LIFE THERE

Thinking Inside the Box

On the American Home, Mystery Babylon and Oversized Coffins

I really marvel at the strength of spirit and resolve it must have taken for the people of Moscow to have burnt down there own homes so as not to have given quarter to Napoleon’s troops. I should think burning down one’s own home, be it a palace or humble cottage, would come close to being the greatest material sacrifice one can make, and yet this letting go of something so dear saved them. What a strange reversal we see today in North America where the house ends up consuming the people and society.

I am speaking of more than simply projecting into and identifying with a house to the point of being psychically enslaved, which I suppose is natural as the home encloses much of life and forms a mini-universe where our nightly dream world and domestic dramas happen. Today in the West there is some deeper occult process going on with the so-called “Housing Bubble”. It is more like Mystery Babylon: a multifarious system of control and manipulation so diabolically ingenious that no one can see it clearly, yet it is everywhere and nowhere, hidden in plain sight.

Today in North America the “Home” has been given such tremendous psychic investment, or mana, that it has become a central organizing principle of the economy and culture. That is to say, the buying, selling, financing, maintenance, furnishing, remodeling and speculating on property (today mostly suburban homes) is the main repository of human energy and resources, hence the term ‘ housing bubble’. This is really a bubble in more than one sense of the word. And add to the mix a surreal shift in the practice and understanding of home ownership, which is now so far removed from traditional notions that future historians will marvel at its fantastical qualities.

The housing bubble dynamic is fiendishly difficult to see clearly, so immersed is it with heavy emotional identification, psycho-linguistics and high level financial manipulation. Now however the spell is being broken. As I write the “housing bubble” is imploding and revealing its darker, deeper religious dimension. I mean more, much more than a big financially leveraged box for storing ‘stuff’, or as the ultimate consumerist meme that has spent itself. I see it as an intended form of entrapment.

First, let’s examine the term ‘home ownership’. Most North Americans have a rather loose, implicit, rule-of-thumb definition which seems to involve a legal title, much greater relative freedom to configure one’s domestic space and the potential to transact a sale. However, when you dispassionately examine this ‘ownership’ it looks much more like a highly contingent lease. You see you can’t normally own property without state obligations, as would be the case with a stove or telescope. This may seem trite and self evident, nevertheless there were periods in North American and European history when property could be owned absolutely, without regular monetary-tax-tribute. In fact, even today there are some rare, exceptional occurrences in North America where this is possible. It is very important that the illusion of control or ‘ownership’ be maintained, while at the same time incrementally removing more and more actual control from the resident. This is all done in the slow Fabian way, but always maintaining the simulation of ownership. This explains why you the reader is astonished reading this!

To put property ownership in a historical-cultural context one needs to understand the distinction between a fee simple title and an allodial title. An allodial title can best be compared to the commonplace notion of owning something, in that, while it can be forcibly or covertly taken from you, one does not have to pay a regular tribute to the state to keep it. In England for example, under English Common Law prior to Edward the Great, even a creditor could not legally seize the land or home (immovable) to liquidate debts. It is the closest one can come to absolute ownership.

A fee simple title is a feudalistic carry-over where originally a serf or freeman can buy or sell his titled land he must still pay a tribute-tax to his overlord-state to keep it. In principle the state has ultimate legal title to the land-property. Granted if one tries to explore the modern definition of fee simple ownership in legal dictionaries one’s head will spin with technical, convoluted and somewhat contradictory explanations; but in actual practice if the fee simple title holder withholds property taxes, income taxes, etc, the State can confiscate your property even if you own it ‘free and clear’ without a mortgage. And indeed it is worse if one considers Eminent Domain Seizure “for the Public Good” which today in the US could mean a highway or private shopping mall. So the concept of property ownership has become progressively emptied of meaning: that is why the legal definition has become so Byzantine and trying to get a clear picture of it is like being trapped in a Kafka novel.

What about mortgages to acquire the aforesaid home ownership? It is no secret that America is going berserk with debt today; and is it not odd that one rarely hears of the awful and consistent historical record of usury. Every major religion condemns it; usury is the second most referenced topic in the Bible, and is proscribed in Islam. Excessive debt has a long record of shredding the social fabric of societies – the proverbial “form of bondage”. Anyway, it is difficult to go through a day without having all manner of credit bait thrown before your feet to hook you into indebtedness, and all the while the credit and bankruptcy laws are becoming more severe. (It seems to me that this is being orchestrated by someone on high.)

A key feature of this process is that once in debt one gets pulled into a legal dimension of Commercial Law (sometimes referred to as lex mercatoria), the legal sphere of private merchants and the law of agencies, sales, insurance, carriage, debt, liens, bankruptcies, etc. Commercial law becomes a whole other layer of obligations and is like a soft net thrown over your life that can corrupt… well… biblically.

Today to purchase a home one is compelled to go into debt by transacting a mortgage. The term “mortgage” comes from Old Norman French meaning a death pledge. This was a relatively new kind of contract where one’s home and land could be claimed as collateral and security against a loan. Prior to its introduction to Northern Europe only chattel (movable objects) could be forfeited. Landed property could not be tied to debt obligations. So to lose one’s home and land to a creditor in Medieval Europe must have been a slow death sentence that I can barely imagine. Suffice it to say that a mortgage was about the worst possible usurious transaction, aside from perhaps indebting your descendants (something we acquiesce to today, it is called Sovereign Debt). Prior to the Norman invasion mortgages were outlawed, as they were an affront to God’s law and the natural person.

But where did the Normans get the idea of the mortgage or death pledge? It originated from Babylon, specifically from the Babylonian Talmud (circa 500 AD) and called a shetar or shtaroth: a contract containing the original Hebrew formula of “pledging all my goods, movable and immovable”. In fact it was still referred to as the Law of the Shetar or Starr in England until the 12th century. The shetar/mortgage was finally codified in Law by Edward the Great in 1285 as the Statute of Merchants. So this was the origin of the modern mortgage system. It came out of mysterious Babylon and is now integral to the banking system of the world.

Today a mortgage can be incurred to purchase a home with the fantastical twist of fractional reserve banking, where a commercial bank will create the principle of the loan “out of thin air” by the very act of lending (the Mandrake Mechanism).

Sit back and ponder this: a bank has the prerogative to create fiat money in the act of loaning, and charge interest on the principle it creates out of nothing while backed by the security of a real tangible structure. Does this not violate our instinctual feelings of justice and fairness, of value for value, in a transaction? One wonders if living in a home acquired under such terms is already a bad omen. Incidentally, with a typical 30-year mortgage of 4-6% one pays about two and a half times the nominal price at the end of the amortization period. One must depend on speculation, monetary inflation, and tax gimmicks to recoup one’s monetary investment. Interestingly enough, I have heard the very wealthy pay cash. The human mind has difficulty grasping mathematical geometric growth and and how quickly compound interest can grow. This was one reason of several for the prohibition against usury in the early Church.

And what of the built structure itself? From a structural and physical point of view the newly built home is a depreciating asset. How could the structure possibly increase in value? The general design life is about 60 years – about a typical human lifespan. From the time it is built most of the components will age and deteriorate at different rates, but roughly is a geometrical function of time. So while the first 5-8 years only requires decorative fine tuning and tweaking, the subsequent decade sees the deterioration accelerate with the need for new paint, floor coverings, water heater, etc. After 20 years costs climb exponentially, with a new furnace-heating system, and the bathroom and kitchen usually need remodeling. At 25-30 years the roof needs replacing, as well as significant plumbing and electrical repairs. Almost all homes built today use cheap ‘balloon framing’ which after 40 -50 years makes them prone to various forms of wood rot, hidden mold, creep deformation and foundational problems, all being inherent in this building style.

Quite often after 50 years these homes become unjustifiably expensive to maintain and many homeowners let the structure simply devolve without further upkeep. Perhaps this is appropriate; after all, while it is certainly possible to build a home to gracefully last 300 years, these structures were made to obsolesce in a typical lifetime. They were also designed in a period of great waste and excess, so as we enter a period of a long economic contraction these places will soon become millstones around the necks of their owners. Perhaps the next generation, living in a situation of resource scarcity, will consider these houses as unlivable abominations, considering how labour and resource intensive they are.

What about how one’s home is valued? It seems there is an ancient dialectic at play here. Two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle, in speaking of the perspective on the home, made the distinction between oikonomia (the root of economics) and chrematistics. Oikonomia being the management of the property and household to increase its use value to its inhabitants over the long run, whereas chrematistics involved the manipulation of property and wealth so as to maximize short term monetary exchange value to the owner. Use value versus market value. So this is an old cyclical story; even the ancient Greeks and Romans were well aware of the potential of either dynamic to assert itself. This partly explains why traveling across North America one sees such homogeneity and sterility in these vast suburban housing enclaves. The monetary speculative aspect dominates and consequently the cosmetic resale appeal is in the background and it is enforced. It would be so refreshing to see lush vegetable gardens or truly idiosyncratic, sustainable functional homes, instead of this soul withering experience that reeks of human vanity and waste. And isn’t it ironic when one considers the huge expenditure of energy and resources invested in the home building industry to hear it referred to with derision, e.g. “miserable plywood boxes”, or “stick framed junk”. Just think of the beautiful things that could have been done with the land considering the various alternative building styles, materials and schemes of urban horticulture. What a lost opportunity!

But what happens to the overall cultural life in such milieus? The best term I can think of is a depressive energy. As I alluded to earlier, so much time and energy gets funneled into the house that it becomes a kind of meta-object that contains the materiality of your life or a material life of things stored in this meta-object. And if the reader thinks I am being too bold with my prose style, then please find some Russians who sojourned in a typical American suburb and get their experience. You see, in this space of The Material World/Home/Suburbia/City, there is no significant countervailing cultural force to pull you out of this bubble, so you stew in it as if in some alchemical vessel. Your spirit gets fractured and projected into thousands of little mundane pieces – your spirit is finitized. There is also a rather peculiar kind of selfishness that seems to grow out of a hermetic domiciled existence – a self-centered heaviness of the spirit and in so many cases it seems some light goes out inside them, at which point the house becomes an oversized coffin.

So from a historical and traditional point of view this is a very unnatural deviant system. Now, if I were some supernatural demon this would be a near ideal setup to draw and entrap souls into a de-transcendentalized, coldly egotistical, and materialistic existence. The formula seems to go like this: first combine the lure of easy credit and other usurious instruments (like simulated fiat money) with the very deep primeval urge for a home. Even though both the credit/money and home are somewhat fake, the enticement is almost irresistible. Next give the cheapest possible home: something that lasts two generations; put the house in an artificial environment and dissociate the owners from the land – we can’t permit family farms or land based communities anymore. Then have wages, taxes and fees so calibrated that one is forced into a psychopathic busy-ness to pay for and maintain the property – which we can never truly own anyway with or without a continual tribute stream. Next, we compensate for the stress by buying furnishings, blinking gadgets, and junk from China, to stuff into our new plywood box.

At this point we are hooked into the sphere of Commercial Law, the legal sphere of money, debt, materiality and contracts. The logic here is to flatten any hierarchy of the spirit and trap it into a Talmudic universe of multifarious things and worldliness. Flatlanders! The coup de grace comes when the ideology of consumerism and Commercial Law reduces people to the status of things to be manipulated, even bought and sold. The compelling logic here is to keep one’s mind fixated on the kaleidoscopic reshuffling of mundane objects within one’s egocentric sphere. This is what most of this home building activity is about, and not use-value for posterity. The public realm or larger culture decays, and eventually the home building obsession takes on a toxic quality, but more importantly the players become, as I see it, materialistic robots. I think that with the addition of advertising, this Western process is much deeper and aggressive than the Bolshevik experiment was.

Getting back to my introductory vignette of Muscovites burning down their own homes to save their own and children’s lives from an invading alien force. North Americans would seem to sacrifice their own posterity to keep this material arrangement going. Home ownership can make people extremely reactive to change by crystallizing their lives into set routines, even as they covertly become debt slaves with no rights. I think that to get to this point there must have been a very sophisticated understanding of human psychology working beyond our conscious awareness. It just seems too systematic and coordinated.

When I was in the then Soviet Union a few years prior to its collapse, one theme that stood out for me from the many other glaring contradictions was the disdain of the youth towards the older generation who built and acquiesced to that society. I was born in the West, so I defer judgment as to whether it was fair or justified, but I can easily see a generational war or backlash happening in North America from a feeling of tremendous betrayal. What feeling would be more natural, living in urban settings that look like they have been blasted by a curse.

Dostoyevsky said the world can only be redeemed by Beauty. I believe he must have meant something more like an inspired deep vision almost emanating from another dimension. In that spirit, why can we not use our land and homes for inspired creations that can endure, edify and nurture the land? There are after all models for this – very exciting and beautifully redemptive patterns that do not rely on feudal land rights, debt based fiat money, usurious financial gimmicks, and self-destructing plywood boxes despoiling the land. I would think even very small humble steps towards real homes and communities that grow naturally would have at the very least a symbolically redemptive value; after all, we live in a concretely symbolic world, and to continue to live in a nutshell universe, when we know better, may lead to a hell of regret. There is a huge world of magical possibilities out there!