MC 23: The Tale of the Herd and the Dung Beetles
In a transquil meadow, roaming amongst the nymphs of the forest, was a herd of horses second only to those pulled Apollo’s chariot. Spending their time eating the richest grass then running, jumping and doing a great many useful things that horses do. Occasionally stopping, widening their stance, raising their tales and pushing out a moist, spherical ball to the relief of the dung beetles below.
“Lunch” the beetles would raw. Rolling the green balls away, burrowing, shredding and doing all manner of useful dung beetle activities. Until, they too having fed on the useful nutrients, excreted their frass to the to the relief of the frass eating insects.
“Absolute perfection” Artemis explained to her fellow god, Hermes.
Artemis the goddess the wilderness, wild animals, nature and the like had a particular interest in and admired “transitions”. Including those of the kind performed by the horse and the dung beetle. Guarding them and enforcing respect for the divine order played out in woodland. “Zeus himself could not design a more efficient process”.
“But surely you’re mistaken” smiled Hermes.
With promethean hubris, the mischievous god announced that he, being smarter than their father could do better.
“I wager, I could squeeze out even more efficiency” he winked. “I am also the god of finance you know. Trust me. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
With that, and loving a good poo joke, Hermes transformed the herd so that from then on the horses would no longer get their energy from the green grass, but the brownish frass of the beetle.
Moreover, the trickster showed an uncharacteristic interest in equity.
“Why should those insects get their dinner for free. Surely they should exchange their excrement in equal measure. It’s only fair.”
The archer 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 unkown 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 waste to fill its belly with the frass of the dung beetle.
“Miraculous” spouted Hermes.
“Observe Artimis.” 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 miseable shit eating bugs to consume”.
“Now, that’s perfection” exclaimed Hermes.
“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, pefectly imperfect” she responded . 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 cut down that oak tree” squealed Hermes. Rolling about in the delight of his own bright 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 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 could eat anything else.
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 they did anything else, but the beetles had stopped performing their unpaid work for the grass. 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.
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 flies and each other.
The frass eating insects that had once eaten the beetles waste, fly around, pollinate and do other useful frass easting insect activities had all starved. Their weight, more than all the King Midas gold, stolen by the same god who, when only a child had stollen Apollo’s horses. Now, before Artemis own eyes, he was openly stealling 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 only that primordial deity Thanatos (who we met in MC19) could do. Thanatos was the personification of death. The son of Nyx, merciless and indiscriminate, he was hated by the gods and mortals alike. He brought the emptiness from which no life springs and flows. The one true evil.
“What have you done”.
But Hermes was nowhere to be found. Recognising the great mischief he had caused he tranformed 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 the horses had eaten everything, the beetles that had not died from over work producing frass, starved. And the horses, like the cursed Erysichthon, consumed their own bodies until nothing was left of them - other than this story.
Have you ever considered how the things we buy and the money we buy it with are a bit like poo.
I suspect not.
Consider a can of coke. The Coca Cola Company get’s no value from it’s product. Processesing the sugar, carbonated water, cafeine, colour and flavoring 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 dopameine 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, a can of coke is indistuighable from a waste product.
Similarly, the money can be considered a type of waste.
The individual who tranformed their time, labour and energy into that can of coke may have extracted know how and experience, but otherwise was 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 Coca Cola Company?
Only a part of the money ever seems useful to the Coca Cola Company and therfore not waste but a source of value. 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 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 buy back 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 encorage 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 a kind useful dung beetle.
Of course, when I say poo, I don’t mean feaces, 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 Coca Cola Company is no less compelled to dispatch its beverages to the market as the bear it’s shit in 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 scatalogical 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 non trivial realisation.
But wishing to avoid (or at least minimise) being labeled coprologist, I began thinking more mythologically. Less logos and more mythos may be required if this new vulgar science was ever to take its place along side the dismsal science.
The greek myths never shyed from taboo subject matter. Next to opediues 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 liitle 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 others shit.
But in thinking mythologically about the more moderns myth - supply and demand, the concept of equilibrium, maximization of profits - I hope to expose a truth about economics that is more powerful and makes more acessible the reasoned explanation to come.
The Tale of the Herd and the Dung Beetles, is an invitation to think about the causes of enviromental 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-inforced by what we experience, if not what we learn.
The veracity of my tale will not be measured in the accuracy of the story, but by those with the courage to retell it.