Teach a Man to Fish

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Chinese proverb.


In our current global system we are like Oscar Wilde's cynic, we portend to know "the price of everything and the value of nothing." We think we know what things are worth, but dedicate little effort to examine whether this belief is accurate. Price is a convention, a covenant of sorts, but value is the fulfillment of a potential. As houses sit empty and people live on the streets we sense the irony in the lost value of the empty home and the cruelty that price enacts on those who would see its value fulfilled but lack the means if not the need. 



As we individually accumulate as much as we possibly can during our lives we often forget to asses what is true value. The huge disconnect between price and value is distorted and blurred by greed and individuality. The concept of value is replaced by price, which serves greed and individuality much better, often to the detriment of society. 


So after centuries of "progress" we find ourselves in a society that produces waste for profit; that values price over value; that creates useless, valueless products for the sole purpose of continuing the diversion of value from most of the world's population to a small group who can continue to use that value to increment the speed and breadth of the diversion. It's a spiral that leads to monopolies, plutocracies, and oligarchies.


Since human society is the expression of the collective human experience, we can only conclude that the systems of governments and religions that have dominated the life of human civilization have imprinted the scheme of society so profoundly that adherence to it is all but guaranteed.


I see governments and religions as the proverbial fish. They are given or, more accurately, imposed. Rather than "feed a man for a day", I see the day as one man's lifetime. "Teach a man to fish" means educate. Education is the only way to change the precepts; to understand the imposed rules of our world. Once the rules are recognized and understood, then we are not only free to break them, but to recognize that breaking them does not alter them.  


Societies rules are somewhat like democracies, they exist because a majority of people agree on them, like political borders. But like political borders, if a majority were to decide they didn't exist, then they would cease to do so. Abstract human constructs govern our frames of reference. We are free to paint whatever we like within the frame on the canvas, and this freedom often overwhelms our senses, preventing us from realizing that something exists outside the frame, and that our canvas is limited by this frame.


Education can remove the frame. It can reveal the entire span of the canvas. It can see past the rules and into the framework upon which the rules are constructed. It could even provide the opportunity to create new frameworks upon which new rules could be created. I believe that it's the only way to create the potential for a real change I'd like to see: a world where we know the value of everything and have no need for prices.