May 17 2009
Has Modern Society made us Incapable of Self-Sufficiency?
This is a follow up on the entry: From the Distributist Review: Cultivating a Local Food System
I have been reading Flee to the Fields by Dr. Tobias Lanz which is a collection of articles and chapters by various original proponents of the Catholic Land Movement. One common theme seems to be that of making sure that the people that participated in the movement were properly trained. It got me to think that modern society has made mankind very reliant, if not totally reliant, on others for survival.
For the most part, we get money from either the employers or the government (which also can be the employer) and we use that money to obtain all our necessities to survive. It has gotten to the point where we cannot fend for ourselves. Most of us have never grown our own vegetables/fruit, raised our own animals or hunted for meat, or even fished. I have grown vegetables/fruit and fished (however, I never have prepared what I have caught).
This is a major problem for survival if any disaster happens that would disrupt the supply of goods and must be remedied sooner than later. One thing the Catholic Land Movement and Distributism have in common is local and personal self-sufficiency. While we cannot actually learn total self-sufficiency from those movements, they can be used as models for setting up the framework for becoming self-sufficient.
