Wild and Tame
The Lord praises sheep, wheat, tame olive trees, etc bc they take no thought for their own nourishment – everything they get they give away If there is no Cultivator obviously this is a very stupid way to live.
The parable of the olive trees in Jacob 5 introduces gradations of tameness & wildness The lord of the vineyard doesn’t just kill the wild & save the tame – he gradually prunes away the hard, woody, wild portions of each tree.
But we also learn that tame branches are prone to decadence & decay – & the solution is to graft strong, wild root systems with hungry, tame boughs that will draw out their strength It’s not just “tame good, wild bad”, both are necessary which is why both are allowed to persist
-from ExDeJCB
Its interesting to read Jacob 5 in this light. I wonder also if it sheds light on the puzzling verses in the D&C about how the water is now cursed but used to be blessed, whereas the land is now blessed but used to be cursed. Water can equal wildness or chaos. (Weird connection I just made. The most successful form of early food gathering was harvesting the sea. Those are the oldest known permanently inhabited settlements. Tillage appears to have been pretty rough when it got started. But now agriculture is wildly successful and sea harvesting is not much more advanced than it used to be.)
John Mansfield
June 23, 2021
I will copy here something from that Clayton Christensen New Yorker article from a few years ago on the problem of scruffy virtue leading to prosperous decadence:
Another thing he worried about in both businesses and families was outsourcing. Look at Dell: over the years, the company had outsourced more and more of its manufacturing to a company in Taiwan—its returns increasing each time, as it focussed on higher-level activities like design and marketing—until in the end the Taiwanese firm started making its own computers for less money. When he thought about Dell, he thought about how, when he and Christine were first married, she had made most of the family’s clothes, and they had picked apples and made applesauce, and picked tomatoes and made tomato sauce, but then store-bought clothes and applesauce and tomato sauce became so cheap that it seemed crazy to keep making them at home. Luckily, they had bought two wrecks of houses and fixed them up themselves, so there had always been Sheetrocking or plastering or painting to do with the kids, but he knew that most of his students would consider this a waste of time. Wanting their children to spend their extracurricular hours in the most profitable way, they would pay for lessons and smart, enriching activities, and they would outsource the low-end, dumb tasks like mowing the lawn and mending clothes, and the children would grow up without knowing how to solve practical problems by themselves, or do something they didn’t enjoy or thought they weren’t going to be good at.
Zen
June 23, 2021
This puts our food Storage, gardens, self-reliance and even commandments to make our own clothes, in a better light.
Bookslinger
June 23, 2021
” … the problem of scruffy virtue leading to prosperous decadence… ”
Some rich wise king wrote about that a few thousand years ago. He was one of the wealthiest and wisest men in the known world. But when his son took over, the kingdom was split and never recovered.
Bookslinger
June 24, 2021
@JM: how does that saying go? A farmer says “I’m not raising corn/whatever, I’m raising boys.” Perhaps it’s from the Ensign or a conference talk.