Andrew Taggart’s reflections on the founding story of Stone Soup attribute the success of the original beggar to personal charisma. Using the arts of magic, the beggar is able to mesmerise the villagers and charm them into parting with small individual gifts of food which, when added together to the communal soup pot, transform scarcity into abundance.
We are tied to each other, but beneath these bonds lies a deep connection that cannot be experienced without letting go of both the suspicion and the sense of duty we feel towards our bonds.
Bonds are ties. Ties are compulsive. They are the fabric of domination, whether between us or within us. We live in societies that are bound by forms of domination. These form the social contract.
We struggle with the shape and size, the fit of this container. Some resist by pulling back, exercising authoritarian instincts to make life “simpler” by making the binders tighter and more direct. Others resist by asking for leniency. They seek to reform the bonds, looking for ways for them to pinch less, for them to make us feel more generous, magnanimous, more liberal. Neither side of this duality recognizes any possibility outside of bonds. All of them agree, without ever articulating why, that life could not exist outside of a state of domination. Each is eager to replace their flavor of dominance over their rivals, but neither sees any reason to look beyond the struggle they’ve bound themselves to.
Central to the gulf between technology and craft is the frictionless quality of interacting with computers. While “dumb” tools wait mutely to be brought to life, computers hum expectantly and rush out to meet us part way. There is tremendous gratification to be had in this seeming collaboration, but it is chimerical. It is a simulation. Mute tools appear dead and intractable until we give ourselves over to the process of learning their use. Then they do come to life and provide points of contact with, and leverage to, connect and interact with our world.
In “The Story of Stone Soup,” as Antonio Dias tells it, a wandering beggar comes upon a village. Hungry and tired, he goes to each door and is met with the same answer again and again. There is, he is told, not enough to go around, and the door, half-opened, is soon closed upon him. Nearing despair, he notices a rusty old pot, an abandoned fire circle, and some kindling here and there, and decides to build a fire. He adds some water to the pot and a stone from his pocket.
As the fire grows tall and the fumes rise high, the villagers, with curiosity piqued, wander out from their homes and ask him what he is about. “I’m making soup,” he says. “Stone soup,” he clarifies. The first villager replies that he has “never heard of it.” In Antonio’s version, we read on:
We talk of technologies when we believe that the means justify the ends. Craft reminds us constantly that the means are the ends.
One of Krishnamurti‘s most powerful insights is that the means are the ends. So much for unintended consequences! There is no mystery there. What blind-sides us is our recurring expectation that we can establish and maintain a distance between means and ends. We read the collapse of that wished for distance as unintended consequences.
