MC 23: The Tale of the Herd and the Dung Beetles
Since the time of ancient Greeks, allegories have been used to make a point. And given, my four year Millennia Challenge odessey began with this quote from Aristotle:
“Of a shoe, for instance, there is both it’s use to wear and its use as an object of barter; for both are modes of using a shoe”
Aristotle
it seems appropriate to use the same device to help make abstract concepts of value a little easier to explain.
Given the subject matter , you could be excused for describing my work as a vulgar theory of value, but a more generous description might be a proto-classical theory of value. A modern take on a theory of value that predates classical and neo-classical economics. To a time when value was a unified concept and exchange was considered a type of use and not an entirely different type of value.
In this myth of a Greek myth, Hermes, the mischievous god of finance, fates a herd of horses to value the frass of the dung beetle as highly as the beetle values the dung of the horse. What could possibly go wrong?
The Tale of the Herd and the Dung Beetle
In a tranquil meadow, roaming amongst the nymphs of the forest, was a herd of horses. Second only to those that pulled Apollo’s chariot across the sky, they spent their time eating the finest grass then running, jumping and doing a great many useful things that horses do.
Next to expanding their number, their most useful activity was to occasionally stop, widen their stance, raise their tales and push out a rich, moist, spherical ball to the relief of the dung beetles below.
“Lunch” the beetles would roar. Rolling the green balls away, burrowing, shredding and doing all manner of useful dung beetle activities. Until, they too having feasted on the useful nutrients, excreted their frass to the relief of the frass eating insects.
And so, it was and so it had been for millennia. Each animal engaged in the production of their own being and, though it was no part of any animal’s intention, the reproduction of that tranquil meadow.
“Absolute perfection” Artemis explained to her fellow god, Hermes.
Artemis the goddess the wilderness, wild animals, nature and the like admired “transitions”. Including those of the kind performed by the horse and the dung beetle. Her job was to enforce respect for the divine order played out in woodland.
“Zeus himself could not design a more efficient process” she proudly declared.
“But surely you’re mistaken” smiled Hermes.
With promethean hubris, the mischievous god announced that he, being smarter than their father, could do much better.
“I wager; I could squeeze out even more efficiency” he winked. “I’m the god of finance you know. Trust me. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
With that, and loving a good poo joke, he transformed the herd so that from then on the horses would eat the grass to produce the dung, but the dung beetle would pay the horse with their delicious frass. The horse no longer getting their energy from the grass but by exchanging their dung for frass!
Hermes had cursed the horse to value frass as highly as the beetle valued dung.
The archer, having let down her guard for but a moment, watched on in disbelief.
It was not immediate but, the vast woodlands, once covered in lushness, became noticeably sparse. Grass, being the key ingredient of dung was transformed with previously unknown industry into as many balls as a well-fed horse could produce. For only when the horse had produced the beetle’s dinner would the horse’s dinner be produced. So it was that the horse ate the grass to produce more dung to fill its belly with the frass of the dung beetle.
“Miraculous” spouted Hermes.
“Observe Artemis.” Hermes, putting on the voice of his teacher, the learned Agathos Daimon.
“The more grass is transformed into dung, the more demand there is for that waste from an increasing population of dung beetles. Who in turn cannot but help but produce more frass to be exchanged with the herd. Look how much more dung there is for those miserable shit eating bugs to consume”.
“Now, that’s perfection” he exclaimed.
“The demand for excrement in perfect equilibrium with the supply of excrement.”
He paused, returned to his natural character and laughed, “You see, one man’s shit really is another man’s dinner”.
But Artemis did not see the joke. “You mean, perfectly imperfect” she scowled. Being the goddess of the wilderness and transitions, she knew there was a natural limit to this abomination. Once the horse could eat no more the madness would stop and the natural, divine order would return.
But Hermes being no one’s fool, had one more trick. “You’re right, but I know what to do”.
“Yes” frowned Artemis.
“Remember that Thessalian King. You know the one”.
“You mean that vandal, Erysichthon”.
“Yes! That’s the one. He made our sister so made when he cut down that oak tree” squealed Hermes. Rolling about in the delight of the company of his even brighter idea.
Artemis, instantly realising what Hermes intended to do, raised her silver bow toward her half- brother, but it was too late. The god had placed the same curse on the herd as their half -sister, the goddess Demeter, had placed on that king. The horses would no longer just eat frass, their hunger for it would now be unquenchable.
At first, the dung beetles could not believe their good fortune.
Once their kind struggled to find enough food, now excrement rained down every day like a clock work monsoon. An almost infinite variety of waste arrived every day. Completely undigested hay, oats, wheat was now all on the menu. Roots and all. There was a rich brown ball for even the fussiest beetle. All they needed to do was keep pooping frass to exchange for the dung. Pupae told from the earliest age that “if you don’t shit we all die. Keep pooping!” There were even schools dedicated to teaching the beetles how to produce the most frass.
Until, one day all they seemed to do is eat dung and produce frass. There was either no time to do anything else and when there was time, no one could remember how or why they once rolled the stuff. And as the day’s past, the horses, having no reason to eat anything nutritious, the herd turned to eating whatever took the least energy to process into dung. Afterall, it’s not like the dung beetles had much of a choice. They’d want what they got.
The beetles could be heard to complain that dung was not what it used to be. The wiser beetles even gave it a name “enshittification”. The dung became impossibly large but empty of energy. How could it be otherwise. Not only had the horses realised that they could get a better frass return from eating the poorest roughage than the best, but the beetles had stopped performing their unpaid work that had yielded the horse the highest quality grass and thus the juiciest meals. Turning the soil, transporting nutrients and providing all manner of “ecosystem services” to the once healthy meadow. Whose protest song grew faint and melancholy, as the Anemoi blew wind through what remained of the dying grass to produce no more than a whimper.
But the younger beetles had no time to complain. Cursed to only consume horse dung, found themselves having to process more dung just to survive. Unable even to find time to lay their larvae, there were now fewer beetles to produce the frass demanded by the horse in exchange for their dung that grew sour and tasteless.
“My insects and Hesperides apples are all gone. The fields are dust and poor dung beetles are turning themselves inside out to get through the day” exclaimed Artemis. “And, look at the state of my horses.” Emaciated they could barely move for the frass they horded up and protected from the thieving flies and each other.
The frass eating insects that had once eaten the beetles waste, fly around, pollinate and do other useful frass eating insect activities had all starved. The horses unwilling to share even the smallest morsel of frass, guarded it. Convinced that their lives depended on having the most frass, there was no frass for the pollinating insects. Their weight of what would never be, more than all the King Midas gold. Taken by the same god who, when only a child had stollen Apollo’s horses.
Now, before Artemis own eyes, he was slowly stealing the life from not only the herd but the whole forest.
The fields, now bare of all varieties of grass. The horses had turned to eating all the flowers. “The leaves will be next” she sighed.
In no time at all, Hermes had done what even the primordial deity Thanatos (who we met in MC19) could not. Thanatos was the personification of evil. The son of Nyx, merciless and indiscriminate, he was hated by the gods and mortals alike. Even Hades, the god of the underworld hated him. Where as death produced souls for the underworld, thantos stole the life that would never be born denying Hades his souls. Thanatos was responsible for emptiness from which no life springs, flows and dies before journeying across the Styx. The one true evil.
Though a minor figure in Greek mythology. Thanatos (or at least a version of him) has gone on to be far more infamous in the Marvel and mortal world.
But Thantos had never figured out how vanquish life itself. No sooner had he blown out one candle out and all the lives the lives that would never be born, than 10 more flickering flames would emerge. Thantaos could take a life and a world but never defeat life itself in the way Hermes had done. “I’ve been going about it all wrong” grinned the black theta as he scrolled his new affirmation and tucked it away.
"I am not a god. I am an economist”
"Now, what to with this information" he wondered, as the mortals playing with fire caught his eye.
The panicked Artemis drew a deep breath and thundered so loudly that it startled the goats on Amorgos “What have you done, Hermes”.
But the god of finance was nowhere to be found. Recognising the great and terrible mischief he had caused he transformed himself into a snake and slid away.
Today there’s only a barren empty wasteland where that tranquil meadow once flourished. Legend has it, that once there was nothing left to transform into dung, the beetles that had not died from over work producing frass, starved. And the horses, like the cursed Erysichthon, once there was no more frass, it is said that they consumed their own bodies until nothing was left of them - other than this apocryphal story.
“The business of business is to do the business .”
Doing the business has long been a euphemism or polite way to avoid being too explicit about the urge to use the more apt, restless room. But have you ever considered how the things we buy and the money we buy it with are a bit like poo.
I suspect not.
Humans generally hate poo and are disgusted by it. I suspect it’s the very last place a well read and educated person would go looking in their seach to understand the cause of the polycrisis consuming the planet. I’m confident Karl Marx, Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes never consulted their toilet for inspiration.
But, consider a can of a fizzy beberage. The company that produced it gets no direct value from its product. Processing the sugar, carbonated water, caffeine, colour and flavouring etc. into an aluminium can but extracting no value for itself from the process. Likewise, being a corporation it has no pleasure from the bite of the carbonation, the hit of dopamine or the rush of energy. Unable to extract any value from their product, the value in the can remains completely undigested by the company. But for the existence of ambient market, the can is indistinguishable from a waste product.
Similarly, money can also be considered a type of waste.
The individual who transformed their time, labour and energy into that can may have extracted know how and experience but otherwise are unable to process their work into anything useful but the money. But money, having no sugar or fats can’t be broken down to produce energy, in its physical form. Again, but for the ambient market, money bears an uncanny resemblance to a waste product. Useful only when the use of it is lost.
But what of the money in the hands of the producer?
Only a part of the money ever seems useful to the company. Thus, a portion of it is useful and not waste. Some processed into wages to pay for the raw materials, labour and energy to make their product and to pay their marketing agencies and of course, the lawyers. But a good part of remaining portion may still go “undigested” and available for export in the form of dividends and buybacks. Which again looks a lot like poo.
Why do I suspect a divided or a buyback is a waste product?
Because, as a rule, the act of paying either the dividend or the buyback price has an almost imperceptive effect on the operations and activities of the company. In much the same way that defecating is not considered harmful among animals, losing the use of excess profits to shareholders is not considered harmful to the corporation. Indeed, company are encouraged to be regular and to proudly announce their fiscal movements. Put simply, if a company has no use for its reserves or has so much that it cannot use and decides to declare a dividend, under the right conceptual microscope, it’s hard to distinguish that portion of profit from a kind of incorporeal dung. In this sense, the shareholders should ideally be seen as kind useful dung beetle.
Of course, when I say poo, I don’t mean faeces, crap, dung of frass or any other biological excrement. I mean things with the characteristics of poo. More precisely, things which the producer can’t extract value from and therefore can do no useful work within the boundaries of the producer. And, having no value to the producer, the producer experiences an irrepressible urge to export. The company that produced the can is no less compelled to dispatch its beverages to the market than a bear to dispatch it’s shit to the woods. And, as I hope to explain in my next post, for much the same reason.
When I set out to research the concept of value in use in in 2021, I had no idea I was developing a scatological theory of value. But realising that economics was more the study of scat than scarcity, I have spent the past 12 month methodically working through the implications of this potentially nontrivial realisation.
But wishing to avoid (or at least minimise) being labelled coprologist, I began thinking more mythologically. Less logos and more mythoi may be required if this new vulgar science was ever to take its place alongside the dismal science.
The Greek myths never shied from taboo subject matter. Next to Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother, the idea of developing a tale that explored the dangers of exchanging waste products seemed tame (if not a little crude).
Of course, the Tale of the Herd and the Dung Beetles is a myth of a Greek myth. It retells a story perhaps too unimaginable even for the ancient Greeks. Could there be anything more unnatural than horses and insects fated to eat each other’s shit.
But in thinking mythologically about the more modern myth - supply and demand, the concept of equilibrium, maximization of profits, counter- value - I hope to expose a truth about economics that is more powerful and makes more accessible the reasoned explanation to come.
The Tale of the Herd and the Dung Beetles is an invitation to think about the causes of environmental and social decay and collapse in way that, in some measure, defies all but our common sense. For as fantastic the Greek myths, they are still retold because there is some element of truth re-enforced by what we experience, if not what we learn.
The veracity of my tale will therefore not be measured in the accuracy of the story, but by those with the courage to retell it.