Become Dirt

Aidan Cunniffe
Spare Thoughts By Aidan Cunniffe
5 min readApr 3, 2021

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I’ve been thinking a lot about dirt.

[waits for readers to leave]

We find ourselves in an ever-more-complicated world. There are thousands of potential roles to play in society, up from a few dozen at the onset of the 20th century. There are supremely complex socio-technical systems that coordinate everything we take for granted. The number of problems to solve is innumerable, presenting a challenge in itself: you could spend a lifetime cataloguing and prioritizing a long list of problems warranting attention.

But you came here to read about dirt. So let’s talk about dirt.

History (which should be called our-story) is full of tales of great figures accomplishing specific, grand, acts. And of course it is, writing was a luxury. 100 ft facades adorned with writing and art about oneself weren’t cheap. The only people who could afford them had a lot of gold, carried swords, and forced labor.

Rocks survive, but it’s hard to find papyrus (the writing tool for daily use) in the historical record that hasn’t decomposed. When we do, it’s usually administrative documents. Taxes, debts, letters, bills of receipt. There are of course ancient writings on science, literature and philosophy that survive on scrolls — but often only because they were centralized in libraries and faithfully re-printed and distributed throughout history.

The ability of the grandest physical materials to survive into the archeological record, while the mundane ones are lost, is a filter that has influenced our collective psyche — perhaps more than anything else in history. We talk about monuments and the leader who commanded them built, but not the people who built them.

Figuring out how to build the pyramids is a logistical accomplishment, probably unmatched until D-Day, but we don’t know how it was done. All we know for certain is that a set of systems, technology and processes capable of building the pyramids did exist, but it never got archived. This asymmetry in what is remembered leads to conspiracy theories (must be aliens!) and absolutely effects how we think about the past.

The only people who know how it was done are…dirt. Meanwhile, the Pharaohs, who achieved the wholly unremarkable act of being born royal and surviving in opulence to adulthood — they’re remembered.

The conversations of those workers — mere vibrations in the atmosphere — have long since dissipated. What did the men building the Pyramids or laying the network of Roads-leading-to-Rome teach the new workers their process? How did they spend their breaks? Trade shifts, food, or time with one another? Did they sing songs? Were there jokes? A big party at the end of the project?

This is curious to me. You could remove Caesar from history and you’d still get something that looked like the Roman Republic / Empire, but if you removed the roads, there’d be a small city in Italy of little global consequence. Infrastructure, culture, systems, and the unwritten work of thousands of people are behind the success of every mythic or historical ‘hero’.

OK I promise, we’re about to talk about dirt

There’s a book I discovered ages ago by James Campbell “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” — in it he explores the intersection of mythology, literature and the psychological archetypes defined by Carl Jung (which may not be your speed). George Lucas read it and structured Star Wars around the common myth Campbell describes. Stanley Kubrick read it and gave a copy to Arthur Clarke. Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia have both mentioned Campbell’s influence on some of their work.

It’s irrefutable that humans are drawn to the constituents of the common myth — we like rags to riches stories, triumphant first-persons, trial -> failure -> rebirth. We get a kick out of imagining our lives as one of these tales.

In the culture today, it seems as if every good and every evil are personified in a Hero or a Villain. This is true in industry, politics, culture, and in the goals of many social movements. In reality these groups of Heroes and Villians are the smoke, but they are not the fire. The fire is the system which will continue to spin out Heroes and Villains until it is changed.

I fear Marvel movies may have ruined a generation by teaching kids that bystanders (ie them, you, and me) are collateral damage. They die when buildings fall down and frankly just get in the way of the real action. They never take a stand. They never move the plot. Heroes spend the entire movie trying to save millions of them, but the whole time you’re asking yourself “why? they don’t even have laser vision”. When we let ourselves and our children believe that progress and problems are only made by Heroes and Villains, we become the bystanders in the world we live in.

The most important problems in the world today are deep and systemic. They’re not planned or orchestrated by specific people, no matter how much we want to believe that they are (see conspiracy theories). The grand systems that act on the scale of industry, society, and civilization are emergent. That isn’t an assertion, it’s a condition, nothing ‘planned’ reaches such a scale in a world this complex.

Tricked you. We’re never talking about Dirt, we’ll be talking about Soil

I used to think of leadership as a singular Hero’s journey — in line with the mythological constructs I was raised around.

Apotheosis, accession, transcendence — whatever you want to call it — is usually depicted as rising up to the plane of the gods or to the company of heros past — some lofty new perch offering rare + novel perspectives. It is depicted as exclusive — it shouldn’t be.

The true progression looks much different — the accended state is not rising up to the clouds, quite the opposite in fact, it’s getting ground up and becoming soil. A part of the system that nourishes and lets good things grow around it.

Maybe we could rely on the singular heroes to step in and save us in past millennia. The complexity of our modern world makes this less likely.

We must all take responsibility for our world in the ways that we can.

And we can. You don’t need to be a super hero. It doesn’t have to be a phase change where all at once you spend all your time in service to others.

It’s just choices. Choices to elevate the group instead of doing things that make one feel good in the moment, or fit into the status quo (aka soil-as-is). It is the choice to spend some of ones time planting seeds, pulling weeds, and enriching your corner of the garden.

Herein, the hero facade falls. There is not an exclusive club, or title — you don’t need permission to clean up the part of the garden you live in. We can all take responsibility for soil, plants and weeds around us. We all should, if we are able.

become the soil.

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