When the “7th Pie Theory” Became Practical

I did not draw this (M.C. Escher did). I did have it as a poster in my college dorm room. Wanna know something funny?

I had been looking through my files for a painting of a group of country cottages in the 16th century or so. They happened to be Dutch cottages. I couldn’t find it, but I decided that this M.C. Escher print, Relativity, was actually better because of what I wanted to get into for Episode Minus 2 here.

As many of you are already thinking, M.C. Escher was Dutch. I had forgotten. So I thought that was funny. The end. (When I use “The end” it’s because I’m remembering when one of the kids told a not-very-clear-or-compelling story at one of our very awesome family dinners here in The Land of Kent. They were probably 13 and 17. When the story ended, the other waited a couple of seconds and offered, somewhat formally, “The end.” A very succinct critique we all thought, as we all laughed, and the tradition continues. Lol.)

Anyway…

Like any pie, 7th Pie Theory has a lot of ingredients, alternate recipes, and substitutions for different situations. Bumbleberry Pie is especially like this, which is partly why it’s our symbolic pie. The original, at least for our purposes, just required some kind of red berry, a blue berry, and a green berry (probably an early gooseberry). According to Stu, it’s the coloring of the fruit that’s most important, because they represent the red, blue, and green light that make up other colors, including plain white light. This actually even gets into Stu’s Theory of Tears, but I can’t digress. (Because I just don’t, not in 2022. There’s no time. We still have time to fix the official Stralfian record of 2021, but time is short, according to Stu. We’ve almost got what we need.)

I’m going to hold off explaining the other six already existing Pies in our economic culture. Full disclosure, that’s because I’ve posted it on Medium but there’s no access due to a mistake I made when tying the website to it, down in the entrails where I’m reluctant to venture again. Even I can’t get to it right now. In that case, I guess we’ll just stick to the heading and the M. C. Escher drawing. Lol.

Some readers might be disappointed as I explain that Relativity there, the title of the drawing, is not referring to the moralists’ question of relative truth vs. absolute truth, at least the way I’m using the image. Maybe we’re all moralists in a way, or in different ways. Depending on what kind of moralist is talking, the questions about relativistic OR absolute truth might be seen as foundational in their mind. Similar distinctions, though less tied to the various modes of metaphysical, are made in the conversations about human tendencies, economics, values, culture, etc.

Much of our postmodernist thought, especially political thought, is based in those deeper framings and assumptions, but they do not strike me as necessarily foundational. I mean, I’m not sure we need to start with the question of relativistic vs. absolute truth. Here’s the ten-foot ASTM certified dielectric pole I’m willing to touch it with for a second: I’m not dealing with that/those, other than to acknowledge the opposing mindsets and say I think there’s probably a more complete and less philosophical way to explore the issues.

Regular readers might expect me to say this way of looking at things has something to do with context. Yes, I think so, but options to our context are mostly hypotheticals at this point, and it’s hard (some might say delusional—that’s mean) to speak genuinely about what we’d think in a different situation or context. I don’t think it’s practical or maybe possible to talk about it directly, at least not in any detail.

But it seems like modernism and postmodernism have been about solving problems, or progress, and marketing is largely about creating a sense of dissatisfaction, and they both help create a context that’s naturally begging for solutions, most of the time. That context seems to be important. But now what then? Okay, who got me started on this?

M. C. Escher’s Relativity and its relevance to us

Some aspects of the drawing are impossible arrangements, and they have to do with intriguing problems that can come with two-dimensional representations of the three-dimensional world. But for some aspects, if you replace the tall humies with sticky-footed six-legged short insects, it would work, as Stu likes to point out. You can’t just put sticky shoes on the humies, and you can’t just make gravity disappear, not that it would make things work, considering other factors in locomotion.

But let’s say gravity is the biggest factor, and that it can only pull from one direction, like the earth’s does, for all practical purposes. Here’s maybe the most philosophical, grab-that-pole-again metaphor for this drawing, with that in mind. Whether or not this kind of relativity works, in a cultural case, depends on the future effects on our kids’ world. That is the gravity. The outcomes of our guesses are the gravity that we can’t escape, and our kids’ or grandkids’ world is where it all bears out, not really in ours. The future is the gravity in this way of thinking. This isn’t just gummie talk, ya know?

We’re starting to understand ourselves, each other, and groups, about like we were understanding gravity a few hundred years ago. We kind of knew how things moved, kind of, but we didn’t understand the pull or inertia or momentum. Practical experience had given us a certain level of understanding, but only a certain level. Do we understand gravity completely now? No, but the understanding we did gain helped us understand why things happened and why they were going to continue fairly predictably.

Now that I’ve used the gravity analogy, here’s one really important difference that makes it only sort of work here. (Note: all analogies only sort of work, and reasoning by analogy is fraught with cautionary tales, logical fallacies, irrationally imputed credibility to the speaker, and confirmation bias—or maybe we have we used the term confirmation bias so much lately that it doesn’t mean much anymore.) With humans, or any complex decision maker, we’re talking complex probabilities not just complicated and/or mysterious phenomena, and that’s a huge difference. Still, just for an illustration not logic, I say that the future outcomes, partly for us but mostly for our heirs, are the gravity that takes some of the fun out of M. C. Escher’s Relativity. There’s still plenty of fun, and fun is important.

The What and Why of the 7th Pie

In a way, we’ve always had elements of the 7th Pie segment of the economy/culture. (I know. I need to decide how use economy/culture better, but right now I’m perplexed by how to separate the two, because…confounding contexts.) But the things that started changing around 2001, let’s say they started reaching a tipping point in terms of recognition, were the Slow Food movement, regenerative agriculture, health and wellness, and metacognitive interests (thinking about thinking). For me, it was 2005, but with us being out in the Middle of Nowhere, plus some other things, I figure 2001 is when things at least started to come together. Close enough for now.

Some of those things I mentioned were affecting the general market (not the NYSE, we don’t get into that realm much). The Food Network had a lot to do with it. Farmers like Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin became celebrities to a growing crowd. And…the internet was building a bigger network in a two-way relationship between publishers/broadcasters and the common folk. Eventually, the remote-working that we’d talked about in the 1980’s, as telecommuting, started to happen in greater numbers. The Stralfs were quite disturbed, according to Stu.

The Stralfs had been influencing us in various ways, for decades, to leave the countryside. The back-to-the-land movement of the 1970’s had been successfully stymied as we mostly went shopping and clubbing in the 1980’s. Disco hadn’t done near as much damage to the Stralfian strategy as Stu and Allie had hoped. By the early 1990’s, the contemplation and reflection of the early 1970’s had gone from Why? to Why ask why? (You need to click that to see a representative commercial of the times. It’s funny and you get to see some early 90’s fashion.)

We were living in Indianapolis at the time. Broad Ripple’s downtown was still cool. NUVO magazine was around for cool 20/30-somethings, and other newsletters were around for even cooler people, let’s say, like me, let’s say. Come on. Well anyway, one of the newsletters had a nice rendition of the Bud Dry ad campaign. It was something like, “Why are there still wars… and so much violence? Why are so many people hurting? Why, in a land of plenty, do so many children live in poor health and poverty? Why ask why? Try Bud Dry.”

So basically (as we used to say a lot, then it was shortened to just So,…), in the early 2000’s the Stralfs were watching over a hundred years of work go down the greywater drain. Their Hundred Year Plan had begun in 1914, but now 2014 appeared to be in jeopardy, in terms of getting us to board their spaceships at the top of skyscrapers. Funny, I happened to be at the Slow Money Conference in Louisville, in the fall of 2014. Stralfs hate that stuff. I didn’t know about Stralfs then. I hadn’t even met Bug Stu, not that he hadn’t been watching me, here in The Land of Kent.

Well, that’s probably enough for Episode Minus 2. We’re almost ready to start something I think!