cultural ruts in theory and in practice

It is clear to many people that our culture has gotten itself into a rut, yet it is hard for most to imagine ways of getting out of this rut. They think of doing one or a few things that make no difference at all (except to their conscience) or actually make things worse. My claim is that this is just the nature of genetic or memetic ruts: all directions lead uphill, at least initially. That is what a species or a culture is: a peak in fitness space, or a valley/rut in negative fitness space. It is separated from another species or culture by a mountainpass, which is the best place to get to the other valley—all other paths require more energy, more suffering and less fitness. The direction which leads to the mountain pass is a change in a combination of tens or hundreds of memes or genes. But the properties of complex networks require that only one of these memes or genes (the so called master or regulatory meme or gene) needs to be changed initially, the other ones follow in a hierarchical fashion. In biological speciation, to ensure stable transmission of the change in the master gene, it needs to be mutated. An epigenetic change would be unstable. But with cultures and memes all changes are epigenetic.

Cultures are more akin to breeds/varieties as the mountain passes connecting them are not as high as they are between species. I propose that species are more akin to civilizations with different paradigms, as both of these have such high mountain passes (between them and the mother species/civilization) that information flow is virtually negligible and they are much more stable than breeds/varieties/cultures. The stability comes from the nature of the fitness (or its heuristic counterpart known as happiness) function: all directions away from the current peak lead downhill (or in uphill if you look at negative fitness instead). Memes, unlike genes, can't be hardwired, but the fact that attempted changes usually cause pain has a similar effect to hardwiring—stability (proportional the the depth of the rut). On the other hand, we are capable of changing them at will, and if we pick the right ones (the master memes), we can get out of a cultural rut with minimal pain.

One problem is that the memetic landscape and its associated fitness function are distributed among all the individuals of the mother and nascent cultures. One individual is not usually sufficient for changing the expression of the master meme--it takes many people acting in concert. Gandhi advocated the seed approach where one individual inspires others and the expression of the master meme thus grows. This doesn't always work, it didn't work for Gandhi in establishing a village-based economy in India for example. Another approach for increasing the expression of the master meme is the Black Panther "use the tools of the prison to get out of prison", tools such as the internet, money and actual products of the industrial global economy.  But this is a topic for another time.

What I'd like to do now is make concrete the abstract way I've talked about memetic landscapes here and in the past. One important point is that what gets selected for in one negative fitness valley is not necessarily the same as in another valley. The highly networked genes that give rise to an organism and a species, and the highly networked memes that give rise to an individual and a culture make most changes to only a few genes or a few memes at a time highly disadvantageous, which is why most people either can't imagine changes that would make a difference (they need to look at many changes in a wholistic way, not just one or a few), or get frustrated when they attempt one or a few changes.

Let's look at a culture that values local production/consumption of goods more than global production/consumption and compare it to a culture where these values are reversed. Here local production is hypothesized to be a master meme, in that many memes are affected by it and that just changing from global to local production gets one from one negative fitness valley into another one. Though an initial explicit isolation from the mainstream culture helps the nascent culture avoid being out-competed (local production is only more advantageous in a local production environment), or swamped by drift of memes from the mainstream culture, there are costs to explicit isolation. Implicit isolation, brought about by the depth of the negative valley fitness (or the height of the mountain pass) has less costs but takes time to establish. How much initial explicit isolation is necessary is an empirical question: Cutting off or reduction in media input should be beneficial for memetic isolation, but it might also have costs, such as reduced ability to recruit people. Cutting off or reducing technological or financial inputs can also be beneficial for memetic isolation, but it can have costs such as less energy available for building the new culture. We need to do many experiments to find out the explicit initial isolation sweet spot. But at least we recognize the importance of isolation, in contrast with the liberal humanist meme of global village which has a knee jerk reaction against isolation.

Memes from different cultures still mix with each other if the fitness barriers are not too high.  Not only do memes from one civilization not mix with ones from the other (because of the high fitness cost of changing them one or a few at a time, with the exception of the master meme), but people from one civilization have no desire to mix either memes (intellectual/emotional intercourse) or genes (sexual intercourse) with the other culture. This is already happening even for varieties/breeds/cultures, which can be seen as small valleys separated by small mountain passes, within one larger scale valley. For example liberals and conservatives are such memetic breeds, separated from each other by a small, not too high, mountain pass. But they are both totally entrenched in the big valley of Empire which uses global industrial production as its main tool.

Here are the differences between the valley of global production and local production, which create memetic isolation between the people involved.

In the local culture, people take care of the nature around them. Not out of altruism or environmentalism, but out of self-preservation.

People do not have much time for psychotherapy and do not value it monetarily more than farming or any other task necessary for survival. People belong to a natural place, a family and a community, people have meaningful work that connects them to these, and this makes them mentally and emotionally healthier than people in the mother culture who lack these relationships. Therapy becomes as absurd as for a gorilla in their natural habitat, a villager in a pre-industrial setting, or a hunter-gatherer. Addictions become less prevalent as people's real needs for belonging, connection to nature and meaningful work are satisfied. Therapy is like an addiction in that it is trying to satisfy a deep need with the wrong means. It works very temporarily and creates a dependency that ultimately disempowers the patient, like alcohol, and other drugs.

People eat meat because they need the concentrated protein and are not able to grow as many soy beans as with industrial agriculture. Veganism works in middle class urban global culture, but is absurd in a local agrarian, craft based culture.

People do not have pets stay and especially sleep indoors because that could give them fleas, ticks and poison oak or ivy. In a global culture where cities are possible, pets can stay indoors all the time or go in the yard where such pests mentioned above have been exterminated

People do not need to go away very often because they value providing for their cultural needs locally. Also they mostly do not have fossil fuels to power vehicles and horses are more expensive to feed and maintain over long distances, especially if they are carrying loads beyond their rider.

People mostly engage in work that provides for their basic needs, not work that provides foo foo luxuries mostly for the rich. I see so much energy spent by people scrambling to get basic goods from the global economy by making fancy chocolate, offering yoga, massage, psychotherapy, financial services, expensive crafts. They could probably spend less energy by taking care of each other's basic needs, producing goods to meet those basic needs and providing basic services and have energy left over for some of the fancier things that they can't afford in the global economy.

In the local culture, people communicate with their families and neighbors face to face, not via Facebook or email. If they need to communicate with people further away, they use “snail” mail, or rather pigeon mail or horse mail. If they need to compute they use their brains, paper and pen. If they need to be social they dance together or sing or play music or listen to other people playing music. If they need intellectual fellowship they get together to discuss ideas. If they need artistic stimulation they get together to share stories, put on plays and teach each other various artistic skills.

Creating Community wherever you are, aka copping out

I often hear the claim from people that intentional communities are misguided attempts at creating community and that they find it better to just create community in the city, usually around some community gardening (Annie Leonard). I think that this is a copout, and what they are really saying is that it is easier to just continue living the way they already are, and that creating a real culture change is just too hard.

It is useful to distinguish these two goals: creating culture change and meeting one's own needs for community. People who stay in the city and try to create community with their neighbors or with people outside of their socio-economic station (as long as they don't share a household with them) are working hard on meeting their own needs for community and alleviating white guilt, but they have effectively given up on culture change. The latter is impossible given their choice as I argue further down. People who form relatively isolated intentional communities in rural areas are working hard on both fronts, but they at least have a chance at culture change.

The meme of diversity is often brought up, but I think this is a red herring. Diversity within a group is a nice ideal but not a good strategy for culture change, as history and evolutionary biology shows. All successful intentional communities have been unified about some central ideal and disunity always leads to failure. Where diversity is useful is between different groups, or within a group once the change sought for has been achieved. Diversity's main advantage within a group is as a way to assuage white guilt.

It is true that one can have a measure of community in the midst of this culture, but it will never be as deep as what is possible with a measure of cultural isolation such as some ICs are trying to implement. The reason is that many ICs are striving for much more than community. They are striving for a new culture.

It has been my claim that cultural speciation, as opposed to slow cultural adaptation (and the adaptation that is most likely to happen in our case is to dwindling petroleum), can't happen without two necessary ingredients: some measure of cultural isolation, and a change in a high level master meme. Adherents of the Religion of Progress (ROP-http://culturalspeciation.blogspot.com/2013/08/credo-of-religion-of-progress.html) offer up three supposed counterexamples to the first ingredient: The feminist movement, civil rights in the US, and the advent of the internet and cell phones.

But upon close examination these are actually not counterexamples, but examples of how cultural speciation doesn't happen. The feminist movement has not achieved a more nurturing, partnership oriented culture. It has simply allowed women at the center of the US-european empire to participate in patriarchy with its culture of domination, selfishness and fragmentation. It has accelerated the decline of the family and community started after the industrial revolution. And it has turned the eye of Sauron unto divorced dads, “terrorists” and other scapegoats. If there ever has been any male privilege, there is none now—quite the opposite. Men, especially divorced dads, are the whipping posts of our culture, left mostly without meaningful work, scorned and abused. What there was before industrialization (and the immense, squandered reserve of fossil fuels that made it possible) was a gender-based specialization of labor, based mostly on biological proclivities. It was a true partnership in most cultures. With industrialization, this division of labor became unnecessary and unfair, but the root of the problem was not gender inequality, but the means of production brought about by industrialization. In effect, the feminist revolution failed at both criteria necessary for cultural speciation. First it failed to form isolated small communities where immunity from the larger culture's memetic drift could be achieved (perhaps the separatist feminist would have fared better had they put their philosophy into action). Second, it failed to change a master meme, which would have made the fitness barrier to speciation much smaller. Love, cooperation, a domestic economy and nurture would have perhaps been such memes, but equality in mainstream culture isn't.

Similarly, civil rights for afro-americans left no vestige of African cultures that may have still been present in Afro-American communities. Instead, African culture got subsumed by the larger American culture, as always happens when cultural isolation is not achieved. So now we have female CEOs of rapacious corporations, and Afro-American presidents of the world's greatest empire.

As to cell phones and the internet, these are more examples of adaptation than speciation. Most people have become more lazy, more comfortable, less able to make commitments, more shallow, but I fail to see how this constitutes a new culture. It is ROP in overdrive.

There are other examples of what Paul Goodman called “missed revolutions”, such as pacifism, real democracy, agrarianism, new urbanism and organic farming. All of them miss either the first, the second or both ingredients.

There are also plenty of examples cultures that actually survived for a long time (or still survive), because both ingredients were adopted. There are two kinds: those that exist before western culture makes contact and are able to maintain isolation, and those that bud off from western culture. Here are a few:

1. The early Christians, especially the eastern jewish communities/churches, which kept some measure of isolation from the Roman Empire, and did not get subsumed into it, but died out eventually because they too could not maintain sufficient isolation, or perhaps because they were too dependent on the second coming, which is not a master meme.
2. The Amish
3. The Hutterites
4. Numerous monastic orders, mostly Buddhist and Christian ones.
5. A few native tribes in New Zealand, Asia, Africa, Pacific Islands and South America.
6. The Basque, who have gradually been assimilated into western culture, but persisted in keeping their culture for a long time.

As far as I know, there are 3 existing models of cultural speciation:

1. The ROP model, where every culture eventually “evolves” into western culture, which is the pinnacle of creation. Western culture supposedly continues to evolve towards something better and better.
2. The Toynbee/Spengler model, expounded on recently by John Michael Greer, where new cultures rise up from the ashes (or at least the downswing) of dead (or dying) cultures, and eventually die themselves.
3. My model, in which cultures can bud off from other cultures when both some cultural isolation and a high level master meme is changed.

The ROP model is not data-based, or rather it is based on a myopic view of history, only looking at what has happened since industrialization as having any significance, with everything before being in the realm of dark ages and barbarians (with the exception of Greek and Christian culture, which “evolved” to us). Most biologists today agree that evolution does not happen in this way, where humans (or another species) are “more evolved” than another species. Adaptation is a part of evolution, but not a way to form a new species.

The Toynbee/Spengler model certainly is supported by history, but it misses the two ingredients in my model (certainly a culture arising in a dark age, or even in the decline part of the previous culture starts off with some geographic and historic isolation from the previous dying or dead culture, and it changes a master meme or else dies out). It also misses cultures which continue to survive without decline. Perhaps those do not count as civilizations in this model. It also seems to me, though I am not sure, that this model considers the high level meme of Empire to not be mutable.

My model is based not only on history, but on evolutionary biology. In evolutionary biology, there are examples of species which do not start off as a small isolated population budding off from the mother species, but they are rare (so-called chrono-speciation). I don't think cultural speciation is much different than biological speciation, with genes replaced by memes, and vertical gene transfer replaced by horizontal meme transfer. It is also akin to sexual gene transfer, in that two people combine memes with a somewhat random assortment of the mutated and unmutated meme. In this model it is possible to get out of the cycle of decline and fall of Empires by mutating that meme.

Modern Swadeshi in the US, or Why Local Production of Basic Needs is Better

Mahatma Gandhi is mostly remembered now for his non-violent resistance to British rule in South Africa and India, but he was a major critic of our civilization. His economic critique, as well as his proposed solution, expounded on mostly by his friend and collaborator J.C. Kumarappa, is still relevant today. Kumarappa was not only an environmentalist way ahead of his time, but an economist who saw an intrinsic violence to the industrial global economy. Gandhist economics is basically luddite, meaning the belief that a local, craft and agrarian-based economy is much less violent and better in several ways than a global, massive capital-based economy, or an economy split into a service economy in the west (and recently some third world countries like India), sustained by a product economy in most of the third world.

Swadeshi was an attempt not only to gain independence from England, but a way to create a better life for most people in India. At that point in history, England and other places were making products industrially that were undercutting native Indian products and destroying the existing village-based local crafts of India along with the communities that depended on them. It is interesting that the factories of England were not spared the ruthless march of industry, nor were those of the US. First the crafts and small farms inside the empire were mostly destroyed (with the remnants being craftspeople who cater only to the luxury needs of the wealthy instead of making functional stuff for all), then that fate moved on to the third world, then the nasty industrial jobs were destroyed in the heart of the empire and exported abroad, along with a few stupid (but not as nasty as the industrial jobs) service jobs. It is interesting that now the fringes of the empire are undercutting the center with not only material products, but services. I believe this race to the bottom is the fate of the global economy, which puts efficiency (and therefore price) first, and deep relationship last. A few jobs that involve creativity and connection were created too, in all fairness.

Below I discuss that and  summarize the advantages of a local economy over a global one.


1. Meaningful jobs
Yes, a few good jobs were made possible by the industrial fossil fuel economy, such as scientists, engineers, teachers, programmers, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, plumbers, house builders, electricians. But most jobs that were made available are stupid, dehumanizing, and disconnecting. The good jobs just listed and others like them can probably also be had in a local, craft and agrarian-based economy in a fossil fuel scarcer world, but maybe less of them. But there are hundreds of meaningful specialties that exist in a craft and agrarian-based local economy. If people can't express their life energy/will/creativity through meaningful work, psychopathology ensues, sometimes only in small ways such as random shootings, other times in massive ways such as the Third Reich or just the will to wage war.  There is more to meaningful than creativity and/or being able to directly contribute to one's community. Such as the following points:
2. More transparency
People can do awful things willingly and get away with it in places that tolerate nastiness. People can also contribute as consumers to awful things in far away places, either because they don't know, or don't care due to the abstract and indirect manner that their choices affect the far away people and nature. It is hard to hide what you are doing from your neighbor, who is also your customer. It is also hard to do nasty things to your neighbor if you are on good terms. So transparency also assumes good relations between neighbors.
3. Stronger feedback between production and consumption
If someone sees what it takes to make something that is at least partially handmade, they are less likely to take it for granted, trash it and just get a new one. If they themselves have to make something, it helps them be more conservative with consumption, but this works even if the neighbor makes it. The feedback in a global economy is very weak, through money. Local production solves the problem of unbridled consumerism.
4. Relationship with people
A vibrant economy is about relationships between people, and people and nature. Not about jobs that isolate people from each other or nature, which is what many creative jobs in the industrial economy do. A pure consumer to market relation is not as intimate as a consumer to producer relationship, especially when the consumer is also a producer.
5. Care of Nature
If production happens in one's "back yard" (YIMBY as opposed to NIMBY), then one is more likely to care about not dumping toxic chemicals or radioactivity.
6. Possibility for gift economy
It is much harder and much less meaningful to gift to strangers than to friends and neighbors.
7. Satisfy the need for craftsmanship
Not everyone can be a childcare, sickcare or eldercare provider, or teacher or other service worker. Some people need to make or grow stuff to feel grounded. It would probably be good for people who are either service providers or doing abstract work to do grounded crafty or farm work.
8. Resiliency
This is the favorite of the transition town movement or peak oilers, though they usually focus only on the food system. The point is that our current system is very efficient, but subject to easy failures based on political or economic upheavals. Too small of a local economy is also not resilient. There is a sweet spot where we can become independent of what happens in China, but also not be hit hard due to a drought or other natural disaster.
9. Peak and Decline of Oil Production
As oil production starts declining, transportation of goods globally becomes more expensive, starting to tip the balance towards local production and consumption, even as far as efficiency goes. Also other things that currently rely on petroleum become less efficient once petroleum costs to much (agriculture, factory production, etc). I put peak oil at the bottom of the list, because it was not an issue in Gandhi's time, and to my mind it is better to be motivated by the positive benefits of local economies right now, than by the negative effects of peak oil in the future.

The problem with current service economy:
1. The services are local, but the materials and tools are not.
2. Takes away services which are gifted (mostly domestically) and commoditizes them. Most services become institutionalized and the direct relationship gets degraded.
3. People need balance, to be involved in the physical world
4. Creates an aristocracy of privileged people in the developed world and factory workers in the third world
5. Creates incompetence in all but one's specialty, as people can't do basic things anymore.

OK, you say, but what about efficiency? That tractor gets the job done faster than the horses, and the chainsaw faster than the two man bucking saw. Well, life is about tradeoffs. I think I would rather have less efficiency in order to have more of the nine listed advantages. It is not just a rational choice, but has to do with values, which is the domain of religion. The religion of Progress has demonized the pre-industrial past. I don't think it was as bad as some people believe. Good work is a sacrament. Neither does the new religious sensibility have to demonize all industrial production. Some things could still be manufactured in factories with global inputs in a sane world. But we have gone too far. Let's get basic need production relocalized. Religion has a possibility to unify people around the 9 values listed above, and to give them the discipline to eschew the race to the bottom based on the value of efficiency alone.

There is also the possibility of increasing efficiency in a local economy, but the first step is to make the choice of putting our resources into it instead of continuing to fully support the global economy.

How is this to be done in practice? I can see two ways. One is for pioneers to sacrifice their privilege in the global economy and start producing basic needs for their communities. This is already happening  with the local food movement, but it needs to expand way beyond food. Tools for farmers, household equipment,clothes, hardware, transportation, medicine, education, healthcare are the next steps. This is an evolutionary process that could take generations, and could also be coopted by the global economy.

The other option I see, which relies to a lesser extent on evolutionary process and more on sapience, is for middle class and wealthy people who can be shaken out/deprogrammed of the cult/religion of progress to fund a think/do tank that would figure out first theoretically, then practically, how to build a sustainable local network of producers/consumers, what I already proposed in an earlier post on this blog:
first stage of think tank and whole project. As a renegade priest of the religion of Progress, I have hopes that some of my brothers and sisters from the priesthood would see this new light of reason and hope, but old religions die hard. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful: enlightened physicist.

Swadeshi. It's not just for India anymore.

obstacles in communal living and ways to surmount them

For the past 8 years I have been trying to find or create an intentional community where I could both feel at home, and that would make a difference in the world. Many people have had a vision of a better life that would be possible in and through intentional community, but most of the attempts to implement such a vision fail. It is disheartening that many who have an inspiration for living in an intentional community do not bother to study the history of such communities, both past and present, and learn from it. It's been a while since I read Diane Christian's Making A Life Together, which also has a similar list. I need to check if she has any additional obstacles/pitfalls.

Here are my tentative conclusions about pitfalls and possible solutions (in no specific order), based on experience, history and interviewing people (please suggest additions if you think I missed something):

Pitfalls:

1. Parents wanting something better for THEIR kids, as opposed to other kids. I noticed this at 3 different communities and was told about the phenomenon by a Hare Krishna explaining to me why their community is no longer communal. This might be generalized to say that the nesting instinct goes against communal needs. Nesting women have a hard time sharing kitchens and households with anyone but their mate and children, at least in our culture. Also babies and toddlers need constant care, and adults need to be able to focus and be coherent and not get down to the babies' level all the time. Babies and toddlers need to learn to become more like adults, not vise versa.
2. Different standards of domestic cleanliness/order. This is hard enough to work out between just 2 people.
3. Sex/jealousy. A strong human emotion that can break up a community
4. Power/control/ego issues. One can pretend that these don't exist and that we don't share a common ancestor with social primates, but if not confronted head-on, they can wreak a community.
5. Not enough privacy. Twin Oaks found this out early on. The needs of individuals for privacy vary. So do cultural norms between cultures (e.g. US rugged individualism vs Jewish cooperative sensibility).
6. Not enough autonomy/artistic freedom. Red Earth was founded partially because there was not enough autonomy and artistic freedom at Dancing Rabbit. Same comment as #5.
7. Not enough shared vision/spirituality. Wanting community isn't enough of a basis for maintaining community. People are later surprised that other people don't share their vision in enough detail. Earthaven folks assumed that sustainability meant the same thing to everyone, but it didn't. Vision and spirituality can counter the selfish motives of a human being, but the vision has to be shared or trouble may ensue. Even if the vision is shared, it needs to be maintained through ritual, outreach and inner work. If people don't have enough rituals which reinforce their common vision/religion/spirituality the vision falls apart due to all the countervailing forces mentioned here, and then the community follows suit.
8. Not enough shared work/economy. Many cohousing communities suffer from lack of community glue. Common work is a strong community glue. It is not enough to live next to each other and probably not enough to even have shared vision.
9. Not enough time together due to external financial pressures. If people work outside the community and their work takes a big chunk of their time, they don't get to bond and the community can fall apart. 
10. No shared effective conflict resolution protocols, or ways to share feelings and stories and prevent conflict in the first place. 
11. Not enough or too much cultural isolation. I have made the point in this blog and on my youtube presentation that some amount of cultural isolation is necessary so as not to be swamped by mainstream memes which work against community and other cultural changes. But too much cultural isolation can be a problem too because cult-like characteristics can arise, and because a community needs startup energy that may not be sufficient from its members. Also for celibate communities, new people are needed to replace the old and dying ones.
12. Not enough competency/skills to make a living/survive without being miserable. I haven't seen alot of this, but supposedly many 60s communes had this issue. Also the folks at the community I started had some issues at first.
13. Not enough study of what works and what doesn't. This seems to be true with alot of communities, not sure why but maybe people in the US have an aversion to the study of history.
14. The small size of a starting community means it is fragile and susceptible to disruption from inside or out much more than a bigger organization of humans. One psychopath can destroy the community, or one hostile neighbor, or one drought or other natural disaster.
15. Radical Income/wealth disparity. Usually the people with the most money or the title to the property make more decisions, have more power. This might be OK with some people, but revolutions were fought in the name of equality and going back to feudalism is still not palatable to most people.  Diane Christian had an article about this situation (at Earthaven) in Communities Magazine a while back. I have seen it in several communities and heard about it from others.

Possible Solutions:

1. individual households or more community glue or patriarchy(not my preference) or celibacy. One or a few people can be childcare providers so as to free up the rest of the community, and they can circulate that chore with others so they don't burn out. As children become older they can participate more and more in adult activities.
2. individual households or a protocol that is agreed upon and followed, where a compromise is made between the different standards.
3. monogamous marriage or celibacy
4. good governance that gives everyone a voice such as democracy or consensus. A spiritual path that keeps ego in check and values altruism
5. individual households or rooms or places to go have solitude
6. everyone needs to have a job that they have autonomy over or individual households
7. make sure before someone joins that they share the vision/spiritual path. Then devise or borrow numerous reinforcing rituals both in daily life and special occasions to keep the vision alive.
8. local economy and/or common cottage industries
9. either a strong local economy or profitable cottage industries
10. shared conflict resolution protocols
11. The sweet spot of cultural isolation has to be found by trial and error. It doesn't have to mean geographic isolation, similarly to the genetic case or reproductive isolation, which can happen geographically or by other means. Memetic exchange has to be limited but not completely eliminated as there is a tradeoff between resiliency and isolation. Eliminating or greatly reducing media is probably a good idea, as is allowing select people to visit, having bridge groups in the cities. Greatly reducing dependence on the global economy and the industrial mode of production and distribution is another good idea in that direction
12. Learn skills such as food production/farming and construction (but pre-industrial) and subsidiary crafts. Also if cottage industries are engaged in, learn those well enough to make a living.
13. Study and be humble. Learn from historical examples and current experiments. Do not assume that you are the only one who had the idea to start a radical community or that your idea is better than anyone else's. There is no point in reinventing failures (or "square wheels" as JMG calls them).
14. Community glue will help with resiliency and also maintaining some connection to the greater economy/culture as was mentioned above. But ultimately many startup communities will fail, similar to startup businesses or species. The more startups, the more some will succeed.
15. If you have title to the land, donate it to a non-profit and either leave or make a special effort to give other people more of a voice. If you have alot of money, give it away or share it (this is not new advice. Supposedly Jesus had some such similar advice 2000 years ago). Not just to anyone, but to people who have a chance to create a sustainable community. I have done these things, they are not just theoretical, but the results are still tentative. Did I pick the right people? Only time will tell. The right people are those that will create a community that is sustainable and inspiring to others. What if they are just freeloaders with no vision except their own opportunity?Study, train, and implement democratic decision making techniques for small groups. It is possible to be a benevolent dictator, though power corrupts even the most benevolent.

The first 6 are specific to communal living situations, and the solutions are either unappealing to most people (e.g. patriarchy or celibacy) or involve satisfying our deep archetypal longing for community/tribe with family and a village setting rather than a communal living arrangement. Community glue is mentioned several times because it is a force opposing the selfish and short sighted human tendencies that conflict with community.
Note that I did not include the generic fact that people have different needs because it is dealt with in more specific ways in the list above. A strong community is able to thrive despite this fact, both by including only people with similar enough needs, and by having people be willing to sometimes sacrifice some needs for the community/other people.

The Great Turning, or The Same Old Song?

It is the curse of prophets that they see the problems and  follies of an age, think they have a solution, but no one listens to them. In addition they are drowned out by a bunch of proposed solutions that come from the same state of consciousness as the one that created the problems in the first place, and then, to add insult to injury, those insane solutions are actually tried right in front of the poor prophet.

I doubt I am a prophet (not fanatical enough, or not full of enough hubris to think that what seems like no-brainer solutions to me would actually work), but I keep having this experience. Yesterday was an example. I went to an event supposed to promote an organization which funds local food businesses (but not startups!). I was expecting alot of farmers but most of the businesses were catering to the yuppie foodist market. The main motif was food distribution (with your favorite high-energy density unsustainable, greenhouse-gas producing fuel), packaging using fancy machines, which are connecting real producers in other countries to consumers in the US.

It is ironic that the main speaker mentioned how he saw the irony of organizations that were supposed to be environmentally friendly, but invested in companies that destroyed the environment.  What are the businesses he funds now doing that is taking us away from a destructive industrial present into a benign de-industrial future? They are mostly promoting a new consumer market, with very little production of goods happening locally. Mostly what is produced locally are services. Some goods are produced locally, but I bet if we looked at the percentage of calories coming from local, organic food, it would be small (because most of our calories come from beans, meat and grains). There is a big focus on ice cream, chocolate and a few vegetables. Moreover, most of the tools and materials used to process, package and distribute those goods come from industrial production, with all its associated nastiness, but high efficiency. For all this critique, these businesses are actually targeting an existing growing market and should make (if they are not already making) a nice monetary return in the near future. But don't pretend like this is part of the Great Turning that Joanna Macy and David Korten envisioned. It is nothing more than business as usual, and not surprising given the homeostatic nature of complex systems, as I've indicated in other posts on this blog and in this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTMwxUcqgqg. In other words, people will do what they already know how to do, which in the US is mostly marketing, computer programming, cooking, and growing some veggies.

There is also a market mismatch between the services that are offered and a a large percentage of the community. What is the market of people who would buy those goods/services? The kinds of people who want food gardens instead of lawns, or good food, would do their own landscaping and prepare their own food. There might be a little niche of elites who are too lazy or too old to get their hands dirty and get their sense of worth from their foo-foo high brow consumer choices of the fad du jour.

After sampling all the yummy food which I wouldn't normally buy, I talked to a guy who told me that the reason most people won't be able to listen to my Luddite Manhattan Project description is the same why people won't listen to his talk about free energy and the conspiracy by elites (or space lizards?) to suppress it. I didn't want to tell him that I already looked into free energy and found it to be bunk, explained more in terms of the psychology of people who are looking for scapegoats to deal with the failure of the myth of progress and are unwilling to let go of their attitude of entitlement than any sound physics. I didn't want to tell him that because that would guarantee that he won't be interested in the Luddite Manhattan Project. But it is not a good feeling that my ideas probably sound the same to most people as the paranoiac rants about free energy and space lizards.

We also talked about the failure of local currency and time-bank schemes (he initiated one of each himself). I think the failure of local currency is due to the misconception of money as wealth. Money is mostly a means of exchange. Real wealth comes from actual production of goods and services, not just consumption. We live in a society where most goods are produced somewhere else, subsidized by petroleum and imported here (5% of the word's population consuming 25% of the energy and 33% of the material resources of the planet) and so the importers of most of the real wealth are not interested in local currency because they don't spend most of their time in our town. There are a few producers of valuable services among us, but they rely heavily on imported energy and goods. This is an additional reason for failure of local currencies and a reason for failure of time banks.

Somehow printing local currency is supposed to work like a magical incantation to stimulate a local economy, but this only goes so far if most of the energy, tools and materials are still imported because people don't have the skills/knowledge to produce them locally.

Another source of wealth is land, and productive land is out of reach of most people. To add insult to injury, most people also have to spend a large part of their income on paying rent or a mortgage. Not sure how a significant fraction of people could make a living just by owning a 3D printer or CNC mill, or even renting all of these at a hacker space if land and materials are still owned by someone else.

One possible way to redistribute land and give people relief from the debts of rents and mortgages is simply for those who own it to give or share that land with those who don't. Not with anyone, just with others who could make productive, sustainable use of that land, who are eager to work, and who want to share with others. I have done it myself (gave away a house with land) with good results so far (it took several iterations to get it right). Land ownership is by a significant american middle class, not just a few wealthy upper class folks. Perhaps it is not so in other parts of the world.

Unfortunately, most philanthropy is towards "at-risk", "under-serviced" and such populations with the goal of educating them to be good consumers and workers of the empire (or at best to expose them to nature), not to produce basic goods and services in a sustainable economy. There are historical and biological reasons why most philanthropy focuses on disempowered people (and nowadays usually disempowers them further).

The historical reasons in this mostly Christian country are that Jesus (and probably other jewish rabbis before him) urged to take care of the least among us, feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Those were times of brutal repression by the empire du jour (roman instead of american), but at least most people could still meaningfully contribute to the survival and even well-being of their community by applying practical skills. This is no longer true and a better strategy than helping those who are even more disempowered than us, is to learn useful skills (useful to a real economy, not the farce that is the global economy, the kind that probably don't pay yet), kind of like putting the oxygen mask on yourself before putting it on your baby in a plane. The best gift you can give a homeless, unemployed person is meaningful work and meaningful usually means being able to help your family and community in concrete ways.

The biological reasons of focusing philanthropy on the homeless, orphaned, "at-risk youth", etc are our innate need to nurture, which is a need that is not met very well in other ways in this culture. This is the same reason people get pets. There has been a massive breakdown of the family, women have become less nurturing, children more aimless and leaving home earlier, and men less able to work at jobs that are meaningful.

Another possible reason for philanthropy being primarily directed towards people in dependent roles and keeping them in those roles is that we can project our own helplessness to provide for our community and dependence on an empire to provide for us, unto other people. That way, as Jung understood, we don't have to look at our own shadow.

Of course investment is not philanthropy and aims to get a return, even if it is an indirect return from the government for supposedly helping "at-risk youth". Instead of aiming for a monetary return, why not invest in reskilling a community so that people can really take care of their community, instead of depending on the handouts from Empire, won through depriving other people and destroying our earth?  What a great ROI that would be! We might need to give up our sense of entitlement to most of the world's resources for that. Or our entitlement to using those resources to prop up an unsustainable health care system, or using those resources to not have to contribute when we are "retired". We might have to settle for a local doctor taking care of us with 19th centrury technology (adding anti-biotic production capability) when we are injured or sick, and the young ramping up their contributions to help the elderly while the elderly still contribute directly to the community in ways that they can. After the talk, an elderly man came to ask the speaker about his concern that investing in ethical companies is not going to give him a high enough ROI for a viable retirement. This might be true (the speaker denied it), but with this kind of attitude, there is not even a Small Turning.

In conclusion, a winning combination is reskilling towards pre-industrial technology, forming a network of producers (in addition to the already existing service providers and consumers), and sharing land.

Social Implications of 3D Printers and Open Source Manufacturing

Factor E Farm, Open Source Ecology, The Maker and Open Manufacturing Movements are moving away from the fringe and coming into mainstream awareness. There are some values that I am sympathetic to, common to all these organizations. They value the resiliency that comes from localizing basic goods and services, the distributist empowerment of individuals and small communities, and the transparency of open sourcing that is encouraged by localism (but possible even without it with open source technology).

But what I want to focus on in this post are values that trouble me. I hesitate to do this because I don't want to harm the open source movement, and hope that this opens up a constructive conversation rather than initiating a cyber war.

First, all these movements are what JMG would call "captive to the religion of Progress", or more precisely to the technological branch of that religion. They have a machine fetish typical of ROP, and I'll refer to them as "the machine fetishists". There are several questions that need to be asked relative to using a high tech machine to do the job that a human plus a tool could do:
1. Can the machine be built, run and maintained on purely local (solar, wind) energy?
2. Can the machine be built, run and maintained on purely local materials?
3.  Would allowing machines to accomplish a task that could be accomplished by humans with simpler tools produce more employment? More creativity? More satisfaction?


I think that the machine fetishists will answer all these questions in the negative if they are honest.

1. The energy from sunlight and wind is too diffuse to get a net gain of energy, once the costs of producing and maintaining solar panels (or wind turbines), batteries (and/or grids) and associated electronics are taken into account. It has been possible so far because petroleum is so energy dense, but it took a long time to store that much sunlight in such a small volume, and petroleum not only is becoming too expensive due to peaking production, but is non-local in most parts and has all the problems associated with importing global materials.
2. Most of these machines are using Computer Numerical Control (CNC) which demands an incredibly complex, capital, materials and energy intensive technology.  I don't see a way to localize the materials necessary to make computers.
3.  If we get beyond the beliefs that newer is always better, that manual labor is degrading and does not involve intelligence, that efficiency is everything (all standard beliefs in the Credo of Progress, see: http://culturalspeciation.blogspot.com/2013/08/credo-of-religion-of-progress.html) , then we can begin to see the advantages of agrarian and craft work over machine work. A machine operator has much less creativity than a crafsman in his work. This is more debatable with an engineer or designer, but engineers and designers are not needed in even a minor way in the scenario of the GVCS once the 50 machines are built. Even if there was room for a few engineers, it is a far cry from the full employment available with just farmers and craftspeople using human scale tools.

Perhaps the machine fetishists will say that there will be full employment, but not with making basic needs--that would be left to the machines. They might say that there would be more artists, entertainers and scientists.  I doubt this could happen because of questions 1 and 2, but even if it could, I don't think it is a desireable state of affairs. I think doing the work that connects us with nature and our basic needs, also connects us with our fellow humans and builds character and keeps us humble. Intentional communities where people do not share an economy of basic goods and services, do not become centers of enlightened scholarship and art with strong community bonds. They either become places of boredom and bickering (standard ICs), or cut-throat competition for status and grants (standard academia).

The other problem that is not considered by the machine fetishists is the fact that acquiring land with enough resources to produce one's basic needs is still too prohibitively expensive for most people and this won't be solved by machines.

In effect, what the open source movement is saying is that the only problem with the industrial mode of production is that it concentrates the means of production in the hands of a few wealthy individuals and the way to fix that is to distribute the means of production to everyone. But as I show above, this ignores a bunch of other important problems. The fate of the open source movement is probably the same as that of all other society bettering movements that did not get to root memes: it will be coopted by the present socio-economic system with 3D printers cranking out extravagant consumerist doo-dads, land and resources being concentrated in the hands of a few, community and family no better than they are now.

It would be presumptuous of me to outright condemn this movement, but I think my concerns are addressed better in a return to agrarianism and craftsmanship, perhaps with a few modern technological additions.

Credo of the Religion of Progress

This post is an attempt to summarize some ideas discussed in JMG's blog. He was probably not the first one to say these things. Wendell Berry and others may have said them before him.

The ROP is the most popular civil religion of our times. It is non theistic, although Progress has some characteristics usually attributable to gods. Both conservatives and liberals embrace this religion, conservatives focusing on the economic aspects and liberals on the technological and moral aspects. Liberals refer to those who are not believers as "regressive" or "backward", and to themselves as "progressive".

Here are the tenets of the ROP. These seem to be common to most practitioners, but there might be variant credos. It is good to become aware of unstated beliefs and it is even better to come up with alternatives. But if the alternatives are just opposites of the original tenets, it becomes an "anti-religion", which is still within the framework of the old religion. Examples are Satanism-Christianity, Communism-Objectivism, and ROP-Primitivism or Apocalypticism. I'll work on an alternative credo, which is not within the framework of the ROP soon.

1. Science keeps improving our knowledge of the world and all that came before science (or offered as an alternative way of knowledge) is inferior (superstitious, ignorant, etc). 

2. Industrial technology is an improvement over other technologies that preceded it because it is more efficient, and hence saves labor and increases comfort, health and creativity (other things don't really matter, and the creativity of the small scale farmer and artisan is quaint, but not of much significance). Manual labor is degrading and requires almost no intelligence. Energy and material availability needed to support industrial technology keep increasing. Finiteness of energy or material resources will be transcended because "they'll think of something", or they'll be a "singularity" (akin to the Christian Rapture).

3. Centralization is a good thing. To make it work we need hierarchies. 

Corolaries from 1, 2 and 3:
A The priests of ROP are scientists, engineers and doctors, aka experts. Experts know more than average people in their field of expertise, and should always be followed. If it doesn't ring true, it's because you aren't smart enough, not because the expert is wrong, or their model is wrong. Experts are required for every daily activity, even if you think you know how to do it. Eg, you should consult experts for childbirth, child-rearing advice, breastfeeding advice (unless you're really progressive and use formula), relationship advice, etc. (Please ignore the fact that humankind has been birthing, feeding, raising children for centuries without said experts). 

B. Every "problem" has a technology solution. Eg, small boys fidgeting in school has nothing to do with being young and energetic, or lack of sufficient time at recess, or any problems in the home life. It can and should be easily solved with an attention-deficit pill.

C. The full force of gov't can and should be used to enforce progress to improve the world, and guided by experts, despite the protests of any group or individual.

4. Progress is not only good and inevitable but logical and rational.
Corollaries:
D. The experts who are guiding progress are therefore logical and rational (like Spock), and devoid of any personal motivations like greed, envy, lust, cover-your-derierre defensiveness, etc. 
E. Anyone who opposes progress is irrational and emotional and cannot be trusted to make informed decisions. Any criticism of experts can be safely ignored.

5. We can't go back to either a religious worldview or a pre-industrial one because they are "regressive" (less leisure time, more disease, shorter lifespan, harder labor, and other demonizations), and there is nothing that will come after science and industrial technology unless it is barbarism.

6. Economic wealth keeps increasing and will continue to do so.
Corollary to 6:
F: The highest and best use of real property is that use which will generate the most profit.

7. We become morally better (freer, more loving, more altruistic) people as time progresses. Society keeps improving on the moral front. There is an inevitability about this just like in the case of technologies. This is a favorite of new agey types, who frame it in therms of evolution, whereas biological evolution has nothing to do with progress.

8. The opponents of progress will inevitably be defeated, as they have been in the past by the heroes of progress.

9. Things must always be improved. If things are not getting better (staying the same or "slipping back") then this is a failure and a problem. We need a permanent avant garde.

The ROP has apologists to assure its believers that everything is alright. They will tell you that lifespan has increased, that education, leisure time, medicine, economic welfare have all progressed. They ignore the relatively high lifespan of peasants who were not engaged in warfare or the effect of medieval city slums on sanitation and lifespan, or the effect of war on, say, Iraqui lifespan. They ignore the fact that most moderns only know a bit about their specialty and a few abstract things but not about how to live a sane, sustainable life. They ignore the fact that most moderns no longer have much leisure time, and those who do do not know what to do with it, feeling stress, alienation and meaninglessness, whereas most medieval peasants and hunter gatherers had plenty of leisure time. They ignore the fact that new diseases have cropped up as a direct result of the kind of life that industrial production/consumption promotes, and that a stupendous amount of non-renewable resources that will not be available to our descendants are used to prolong miserable lives in old age. They ignore the fact that economic wealth is mostly concentrated in the west, that it is mostly a result of a finite bubble of petroleum that has peaked, and that family, community, connection to nature and ability of small groups to produce their needs provides another kind of wealth that might be more valuable. They ignore these things even when presented with concrete evidence to the contrary, as in a living, existing village where people are much happier in a pre-industrial setting such as the Possibility Alliance. This is one reaction to cognitive dissonance, to just ignore, to not even see something that doesn't fit one's religious narrative.

I used to believe in the ROP. Most people still believe in it though they are not even aware of it as a religion (which besides having faith-based beliefs that motivate people, also has rituals, and an anti-religion where the good is inverted to be bad, and the bad is inverted to be good). I suppose I still believe in a modified form of #7: I'd like to think that individual humans can become more loving and increase in other virtues, and that during certain times there could be more humans who are virtuous than at other times. But I don't think that virtue has to increase, and that at certain times it might actually decrease. I don't believe in the perverted view of evolutionary theory that sees evolution as leading to more morally evolved humans.

The problem with the ROP is not that it isn't true. It is as true as any other religion, but it isn't adaptive at this point in history. It increased human misery. Of course there are scientific and technological developments and some of them help some people (e.g. anti-biotics). But every culture does some things better and some things worse. To believe that our western culture is at the pinnacle of evolution and that the goal of life is to control nature is not only hubris, but it prevents us from seeing better ways of living in this world.

Attempt at formulating an alternative (Luddite, or maybe just Iuval's) Credo:
1. The universe is not always deterministic. Free will exists.
2. Matter exists concomitant with Spirit. Spirit has qualities like information, love, creativity, spontaneity and fundamental unpredictability.
3. The equations of Physics and abstract math are spiritual, non-material.
4. Humans can live well on the earth with much less material goods, and much more spiritual ones: love, freedom, deep relationships, scholarship, music, art, play, dance, engineering of simple tools.
5. The material world is good to engage with when it doesn't take over our minds and hearts, but when it places us in relationship with nature and each other.
6. Sometimes mistakes can be made in the collective choices of a society, or the powerful elites of that society which then become the choices of most others in that society. For example the choice to adopt industrialization which placed efficiency and comfort above all else. Newer is not always better. Efficiency is not everything.
7. Local economics is better for the planet and most people's souls than global economics. The particular form (socialist, free market, gift or other) would naturally vary from place to place, from soul to soul.