For those of you who live under a rock, House Greyjoy is a fictional dynastic family in the fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice, best known via the TV series Game of Thrones. House Greyjoy are basically sailors, pirates and raiders who live on some islands off the coast of Westeros, the main continent where the story takes place.
But I’m not really that interested in the house itself. I am only interested in their house motto: We Do Not Sow. Basically, House Greyjoy are committed to not doing anything productive. How can one possibly defend defend that kind of motto?
Well, let me start by referring you to the essay that got me thinking about this, entitled “Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: The Growth Revolution, Part I”. In it, the author divides human civilization into three phases: pre-civilization, civilization, and modern civilization.
In pre-civilization, people lived as hunter-gatherers. Then they invented agriculture, after which society became stratified into three main classes: farmers (i.e., the 90%), rulers (i.e., people who exploited famers — the 1%), and soldiers (i.e., those who were paid by the rulers to exploit farmers, conquer more farmers, and defend exploited farmers from being conquered by other rulers). Maybe we should also add priests into the mix. Priests, when considered with a cynical eye, are kind of like soldiers in that they are paid by rulers to help with the exploitation of farmers (i.e., by convincing farmers not to rebel against their rulers).
Now remember that House Greyjoy lived during times like these, so those are pretty much the only choices. So the motto is pretty much the antithesis of this other famous house motto:
That is, given the options, House Greyjoy is simply stating “we will die before we become the exploited class.”
Ok, but we don’t live in such a brutal age, do we? Of course not. This is where the modern age comes in. According to the Growth Revolution blog post, there are three ways a man can succeed in life:
1. combine his energy expenditure with that of other humans
2. steal the fruits of other humans’ energy expenditure
3. find a way to control a non-human energy source.
Farmers tried option #1, and then got exploited by those who figured out option #2. But in the modern age, we now have option #3 available. In other words, you don’t have to exploit farmers if you can exploit machines.
Interestingly, when people first started replacing farmers with robots, the farmers weren’t at all happy about it, and started breaking all the machines. Being exploited isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, but aside from House Greyjoy, most people find it preferable to starving.
Aside from the introduction of machines, a few more things happened during the modern age that changed the options that people have available. But the main thing I want to mention is Democracy. In the early stages of the Modern Age, all the farmers rebelled against their rulers and decided they didn’t want to be exploited by the rulers. So they established governments to exploit themselves.
When the rulers realized they couldn’t own humans directly anymore, they shifted to another tactic: capitalism. In capitalism, you don’t extract money from people by force — you have to sell them stuff. So farmers become consumers, rulers become business owners, and soldiers become salespeople.
And the priests? They become government workers, but their job remains largely the same — make sure the consumers don’t rebel against the owners. And one of the things that has traditionally kept workers in line in America is the tenet of our national religion that says: work hard and you can get ahead.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Just because this is part of our national religion doesn’t mean it isn’t true. In America, the doctrine is true to a large extent. In fact by some measures it appears that most wealth in the US is held by the “working rich”. But in reality, the “work” of these “working rich” refers mostly to the work of rulers throughout the ages: maintaining some system for extracting rents. In the ancient world, that would have meant they held the title to some land (and, perhaps more importantly, the peasants on the land). In the modern world, it means they run businesses.
Of course, just because you “own” a business doesn’t mean you have to “run” a business. In fact, about half of Americans own stock in corporations, and the vast majority of those stockholders aren’t involved in the management of the companies they own. But there is still a significant difference between working to earn a salary and working to maintain or grow something you own.
An that brings us back to House Greyjoy. In ancient times the term “sow” is significant because it refers to the work of farmers. And one of the key defining elements of farm work is that it is easily exploited (compared to say, the work of shepherds or hunters). So the modern equivalent of the House Greyjoy motto might be something like: “We Do Not Work for Others”.
Even today, the key difference between the rich and the poor is that when rich people work, they work for themselves. That is, they work to increase the value of their investments, and then they live on those investments. In some cases, the investment is a business, or even a career, that allows them to extract rent from some kind of economic system.
So ask yourself, does your work involve building an empire from which you can extract wealth? If so, embrace the motto of House Greyjoy. If not, you are probably part of the ancient tradition of exploited farmers.
