It is curious, this endlessly expanding, gravity fighting, nature-escaping, life-accelerating civilization, which is marbled throughout with these increasingly urgent dreams and projects of getting back to nature and the land, of simplifying, of deflating, of surrendering to gravity, and all of the rest of it. This is an urgency that grows as industrial production and capital double over on effort and activity.
Is it some form of self destruction? Well perhaps if you want to attribute some sort of essence to the project of civilization. But what it looks like to me is more the dynamic forces of a multitude which may progress in a certain direction more readily, but which has a wide of array of transformational possibilities, so long as the time, energy, and will are available.
At the very least, we can conceive of the homesteading dream as a sort of friction or drag acting upon the supposed fundamentals of what we imagine the modern civilization project is supposed to be about. Of course this phenomenon is not specific to homesteading by any means.
We can find a parallel - not a flattering one perhaps, but striking it up in these terms is at least useful for explanatory purposes - in the Marxist concept of anti-value, which unsurprisingly, tends to be passed by in silence other than in certain rarefied theoretical circles.
Of course there was a different term for this in classical liberalism: "rentier" activity was quite loudly talked about even in the mainstream then, but since the 19th century this sort of language has been systematically snuffed out and swept under the rug, as it were.
But anti-value or rentier activity is often identified in what is today known as FIRE sector activity, or in finance, insurance, and real estate. As the theories go, the reproduction of value and expansion of "productive" activity was predicated on the increasing production of largely material goods and services. The currency sort of correlated with all of this, though due to its characteristics, was subject to hijacking by largely financial and abstract economic forces which diverted the surplus away from production and consumption. Get rid of the rentiers and unleash the free economy, as it goes.
But the finaciers and the rentiers lauched their rebellion against productive capital, and harnessing their own forces of economic "drag" inverted the logic of production and began to eat up the surplus, all the way erasing ideologically the traces of their actual processes in relation to the economy. And now the headwinds are beginning to blow against them yet again.
More generally there is a dependable rebellion that occurs in any sort of extended project, at least in the last couple of thousand years of human history, in which a given extension or movement or project overexerts itself and falls back on itself, spawning reactive movements and projects which take a different direction as ideological values invert or become altered.
This rebellion, this drag, is a natural part of the process. There are intervals of reaction, which vary in intensity and frequency, oscillating over centuries, showing up in the historical record like the winter and summer bark on trees. With the winter bark, growth in the mass of the trees falters and it appears as the darker, thinner rings on the stump or round, whereas the faster growing and expanding summer bark is lighter and the rings thicker.
And so with rebellion a given process begins to drag against itself and slow itself, but the extent of the rebellion - and rebellion takes many forms - is limited to the time and energy available to change directions and natures away from the movement the rebellion is moving away from. Rebellion begins to lose its spark with the age of the movement, exhaustion and resignation of its constituents, and the demoralization that comes with losing one's struggle against a greater power that is unable to be budged in one's lifetime, or even in several generations.
Nevertheless even the great trees must eventually fall, with all of their rings oscillating across history going down with them. If one is to be a rebel, and if the dignity of one's life is to be predicated on this rebelling, so be it.
