The Fifth Song is perhaps the most self explanatory of the Song of Seven. The verses of the Fifth Song are as follows: grow your own, keep water clean, build your home, warm yourself, band together. The purpose of the Fifth Song is to provide a guide for how to be independent. The first four components of the song relate to how an individual can live in an independent manner. The last component of the song relates the truth about how humans live.
The first verse: grow your own, explains the importance of having control of one’s food supply. If you do not grow your own food, you are dependent upon those who do grow food. Every link in the supply chain from which you obtain your food is an added level of dependency. When peoples flee from Empire, they seek out food to grow that is not readily taken back by empire. They grow root vegetables that can be stored and hidden in the ground, rather than easily confiscated grains. They grow things that are hardy and take less work to grow, rather than what produces the highest yield for the empire. They grow medicines and drugs so that they need not rely upon empire for their health. Even if they hunt and gather, having a victory garden as back up is a powerful tool of independence .
The second verse: keep water clean, explains the importance of clean water one health and survival. Waterborne diseases have killed hundreds of thousands through history. Indeed their simple love of a cup of tea may have aided the British in the building of their empire, boiling water for tea rendered the water much more sanitary. Nestle and other corporations have sought to privatize water and to force humans to buy this most essential component of life. Many governments have regulated or forbidden the practice of collecting rain water. The failure to keep water clean, and separated from human waste is what led to the cholera epidemic in London that birthed the study of epidemiology. Knowing how to collect, purify, and store water is the ultimate declaration of independence from Empire.
The third verse: build your home, speaks of the importance of controlling your own shelter. The Hungry Empire has worked very hard to keep people from having control of their own shelter. We rent it from landlords. We buy it from others, rather than building it ourselves. And even if we, ostensibly, own our homes, we must rent the land from the Empire. When the colonial governments seek to break the spirit of the indigenous populations, they separate them from their land: the trail of tears, the residential school system, the lost generation. Knowing how to build shelter is a revolutionary act. Knowing how to build a variety of types of permanent and impermanent shelters is the equivalent of having an arsenal one can bring to bear against the Empire.
The fourth verse: warm yourself, refers to the importance of maintaining homeostasis. This verse refers to both the ability to keep warm and the ability to keep cool. Humans live across the whole of the globe, and the environments in which we live are often marked by extreme temperatures. From the deserts of the Mideast, Africa, and Mongolia, to the polar regions of Canada, Lapland, and Siberia- humans live everywhere. An essential skill of independence is understanding how the human body loses and retains heat. When the empire seeks to displace the homeless peoples, it confiscates their methods of keeping warm. Knowing how to maintain homeostasis is not simply a tool of independence, it is a tool of survival.
The fifth verse: band together, articulates an essential tool of human natures. We are not solitary creatures. Humans must know how to survive on their own in order to retain their freedom, but they are not evolved to live alone. We are not leopards sleeping solitary in treetops. We are like the wolf and wildebeest. We are a social animal, the most social animal that ever evolved arguably. And so the purpose of the first four verses is to build skills that enable you to survive on your own, but also to be useful to a tribe. With the first four verses mastered, you can enter a tribe or group as an equal. You can join the group, and still retain the independence to walk away if the group ceases to be to your liking. The goal of the fifth song: independence, is to reach the sixth song: interdependence.
Recommended Reading
- The Barefoot Architect, by Johan van Lengen
- Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook, by David Werner, Carol Thurman, et al
- The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 