Pete's Bet

You’ve heard of Pascal’s Wager? Let me introduce you to Pete’s Bet.

John Constable, “The Hay Wain,” 1821

Pascal’s Wager, formulated by French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), puts belief in God, requisite for eternal life in Christian thought, into a bet. If you bet the God of the Bible exists and all His promises are true, and they are, in fact, true, you get the infinite reward of eternal life. If you bet on the promises, but they’re not real, your belief still gets you a demonstrably better life. You’re happier, healthier, and so on in the here and now, as shown by a bunch of research. If you bet the promises aren’t real, and they aren’t, then you get the satisfaction of being right but not of a better life here on earth. If you bet they aren’t true, but they actually are, then you have really missed the boat on both a better life on earth and on eternal life. So, rationally, it makes sense to believe in God, and the very utility of that serves to validate the project. 

I see home food and energy production in much the same way. If the worst comes to the worst, and the commissars cut off your food and fuel, then you’ll be really glad to have a cellar full of potatoes and a shed full of wood. If that, hopefully, never happens, then there are still a lot of reasons to be glad you have those potatoes and that wood. You’ll enjoy the production, you’ll eat the potatoes and burn the wood, you’ll be healthier and happier. They have great utility outside of disaster. 

Consider that scores of people garden and hobby farm just for the fun of it with no thought of heading off impending doom. It’s not like building a bomb shelter. That’s a project you hope will never be used. That must be kind of a depressing project, working on something that’ll only be used at the end of the world. I have to wonder how people repurpose those bomb shelters when they decide they’re no longer needed. You can’t easily get rid of them by putting them on Facebook, unlike the glut of unused exercise equipment you see there. 

But home food and energy production are enjoyable and satisfying. At least, lots of us like it. If you really just can’t find a way to like it, then maybe you should just stock up on canned goods instead. Seriously. Maybe that’s a good use for your bomb shelter. But mostly I enjoy the work of gardening and farming. 

There are moments I don’t like: a broken baler, hay down and rain’s coming, I’m laying in the dirt in the hot sun, trying to reach something inaccessible, the bolt’s rusted in place, I can’t actually see it, working by feel, the wrench isn’t quite right and keeps slipping off, skinning my knuckles, I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s after five so the dealer’s closed, and, of course, the bugs are out and hungry and so am I. That pretty well sums it up the worst of it, next to those events that break a rib.