A Cityless and Countryless World
An Outline of Practical Co-Operative Individualism
Henry Olerich
[A condensed and edited version of the book
originally published by Gilmore & Olerich, Holstein, Iowa, 1893 /
CHAPTER 4 - Home and Family]
Years ago we had cities and towns, and a country similar to yours of
the present time; but experience gradually taught us that it is not
healthful to live in a crowded, smoky city and town, and also that we
have no particular use for cities and towns, that they are detrimental
to an orderly, well-regulated society. We also found that a family of
husband and wife and their children, living alone in a country home,
are largely wasting their lives socially and economically.
The farming is all done with electric power. A locomotive, which
builds and takes up its own track, does all the plowing, sowing,
harvesting, etc. Instead of fencing each little patch of land, and
turning our weak, tired teams before all those fences, destroying, in
the act of turning, the very crops you endeavor to raise, like you do
here, we hitch up a powerful land locomotive to a set of gang plows
and plow a furrow which is from three to twenty-four miles long, as
the case may be. …
[I]n sowing, reaping, threshing and grinding, not a human hand …
touches a straw nor a grain. With our method of artificial curing, not
a grain is damaged by moisture, not a grain is lost on the land or
road. By the aid of electricity we can, if need be, cut day and night,
rain and shine.
From the foregoing, you see that our system of agriculture,
especially harvesting, has many points of advantage....
[In our society] transportation is rapid, cheap and convenient.
Manufacturing is principally done in those localities where it
requires the least amount of labor. Crops best adapted to the locality
are raised there and then transported where consumed. …
[W]e economize both wealth and labor by our extensive co-operative
individualism, and how easily we can produce with abundance the
necessaries and luxuries of life, so that we are obliged to work but a
few hours daily. Each community is, so to speak, a large family, in
which each member has a personal interest in the community's wealth.
For this reason every member of the community is keenly interested in
the productive industries of the community. [We have], therefore, no
wage-workers. Experience convinced us that a wage-worker, having no
direct interest in his productions, is, as a rule, not highly
interested in the quantity and quality of his labor; such uninterested
labor is also toilsome and fatiguing. …
You see there is only one difficult point in the solution of the
social and industrial problem. …The difficult point is this: To
devise or outline a social and industrial system in which a large
number of individuals co-operate harmoniously, and yet have every
individual free to do what he believes to be right, provided he
infringes not upon the equal rights of any other person. No man here
on earth thus far has been able to outline such a system.
Quarrels, fights and murders are the results of ignorance and an
ill-adjusted society.
With us every man, woman and child has a splendid private apartment,
to which they can retire at any moment. No one intrudes on them there.
Any one can leave any or all his social companions whenever he
pleases.
When the conditions are right, a thousand can live just as peaceably
together under one roof as two can, and even more so, for the very act
of living in small families like you do, is a sign that the conditions
are not right; and as long as the social and industrial conditions are
wrong, there can be no right society.
That a certain advance social state seems unattainable or even
dangerous may not be a sign that it is so. It may be only a sign that
those who think it injurious are not ripe for it at present that their
intellectual culture is not in tune with such a life. But it may just
suit some who are more advanced than those are who claim that it is
unattainable; or they, in time, may grow ripe for it themselves.
Perhaps our primitive ancestors … were cannibals, and they no
doubt believed that the desire for eating human flesh would never be
eliminated, and if it were eliminated the world would then not be
worth living in. But we have no desire to eat human flesh. It would be
very repugnant to us. The contemporaries of [the] Holy Inquisition no
doubt believed that society would crumble without the so-called
protection of that Holy Institution. But we know from a retrospective
view that it was a very cruel enemy of society. Again, … civil
courts that convicted, imprisoned, tortured and burned thousand upon
thousand of innocent people as witches during the witch mania,
undoubtedly thought that a person's life and property were not safe
without the protection or intervention of these civil tribunals; but
we now know that the more witches you killed the more rapidly they
increased, and that when you ceased killing them they all soon die of
their own accord. We know that there never was a witch; that this
belief was only a mental illusion, like thousand of your present
beliefs are; and we also know that the human family, with the advance
of intelligence, will gradually adjust itself in the line of the
completest life and greatest happiness.
CONTENTS
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