The Barn
| If I painted you a picture, drew you a small piece of wisdom, I’d be glad to know you looked, and smiled at it, being a naive start. |
| If the picture was rough, and the lines smudged, I’d be glad for your help, to paint your insight, did your part. |
| And as we toiled and worked, we’d find the time to smile and enjoy, looking at what we had created so far. |
| And given God’s grace, we’d smile some more, until it took our fancy to improve it some more. |
A man called Mango-Man is living on an island called Fruitopia and all he wishes to do is to surf all day. Unfortunately he finds that most of his time is spent cutting firewood, picking mango’s and collecting fresh water. Often he misses the best waves doing the work he has to do to survive. He comes up with a plan to ensure that he won’t be burdened with these trivial tasks so that he can spend all his time making surf boards and surfing.
He decides to work very hard for five years of his life building a huge barn where he can store all the energy necessary to his survival. He works non-stop building the barn and collecting a huge stash of wood and mango’s. He builds huge tanks where he can store fresh water. Even though he works hard he simply can’t complete the project in the time he thought. He underestimated the time it took to build the barn itself .
It was a massive barn. He needed three hundred and sixty five thousand mangos, more than two million litres of water, and a million logs of wood. He had to collect all that and build the barn for the mangos and wood. He had to make storage tanks for all the water. They were more work to build than collecting the wood, food and water he needed.
Eventually he completed his project, his massive barn, and had stocked it with enough stuff to last the rest of his life. In the beginning life was great. He could surf all day, everyday, and whenever he needed something he could just go to his barn and get it. He had done all the work he had needed to and now he could just sit back and enjoy life.
Unfortunately there was a problem. It started with the mango’s. Even though his barn was cool he found that the mango’s he had collected where slowly going off. His life time’s worth of mango’s were slowly decaying. He decided to make mango jam, but he ended up spending so much time making jam jars to store this jam. He also found that a man can’t live on mango jam alone. So he resorted to having to go back to collecting mango’s again. Still, he had his wood and water.
A couple of years and a few leaks in his barn later his wood had started to rot. Again decay had set in and all his hard work was wasting away. Rats had eaten away at his water tanks and they had started to leak. All the work he had done was for nothing, all the energy he had stored was leaking away. Eventually he was back to where he had begun.
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| The Island of Fruitopia |
After giving the problem some thought he decided it would be better not to try and store the energy he needed, but rather to build a contraption that would produce the energy he needed as he needed it. He worked hard for five years building this machine. Once it was completed he wanted to have to do as little work as possible.
He started off by building an aqueduct from the faraway river that would continuously supply him with fresh water. He built a wood cutting contraption that worked off the flowing water from his aqueduct and he tilled the land and made a mango orchard right next to his house. He called it the ‘Fundament’ because it formed the foundation of living.
Once the Fundament was done he went back to surfing each day. At the end of each day he could get fresh water straight away. He could collect mango’s from right outside his house, and his wood cutting machine was always working cutting his wood for him. It was almost the same as collecting what he needed from his barn, except that with the Fundament nothing ever went rotten or decayed. He had built a machine that collected what he needed from his environment as he needed it.
Mango-Man was really enjoying life. All he did was surf waves and make new and better surf boards. The other people living on Fruitopia began to wonder how he could be doing this, and one day a few of them came and asked him. He showed them the Fundament, the infrastructure he had built, and how it did his work for him. They asked him if they could also use his machine. He told them that he did not mind, but they would also have to work on it for five years of their life just as he had done.
So a few of the Fruitopians joined in and helped Mango-Man with the Fundament. The idea was simple enough, “Improve the project I have started” said Mango-Man. The few helpers extended the aqueduct to their houses. More mango-plantations were planted. And a few more wood cutting contraptions were built. When the first set of workers had worked their five years and retired, they joined Mango-Man at the waves. They too had all their basic requirements sorted.
Not surprisingly, more and more people wished to help Mango-Man with the Fundament. Again he said: “Not a problem, just keep making it better”. And they did. Mango-Man laid down three laws that would ensure that the Fundament stayed true to its purpose. He called these the laws of production. They were there to ensure that the ‘barn’ each person built would never decay. Mango-Man said that if these laws were ever broken, the Fundament would break. They were:
Inevitably, there was the Dodo incident when the Fruitopians broke the first law, and there was the night the Milkyway disappeared when the Fruitopians broke the second law, and the time when jam lost its virginity when the third law was broken, but after that things worked just fine...
Eventually the project was extended across the whole little village where Mango-man lived. Other villages along the coast started to join in and a network of mango-plantations, aqueducts and logging machines developed. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. The Fundament even extended into Ivory Tower.
Ivory Tower was the most beautiful city of all the villages and towns in Fruitopia. It was right in the centre of Fruitopia, and all roads led to Ivory Tower. Its walls were white marble. Every street was lined with statues of marble. Every house was an expression of art. Every garden tended to perfection. And at the centre of Ivory Tower was the Free Market.
Stall owners at the Free Market started to use the Fundament to get the stuff they needed to produce their wares. The mango-jam stall owner used the mangos from the fundament, just like the black smith got the wood for his fire there. Everybody got their water there too. More and more stalls started to pop up at the Fee Market, and more and more people started to use the Fundament, even if they had not worked on it.
The people that had worked on it came to mango-man and complained. They said how can we stop people from free-riding. “Well”, said mango-man, “that is simple! We’ll make Banana-Bucks that you can use to buy some water, a few mangos and some fire wood. We’ll give everybody that works on the Fundament a lifetime’s supply of Banana-Bucks and then they can use those tokens to buy what they need. “It’ll be your virtual barn” said Mango-Man. The stack of Banana-Bucks money earned at the Fundament is exactly the same as building a barn containing lifetimes supply of Mango’s, Wood and Water. And as long as the Fundament kept on going, the Barn would never decay.
Ofcourse as soon as he said this people flooded him with questions. “How many mangos can you buy with a Banana-Buck?” and “How many Banana-Bucks do we each get?”. Mango-man gave these questions some thought and came up with the laws of wealth. “The Laws of Money are there to make sure that we each get sufficient to be happy now and in the future” he said. They were:
The Fruitopians looked at the laws and thought they were kind of strange. “Why should a barn always cost 3.65 Million Banana-Bucks?” they asked. Mango-Man explained that when he built his first barn, the one that rotted away, he calculated how many mango’s, litres of water and logs of wood he would need for the rest of his life. He said he planned to live 100 years. Each day he needed 10 mango’s, 70 litres of water and 30 logs of wood. His barn needed to hold 100x365x10 = 365 000 mangos, 100x365x70 = 2.555 million litres of water, and 100x365x30 = 1,095 million logs of wood. It was a big barn.
If a mango costs 1 Banana-Buck, 1 litre of water costs 1 Banana-Buck, and a log of wood costs 1 Banana-Buck, then to buy 10 mangos, 70 litres of water and 30 logs of wood would cost 100 Banana-Bucks. “So for a whole lifetime, we all need 100x365x100 = 3.65 Million Banana-Bucks to make up our barns”.
After working at the Fundament you got your money, or rather your virtual barn. And at the end of a hard days surf, you get your mango’s, water and firewood from the Fundament. Banana-Bucks were tokens representing your virtual barn, instead of the real one that you could have built, except that it would have rotted away.
“The other Laws of Money are to ensure that all the Fruitopians were wealthy, not only in terms of what they could get at the Fundament, but also in terms of what they could buy at the Free Market. Really they are all about making sure that the Banana-Bucks keep their value.”
At the Free-Market the mango-jam seller, Brand, who was a good friend of Mango-Man, decided to start selling his mango-jam for Banana-Bucks. Some of the Banana-Bucks he got for selling his jam he used at the Fundament to buy the mango’s, but he could pocket the difference. Lots of other stalls cottoned on to this idea, and started to do the same thing. Everything at the Free-Market started to get priced in Banana-Bucks.
And it worked out brilliantly. After the Fundament had become part of the Fruitopians society, everything started to go better. Even the Free-Market was busier than ever before. Unfortunately, as time went by, the Fruitopians started to discover that their virtual barns did not contain enough stuff anymore. Their living standards had changed, and instead of just 70 litres of water a day, they now all wanted 140 litres a day.
The people wanted to change the size of the average barn, and that was no problem because according to the fifth law (The average barn could only get bigger), it was possible, but how much bigger could they make it? Mango-Man said that they should make it big enough so that everyone could be happy as long as they broke none of the other 7 laws
And that is how Banana-Bucks got started. Long after Mango-Man died the Fundament was still going. And the average barn still cost 3.65 Million Banana-Bucks even though it was filled with lots of different stuff. There were still many problems they faced in life, but the Fruitopians never worried about the basics of survival again.