Nothing About This Is Natural

A mendicant is a beggar -- someone who goes from place to place asking for food, money, or material support. In many pagan and pre-Christian traditions, mendicant practices were built directly into seasonal rituals. Going door to door wasn't shameful. It wasn't criminal. It was expected.

As Mark Green writes:

"In Pagandom, we remember many holiday traditions rooted in mendicant practices... the special wonders of traditions involving house-to-house beggary, and the deeper meanings associated with many of them."

What matters to me about these traditions isn't their charm. It's their function.

They were systems of redistribution.

Ways of making sure excess didn't pile up in one place while other people starved. Ways of reminding the wealthy that what they had wasn't sealed off from the rest of the world just because they wanted it to be.

Human societies -- and nature itself -- have always created ways to redistribute resources. Not out of kindness, but because imbalance eventually kills systems. Ecosystems regulate excess automatically. Human cultures used rituals, custom, and social pressure to do the same.

Late-stage capitalism completely ignores this.

In our current system, hoarding is treated as moral. Accumulation is framed as intelligence!? The more you take, the more "successful" you're considered -- even when what you're taking is wildly beyond what you could ever need.....

What we're living through isn't natural. It's been enforced by rich white men.

In the United States especially, wealth and power have been historically concentrated in the hands of white men, and the systems that protect that concentration are working exactly as designed. This isn't a moral accusation -- it's a historical fact. Laws, policing, borders, and economic structures were built to preserve that power and keep it from being redistributed.

And when those systems are threatened, violence suddenly becomes "necessary."

Many of the poorest people I've known weren't obsessed with consumption. They weren't hoarding. They weren't trying to extract more than they needed. They were focused on surviving, staying connected, and finding small pockets of stability.

At the same time, massive amounts of wealth sit untouched, protected by law and force, while people go hungry in a country built on stolen land and enslaved labor....

When redistribution systems disappear, pressure builds. Historically, when imbalance reaches a certain point, correction happens -- sometimes slowly, sometimes violently. Nature doesn't tolerate empty stomachs next to vulgar piles of wealth forever.

Mark Green describes mendicant traditions as pressure valves. A very good way to put it. They were ways to release tension before things broke.

Where are they now?

Instead, the system relies on police, prisons, borders, and fear to keep things in place. To make sure the people doing the labor don't realize how badly they're being fucked. To make revolution feel impossible.

Hold on to your truth. "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most important directive." - George Orwell 1984