Opus 2026-084: What Is the Ratio?

How many peasant farmers does it take to support one philosopher?

This isn’t the first time I’ve asked myself this.  Often it reflects the opulence of ancient kings and medieval nobility.  Recently, though, I have been reading about the Muslim empires, and the author, Will Durant, seems very supportive and excited about Islam historically.  His accuracy is questionable but his enthusiasm is measurable.

In the process of going through several hundred years of medieval history in the world of Islam, he mentions name after name of syllables that are impossible to pronounce and all have deep hidden meanings.  He will then go on and talk about all of the books they wrote.  Some of them lived in very high style.  One of them insisted on living on two dollars a day.  Overall, I asked myself how many peasants does it take, laboring from sun up to sundown with all of the difficulties of raising a crop and feeding a family, to make it possible for this great famous wise man to sit around, meditating on the categorical imperative.

When you consider the vast amount of gold that went into providing the elaborate mosaics, flowing fountains, numerous slaves, and concubines, and just general waste in supporting this infrastructure, I keep wondering what the ratio is.

One of the miracles of the free enterprise system that we used to enjoy was that it provided a large enough surplus from the labor of what used to be peasants, to support an elite that lived an elaborate lifestyle.  Rockefeller, Carnegie, the other is so called Robert Barron’s lived in great luxury.  At the same time, the people who worked in the oil industry, steel industry, at Ford Motor Company and so forth, tended to live lives of security, plenty and prosperity.

Now with all of the graft and corruption going on in government, I see the day coming again, where we will be forced into the same pattern as ancient times.  The elites will not suffer.  They will make sure that they have their caviar, gold plated toilet seats, numerous servants and so forth, but with so much being siphoned off for their waste, there will come a point where we will become peasants again.

We worry about the economy, collapsing.  That could be from a mild collapse to total destruction of the infrastructure.  Rest assured that there will still be a small group of elites at the top who are living off our blood and sweat.  It’s called communism.  It’s called socialism.  It’s called tyranny.  It’s called the a lot of the common man for most of history.

The younger generation seems to want to embrace the socialism.  If I live long enough to see all of these feminine studies majors out slaving in the fields then maybe it will be worth it.

But I doubt it.

homo unius libri