by Brett Stevens on April 4, 2015

If I had a billion dollars sitting in a bank account, I would buy up a small town in middle America. Someplace green, with fresh air and clean water, and well out of the way. Far from major freeways and big cities. Isolated.

There I would build normal-sized houses and invite people I esteem to set up home life. Money could purchase new infrastructure and set up businesses for them to have jobs. The town could quietly incorporate and stay out of the news.

There, their children would grow up in normal homes on normal streets. Dads would be home in mid-afternoon and not much of anything would happen. People would live in a silence of themselves and the woods, and have to invent their own fun and purpose in life.

But what they would have would be the ultimate wealth: healthy normalcy. They would grow up without doubt, seeing the best of life, and by the abundance of unstructured solitude they experienced, they would come to know themselves and their world in a depth that has not been experienced by more than a handful of people in centuries.

Their lives would be filled with beauty and not the ever-present self, like a cancer demanding to be so important the world must retreat to a place within the self, like a small ghetto where every concept is reduced to bright primary colors, simple numbers, and yes/no judgments of its safety.

Most would not say that this is wealth. To them, wealth means living in the downtown of a big city, in a condominium or urban house, without much exposure to nature or anyone but those like them. In this life, the ego takes center stage by being important, but health and knowing oneself, much less knowing the world, take a distant secondary importance.

We have many wealthy people, but few have actual financial power. They have a position that they rent with their time in order to maintain a lifestyle, and they are dependent on that lifestyle like an addict on heroin because it supplies their self-esteem.

In the meantime, out among the birds and trees, others live normal lives and are richer than any of the suited charlatans and credentialed miniature kings that are held up to us as an ideal by those who benefit from our conformity.

Tags: mayberry, secession, wealth

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