The recent announcement of the forgiveness of $10,000-$20,000 in student loan debt has sparked quite a bit of discussion and debate online. As outlined in David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, debt forgiveness, or jubilees, are actually incredibly common throughout modern history. That doesn’t mean that this particular move is necessarily good or bad, but rather a small part of a larger more complex system. We will start by getting into some interesting background on this new jubilee and then expand into a bigger historical and systemic perspective that creates the real opportunities to expand our potential permaculture pathways towards a just and sustainable economic future.
First, some context. You’ve heard quite a bit about monetary inflation lately I’m sure, but we also have a historically radical case of educational inflation. The book, The Case Against Education, by Bryan Caplan, covers this in excruciating detail. Basically, in order to compete in the job market, you need college education today. Caplan argues that something like 60-90% of what you are forced to learn throughout your two decades of necessary schooling will be immediately forgotten and never used in your life again, and cites plenty of research to back his claim up. The most compelling simplified argument from the book is this: Would you rather get all of the skills and knowledge from a college degree, but no diploma, or cheat or skip all of the classes and get the diploma? The fact that this would even be up for debate says it all. The diploma would open 100x more opportunities than just claiming to have a set of skills and knowledge. The AI algorithms used by most big corporations today would filter you straight out if you don’t check that diploma box. He even points out that most universities will let you sit in classes, for free! The only thing you have to pay for is that diploma.
As a k-12 public school teacher for the past decade, I have to agree. Almost every time a student asks, “When will I use this in real life?”, they have a point. In all likelihood, they will never need to describe proofs that triangles are congruent, never get paid to analyze the rhyme scheme of a poem, and never remember what the 3/5th’s Compromise entailed once they get past the exam. Sure, those could all be fun and interesting and worthwhile things to learn about, but do we really need to mandate that every child sit through them? It’s an absurd exercise, training them mostly in conformity, diligence in drudgery, and agreeableness with peers and authority figures. Yes, I realize the irony here and the fact that I sound like Ron Swanson bashing the government while also working for the government. My goal is to work within the current system while also building better parallel systems that can eventually meet our needs. That is a long term, probably generational objective, and I am but one humble human muddling through this mess.
The current financial and educational systems are broken. They leave most young adults in quite a predicament. While it is more necessary than ever to finish college in order to make decent wages, the cost of that education has risen disproportionately faster than wages over the past 30 years. If young people do not conform and get high school and college degrees, they pretty much have to take the risk of starting their own business, which is a very risky endeavor indeed. Especially when you do not have the option to fall back on a “regular job” if it fails. In today’s economy, the vast majority of small businesses do fail. Meanwhile, with easy loans accessible to all college students, universities have basically been given a blank check, secured and backed for them by the federal government and oodles of freshly minted digital mammon. Which has led to this:
Another interesting factoid that I recently learned about the new debt relief proposal is that it is legally justified through an extension of the Patriot Act. Remember that was the act that gave the government emergency powers in response to 9/11 that still allows them to spy on all of us to this day. As if the name “Patriot Act” wouldn’t make Orwell proud enough, it’s tucked in under a clause called the “Heroes Act”. If there’s one thing we have learned in the past 22 years, it’s that emergency powers do not go away, and that they will be used for corruption, grift, wars, power grabs, and oppression. I found Caplan’s book, much of this information, and the following dank meme at the Bad Cat’s Substack: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/control-the-lending-control-the-schools
Of course, the educational inflation is but one part of a bigger system that is also inflating beyond the capacity of the earth and of pure mathematics. An economic system that is centered on usury (making loans and collecting interest) and dependent on perpetual growth is literally impossible to maintain. Since the creation of usury around 5,000 years ago, the status quo has been a pattern of growth and collapse. Debt jubilees that forgive all debts periodically as currencies inflate themselves out of existence are a feature of our economic system, not a bug. As our global financial systems inflates beyond capacity, the bubble will burst, and we will have some form of jubilee restructuring, widespread depression, war, or all of the above. This minor band-aid of student loan jubilee is the tip of an iceberg of inevitable collapse or restructuring. For more on the history of debt and economics I cannot recommend Graeber’s book on the history of debt enough. Graeber helped organize the Occupy Wall Street movement and advocated for us to create new systems of finance and economics that are not dependent on usury and the fairy tale of infinite exponential growth of the economy.
Chris Martenson gives a more succinct, modern focused, and free version of the same story in his free youtube series Crash Course. He describes with simple visuals how the exponential growth required by our financial system rapidly becomes impossible as the numbers escalate into nonsense territory. Try adding 4% to $100 every day, and before you know it you have the fed printing out 20 trillion dollars just to postpone collapse. The math simply doesn’t work. Neither does the ecological impact as we burn through finite resources at a faster clip and extinct more species every year. Neither does the energy input required as we run out of easy and cheap fossil fuels. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) gets worse every year, but we stay stuck in a conundrum of needing to burn more energy every year to keep the economy growing. Here’s a link to the Crash Course that sums it all up with helpful visuals and loads of economic data:
When we look at the bigger picture, this bit of student debt relief is like Clark Griswald trying to patch up the Hoover Dam with bubble gum. The entire financial system is inflating beyond capacity, the need for education is inflated, the amount of time spent in education is inflated, the price of education is exceptionally inflated… and yet most people still need it to survive in modern society. What are we to do? First off, what I always recommend to my students is to be as practical as possible in navigating the current system. Make sure you get a degree that can pay for itself in higher wages, keep your costs down with community colleges or trade schools, live frugally and prioritize paying down the highest interest debt you have once you start making money, etc. In the long run, though, we need to create different systems that better meet our needs while also caring for the earth and caring for people. We need to follow Buckminster Fuller’s advice:
Throughout human history, postponing the right of passage into adulthood until 22 (or even later for graduate degrees) is unprecedented. Additionally, attempting to force nearly 100% of the population into 18 or more years of education is a pretty recent modern phenomenon. Though they seem normal today, these are actually strange and new cultural outliers. I would argue that we could all benefit from a more decentralized, more indigenous, place-based, community driven process both for the entire economy, and particularly for education and the initiation and rite of passage ceremonies for our young people. There are many ways that this could play out, and in fact having a diverse array of approaches is a permaculture value in and of itself.
Joseph Campbell was a beautiful storyteller of global mythologies and cultures that have many diverse approaches to these things that we could learn much from. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Native American Professor of Ecology who beautifully describes how we all need to re-indigenize in different ways in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Aldous Huxley is most famous for his brilliant dystopian novel that becomes more real by the day – Brave New World, but he also wrote a vision for a different path forward that I believe is worth exploring in The Island. There are many pathways to sustainable and just cultures for education – but none of them run through massive centralized federal bureaucracies raising prices exponentially, forcing everyone into debt that only they can choose to forgive, and imposing their gatekeeping and mandates on the people.
One other interesting historical approach came article I read recently that explored the reasons Why we stopped making Einsteins. What do the geniuses of previous centuries have in common, and why are they so much less common today? It turns out that nearly all geniuses had two major advantages that most kids don’t today: lots of free time and highly trained, highly personal mentors. Nearly every genius had “extremely abnormal amounts of one-on-one time with intellectually-inclined adults, who often introduced them to advanced topics far beyond their age.” Don’t get me wrong – making a higher number of geniuses isn’t the only goal, but helping more people reach their full potential and letting more people lead more leisurely and intellectually curious lives would certainly be improvements. We also don’t want to exactly replicate that model because it was based on aristocracy and inequality, but going forward we could get closer to that using a combination of appropriate technologies and lifestyle designs.
What does this have to do with Permaculture?
Aren’t we supposed to be out in the garden or the field or something, minding out own business? Not necessarily. A good designer will account for all of the larger systems their site and culture are nested within, including politics, finance, and education. Permaculture is a holistic design approach that begins with larger patterns and works down into details from there. Bill Mollison, the co-founder of Permaculture, once said that he would much rather talk about where you are banking your money than organic gardening techniques. Of course, organic forest gardens are, and will remain, a cornerstone of permaculture design, but they are far from the end-all be-all of its potential.
All of these larger systems should be consistently under scrutiny and analysis, part of healthy debates, and factored into our life designs. Whether we see further debt jubilees, economic collapse, war, or some combination of all of the above is anyone’s guess. All we can do in the meantime is focus on what we can control and take small steps each day to make habits and cultures that move us 1% closer to the direction we’d like to go. An organic forest garden is probably the highest leverage investment you can make, but it won’t matter if you are trapped in a larger system of debt that impoverishes you or can take your land access.
Where did you learn all of this?
This is the most common question I get when I’m teaching a permaculture class or giving a tour. What is your degree in? Did you go to school for this? They’re usually pretty surprised to hear that my college degrees are completely unrelated to my permaculture, foraging, and herbalism knowledge bases. Sure, I’ve taken a permaculture design course that spanned 6 weekends and did a weekend camp on foraging, but those are far from a college degree costing 4-8 years and over $100,000. Most of what I’ve learned has been through a couple of mentors and self-teaching with experience, books, and videos. If you’re like me and have a standard college degree in a decent paying industry to fall back on, then investing in yourself and expanding your knowledge and skills can be both highly regenerative, profitable, and a safe bet. There are numerous potential profitable side hustles that fit nicely into spare time that can also create diverse, locally resilient, ecologically and ethically sound economies.
The beauty of taking these paths is that you compound your investments in yourself, in your communities, and in your ecological systems. You can make the world more beautiful, lush, and enjoyable while also making it more livable for future generations and all living things. You can make safe financial investments that can give regenerative returns for generations while also creating a more beautiful world. And if you’re creative and resourceful, you can do all of this while keeping your debts in the current system manageable or completely nonexistent. A debt forgiveness jubilee may or may not come, but either way you will be better off.
