Meanwhile, "none shall go to the table twice until all have eaten."

The crash program for providing basal emos should not depend upon conventional policies of land redistribution, which should properly be called land-use reorganization. Land redistribution policies have often understandably failed in the past - farmers are moving to the cities; rural farm land varies in quality and is insufficient almost everywhere for cutting up into viable farms; a new set of statist landlords is created in the place of the old independent landlords. Kalotic land use calls for only small proportions of the population to derive their living from agriculture. It is possible, however, to provide a small country place for nearly everyone who wants it.

The heart of the first generation program for rural emos is the Implantation of mass production complexes within dystrocracies. The aim of the Implantation procedures should be the immediate escalation of the poor countries to Basal Emotic Levels.

The program should not be intended as a permanent restructuring of dystrocratic economies, but as an emergency, precisely directed process. It should not carry complicated implications and plans for industrialization or long-range kalotic development.

The whole program should take place with as little regard to national boundaries as possible. It should be outside of existing customs, excises, quotas, balance of trade policies, and other "normal" considerations of movements of capital, construction, and personnel. It should be an extraterritorial international operation. The resources should come from military,10 production, and consumer expansion surpluses of the region, and from local supplements.

Typical complexes to be implanted will be in textiles, building forms, a primary food staple, a secondary food staples, a prime vehicle, local power generation, and health. Each complex will be based upon an intensive direct survey of the population concerned. The sponsoring consortium will devise the best available means of providing the maximum of supply at the lowest cost in the shortest time. The precise form, product mix, and functional span of the complex will be determined by the consortium in relation to local conditions.

A general estimate of the financing costs can be advanced. Let the unit of population to be supplied be 15,000,000. A basal emotic median is computed for all such aggregates of population within the region. The aggregate with the lowest median is the first population of a region to house an Implantation of Mass Production. A maximally automated plant complex for supplying a population unit with a basal emotic element will cost on the average $15,000,000 in plant capital and $15,000,000 in operating capital over the first five-year period. Typically, the seven complexes named above will require then a total capital investment of $210,000,000. A worldwide investment to cover 2 billion people with Basal emotic protection will amount to only $28 billions over an initial five-year period.

All of this capital is carried along with unit costs of sales by being debited to the account of receiving (purchasing) individuals who repay their debts anytime before death. Every person in the world warrants some credit. Valorizing this credit is a great task of the Tutors.11 It can be assumed that almost all who are obligated by Basal Emotic transactions will want to pay pack what they have received if and when they can. Unpaid debits of 50% can be anticipated. The mark-up of goods should therefore be 50% plus 100% on the return of interest over a fifteen year period. At the end of fifteen years the production complex will distribute its assets to its paid-up debtors or their heirs in proportion to their individual purchases; also, those who have worked for or with the production complex as employees or auxiliary and supplementary suppliers will receive shares based upon their labor contribution alone.

Thus at the end of a fifteen year period, the original consortium if from abroad has retired from the scene physically and has retired its capital through withdrawals of principal and interest over the fifteen year period. This withdrawal cannot usually be in gold or dollars because of the generally poor state of the population that now owns the complex. Therefore the payments have to be returned to the regional treasury in the currency of the land, to be converted into "hard" currency and returned to the sponsors of the project. The "soft" currency enters the international (regional) treasury accounts, there to be spent for other regional projects in the country, or to be held for the future "hardening" of the currency, or to be retired at an unfavorable rate at a partial loss to the treasury absorbed by the regional fiscal system, or to be transformed into a long term capital loan asset of the international agency (Association Boards) to which the population unit belongs.

In order to supply the resources for the Implantation Program, it is necessary to redirect the expansion of energies and resources of highly productive elements. Government appropriations and taxes can carry part of the burden. A principle of staggered incremental relative advantage is also in order. By this principle, whenever any person or group such as a corporation or union achieves an increment of over 10% to its emotic situation ("profit," roughly speaking) in a two year period, it should divert resources and energy to the production of goods adjusted to the needs of persons and groups of lower kalotic levels domestically or abroad for a two year period. This effort may bring a lower return or even a loss, and is sure to be riskier than fighting for more of the old market through heavier advertising and larger production. But the attitude and practice can be made to prevail by general discussion, persuasion, and reeducation.

Industrialists, whether they admit it or not, are engaged in their own business practices just as the dystrocratic subsistence farmer or fisherman is bound into his habit; not "pure economic rationality," but "pure sociology" governs their behavior. If the group should lose more than half of its original increase in profit, then the effort may be called off or sold out; however the group may determine to continue its "welfare activity" in any event, or feel that it will begin to profit sooner or later.

This is a twenty-first century kind of tithing. The Principle says: "Gain for your group via the most efficient exploitation of the best markets; but simultaneously or thereafter, adjust your activities directly, not indirectly to benefit the kalotic levels of the poor." It means simply that people and groups should not get rich so quickly as they might otherwise do. Although they will not be taxed for getting rich they should slow down their profit taking pace and enjoy the true enriching process by giving, lending, constructing for, educating, advising, organizing, distributing to, and otherwise benefiting groups and persons of lower economic status, at home or abroad. The "donor," "giver," or "kalotic supplier" has a broad range of possibilities and should indeed enjoy the process of doing whatever is within the range of his commitment for the groups whose kalotic level he is interested in raising.

This Principle should become the second law of the Regional Association Board, and the enforcement should take the form of asking for public reports of resources given, work accomplished, and results measured. A formidable change of attitude is required; neither sanctions nor taxes should be imposed; only the public statements of the group or person will stand as the report, record, reward, and punishment.

To make available ever increasing amounts of capital, the mismanagement of resources must be discouraged in every possible way. These are the new Four Horsemen of the Neo-Apocalypse: Instead of famine, flood, plague, and war, they are wastemaking, malproduction, fraud, and inefficiency (see above, chapter IV). Included, it will be recalled, are such practices as the pursuit of costly fads, useless physical movement of masses of people, excessive military costs, and the costs of sprawling and crowded areas. Little liberty will be lost in reducing such costs. The tenacity with which man engages in the destruction of his substance is due largely to his ignorance of another path of existence; he often needs merely a sign, and otherwise persuasion and pressure.

Conversion of Rurality

Towards the middle of the period of Implantation, the phase of rural kalotic conversion should take shape: the rural population would be stabilized, enjoying a basal kalotic standard of living, and would be in training for Kalotic Dualism. Foreshadowed would be the dramatic redistribution of occupations among the seven categories of rurality. In the new Dual Economy, a transformed rurality will exist kalotically as an organic counterpart and transactor with the urban centers.

Less than 400 million citizens should be in the families of subsistence farmers and their provisioners.12 A fourth would be in China, a fourth in India, a fifth in Central and South America, and a fifth in Indonesia, with the balance scattered in many places. They would collect some resources from the remittances of relatives, from the new surrounding prosperity, and from larger land holdings (inasmuch as the land itself would be less valuable and less worked in small parcels). The macroland would be ruled and worked by kalotically organized groups.13

Ordinarily, agrarian reform is not critical. "No conclusion emerges which would suggest that agrarian reform is a condition of development," but "agrarian reforms really do liberate." Thus Doreen Warriner speaks from a study of a dozen countries around the globe.14 In other words, use agrarian reform for dikeos and pneumos; only secondarily expect benefits for emos and therefore take large steps otherwise to attain this goal.

The archetypical survivors would be disturbed as little as possible, for once the great central problem of the subsistence villager and farmer is solved the village population generally should be relatively undisturbed: kalocracy can support a reasonable proportion of persons who prefer to dwell in a traditional past. It would be a dikaic offense to force them into the modern consensus more than is necessary to provide them with the basal emos.

The proportion of high-efficiency and large scale producers will be considerably raised. Extraction of minerals, fishing, herding, dairying, orcharding, wheat and rice culture, and various other major agricultural activities can best be carried on by non governmental corporations operating toparchically or cosmarchically. The United States has shown the way in farming and mineral exploitation; the Soviet Union, Japan, and Norway in fishing; the British, Germans, Japanese, and Americans in trade; the Swiss, French, and Italians in tourism; the Soviets and Americans in energy production; and so on. Relatively small amounts of land, few fishing fleets, few textile complexes, few oil fields, few mines, few power plants, and in general few industrial complexes are required to furnish emotic essentials to the world. It is a matter of providing them with the appropriate organization, capital, and would environment.

Within half a century, and while fulfilling the goals of its second Phase, kalocracy should apply generous resources to research on mini-models of power generation, material processing and manufacturing, so that the world can form gradually into settlements of smaller scale and organizations of smaller size and greater autonomy.15 The ultimate Kalocracy will be thoroughly decentralized and autonomized while simply and rapidly connected where communications are desirable.

A modernized society is on the move. This we have shown. If the world in general moved at half the rate that Americans do, there would be greatly increased need for the services that travllers, students, and tourists need. A great part of such services are performed within metropolitan areas. But even more will be needed in rural areas. When a rural family moves to the city, it dies somewhat in its relation to nature. The need to provide contacts with the world of nature is and will remain high. These take the form of desires for vacation and week end farming, visiting, camping; they are collective representations of the natural life of man.

Today, 5% of the population of non metropolitan U.S. is taken up with travellers and tourists, 20% of the rural population of Italy. In both countries a large part of the population, for historical and other reasons, does not yet enjoy such services, although it should enjoy them. When this happens, the percentages in each case would triple or quadruple.

Vietnam, to take another example, has little that can be called tourism. It has, nevertheless, a great many travellers, a fondness for travel, a heavy movement into the cities, a large volume of pilgrimages (which the previously mentioned countries possess too) to its Cao Dai, Roman Catholic, and Buddhist temples and shrines. At least 10% of the present rural population of Vietnam could work to service facilities of these sorts. If the rural population undergoes constriction of birth rates, and the movement into the cities continues, this percentage would actually reach 20%.

A formula is as follows: for every traveller, pilgrim, non native student, and tourist, one servicers is needed. Out of a population of four billions, adequately fed and normally required to travel, approximately a billion would be on the move each year. Of these, as many would go into the country as enter the metropolises. For this half-billion persons, the occupation of perhaps 400 million rural persons would be required. The figure would vary greatly from one country to another, depending upon the degree to which a full set of facilities were available to the metropolises and the degree of technology employed in tourism. More important in the long run would be the disproportionate rurality of certain countries. Obviously a much higher proportion of the rural population of Spain and Algeria would be devoted to tourism than of China. The total cash income of direct tourism would be greatly in excess of the present miserable income of most rural dwellers; cultural and other intangible income would also rise.

To service all rurality in the next phase, some 1.3 billion persons would be needed who would themselves be rural. About 300 millions would create and maintain the roads, power, transport, forests, waterways, and other features required as the basis for all rurality of a modernized type, and a billion would service the high-efficiency producers, subsistence farmers, and services of movement.

How do the Tutors reach these people of rurality in the years to come?16 One way is via their religious connection. It was stressed earlier that the religious groupings of the world have a great unused potentiality for extending the kalotic consensus, provided that the religions are stripped of certain self-glorifying and archaic doctrines, and that the proposals of modernity are cleansed of anti-pneumos. The religions are already in the country. The Tutors have to follow them through the great trunklines of religious persuasion.

Secondly, the Tutors are the prophets, organizers, and managers, in their early phases, of the high-efficiency, rural industrial concentrates. In addition to their central mission as they move into rurality, they have to be equipped with the doctrines and formulas of rural kalocracy to engender the reorientation of the rural population around them.17 They should not act as kinghts of an isolated invaders' castle looking down upon an alien peasantry.