Colonialism

Dear Sylvio,

Thanks for speaking your truth to the PA. I resonated with much of what you said. Remember that time you stopped at our place, walking back to the PA from the train station, after some trip you took, when I told you I thought the folks at the PA were spoiled and living in a country club for the rich, pretending like they were largely independent of the Empire? You seemed offended, probably thinking "but we work so hard at bread labor". Perhaps now you understand that most working class people do not have the luxury to work towards any vision other than their and their family's survival. That unlike the PA settlers, they don't follow their bliss (they follow the demands of the boss) in their jobs, that any momentary bliss is drug- or sex- or dumbing-phone-induced. Or else they suffer the shame of unemployment, not being able to use their gifts to contribute to their family's well being, being treated as a burden to society by the welfare system. And yet most of them would not want to live at the PA, even if they knew about it, for the reasons you gave about the PPC (being treated like second class citizens), and maybe others (forgotten skills, less autonomy?) And yet, if that privilege could be used to create opportunities for even people without money and give them autonomy. With privilege comes responsibility, not just for helping wealthy white people...

Another historical tidbit: Remember the story of how the Dutch "bought" Manhattan from the natives for about $24 "worth" of beads and other trinkets? I wonder what was going on in the minds of the Canarsie tribe. Did they understand transfer of property? Probably not. They probably wanted to share that land and were in the gift economy (not the kind you rightfully critique, where wealth comes through Empire to settlers who then without much toil, pass on that wealth to other wealthy people). Yet your (and your black mesa compatriots') language of "give back the land and go back to Europe" makes me think that you want to keep playing that game, only reversing the roles of oppressor and oppressed. Go back to Europe? Are you fucking insane? Most of the people who came here from Europe (not Columbus though) did not come in order to oppress anyone. Most of them, at least in the beginning, came because they were being burned at the stake, hung, imprisoned, were driven off the land, had their houses demolished and their crops burned, not much different than the slaves who came here from Africa (sometimes white people came here as indentured servants). Same with some of my jewish people, who came to Palestine seeking a safe space from two millenia of oppression, the latest of which was the holocaust and state-communist dictatorship, not seeking to oppress or colonize anyone. But they had already been infected with the "ownership of the earth" disease (after not being allowed to own land for most of those two thousand years by the god damned so-called-christians) and the inability to share with people that were different than themselves. Not that most of the Palestinians were that willing to share either. You can perhaps blame it on the British and the time-tested colonizer strategy of divide and conquer, but I think most tribes left in recent history do not want to share the earth with other tribes that have oppressed them, are considered inferior (tribal supremacy, not just white supremacy, as in "we're better than the fucking settlers"), and/or have some resources that are coveted. As Andy Schmookler pointed out in his book "The Parable of the Tribes", the warlike tribes that do not want to share tend to take over, without some external intervention like what Hobbes called Leviathan (an healthy example being The Iroquois Confederacy, a not-very-healthy example being our legal system), and perhaps other factors like trade and ability to effectively defend.

In game theoretic terms, love and a willingness to share are not by themselves evolutionarily stable strategies. Tribes possessing those strategies, without the ones mentioned above, can be invaded and colonized by tribes who covet their "resources", are warlike and/or have a supremacy ideology.

I like to think of this in game theoretic terms because it is obvious to me (as it was to Jesus, Gandhi, and MLK), despite the children's story (enacted in Western movies of cowboys and "indians") of good guys and bad guys, that hating and trying to destroy the other group is not going to change anything except switch oppressor and oppressed. Same with feeling guilty about being part of the group that has historically oppressed other groups, or even a group, some of whose members continue to be assholes and oppress others. Most conservatives still believe in that children's story of good and evil. Most liberals and leftists have slightly embellished that story, adding another role of the rescuer (usually themselves).

No, the world is not that way. Anybody, regardless of what group they are part of, is capable of being seduced by power and thinking of the earth as resources to be acquired, and that other tribes are inferior and deserve to have resources taken from them, and only their own tribe's needs matter. Even native americans can do this, even people from hispanic descent, even people who go to "defend the sacred" at Standing Rock or other places, even the jewish people who must have won the "oppression olympics" before Israel. We need a different game, where the strategy of creating friends (as opposed to enemies) and seeing everyone's humanity is appealing, and reinforced by Leviathan and trade.

I am now going to say something that will probably get me accused of cultural appropriation or being an entitled white male who wants to be the center of attention, but I have to say it anyway, in hopes that your heart is still open, and your mind is not totally clouded, and I want to say it before I die in hopes that the lesson is not forgotten. I know what it's like to have a gift that was meant to be shared (such as ancestral land and home) taken away to satisfy someone's selfish need or greed and desecrated, to be cast out, shunned and forgotten, powerless to change anything except to continue to appeal to cold hearts in the hopes that there is still a warm ember in the center of the ice. Ironically, the people who took this gift and desecrated it are anarchist LGBT people, some black, some white, some hispanic. They are not evil monsters (is anyone except our jungian shadows, before being touched by the light of consciousness?), just humans who wanted a safe space and some autonomy, but did not care what the previous people who were there wanted. They thought they were superior to the previous people, who were mostly cis, het, white and black men. They did not want to share the gift or steward it, but to use it for their own needs, treating it as a resource. I have documented some of the details of the story from my own limited perspective, and if I'm still alive by the time you get this I can send them to you. The details may not matter. You might scoff at this comparison, since there is only one white male who wanted to share a gift, who gave up power over, whose heart was broken, who has been silenced and shunned (and a few other white and black people who converted to a mainstream mentality after this experience), not a whole village, or a genocide of a whole tribe. Yet all the elements necessary for genocide are in place in the mindset/game that these people and most people on both ends of the political spectrum are holding/playing. The conservatives have told me to use our punitive, adversarial and wealth favoring judicial system to punish my LGBT grandchildren whom I love at the Homostead. The liberals have either ignored me, or told me to use the courts or to let it go and do inner work, which lands in me the same way those words would probably land in any native whose culture has been largely destroyed and who yearns for justice and connection. Restorative justice liberals don't want to get involved unless I pay them alot of money and even then they don't want to because they don't want to violate my grandchildren's boundaries who are not willing to talk. Maybe they think it is better to violate an expendable cis, white, het man than the boundaries of LGBT people. Ethan understands the need for conversation and a restorative justice circle, but says he has other priorities (I'm guessing like figuring out how to keep his family together, and also not have the gift he was given be desecrated the way the gift that flowed through me was).

I am tired with a weariness of many generations of playing a losing game. Since I have left the mainstream world, I have not been able to accumulate any substantial wealth to share through any of my own efforts, though I have produced some food and have kept Sashi and I warm. I have accepted welfare from my parents, which has been humiliating though I have tried to save it in order to try again, despite all the evidence, to share wealth in a way that doesn't get taken over by the old game. I have tried in vain to interest people in developing that game, even as a computer game, but most people do not seem interested in a new game and I have not found the ones who are.

A few more things: You urge us to follow and serve native people if we don't go back to our native habitat (where am I supposed to go?). But I will not follow anyone, native or otherwise, who professes intolerance, supremacy and hatred (unless that hatred is used as a cathartic tool, not as an ideology).  I would like to follow peaceful native leaders, if they are also loving, tolerant and encouraging of conversation and critical thinking and can think about the bigger picture, helping white people, not just natives. Do you know any? Perhaps Pat McCabe? Or her daughter, Lyla June Johnston? But both have refused to help me. I would want to help them if I could trust them.

I pass a dying ember to you, Brother Sylvio. Perhaps it will live.

incentivizing interdependence

Previous versions
http://culturalspeciation.blogspot.com/2012/02/proposal-for-funding-blueprint-of.html
and
http://culturalspeciation.blogspot.com/2012/04/luddite-manhattan-project-first-stage.html
Motivation
There are 3 great needs that are not met for most people, so this presents a market opportunity to provide them. These are the need to exercise one's intrinsic skills, to share them with a close-knit community, and to connect with the natural world. These needs can't be satisfied very well under the present global industrial economy, but could potentially be satisfied in the context of a village economy. The village need not be completely isolated economically, but it's something to aim for in order to create a stable village and land-based economy, since the industrial economy will outcompete a village which is not producing things in an industrial way. Once stability is reached in relative economic (not informational) isolation, the village can send out feelers, from a position of stability and generosity, not of need.

Urgency
As our civilization declines due to increasing costs of petroleum extraction, environmental degradation and socio-spiritual issues, it will become increasingly difficult to find the resources necessary for this project to take off and thrive.

Autonomy vs interdependence
Paradoxically, since interdependence gets traded off with autonomy, and since autonomy is highly valued in our culture and has a selective advantage, it is important to compensate for any loss of autonomy in one sphere, with more autonomy in other spheres.
1. So, give people a home sphere, where they are largely autonomous, or interdependent on one or a few people they are intimate with. This contrasts with some intentional communities (even ecovillages), where people give up autonomy in their home sphere.
2. Create a company where people work to produce an interdependent village, which is economically autonomous of the larger economy. At work, give people autonomy within their sphere of expertise, but expect them to answer to a boss or committee. Successful companies already do this. So do reproductively successful communities like the Amish.

Competition vs cooperation
Without the feedback of competition, evolution cannot happen. But many liberal people (including myself) dislike competition with others. I like challenge, or friendly competition in sports, but I don't like thinking that my victory is someone else's defeat. Successful companies try to incentivize both competition and cooperation, with a focus on competition with impersonal outside competing companies, not people, and internal cooperation among people.
3. Expect a product from each individual and evaluate them based on milestones towards that product. Apply selective pressures based on evaluation. This is an instance of individuals effectively competing with themselves. In the case of the village, the product has to be something that people in the village want and that will contribute to greater independence from the global economy. The product needs to be evaluated also based on what inputs it needs to be produced, as far as whether those input can be produced by someone from the village, maybe in the future. Or whether the inputs to those inputs can be produced in the village.
4. Expect a product from the community (in this case a self-contained village as the final product, but intermediate products could be produced that would be able to compete in the global economy) and evaluate the whole village based on milestones towards that product. Apply selective pressures based on evaluation. This is an example of the community effectively competing with itself.
5. Allow for redundancy of individuals (or subgroups) on certain products, which allows for competition between those individuals. If the rest of the community favors one of the individuals, the other individual has the opportunity to adapt and maintain autonomy, collaborate with the other individual and lose some autonomy, or leave. This is an example of competition among individuals.
6. The evaluation and selection is not just selection for individuals and products, but of the group product (a self-sustaining village). At first the selection happens with the foresight and wisdom of a hierarchy which always selects at the lower levels. At some point, the group can open itself up to selection by the greater external social and ecological forces, at which point the hierarchy is no longer necessary.
7. Promote a culture of collaborative debate and dialectic (as opposed to individuals competing), friendly critique, and relishing of different ideas and strategies, as long as people share the same long term vision. The goal is not to win the argument, but to come to a higher truth and brainstorm ideas collaboratively.

Governance
Selection is always external, by an entity's environment. The internal environment of a group can be the external environment of a part. That internal group environment can be controlled so that it is more conducive to some parts' thriving than a direct exposure to the external group environment. If the parts are highly dependent on each other for survival, the selection becomes for parts that serve not just themselves, but the whole the group.

Who makes decisions? Those entities that select for the whole group, or parts of the group external to them. If the people (parts) need each other because they can get their needs met from each other, then decisions will be made for the good of the group, because the good of the group is equivalent to the good of the parts. The converse is also true: if the parts do not need each other because their needs can be met from the global economy (the case with most intentional communities), then decisions will be made for the good of the global economy, not for the good of the group unless the group (and the individuals in it) aligns with the global economy.

The important question is not so much who makes the decisions and whether a hierarchy exists or not, but are cooperation, care for the earth and happiness selected for? If we produce a group where people depend on each other in a direct and transparent way for their survival, cooperation should follow. If we produce a group that depends on the earth in a direct and transparent way for their survival, then care of the earth should follow. And both of these (cooperation/care for each other and care for the earth) would synergise with autonomy and the ability to pursue one's gifts without too many constraints (at least in the home sphere) to produce happiness. I hypothesize that in such an environment, despotic hierarchy won't flourish, though some form of hierarchy could.

Evolution towards local interdependence
Until everything is produced in the village, people could buy from the global economy stuff that is not yet made in the village. But as soon as someone makes something they need, they commit to buying it from them, and the producer commits to negotiating price and taking feedback on the quality of service or good. People will be paid until they can sell their products with the money they make internally deducted from their paycheck. They will stop buying things from the external economy as soon as they become available in the village and buy them from fellow villagers. At some point no more external funding is needed and much abundance is produced and shared internally. Other people are then inspired to propagate the village elsewhere.

Funding
People who understand why this needs to be done sooner than later could help fund this. They could directly participate in the village or not. Prime candidates for funding would be the offspring of millionaires who see the emptiness of the global economy and long for connection and meaning.

Possible Obstacles
1. Many people in agrarian and industrial environments have been traumatized by having their intrinsic value be dependent on their productivity. Though I wish we could live like peaceful hunter gatherers in some ways, I don't think it is practical given the state of our environment and the fences and borders of private property. So we have to be productive, but we could also offer healing for the trauma with group rituals and activities that affirm people's intrinsic value.
2. Many young people are not able to commit to ambitious projects. They desire to have sex, to have children, to socialize with their peers and to have status (be seen as cool). Ideally the people involved in this project are older, have done the sex and children and status thing and want to do something else than the evolutionary status quo. Not that there is anything wrong with those other things; they are useful for continuing that status quo, but not for doing something radically different.
3. Outcompeted by global economy on comfort--I hope not, but possible
4. No funding because most people are brainwashed by the Religion of Progress, and don't want to learn anything from the past, or admit that industrialization was overall a mistake. All it takes is one deprogrammed millionaire to help.

Alternatively, mothers and children too young to contribute are only active in the domestic sphere so that the other people can do the work of building infrastructure without impediments and with full commitment.

privilege as a Jungian shadow

The following thoughts are not intended to be mean spirited, or condemning of anyone. If you, dear reader, find yourself offended, please know that is not my intention. I see through my filters something I feel compelled to point out. If it doesn't resonate with you, then you could tell me why and we could come to a clearer picture of our common reality together.

Also, I'm not trying to MAKE someone feel guilty, as are many SJWs. My guess is that we all feel guilty at a subconscious level, not for things in the past that our ancestors may have done, but for things that are happening in the present, that we are complicit with, despite trying to do "good works". The question to ask is are these works going to make it possible for anybody who wishes to participate in our privilege, or do they just make us feel better and offer bandaids to some people?

The greatest privilege is not wealth, or being able to get certain high pay or high status jobs. It is being in charge of one's own time and having the resources to do something uplifting with it--not having to work a soul-draining job, or a back-breaking job, or having to answer to a boss. Being able to work on what one loves, as the spirit moves one. Or to just be and not do. It is the 1% who have this privilege, usually white, though asians might have higher average incomes.

Given our social nature and the fact that we evolved in small forager bands, we also have an innate sense of justice, or trying to distribute wealth to everyone in the band and not tolerate gross inequality in that distribution (though some inequality based on who produced or obtained the wealth, or experience can be tolerated). So if we ourselves are privileged in some ways that others are not, this privilege could be a shadow, only barely visible to our conscious minds. It might threaten us to know it is there and we might take all sorts of tactics to bury it deeper. Or we could confront it, shed light on it and integrate it into our psyche, possibly by creating the socio-economic-psychological conditions that remove the gross inequality from our social body.

What is a person who has this privilege to do? We could just enjoy the benefits and ignore it, but then we would be no better than all the privileged people throughout history who got murdered after the revolution for not caring about the 99%. Oftentimes a social shadow that is repressed comes out in violent ways.

We could try to justify our privilege by giving money to charities, in effect saying that we're helping others, but we are only helping them not starve, we are not helping them have the same privilege. There is an irony in that many of the people or earth served by charities are hurt by the ways the money which comes to the privileged is made. The shadow is not really brought to consciousness this way, but further repressed.

We could try giving up the privilege by working hard at a job in the system supporting our families, but that doesn't help anyone else, including ourselves, enjoy the privilege, with rare exceptions. We could try to justify it by saying that we are doing God's work trying to live more simply and sustainably, or providing hospitality. We could even deprive ourselves of many of the modern luxuries, consume much less than the average and experience some redemptive suffering. But that does not change the fact of our privilege and that most people don't have it and can't live like us either because they would lose their little measure of autonomy or because our pork barrel is not big enough to support too many others. We could change that by producing much more so that new people could live for a while on the fruits of our production and produce more themselves in a feed forward way. But most of us don't. We focus on how little we consume, while most people on the planet can't afford to consume so little. Those who are the customers of our hospitality are themselves mostly privileged. If not, they can only stay for a while and then go back to the real world. The shadow is still repressed.

We could share our privilege by sharing our land and houses in a way that does not give us control, but we know that doing so would just prove the republicans' claim that most non-privileged folks nowadays have feelings of entitlement, and given the opportunity, would take those resources for themselves and their families (or identity group) without wanting to pay it forward or participate in a productive economy rather than a pork barrel economy built on slaves (the rural "deplorables", the illegal immigrants and the factory workers out of sight out of mind) and non renewable resources. The attempted sharing might result in losing one's own wealth and privilege.

We could contort ourselves in all sorts of philosophical ways to justify a gross inequality and injustice (that we have time to live as we please, to teach yoga and permaculture, to take workshops, to take the time to bike to town, to not depend on a soul draining job away from home etc, while the 99% don't) by projecting the privilege shadow onto others. Some have earned that privilege by working within an unjust system that promotes inequality. Some have been born into it, and are passive recipients of wealth. Here are the philosophical contortions: we'll feed the homeless and the hungry, we'll visit the prisoners, but we won't work towards creating the conditions where the homeless and prisoners can feed themselves through their own efforts and contribute towards not only their own welfare, but the welfare of their communities. We'll confess to being privileged and oppressors, like those catholics who think the goal of confession is to feel better and look better to others around us rather than changing our behavior.  We say in effect: it's not us that's the problem because we confessed, or we are materially poor, or we feed the hungry and offer hospitality to the homeless. It's those white supremacists or those wealthy people or those republicans who are the real problem. Please oh christian masses, don't kill us with those oyster shells like you did with Hypatia. We are good--we live simply and sustainably. We show symbolic solidarity to the illegal immigrant meat packing factory workers who mysteriously prefer to work under inhumane conditions than join us on our homesteads, even if we truly wanted to share our homesteads (which we don't), even if we had enough money from our wealthy donor network to support all of them as well (which we don't). Maybe they WOULD join us if they could retain a measure of autonomy and wouldn't have to be our apprentices and depend on us financially, or if we created the conditions where we and they would not need money because we are all producing for each other what we previously had to buy from the system?

We have guilt buried in our subconscious which is coming out in putrid ways and causing us much suffering. We do not believe, as the Republicans and libertarians claim, in equal outcomes, we know people have different gifts. But we have a deep sense of justice and we know at some level (whether conscious or not) that the current system will never be able to provide justice, or even the holy grail of the Replibs: equal opportunity. Opportunity for what? Opportunity to rape the earth, waste our non-renewable resources, work at soul-numbing jobs (you think everyone can be an engineer, scientist, home-maker, yoga instructor, therapist, stay at home mom or dad or artist for sugar cubes?) We know that we are not working hard enough or at all to create an alternative, but are smug and comfortable in our eco-homes. We know that there is not enough concentrated, low entropy energy to support industrial civilization and to share our privilege within it with more than a small percentage of the population. And if we have kids, any energy that might have been used to create an alternative system is now being used to keep the kids happy, to keep us sane. Or we develop physical or mental illnesses that keep us in survival mode, with barely enough energy for ourselves. Now we are suffering as much as anyone, and we don't have to feel guilty anymore.We might support BLM or even Antifa to bury that guilt further.


But we also know that there has got to be a way to share the privilege of using our gifts to edify ourselves and our community, to have some autonomy and time to be and wonder and celebrate.

The only ethical thing I can think of is to work along the 99% in a way that brings the privilege to everyone who wants it. Not in the offices and factories and stores because doing so does not help create an alternative and bring the privilege of managing one's own time to others. But sharing one's privilege in a way that new people retain a measure of autonomy, and having enough resources to support them in a scalable way. There are several ways to accomplish this latter goal. One way is to have industries that employ people in worker-owned/managed coops, or facilitate (e.g. through gifts or loans) their own cottage industry. The industries would have to be such as to progress towards a world in which power and the means of production are decentralized and personalized, otherwise we end up with the gross inequalities we have now, but they would leverage the current wealth of the system.

Another way is to find some eccentric wealthy persons to heavily fund a research and development project for localizing technology and economy.