Drinking From the Pump Well
How LARPers can discredit the causes they care for.
When I was young, my family worked on a large farm owned by a rather eccentric wealthy lady. My family was part of the co-op—getting food in return for working in the fields and with the animals—and my mom was a member of the board. At the farm there worked a lot of rich hippies, usually in management or sales. These were boomers who, after decades of corporate work, had decided to live out their dreams of pastoral farming. The few people who knew what they were doing often got frustrated by them.
I can vividly remember my grandfather, an organic farmer himself, visiting and doing nitrogen tests, baffled by the poor soil management at the farm. Even when my grandfather told these “managers” everything they needed to do, they still did nothing. It’s funny to reflect how different we were: a lower middle-class family who were working there because it was the only affordable way of getting organic food.
There was an expensive private school which owned a facility on the farm’s property. To those students, the farm was for fun little excursions. For my brother and I, it meant that any time the students were given a run of the place, he and I had to make sure they hadn’t left a gate open, so that the sheep wouldn’t run off or a fox wouldn’t enter the chicken coop.
The worst example I remember of their feckless behavior was during one of the spring parties, with a maypole dance in the day and a large buffet in the evening. I remember all of the kids out in the field, my brother and I trying to keep them out of the woods so they wouldn’t disturb the chickens. Feeling thirsty, we went to the pump well. This was normal, we had drunk from the pump well countless times after hard fieldwork on hot summer days. I loved the mineral-ly water that came out, to hang my face under it as I pumped the wrought iron handle.
You can imagine my anger when I was smugly informed by one of the students not to drink from it, that it was unsafe. “I work here, I have drunk from this a lot of times, I know it’s safe,” I told him. “Drinking water from a well is dangerous, and I go here too,” he replied, and when I saw his smirk I could feel myself being judged for working here instead of visiting from school, I could tell that he believed himself to know more than me, and that he believed this place to be his.
But he had never cleaned out the corpses of chicks after a fox invaded, in the sweltering heat of the incubator room, choking on air full of feathers and shit. He had never gotten attacked by geese, spent hours weeding the gardens, wheeled manure out to the dung pile, gotten shocked by the electric fence, watched the chickens get butchered, or fought to stop the Rose of Sharon from taking over the vegetable fields. He had never drunk from the pump well after a long day in the sun.
Ultimately it would be the adult form of him that led to my family leaving the farm all together. Visitors who believe themselves to know more than the people toiling there. Not just to know more, but to actually look down on those working there, even though the fact of them working there is exactly what makes them know more in the first place. We call them LARPers now, and they show up everywhere.
The omnipresence of LARPers in any political or social movement leads to much of their discredit, not only in organic farming but in anything else as well: from middle class white kids with USSR flags in their room or staunch tradcath sedevacantists or the average millennial with an office job calling themselves a socialist or anarchist. And it’s unsurprising, a large number of people in the developed world have not had experience with work which isn’t alienated. They do technical work, their labor divorced from any connection to the land, or even any tangible value creation.
With so much of the productive power held in the developing world, or an increasingly small and exploited pool of farmers or truckers in the developed world, the people who hold radical ideas about worker’s rights or agriculture have no functional power to carry them out. They have so little relation to productive labor that there is not even a concept of its necessity. These same people then proclaim what is necessary for the working class through hyper-specific political ideologies; reminiscent of the smirk of that boy when he saw me drinking from the pump well.
“The omnipresence of LARPers in any political or social movement leads to much of their discredit, not only in organic farming but in anything else as well: from middle class white kids with USSR flags in their room or staunch tradcath sedevacantists or the average millennial with an office job calling themselves a socialist or anarchist.”
People are so alienated that they lack the vocabulary to articulate what they need to change their circumstances. People know that something is wrong, that we aren’t meant to live this way, so they try to change the world through ideas. They pursue their abstract ideologies in the hope that material changes will follow. It was the same with the founders of my childhood farm who pursued an idyllic plan of co-operative farming. Their problem was not only that they lacked the expertise on how to make the farm productive, but that they were so caught up in their idealistic vision that they actually resisted making the farm productive.
We learned after years of working there that the idea was not actually for the farm to be productive and make good food, but simply to be educational. The farm saw productivity almost as some kind of failing, something that took away from the utopian purity of the project (despite it being propped up by trust funds). My family were looked down upon: we didn’t share the LARPers wealthy liberal culture, we went to church, we were cynical about the place's idealism...but we knew how to make the farm work, and could have helped make it a successful project.
Real change doesn’t come from abstract narratives, nor does it come from those who are visitors. It comes from the people who are in the trenches, doing the work, who don’t have a narrative but instead the productive power, motivation, and expertise. They can make ideas based on what functions, rather than trying to create ideas and forcing them to function.
Writing and art suffer from this idea that they are powerful forces of change, and not things that are purely beautiful. It’s why we get so many insufferable, hamfisted pieces of media convinced of their own self-importance. It’s also why the organic farming movement, among many others, is still dominated by the professional managerial LARPing class. But my grandfather, whom I mentioned above, started a farm long before this one.
“Real change doesn’t come from abstract narratives, nor does it come from those who are visitors. It comes from the people who are in the trenches, doing the work, who don’t have a narrative but instead the productive power, motivation, and expertise.”
My dad and grandparents built their farm from nothing on cheap and unproductive land in a remote and freezing area. They not only made it productive, but trained countless people over the years to do organic farming too. Many of them never continued. They got disillusioned when they found out how hard the labor was, how much commitment it took, how far a real farm was from their fantasy. But many of them stayed, and some even have farms of their own now.
We can have autonomous communities of people working and living together, creating parallel institutions to the ones crumbling around us, not guided by abstract ideas but by practice and cooperation. We can live close to the land in a way that is sustainable and healthy for our bodies and minds, preserve what is important to us, hold power locally, and keep the world from becoming globalized, homogenous, isolated, and inhuman, with all connection to our land and our ancestors destroyed. We can have a world with space for nature, for indigenous and pastoral ways of life, for everything which modernity crushes in its mad lust for progress.
But that means we must not be visitors. We have to actually get dirty and work in the field. We have to forget what we think we know. We have to drink from the pump well.
