50 Years Later: Small is More Beautiful Than Ever
What if we added a 7th Pie?
THE PIE AND CREW MONTHLY
Issue One 1/23/2023
ADVANCE SCREENING FOR THOSE WHO DON’T NEED ALL THE DRAWINGS THAT ARE ON THEIR WAY : )
But first…it’s the 50th year of Small is Beautiful, the little engine of an idea that could.
It hasn’t yet, but it could. That is, it’s been chugging away just like in the children’s book about the little train engine that needed to pull those train cars up the mountain. But it’s never really reached what marketers and sociologists call a tipping point.
A tipping point is that point when enough people, starting with the Innovator and Early Adopter segments of society, adopt a new idea…causing more and more people adopt by way of social proof, eventually even the Laggards.
It’s kind of like the Little Engine reaching the top of the mountain somehow, partly through determination, so that momentum and gravity are finally on its side.
The Little Engine was no revolutionary, it was just trying to deliver something nice to people on the other side of the mountain (depending on which version you’re thinking of). Maybe Small is Beautiful sounded too revolutionary. Certain elements of Schumacher’s critiques and projections were toned down with time by his admirers. The future is hard to see after all, and he died in 1977, long before a lot of things. But he started a different story about economics, production, and society, which is what The Pie is about.
What Is The Big Deal About Small is Beautiful?
E. F. Schumacher planted a good seed
Why Do We Need A 7th Pie?
And a new story?
How The Story of Stu Starts in Star City
With Rhettie and Wally at Matches
Masthead for Issue One
Contributors:
Tim Storey--Fictional management and misc.
Sean Lutes and others--Art on its way
Dr. Dan Smith--Credibility, philosophical gravitas, phun
Thanks also to members of The Fellowship of The Dimly Lit. Only you know who you are.
How to get the most enjoyment, amusement, and underground illumination from this Fellowship of The Dimly Lit publication:
-Have time. That might mean it's best to read this at work or whenever you're supposed to be doing something else. Might. This is to be a monthly publication, so take leisurely looks :).
-Go to links whenever possible. Especially if there's music, because it's probably going to be thoughtful and not just drumbeats/cooing/crude, not that there's anything wrong with that maybe. And you'll want to use earbuds or headphones. This tip comes directly from Stu and about 300 million years of insectual life, along with 300,000 years of human+/- life (oldest fossils of that age are in Morocco, of course) through observations by other insects (Stu's only a few hundred years old). Music matters...a lot.
-Embrace the context. This is not going to be very snarky or dark or angry or edgy even. However, some play is beneficial for our brains, they say, and for society, so...
-Keep in mind that it's all about "Turning back the Foes of Flourishing," and those foes might not be what the Left/Right mainstream knows, and that might imply stepping on some toes, especially for those...caught up in the throes...of postmodernist woes. On the other hand, if we'll all admit to being a little dimly lit, more so than is popular, beyond the posing, and the fits, then this might be fun.
-The Deeper Middles: Middle ways, like this, aren’t so much about compromising two sides as going deeper, in between things, which does take some depth at times. And since it’s not about confirming an established position it can sound unfamiliar. It might be a conversation between Bug Stu or someone and a philosopher/psychologist/linguist/historian or something. Sometimes staying there too long can get tiring. I'm not always in the mood myself. But it is a good way to see where Stralfs (the Foes of Flourishing) have had opportunities to mess with us.
-Share your initial puzzlements with a friend. That is, share this. Then you can ask if they know what the eff an occasionally obscure observation is about. This kind of thing discourages the Foes of Flourishing, even if you/we don't have things entirely figured out. The Stralfs know we're trying. They hate that.
Warming The 7th Pie
On my dad’s 80th birthday, I brought him the Who Cares poem below and a few other related sentiments to share about This Project. It was a dedication to Dad and to Mom mainly, also to others that take thinking and doing seriously--with the future in mind.
That was the year I decided there could probably be something more interesting than an aging former science teacher talking about emerging cognitive science along with themes related to E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Woody Tasch’s Slow Money, and similar. So, somewhat out of character, I set out to make Bug Stu real.
In that process, and with my window restoration work, Lafayette became a bigger and bigger part of the story. With Stu’s help, it became clear that the history, Purdue, Prophetstown, shared brews from the timeless Teays River, the hours at so many other bars and coffeehouses, and especially MatchBOX Coworking Space, meant the Greater Star City area should surely be where our story starts–then it weaves around from there. (Stu’s personal story starts in a small town, as in the poem.)
Playing with scale here for the poem. Concepts sketches and constructions…Allie is on a little meteoroid not the moon, just fyi. Scaled to abstraction and nothing else. Drawn and crafted by Em, early on.
Who Cares
Looking down from the sky
was an alien eye attached to a body behind.
Not a monster, deep sigh, but a cute little spy,
with her scope and our county aligned.
She was checking to see if as stewards, we,
would fulfill the role of our kind.
Yes stewards, with big brains to take entropy’s
strains, and despite them, find a way, as designed.
Who else would it be? The pig? Chimpanzee?
Only we can help The Place flourish.
We’re wired for just this, and we’d better not miss,
for our own kind, too, we must nourish.
We count on the rest, so the system works best
if they thrive and make more of each other.
We watch over them, not too fat, not too slim
like a farm, with a father and mother.
It’s one big round ball, a great place for us all,
if we know and pass down how to run it.
If our kids then theirs, then theirs, then their heirs
are happy, she’ll say we have done it : ).
And to keep the place whole, tiny towns play a role.
Some forgot, so they’re tearing them down.
That eye in the sky knew tiny towns’ Why,
so that prompted a worry and frown.
It wasn’t Stu in the sky, she’s for later, this spy;
we’ll start here, on the ground in a town.
It’s in the Midwest, and like most of the rest,
it’s real small with a wonderful past.
And we’ll take this Slow, because we all know…
we see more when we don’t move too fast.
© Tim Storey 2020
(This version is for Rhettie and Wally’s production. The original version in 2018 had just a few different words which were changed for the slight left turn made in 2020. The real small town is in Newton County, where Stu had moved to before Morocco was established.)
Bug Stu is a how-things-work kind of guy; he’s curious, but he also appreciates that we’re at best dimly lit about how we understand things--metacognition. My occasional references to The Fellowship of The Dimly Lit are nods to Stu’s old firefly mentors as well as to Socrates. It seems that Socrates and Plato are making a bit of a comeback, with dimlittedness and genuine searching dialogue looking better and better.
Dimlittedness. That’s not to say we don’t treasure our PhD’d and otherwise credentialed connections, and it sure seems like there are a lot of connections. I guess that’s another benefit of being close to Purdue and maybe being my age. I will make a little jab at an ivory tower phenomenon in a minute, but in no way is it meant to discredit the education and experience of the educated and experienced. Dimlittedness is the same as dimwitted…
On those notes, Dr. Dan is back from Paris briefly, and we happened to meet unplanned right under the “Is Train” painting at The Black Sparrow last Thursday. (Hobo Ghost Train is its real title, but the artist liked my rationale for calling it the Is Train for our story, and that has become increasingly fitting for at least our philosophical and metacognitive explorations.)
We met through my window restoration work, and Dan happened to be a Purdue Philosophy Professor focused on a couple of areas I was interested in for This Project. That includes broader understandings of technology/human flourishing, using concepts such as Technium from Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine and also the origins and evolution of postmodernism.
So there under the Is Train we talked about how the effort toward A.I. is what has both helped and pushed cognitive scientists to rethink their own mental frameworks of how we think about reality. (And this has caused some to return to Socrates and Plato, crazy as that might sound.)
It seems kind of funny that much of what we’ve learned about our own thinking, from complexity science in the 1980’s to A.I. advances today, has come from trying to make a human-like mind. Or maybe that’s exactly how it would be expected to go. Dan brought up an observation of an early ponderer of how our inventions are what have helped us understand, or correct our understandings, of ourselves all along. He sent me this as well as the book mentioned here:
“The German philosopher Ernst Kapp, in his book of 1877: Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (the first book with the phrase "Philosophy of Technology" in its title) argued that we come to understand the nature of the human body through the technical artifacts that we create: the heart is a pump, the eye is a camera, the brain is a computer [mechanical then, still impressive-TS].
Kapp was ten years older than Marx, and like Marx he had to leave Germany because of his political activities. But while Marx eventually settled in London and spent much of his time writing in the British Museum reading room, Kapp emigrated to America and built a homestead in central Texas, working as a farmer, geographer, and inventor. In a certain sense, his book was a reflection on his frontier experience.”
Not Proofs but Probabilities–Emerging
You might get the idea that I’m thinking a scientific discovery about our minds is going to “prove” E. F. Schumacher’s theses related to Small is Beautiful or mine or Stu’s about the need for a 7th Pie, Star Eyes, and the rest. No, but we clearly have a lot to learn—clearly too much to be letting the Invisible Hand put all of our economic eggs in one or two or even six baskets. (That last bit will make more sense by the end here.)
Aside from a couple hundred thousand words I’ve put on the internet already, some not easily accessible anymore, this Star City based periodical is how Stu emerges--to turn back the Foes of Flourishing and bring more life back to where it came from.
What is the Big Deal about Small is Beautiful?
The 1973 book Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher is still considered to be a groundbreaking book and has multiple editions. Later prefaces and commentaries acknowledge what Schumacher didn’t see or see coming, but, by far, his observations in Small is Beautiful are still mostly relevant today. There might not be a more important author to read on this and (surprisingly, at first) related topics.
For me, E. F. (Fritz) Schumacher’s vocation was important background, and I assume it also was to readers of his book(s) and to the various heads of state that consulted with him in response to his theses. He had spent over twenty years as what some call an energy economist, advising Great Britain’s National Coal Board for one. He also served as economic advisor for developing countries in a more general way, beyond energy issues, and wrote on economics in various publications.
His experience and expertise, and maybe other intuitions, led him to champion the use of “intermediate technology,” a sort of optimizing economics and machinery rather than maximizing, and not just for developing nations that might not have much choice.
One of the persistent conundrums he observed was how the same advances in providing humans with comfort and ease were creating discomfort and dis-ease, seemingly because of unintended effects of scale, concentration, and maybe control. That is, an economy initially evolves to reduce onerous and/or dangerous labor needed survive against countervailing forces, initially from the natural world (e.g., pumping water, spinning/weaving cloth, producing energy, furniture, food, etc.), but those systems can become problematic themselves, of course.
The inherent problems with Bigness versus more the wholistic alternatives are essentially what Small is Beautiful was exploring. Economics is all about trading and also trade-offs in the sense of pros and cons of various regulations. It’s not simple. Actually, you might already be thinking of downsides of Schumacher’s more dispersed and self-sufficient concept of civilization and economics. I do. And just how would the remedies be implemented if we were to adopt his recommendations?
But maybe this is taking Smallness in too big of a way. Maybe the book made Smallness sound too big. Maybe it’s not the kind of idea that needs to take over the whole American Pie or needs to be enforced by new regulations. Maybe that’s a recurring problem with reform-minded ideas intended for good. And it’s not like we would all agree on Good, nor maybe True, nor Beautiful. But at least we might be able to start talking a little more…Socratically now, in a new and more effective way. (Not on Twitter)
Before we get to that…
Lately especially, many people imagine “democracy” disarming some despicable villains and implementing regulations to combat greed and unjust corporate moves. It’s easy to imagine and propose such things, and demagoging would-be saviors fan the accusing and punishing flames as it suits them. I don’t think it has ever been otherwise. They’re usually partly right.
And sure, there are plenty of partially understood, partially explored examples to support their villain-dependent narratives, especially in a primed crowd, which is about the only kind of crowd we can identify now. The prevailing idea is to grow a primed crowd into an effective force or majority through social currency and connections.
Surely some would say that’s what democracies are all about—well, that and protests, and riots as seen fit to instigate. (It’s all a little cynical in terms of self-awareness and of mechanisms in use above the immediate melee, but this has become seen as part of natural social life, similar to how public relations consulting in business, once seen as too Machiavellian, has become a norm in the last hundred years.)
Converging Historical Big Ideas and Diminishing Room for Nuances
Another layer of background related to all this talk of a better economics is that the increasing self-rule in governance and in economics came around the same time, say…the mid-1700s during the Age of Reason (a huge contributing concept). In both cases the idea of an Invisible Hand was invoked, which was seen as propelling the public toward a presumably informed and therefore workable, self-organizing, flexible future through rational/enlightened self-interest, the theoretical source of the Hand’s direction.
The often-used Invisible Hand concept comes from Adam Smith, an 18th century Scottish economist and philosopher who wrote two fairly famous books on the practical nature of moral sentiments and of free markets, bounded by a presumably common ethical sense.
(This is where the term liberal was first used, meaning an economics relatively liberated from governmental dictates--for the good of the people in that naturally dynamic/complex system, not based on any political/philosophical affiliation. The term liberal still creates confusion today when exploring the bigger ideas which go beyond Liberal vs. Conservative politics in the U.S.)
As I’ve written other times, Adam Smith didn’t seem to attach as much rhetorical power to the Invisible Hand concept as today’s politicians and influencers do. The term appears once in each book as I remember, and fairly casually. Both Conservatives and Liberals use the abstract idea for justifications, although only free-marketers, usually Conservatives, use Smith’s literal figure of speech. (This assertion gets messy in terms of meanings, and I’ll only expand on that next time if someone requests it.)
Why Does This Matter?
We get ourselves into emotional/cognitive binds when a principle (i.e., democracy, free markets, independence) becomes so holy and foundational that nuances are forgotten. Nuances often include important “yeah, but…” boundaries of even enshrined social practices. Nuances are important, because democracy, free markets, and freedom aren’t good all by themselves. Is anything? The old saying “The proof is in the pudding,” is pretty apt here.
That pudding is going to get worse and worse if we get better and better at manipulating each other, which we have on both individual and mass population scales. Manipulation, sort of, can be seen as an essential part of social life, but some fuzzy nuances tell us that there’s a difference in degree, as there always is about almost everything, despite rhetoricians’ skilled moves around that fact. (They know who they are–or were once–and why.)
For the most part, I’m going to skip the standard essay on how proliferation of peer-reviewed (potentially) utterances from ivory towers contribute to the manipulation directly and indirectly through journalists sworn to make a difference in readers--or readership numbers. It’s not just ivory towers, but that’s the most powerful and intriguing source to me. (Related: The Two Towers, the Tension, and The Pie)
I’m also going to skip prescribing a solution for big problems or big populations, partly because I don’t think there is one. I have a hunch that nothing realistic would work. I know a lot of people have a hunch that today’s multi-faceted Left has the solution, or that someone on the spectrum of the Right does. Despite my including those last two sentences, members from almost any of those groups will probably like a lot of what we’ll be exploring here; I hope so.
But it's not meant to be a political solution in the ways we’re used to thinking. That’s one thing that’s different about this fledgling-fledgling of a publication vs. how some earlier advocates of smallness publicized their mullings and proclamations, and there have been many.
Did Theodore Roosevelt Start This?
Sort of, but it sort of started right along with the Industrial Revolution. We could say the Romanticists around 1800 sort of started it along with their skepticism about long-trending Rationalism. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a big fan of Romanticist theses and modern extensions of them, in general, but some of it is sensible and not just an apologetic for self-indulgence and short-term delight causing long-term pains soothed by commiseration.
Those early well-known smallism advocates like T.R. Roosevelt, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc were not only sensing problems in their present but seeing things getting worse (human flourishing that is). That was all around a hundred years ago. The Arts and Crafts Movement was peaking then too, as another way to show a different…way.
Well, how about that. I didn’t plan this, but now we’ve conveniently landed near my personal starting point with this several years ago: the genius of the historic Arts and Crafts Movement and important ties between Lafayette (Star City), Newton County, the whole world, and the galaxy—according to Bug Stu.
I plan to attend the National Arts and Crafts Conference again this year. Glee. AND its decades-long location at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC is near where the Teays River starts, or started, which works well into This Project. Some of you know about the Teays River, mostly rerouted or covered over two million years ago. That might not seem relevant.
However (!), it still flows under Lafayette. Many of us have even tasted its water—in the form of beer--south of downtown on 9th Street. Much of This Project has flowed from the pub there as well as from The Black Sparrow. But it was at Teays River Brewing and Public House that “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” seemed determined to play during repeated visits early in our conception phase.
That theme has always had such a web of connections to This Project. Yes, goodbye, Yellow Brick Road, because the Emerald City is just concrete and the Wizard is just a guy familiar enough with human nature to elevate his pitch and prescriptions. Yes, those work for a while, but then the saccharine in the pudding gets discovered and it doesn’t seem so good after all.
By then though, we’ve built more highways to and from Emerald Cities, and our schools and colleges are mostly about how to get there, and our libraries are about how to thrive there, or survive there, barely, where it’s so wonderful. What we’re really left with are different versions of how wonderful it could be–if only someone somewhere would do something or hadn’t done what they did…
Okay, so no real surprise, large cities create a conundrum similar to the Industrial Revolution, typically related to the general economic perennial of unintended effects given a concentration of labor-saving machinery. Schumacher touched on the inherent problem of large cities, of course, as have others, suggesting people would be better off in more self-sufficient small cities and towns—and with more reliance on intermediate technology (in size more than sophistication sometimes).
But how could that ever happen? We’ve built as many Yellow Brick Roads to the Emerald Cities in our minds as through the countryside. The second is not as limiting as the first, it seems to me. That doesn’t mean we need a big campaign. I think that’s too Big and more likely to be misunderstood and exploited than something Small and more natural.
I’ve been thinking about how to express this idea, which is not anti-city. I guess saying it’s anti-Emerald City and anti-Yellow Brick Road is pretty close to what I mean. Even then, I mean it mostly in terms of our imaginations–for doing a better job, for ourselves, others, and future others, of implying a path to happiness, satisfaction, and general human flourishing. And this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. I’ve probably said enough, but I can’t help but try to express it in a better way.
First though, back to the book. The timing of Small is Beautiful, published in 1973, was pretty much perfect, except interest rates soared, and things got crazy in the Middle East again by the late 70’s. It reminds me of how the momentum of the quieter back-to-the-land movement of the early 2000’s was diminished by the crash of 2008 and the resulting appetite for traditional household income security. (There were differences between the 70’s and the Aughts, and Smallism is still better off this time around, partly due to data technology.)
Small Could have been Much Bigger
A Small world could use less energy, fewer materials, be more economically resilient, and be more dispersed, kind of like G. K. Chesterton and H. Belloc had suggested in the early 1900’s with Distributism, even though they weren’t so concerned with environmental/depletion issues yet. Smallness seems to benefit us in social and psychological ways, too. That might be its biggest benefit. Again though, how might that ever happen?
There are always political, ideological, logical, and illogical reasons for going in a different direction, or not going, especially on a movement scale. And there’s usually a branding of the movement, intentionally or not. And there’s usually an element of “imagine the difference we could make,” and that has lots of tentacular implications which can result in “people like us do things like this” sentiments (thanks, Seth Godin), which can feel like misplaced affiliations. And, and, and…
Out of The Blue from The Middle of Nowhere…
And so, Stu and Allie had anticipated the recurring problems with reformations early on, maybe because Stu had already observed humans for at least a couple hundred years. That’s why he came up with the concept of a “7th Pie”—to avoid implying that everyone, everywhere, all the time, actually needed to be part of some New Way. Funny, this relates to an actual suggestion that Mahatma Gandhi had for E. F. Schumacher on another issue that naturally divides people. I’ll have to remember that for later. (Fritz took his advice.)
In the next two sections, I’ll try to explain how The 7th Pie came about and how The Story of Stu starts in Lafayette (the Star City).
(By Jordan Johnson in the Land of Kent)
Stu and Allie had already come up with 7th Pie Theory long before E. F. Schumacher came onto the scene with Small is Beautiful (1973). The 1800’s had been Peak Utopia in terms of the number of ideal communities and societies. They usually disbanded not long after being established. You know how Need is said to be the Mother of Invention, but that doesn’t mean the inventions work out, and that goes for any realm, from plumbing to personal improvement. It was probably good that the social inventions were on a small scale.
Indiana had a few, including Stu’s favorite, The Owenites at New Harmony because of the focus on science and knowledge. Well, and it was also the home of Thomas Say, for whom the Say’s Firefly is named, so that’s probably significant. But anyway, 7th Pie Theory isn’t nearly as radical as those ideal community ideas, nor as broad as E. F. Schumacher’s suggestions. It just has a different focus from normal.
From our species’ start, Mother Nature herself brought about the need for us to invent “work-arounds.” But some of the work-arounds brought more need of inventions in other ways, work-arounds for the work-arounds, even in changing human behavior, which gets a little tricky. It’s iterative and takes a curious mind. That’s how Stu saw it, and Allie agreed, which is why she joined him. That made Stu feel good—confident in moving forward.
A Brief History of 7th Pie Theory
“Funny, it’s iterative but there’s never an It,” he’d say to Allie. She would just blink. Owls can’t smile because of their beaks, but Stu decided she wasn’t very amused. At least she wasn’t showing it. She kind of wanted to roll her eyes, teasing, but owls can’t roll their eyes. Instead, she blinked twice to try to set a pattern he could learn to recognize. “But I do kinda like it,” she added. “I mean I think you’re right.”
That’s when they started talking about the 7th Pie. That is, Stu had come up with six categories in the overall modern economy (i.e., Manufacturing, Farm/Foods, Finance, etc.) and he designated a different type of pie for each one. I won’t get into the details here, but each pie was “all about” their one particular pie. The question would always be whether or not enough people liked their particular pie. So, Stu imagined a circular display tray where one slice of each of the six pies would be placed next to another with some space in between, so the insides could be seen somewhat.
Since Stu was in Indiana in the U.S., he called that six-piece arrangement the American Pie, which was really a collection of six different pies, one slice of each. He drew a circle and colored it in with six equal sections as you can see up above. Then he made another circle and colored it in with seven equal sections.
That seventh slice was to be from the 7th Pie, which is different from the other six partly because it’s made up of a mix of three different berries: red, green, and blue. Stu’s a science guy, so he was making use of the fact that red, green, and blue light can be mixed to make any color. That was just for some symbolism about flexibility. This kind of pie is called Bumbleberry Pie in our world, and it’s said to come from Canada.
To have seven nicely fitting pieces of pie in the display tray means a pie must be cut into seven pieces not six, and this is tricky. At first Stu did it iteratively, and in doing that he figured out how to repeat it by using some math and geometry. It takes some knowledge, some study that is, but it can be done. He liked that symbolism too–that it took some study. So did Allie, and Stu knew.
The mix of berries is meant to symbolize the mix of elements that go into enduring human flourishing for each generation. That means each generation needs to have enjoyment and satisfaction, and it needs to be done in a way that enables the next generations to do the same. And hopefully it wouldn’t be too iterative, since mistakes have various costs to people and the environment.
So hopefully some deep understandings can be passed down and welcomed from one generation to the next. It’s all pretty tricky, but especially when there are tricksters in the mix, which will always be the case, based on what Stu and Allie have seen.
The overall purpose of the 7th Pie is different from the other six, because it contains a wariness about the Invisible Hand’s direction. So, it stays pretty much in place, growing things in sustainable and regenerative ways and repairing all kinds of things, since humans enjoy shared connections through things that have been made and used. Of course, repair is also good stewardship.
The work is more like the less strenuous work on an old farm, where usually at least a few different things are done in a day’s time and the days vary around a theme, and exercise is natural and unavoidable.
And They Kept in Mind That…
The Invisible Hand can put shackles around one’s leg and even their mind, which is another reason to be wary. The Invisible Hand is not invisible to tricksters; they have domesticated it in many cases.
Also, to Stu and Allie, the Invisible Hand sometimes functions as more of a sculptor than a motive force or a shackler on the masses. In this case, it’s like theInvisible Hand forms a clay model, or models, of what humans should be. But they see the Invisible Hand is also made of clay, and that creates a puzzle about how clay can form clay. They’ve set that aside for now and moved on.
Finally, from observing humans at night, Stu sometimes calls us Star Gazers, and Allie happened to have made up a story about Star Eyes in the sky that want the best for us (but have no physical power from the sky). When Stu combined their two ideas, he became especially concerned about the Invisible Hand, how it might affect so many aspects of our imaginations, and our aspirations, and decided we needed a new story—not just a new pie. Allie agreed.
I don’t really want to get deep into it here, but it seems that cognitive scientists and others trying to empower A.I. robots to rule over us (I’m exaggerating but…you know) have stumbled on a much more complete model of our thinking than we had fifty years ago—and that’s actually very good for us in terms of human flourishing, even if we become temporarily enslaved by the A.I. armies. And they’re not our biggest problem, according to Stu.
Back to Stu’s Diagram
Allie noticed something interesting about the two different display trays as she was standing back and looking over Stu’s drawings. That’s her usual role, taking a more distant view, sitting up in a tree or flying overhead.
Allie noticed that when she looked at the six-slice tray she would see different patterns of two threes or three twos. It gave her a feeling, the patterns, that she really had some new insight about how humans existed, but again she was wary of it. “I think the patterns make a promise that they can’t keep,” is how she explained it to Stu.
That was a metaphor about what the two of them had seen in the attempts at ideal societies and had heard about from history and other countries. “You can’t…plant…ants,” they both said together--then laughed a little because it was one of their many sayings. I need to explain it a little.
It meant that even though we could learn things about how societies work through patterns of ant behavior, like E.O. Wilson taught us, we’re so much more complicated that we need a whole different level of understanding. We need to understand understanding, you could say. The ideal communities and inventive political systems were planted in a way, but things never turned out like expected. The patterns that the designers thought they saw weren’t there, or they weren’t enough of the whole story.
Allie compared the seven-slice tray to the six-slice tray. She didn’t detect a pattern as she looked at the seven-slice tray, and she liked that. It seemed like that might help discourage anyone from thinking there was clear solution or a hack that could be used. Humans are pattern-seekers, which is good, but that can also trip us up when we think we see patterns without seeing what we don’t see. That’s what economists and other social scientists have to contend with in their own fields
It was in the 1970’s, like Small is Beautiful, that some started to take another look at Economics, and that resulted in Behavioral Economics, a much more complete perspective on how we make choices. That has now even entered pop culture thanks to a Nobel Prize awarded for the work in 2002. That’s good news.
Economics, technically, isn’t about money, it’s about how we make choices, as Dr. Katie emphasized to me a couple times last summer. That’s probably why Stu doesn’t like to think of us as having economics but having an ecosystem. That helps him think of the costs/benefits/risks we consider in more grounded terms than money—as we try to maintain happiness, reduce misery, and find satisfaction.
That’s also one of the reasons he chose to use pie for his model, since pie always has depth and complexity, like our real world and our wants. He does get buried in the details of the pie sometimes, so it’s great that Allie is there to remind him of what she sees in the bigger picture.
Okay, that’s the Why behind the 7th Pie. I realize there was only a general idea of the What and How of it, but I want to point out that it maintains the idea of Smallness in a lot of ways, and it’s not about changing everything everywhere. One-seventh is just 14% (14.29% actually), but that should be enough to make a difference. Here’s a little poem to go with it. The authors will be explained in the next brief section, where we learn a little about how Stu and Allie’s new story starts in Lafayette.
Under Skies and Star Eyes
Small is Beautiful, just 14%.
Sent for everyone, but not everyone’s sent.
Bug Stu had a vision he had seen in our eyes,
a world of, commercially-made, six pies.
An assembly of six makes a pattern we see,
a simple collection: three of two, two of three.
But if one more is made, a mystery appears,
and we’re not quite sure we have grasped all the gears
and the pinions and shafts and chains and the rest
don’t tell the whole story; now it’s much more complex.
Now there’s more room…for guesses—at best.
A seven-pie world and one big display tray,
a slice of each pie for the kids to survey.
A slice of each pie that we all can see
where we might spend our lives bearing fruit, happily,
paid a salary, a wage, or a scene and a way
to make up a living, a life, as they say.
And one of those slices, with three different fruits,
is made for us all and seeks Small recruits.
Small’s not a size, or a wage, but a way,
a vision of how to get by day to day.
Tinker, take care, repair, smell the air,
this piece of pie serves a purpose out there.
It’s back to the land, back where big skies meet Small
and not buildings that back up the clouds they’re so tall.
Those places are fine for most other pies,
but this slice thrives best under skies and Star Eyes.
Some stay all year; some just visit the place,
but it’s always here beside that big rat race.
And it touches the tips of the other six pies
arranged in that tray of how we’ll spend our lives.
Just 14% can go a long way,
just a small shift that’s meant
as an escape from the fray.
So wherever you’re called or wherever you’re sent,
construction, computers, a universe to dent,
this crew will take care of your landing—The 7th Pie,
for when you feel Small, want a break, and the sky.
Rhettie and Wally—2023
How The Story of Stu Starts in Star City
Bug Stu, like a lot of things, first needs to become real by entering conversations and dreams. Back in 2014 he entered Rhettie’s dreams, and he’s been with her ever since. I won’t go into the whole story, but she had just graduated from Purdue. The teaching position she wanted got filled, and it made her stop and think about what she really wanted to work on. As she was thinking about all that out by a pond one summer afternoon…she fell asleep.
I guess Stu decided that was his opportunity to pop into her dreams. So now Rhettie thinks she’s just dreamt this whole thing up, which she sort of has, and that’s fine. Anyway, after a few years of planning and learning how she could create something called “Functional Fringes” on poor farm ground, involving campers and gardens and small fields of flowers, she realized there was much more.
She realized that what we really needed was a new story that would explain why we weren’t doing this all over the place already. A new story? If you read the last section, you know that Stu and Allie were also thinking we needed a new story.
Well, driving to Lafayette one day to meet an old college friend, Rhettie started imagining what it would look like if there were Functional Fringes popping up occasionally all the way from where she lived, near Morocco, to Lafayette. “Why not?” she thought, just like her grandma Dorie would say.
She was a little early for meeting her friend, and she’d been up since 5:00, so she parked on the far west side of campus in the shopping plaza lot by McCutcheon Hall, where she’d lived almost ten years ago. Her plan was to make some notes before meeting her friend, then have a nap.
She found her “McMix” from 2010 on her phone and then went from reminiscing to sleeping before she even found a pen. And Bug Stu showed up again in her dream. This time he was talking to Allie Space-Owl about Stralfs.
He was explaining how Stralfs are very small, potato-sized, very strange, made sort of like an octopus but with no real legs. But they could still get around in different weird ways, and they could sort of sing, almost like lyrics but not. Kind of creepy, at least in this dream. And Stu explained their Invisible Voice.
He called it an Invisible Voice because they had no mouths so you couldn’t see anything moving to make the sound. The sound came from their skin…vibrating like a speaker. It could be soothing or grating, and it could sort of sound like words, but they were almost impossible to really make out. It was like they could imitate us but not quite. When they did seem to be speaking it was a little lyrical still.
That’s what Stu described, and that’s what Rhettie saw. She saw around ten but she knew there were a lot more. And Stu said they wanted to drive us away from earth without knowing they were here. They wanted us to go to their planet so they could have ours. And they had been here for a long time, hundreds of years, and the same ones that landed here were still here, mostly.
Rhettie learned that a lot of them live under hog barns, under the slats in the manure pits, because they don’t mind the ammonia smell or the rest, and they knew they could hide there pretty well. They had control over every square inch of their skin, and they could make little humps stick out and use them to get around like caterpillars.
They had two eyes but nothing else. Just greyish-brown wrinkly skin. Well, there were also some tiny holes along their sides for breathing, like insects have. They could go a long time without breathing. Sometimes the air going in an out made a noise—kind of like a flute but very faint. You couldn’t really call them ugly, but they were disturbing, especially in a dream. It made Rhettie wake up.
Rhettie jumped a little in her seat as she woke up. Then she was disoriented about where she was and why. She realized what had happened, and she was still startled and kind of panicked, but she kind of laughed too. Then right in front of her on the lawn she saw three big mushrooms that hadn’t opened yet and looked kind of like the Stralfs, and a second later a lawnmower went over them.
Rhettie pushed back in her seat, startled again. She took it as a sign. She liked signs. She and her Grandma Dorie used to make fun of “signs.” If some coincidence would happen, they’d turn to each other and open their eyes real wide, and the first one that had a story would say “Could it be!…” like the announcer on Ancient Aliens, then they’d make something up…then continue the line…then crack up. But they both actually liked signs.
It was time to meet her friend over in Lafayette at Matches Co-working Space. Now she couldn’t help collecting more signs if any were to be found. A big building on the right said DISCOVERY PARK. Another said CRAVE. The very next one said ASPIRE. “Oh geez,” she said out loud. She was already putting the story together as she drove. This really did seem like a sign to her, and she would tell her grandma and even admit she liked it and that it felt real.
Her friend at Matches, Jennifer, had mentioned where she worked many times, but Rhettie hadn’t been interested in seeing it. “Well…I’ve decided to go in a different direction,” she’d say, mocking a line from some movie about aspiring go-getters getting passed over. “I’m still not looking for a match,” was another excuse. Rhettie was actually making fun of herself with that because she’d thought Matches might be some kind of singles or swingers place when it first opened, being kind of tucked away south of downtown like it was.
But that day she’d finally made it to Matches. Jennifer opened the door for her and hugged her before she could even step in. Then she dragged Rhettie inside and they walked straight to a little conference room. Jennifer had forgotten about another meeting she’d scheduled, so they only had thirty minutes. She grabbed Rhettie’s shoulders. “It’s so good to see you! It was three years ago that I started trying to get you here! Now I’m curious about why you came. Here, let’s sit down.”
Rhettie skipped all the catching up stuff and told Jennifer she just needed to write a story, or something. She explained that she knew Matches had writing classes and marketing help, and she didn’t really know where to start even, just that she needed to do it.
“Oh…is that your dream?!! You want to be a writer. I bet you’d be a great writer. Good for you!” Jennifer grabbed Rhettie’s hand to squeeze it, but Rhettie needed it to explain.
“Well, it’s not really my dream. I don’t really know… Well, it is my dream…”
“It’s a great dream! It’s your dream, so it’s a great dream, if it’s your dream. That’s what they always say, right?! It’s awesome. Jennifer was smiling and excited, mostly because Rhettie would probably be there occasionally.
Rhettie grabbed a marker off the table and went over to the wall, which still had sketches and notes from an earlier meeting in the room. She erased it saying, “Oh, this is perfect…a whole wall. Here’s what I mean by my dream. Writing is not my dream. This is my dream. I can’t really draw, but here.”
Rhettie filled the wall as if she’d done it many times before—but this was actually the first time, and she had never been close to putting it all together before. There was Bug Stu, Allie, a few drawings of Stralfs and flying saucers, hog barns, dilapidated old farms and buildings falling down, signs that said “CRAVE,” sky scrapers, Main Street scenes with missing buildings. A lot of it wouldn’t be recognized without Rhettie narrating what she was drawing.
Jennifer was from Indianapolis and considered herself a “certified satisfied city girl,” but she got what Rhettie was explaining and why. Even more importantly though, she had someone for Rhettie to meet.
Jennifer had a friend there named Wally. She knew he’d been going through something--something with his father or his father’s illness. Jennifer didn’t really understand, but she sensed that he needed something different from his usual marketing/art niche. And this was very different. And Rhettie was very different. And right then Wally walked by their little conference room, so Jennifer grabbed him.
“Come in here, you’re not doing anything important. I want you to meet someone. Wally, this is Rhettie, a friend of mine from college. She wants to change the wor--I mean the galaxy. Seriously, Wally, but I need to run, and I think you two should talk.” He smiled and nodded, then she told Wally to take Rhettie to the coffee bar when they were done and she’d watch for them. “See you in a bit, Rhettie!” And Jennifer was off.
They did their minimal introductions, and Rhettie started explaining what she’d put on the wall to Wally. Rhettie only had thirty minutes again. Wally started taking a few notes. “Wait,” Wally said, “Does that say Small is Beautiful? E. F. Sch--?”
“Yeah, E. F. Schumacher. Wait…you know that book?” She turned around and gave Wally a funny smile/frown out of surprise.
“Yes I do. So you’re a hippie chick?” He asked, knowing she wasn’t, since Jennifer had told him a little about Rhettie.
“No I’m not. Are you?”
“No. I didn’t think you were, but you probably know what I mean, right?”
“Yes,” she replied, laughing a little. “I’m just a country mouse now. Never was a hippie chick.”
“What were you before?” Wally asked.
“I was a town mouse in Chicago except for summers and Christmas. You?”
“Total town mouse, but just here in Lafayette—my whole life. I love Small is Beautiful.” I actually just read it a couple weeks ago.”
This was kind of distracting for Rhettie, because she hadn’t expected Wally or hardly anyone under fifty to know about Small is Beautiful, since it was almost fifty years old then. She knew about it because of Grandma Dorie. Wally explained that he knew it because it was in a box of his dad’s old stuff, the Road Not Taken Box, as his dad called it.
Now Rhettie felt like she had found someone, at the most unlikely place she thought, who would know and feel what she was trying to say. She explained the rest of her diagrams and phrases in a different way now than she had to Jennifer. Wally asked her if she’d seen WALL-E, which was kind of a funny coincidence with his name. Of course she had, and loved it. There was one other movie Rhettie thought was as relevant to her project. She asked if he’d seen Inside Out—he had not, but he was a big Pixar fan. He would watch it that night.
This might be it finally, and it seems so fun, they both thought. Neither of them knew for sure what the other could really do. How far along was Rhettie in her story, and could she even write? Wally had said he wanted to go down the road not taken by his dad. This might be perfect. This might be a short-lived impulse. She wondered if she should have told him she was in a serious relationship. Her grandma would ask her if she did. Maybe she should have worked it into the conversation. Grandma…Rhettie thought, then guys...
Okay, a lot of you already know a little about what’s happened so after this. You know about the music they’ve used from Wally’s dad, Wally’s dad’s signs of dementia and his regrets, Wally’s teetering personal mission, and you know even more about Rhettie’s background, especially with her Grandma Dorie.
Rhettie and Wally have made a lot of progress on the project since then, and you might have noticed that the poem up above, Under Skies and Star Eyes, has their names at the bottom. It’s been a little over three years, but they’re still working on The Project.
All the episodes in past newsletters will be filled in a little more later, but for now I just want to close this first issue of The Pie and Crew Monthly with a poem that Wally wrote for Rhettie’s project just a week after they met, as a way to tell her he understood what she meant was missing and maybe what to do about it. He even did a little drawing for her.
A Better Brass for Them
There’s better brass within Their (1) grasp.
It’s for Them we pause; it’s for Them we gasp
as we look again at our options here:
there’s Dizzyland (2), designed in fear
of real demands - or a rich real land
of bugs and bonies (3). Let’s make a stand
in a world of phonies; let’s sell what’s Free! (4)
Despite the cries to make them be
new pawns with eyes fixed gazing up;
let’s light the prize that could disrupt
the Stream of Tears (5), “The Dream” of years
of ads and fads and “Not Enough!”
Let’s look again and call that bluff.
There’s better brass within Their grasp,
but Carnies and The Circus clasp
The Crowd’s attention – as designed:
“Don’t miss your chance / be left behind!”
“But we’ll be fine, there’s something new –
a New that’s even good for you.
The brass is better and brings more smiles.
The grass is better and goes for miles.”
Despite the ploys and big brass rings
Their crowd has found Way Funner things.”
©2019 T. J. Storey/Wally
Poem notes:
1) Our kids, grandkids, theirs, etc. 2) Blind busyness and theme parks 3) Bug Stu’s name for vertebrate animals 4) Not so dependent on urban systems/conventions 5) Well, things could be left better…
Okay, we made it! Now we’ve both finished Issue One of The Pie and Crew Monthly, which was probably around 40 minutes of reading time, not counting any links you went to. Of course, you might have skipped some, and that’s okay. Now that Rhettie and Wally are taking over in writing The Story of Stu, I can work on some other things.
I’ll still be around as needed, and I’m looking forward to watching Rhettie and Wally talk about how to convey the story in just the right Middle Way. There might not be one just right way, but you know they don’t want to get it wrong.
This all brings a song to mind from a very unique 70’s band, Genesis, back in 1976, from the Wind and Wuthering album. I’m pretty sure this song has been on Stu’s mind quite a bit this whole time. It’s a beautiful song with deep but accessible meaning(s). Well, it’s beautiful except for a minute of intentionally offbeat play in the middle. And the meanings are accessible except for the answer to the “What would you do?” implication and the paradox. I like where it leaves us.
Many will see an anti-religion message in the lyrics, but I think that’s just the surface and doesn’t take enough history into account. Genesis wrote a lot of too-long-for-radio songs back then, and this is one of them. It’s 10 minutes long, on the dot, which is very unusual. Stu thinks there might be a sign in that. Maybe we’ll see what Rhettie thinks someday.
Thanks for reading.
Tim