spirituality and global capitalism

For hundreds of thousands of years, our species has been based on tribes, then also families within villages. It has also been based on a deep interdependence with the natural world. Individuals didn't even exist as such for most tribal people, as each person could not be defined without a reference to the bonds that bind them to tribe, land, sky and water. Tribes, families, villages and the relationship with nature not only helped people survive, but met deep needs within individual humans so that they thrived. Hunter gatherer individuals do not need a God to fill a deep vacuum within them. Their needs are met from each other, from nature and from a sense of belonging to the tribe and the land. They might have stories about various spirits, who are rooted in the land or the sky or the oceans. But they would never dream of giving up the relationships with each other or the natural world for one of these spirits, or even all of them. The piraha are one example. And these spirits were external to them, though there might be resonance of certain spirits with certain  individuals.

Families within villages also provided deep belonging and interdependence with people and nature. If there was a God involved, there was usually not the idea or the possibility that this God would replace the relationships between people or between people and the land.

The idea of focusing one's life on a relationship with God arose in village culture within Judaism. I'm not sure how it arose, probably innocently from mystics like Jesus who were misfits and did not get their basic needs met from a family within a village. Maybe because sometimes their family and village were destroyed by an invading nation.

The idea also arose in India with similar environments among misfits. And in the middle ages in Europe and Persia with a few mystics who needed an outlet for their strong sexuality in a sexually repressive society. Listen to songs and read poems about mystical experiences, or take entheogens, and the presence of sexuality or a similar force that feels ecstatic and connective is hard to miss. You don't get pagans or native people or most villagers who are sex positive, advocating dropping everything and focusing on God. Perhaps this is not quite what "seek ye first the kingdom of God" means, maybe it means prioritizing this God, external in tribal and village cultures, internal for moderns. It seems to me that prioritizing is innocent for the external God, but with the internal God, in combination with seeing the global market as a source of economic goods and services, it leads to an extreme individualism and lack of genuine care for others. On the other hand, perhaps the external God is more prone to disagreements with other external Gods than the internal God, which is not about dogma but about inspiration and creativity.

Still, this idea of prioritizing God didn't take off and go viral till late stage global capitalism which encourages individuals to interact with (prioritize) a global market instead of with each other for their basic needs. The greatest profit comes from individuals; also villages and families get in the way of people's dependence on the market. If people can produce what they need for each other they don't need the global market. Conversely if they can get their basic needs from the global market, they at least superficially don't need each other. Sex becomes a commodity which they can get from porn or human trafficking instead of a sacrament that binds them to each other and makes them deeply care about each other. An ideology which tells them they don't need each other reinforces this dependence on the market and is selected for by capitalism. The end result is the destruction of tribes, villages and families.

Enter Ayn Rand and her poisonous ideology of objectivism (see here a satirical description of the irony of conservative christians adopting objectivism as an ideology). Now not only do people not need each other, but greed and selfishness become virtues. Ayn Rand was reacting to the brutality of the soviet regime, which took collectivism to an unhealthy extreme, allowing free riding in the form of Stalin and party apparachniks to take over. In the Marxist ideology, everything is a cause of social environment and large economic forces, and so there is no room for personal responsibility. The opposite of this is that personal responsibility is the sole cause of everything in human matters. Both ideas are terrible and lead to different forms of hell. People need each other on a personal and small collective level, and can't have much deep connection beyond the family level, with still some emotional connection possible at the village or tribe level (about 200 people max). 

The solution that evolved out of the medieval mystics that gets selected by global capitalism is a parallel story about how people can get their deepest emotional and spiritual needs met only from a God (similar to the global market), either an external God for conservatives or an internal source God for liberals (especially in the american yoga community). And that the relationships with each other and the land are either not necessary, or that they are only instrumental to a relationship with a God. 

There is no conspiracy of capitalists trying to get people to not need each other or the nature around them, or to destroy villages, tribes and families and the relationship between people and land. There is just a resonance between belief systems that encourage these sort of things, and an evolutionary selection pressure for these sort of belief systems within global capitalism.

Just like cells in a multicellular organism, people can survive alone for a while, but to thrive for a long time they need each other (and nature). There is nothing wrong with interdependence as long as the parts/cells/humans are healthy, and as long as the needs of the cells are resonant and not to far from the needs of the whole organism. But in global capitalism it is fashionable to believe that dependence on other people or the natural world is unhealthy and only a dependence on the global market is healthy. The spiritual equivalent is to believe that only a dependence on an internal source/God is healthy, and a dependence on other people or nature is unhealthy. 

How do I know that there is no internal God that can fill the deep vacuum left by global capitalism by destroying villages, tribes, families and our connection to nature? Because nobody has ever seen this God. Most believers feel creativity, intense belonging, peace, joy, intense energy, and euphoria induced by entheogens, by meditation, sex, ritual, music, prayer, dance or being in nature. Also, if there were such a God, it would have revealed itself to our tribal and village ancestors, not waited till now when it is suspiciously conducive to global capitalism.

What I am concerned with is a sort of psychopathic egotism that is unable to feel compassion, care and curiosity for other beings because it declares itself to be happy and godlike and only sees others as instruments for one's own needs and goals.

Still this does not rule out the possibility of a deep ontological interconnection between people (and other living organisms) that transcends face to face communication, perhaps through some sort of field, either a known long-range field such as gravity or electromagnetism, or a yet unknown one to science. It is also possible that this field is involved in creativity and mystical experiences and that most of what people consider their selves are representations of this field, not the field itself. This sort of interpretation of the inner source is then compatible with having real care, compassion and curiosity for another part of the field. A more mundane psychological interpretation of the internal source/God is that it is simply an individual's knowing of their own needs, a deep understanding of themselves that is essential for not only their health, but the health of their family, tribe or village. Without such an understanding, it is possible for an individual to become unhappy and become prey to people who use them for their own needs without contributing to the needs of the whole family or tribe or village (i.e. freeloaders). It is also possible for such an individual to become a free loader, using other people to compensate for their lack of understanding of themselves. This disease of the part(s) (e.g. individual) can lead to a disease of the whole (e.g. tribe). We might call it co-dependence, but health does not consist in pretending to not be dependent on the family, village or tribe, or pretending to be dependent on only the global market, internal or external God. Health comes from both an inner understanding of one's needs and the needs of others in the tribe, and of the needs of the tribe as a higher order entity. Health also comes in situations when those 3 needs can be made congruent and resonant with each other.

Perhaps tribal and village people did not individuate as much as modern people and did not have very complex individual needs that differed much from other members of their tribe or village. I wonder if a modern person could be happy living under such circumstances once they've tasted individuation. Perhaps out of tribal deep interdependence and modern extreme individuation we can synthesize a middle sweet spot...

Pros and cons of Libertarianism

I have much sympathy for libertarianism and libertarians because of course healthy humans love freedom and dislike stupid rules, incompetent or mean bosses (or slave owners) who wield power over us, senseless laws, exploitive rents and taxes, stupid burocrats who waste our time and wield petty power.  And we have seen the horrors of mobs and cults (but are often ignorant of their ecstasies). I agree that there is something sacred and important about human individuals, that freedom and happiness are the domain of the individual human, not of the cells inside a human body, nor of any higher level of organization of humans, such as a family, tribe, village, nation, the EU or United Nations. But individual happiness can sometimes be maximized by trading some individual freedom for the benefits that come from belonging to a family, a tribe or a village. 

Libertarians respond to this challenge in two ways, either ontologically or based on a different calculus of ethics (I'm not going to categorize them in economic or political ways). The ontological libertarians deny that there is any reality to organizations beyond individual humans, that they are not more than the sum of the individual humans, that the only real thing is individual humans interacting (and possibly a separate God).. The opposite view is embraced by deep ecologists, who think that individuals are an invention of late stage capitalism and have no ontological reality, that individuals are always inextricably embedded in a  family, tribe and ecosystem and can't exist without those. I disagree with both these views based on my understanding of emergence and evolutionary game theory (which I won't go into here),  and think they are complementary not exclusive of each other.  I understand how the both arise. The deep ecological view was the default before western civilization. The individualist view arises when people are so little dependent on others around them for goods and services, villages and tribes can't survive. Instead there is a dependence on abstract entities with a dubious independent (of us) ontological reality, like global markets and the military, money, an Abrahamic God, and large governments, all of whom supposedly bring goods and services from all corners of the globe to our local stores, giving an illusion of island individuals. Moreover these entities are more of a nuisance, convenience, protection, authority or a danger to us, than a source of joy and communion. The family, village and tribe provided a means for people to commune with each other (and the natural world), not just annoying transaction costs. They provided a set of traditions, values, boundaries (around the family, tribe or village, not around the individuals) where communion could be refined and concentrated. In such an environment libertarianism never arose. Instead there was the distributism of the Catholic church and village, the primitive communism of tribes and families, the mysticism and pantheism of individuals who know what it is to deeply belong to something bigger than their own individual selves.

Then there are the other kind of anarchist libertarians who love freedom and individualism above all else and won't trade it off for any amount of happiness, or maybe they just have never tasted the kind of happiness that can be had from deep communion with other people or nature in a supportive institutional environment. No social contract for them, except between individuals, no laws, but also no ecstasy or ego-transcendence. These folks acknowledge the reality of higher order entities/institutions than individuals, but see individual freedom as the highest value, never to be traded off with happiness, theirs or someone else's, and so these higher order institution seem evil to them, because they invariably impinge on individual freedom. Not only do they see the higher order institutions as evil (except the religious ones who don't see God as an entity to know and be part of but as an independent entity to fear, worship, obey), but the people who promote these institutions are sometimes seen as evil. They mistrust generosity or altruism or sacrifice of one's own (immediate) best interest for someone else's well being (except when Jesus does it). They are more interested in establishing boundaries than transcending them or allowing others through. They are more interested in taking personal responsibility than letting go of control. And they are correct in a limited, paradoxical way, and so are the collectivists, the cultists, the addicts (who long for ego-transcendence but can't achieve it within western individualist culture without their addiction), the artists, the great scientists, tribalists, deep ecologists, the co-dependents, the mystics, the distributists, the neo-primitivists, in that what they are all reaching for is part of the human experience, which is both individual and collective. They might even agree to a government that would be given (only) a policing and protecting power, as these would presumably maximize individual freedom. Happiness to them is an individual choice, despite much data that contradicts this claim, showing that happiness depends on community, family, stability, flow (aka grace), nature and other things not under direct control of individuals (see The Happiness Hypothesis by J. Haidt)

The problem with usury

Usury has two legs, an individual intentions leg and a systemic/societal leg. It can stand (shakily) without one or the other, but not without both.

Individual intentions

Usury comes from the same root as the verb "to use". A world in which individuals see each others as a means to their own ends, or more bluntly as Hobbes said "a war of all against all" leads to hell, and many traditional religions recognized this and forbade usury, at least within the tribe (aka intra-tribal).  We're talking mostly rent and lending at interest, but it generalizes beyond that. This has an easy "fix": if we see each other instead as manifestations of the sacred and try to make our relationships with each other based on that perception, we may have a taste of heaven on earth. From an evolutionary game theory perspective, forbidding usury and instilling the sacred intra-tribal relationships perspective is a way to reduce intra-tribal conflict and impose a cost (when the rule is broken) on "defectors" (aka free riders, landlords, money lenders, some politicians, etc), which gives a selective (inter-tribal) advantage at the group/tribe level compared to groups/tribes that don't use this strategy.

However, even the best of intentions, where we want to create a relationship based on the sacred within the people involved in an economic transaction, can lead to hell, in a system whose foundation is short term individual benefits with only long term individual costs, or externalized costs to others. Such a system (e.g. our current global economy, whether in capitalist or socialist form) inevitably goes towards massive inequality, which destroys communities and families, which ironically individuals need for optimal functioning. This is a systemic problem, not an individual one, and it's solution is also systemic (as in we need a different economic system).

Systemic dynamics

Here's how it plays out: some get wealthy just by having land or money, which they can leverage to make a much greater (money) / (labor spent) ratio than most people with less money. If we start with everyone having an equal amount of resources and add a tiny amount of random inequality of resources, or even random inequality in self-interest, it's an unstable equilibrium where the initially slightly richer (or slightly more self-interested, or even just slightly more entrepreneurial) get even richer and the initially slightly poorer (or less self-interested, etc), who have to pay the bulk of the interest and the rent to the rich, get poorer. Sometimes it's even indirect, where the rich rent to other rich people, who are using other poor people through rent or interest. The short term stable equilibrium is massive economic inequality, but that is also unstable in the long term as the poor revolt against the rich. And this can happen at any scale, even a small village, or a family. That is why stable families are mostly based on a gift economy, and long-lived villages do not have money lenders or landlords within the village. And that is why villages and families which adopt and mimic the current global economic system within themselves are not stable, also leading to individual unhappiness.

Possible solutions

One possible solution is to forbid usury (as some mainstream religions have done), but people are very clever about circumventing prohibitions and attempts to legislate morality. Things are not always black and white: I'm not really renting the house to these folks, it's a mutual gift....

Another possible solution (favored by conservatives, though they won't necessarily admit what is being done) is propaganda (this word does not necessarily entail deceit) campaigns by the government and the wealthy to make the poor either aspire to be rich or at least middle class (and sometimes succeed to various degrees) by playing the game, to look forward to a reward in an afterlife, or to identify with the rich or middle class through other shared "identity" traits (even though they are wealthier and have all these perks that we don't, we can identify with some of them who are white, black, women, men, american, pakistani, christian, jewish, muslim, gay, straight, entrepreneurial, hard-working, talented, coke-drinking, etc), and by identifying with them, resist the temptation to be murderous towards them (in sociological terms, they are no longer considered an out-group, they become part of our in-group). This is a containment solution that might succeed in preventing revolt for a while, but does not prevent the massive unhappiness of a large part of the population that is either not able to be of use to family and community (aka unemployment), is toiling under alienating conditions, and is often causing harm to nature or other people far away and in the future.

A third possible solution (favored by many liberals) to this systemic problem is the redistribution of wealth by a big government through taxation, or subsidies to the poor. It has the problems of creeping burocracy (with its own version of inequality and dampening of initiative) and disempowerment of poor people, which I don't want to get into here, suffice it to say that it is not a good long-term solution.

I don't know what a good solution is (can you help me figure it out?), but I can speculate based on my best understanding of the problem that it involves localizing the economy so that it is easier to see the effects of our actions on other people and even on ourselves, in a short enough time. This is the solution that was favored by tribal societies, families, rural villages before the industrial revolution, Gandhists, and catholic distributists.

old problems, old and new solutions

P=problem

S=proposed solution

Based on my study of how nature evolves higher levels of organization, (all the way from organic molecules (not just DNA) to networks of organic molecules, cells,  organs, organisms, families, villages, cities, companies, economies, nation/states, ecosystems, all the way to a whole planet earth), and my experience assisting, visiting and starting intentional communities, I propose that we have the following problems and the following possible solutions. I have in several previous posts discussed problems of intentional communities from the perspective of what we can learn from conservative intentional communities I , and II, systems theory, mundane issues that arise in communities, and tragedies. This is yet another attempt to tackle problems from a practical yet radical perspective.

Do you agree that these problems are fundamental (for example some people think systemic racism is fundamental, but I think that is false) ? Do you have other proposed solutions? I'd love to hear from you.

1. P: We are yearning for an intermediate between family and nation/state

    S: community composed of pods/families, where the pods are economically and culturally inter-dependent, because of the structure and agreements about what we are and are not doing, what we call Community Supported Community (CSC)* in analogy and extension of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In contradistinction to capitalist and communist economics (where there is no intermediate of value between individuals and the global market or the state), or distributist economics (where there is no intermediate between the family and the global market or state), we value the nesting of individuals within families (or pods), and families within villages (or tribes).

2. P: Feedback loops are too big for learning to occur (e.g. global warming, peak oil, government and corporate corruption, (global) market failure to provide for needs, usury (usually exploitation of strangers through rent).

    S: Localization. All basic needs are produced locally, and most local production is for local use. For this we need hundreds of people to take advantage of diversity of talents, and efficiency of specialization. Also, externalization to nature (as in atmosphere and rivers or oceans), future generations and people far away is impossible with a local economy. If we screw up we get immediate feedback and have to make corrections. Both communism and capitalism could benefit from smaller scales (the family is already communistic, and the village can benefit from a small market economy)

3. P: a. Too much communalism on a scale larger than about 10 people leads to freeloading (it's a good breeding ground for that kind of behavior) and competition (diverse needs, finite resources), with resulting conflict, drama, and only the most assertive or strong people getting their needs met. Conflict resolution is an oft-touted solution, but how much time do people want to spend on conflict resolution vs just enjoying life? Of course conflict resolution is part of the solution once conflict arises, but we propose there are ways of reducing the potential for conflict (see below), similar to germline segregation in biology.

        b. Too much family in the context of a global economy (e.g. homesteads that barely interact with each other) leads to cultural anomie. Also, we have serious ecological and economic problems that can't be addressed in the context of families in a global economy.

    S: Separate pods of people who resonate with and deeply love each other and can share a domestic space. In such an environment (usually a sexually and genetically related family, but it doesn't have to be), competition is reduced, there is less diversity of needs, and it can be more simply negotiated than if there were more people. But unlike homesteads that are barely interacting with each other because they can interact with the global economy for their cultural and economic needs, we agree to a radical economic and cultural interdependence (CSC), where people need and can rely on each other for their diverse economic and cultural needs. There is less energy needed to devote to conflict resolution and meetings, and more energy for enjoying nature, work, contemplation, personal passions and relationships. For a functioning economy hundreds of people are necessary, whereas for a functioning family no more than about 10 people are needed or possible. We propose to encourage both levels of organization and nest the family within the community in a synergistic way. In disagreement with Confucius, who thought that the success of the nation depends on the success of the village, which depends on the success of the family all the way down to the health of the individual, I think that the success of each level of organization depends on the levels both above and below it, not just below it. Also, I disagree that everything depends on only individuals being healthy (the libertarian view), or individuals having a good relationship with a God or Spirit or some other foundational (lowest) or ultimate (highest) entity (the mystical view). If we can at least get the 3 lowest levels (starting with individuals, of course there are lower levels) healthy, and make the dependence on levels beyond the village mostly superfluous, we can create something good. 

5. P: We don't need each other, given our dependence on the impersonal global economy

    S: We agree to produce for each other and use each others goods and services (CSC, which includes cultural services). We also unite around sacred values**, have respect for competent authority in specific areas, and have good boundaries around community and agreemets, since these are the "secrets" of conservative communities that make them last longer and have smaller turnover than liberal communities.

6. P: We are destroying nature because we are not connected to her and our dependency is not apparent

    S: By getting our economic, cultural and spiritual needs met from the land around us, we are forced to deeply care for nature. It becomes concrete as opposed to the abstract way most people experience nature. At best most people are currently tourists/hikers/backpackers in nature. We propose to trade the comfort, convenience and removal from nature of the global economy for more immediate connection between us and nature

7. P: 85% of people hate their work, many are unemployed

    S: We trade off mechanization for craft production and practices (such as permaculture) that encourage individual autonomy and creativity and an appreciation by pod and community members for the fruits of one's labor.

8. P: overpopulation--meaning too much competition for resources (not necessarily overcrowding)

    S: we agree to no more than 1 kid per individual, though people can trade for the privilege of having more kids (like I'll give up my potential offspring so you can have an extra, maybe you can give me something in exchange). We can be lenient if accidents happen and people get pregnant unintentionally, but if it happens too often there has to be consequences. Humans should be able to control their population, unlike most other animals, because of the gift of foresight and choice.

9. P: Unhealthy or un-environmental food (even when it's organic)

    S: We produce our own food, each pod has their own food production, though pods also specialize in food production (and other production).

10.  P: Injustice (the haves exploiting the have nots)

       S: There will be less injustice because pods will have joint ownership of the land and just like families they will have love as an ointment to help reduce conflict due to diverse talents and needs. There could be differences between pods, but these will be based on pod focus and preference, not on one pod exploiting another. The community will have monitors (one of the Ostrom principles) to make sure this does not happen, and a coalition of people who can prevent any one pod from imposing its will on other pods. Also, we will try to encourage a spirituality based on communion rather than resource acquisition and control**.

11. P: No say in decisions regarding health, housing, and our immediate environment

      S: Pod governance, nested within community governance, nested within local county/town governance, ... Most really important decisions happen within community and pod, not higher levels, as it is now. Also, pods can send representatives if they want to community decision-making meetings.

12.  P: Loneliness

       S: Pods that are more stable than families in the mainstream, because the community and nature encourage their stability through a mutual interdependence.

13. P: Xenophobia 

      S: We need to inculcate a deep ecology or deep humanism view where people care about others and the earth outside of the village. We at some point might need to help create higher level entities to prevent any one community from getting too aggressive. This is an exception to localization. We need globalization of communication and information to continue to some extent, not to dominate our economic and cultural life.

14. P: Woundedness. Our culture has left many people not getting basic emotional needs met (due to industrial revolution destroying villages, good work and reducing effectiveness of family) resulting in scapegoating (shadow projection onto others), addictions, and cognitive deterioration.

      S: As a short-term transition, encouraging people to do inner work (meditation, contemplation, exercise, nature therapy, and therapist-assisted therapies of various modalities) and inter-personal work (NVC, Nakaima, Zegg Forum). Long-term, restoring the family and keeping it sustainable in the context of a village, and restoring good work.

15.  P: Insufficient attention by liberal intentional communities to the 6 values that help conservative communities last longer and have smaller turnover (but not so far go viral or provide a radical and resonant alternative to the mainstream). Also insufficient attention to the problems listed above, especially the distinction between family/pod and community, and the dependence on the global economy, instead of the among community families/pods. Eco-villages have the most potential to remedy these problems.

       S: First, like in addiction-recovery programs, admitting that there is a problem, and then implementing the 6 values and the solutions above.

16. P: Insufficient attention by the mainstream (even the fringes of the mainstream) to the problems of western civilization (some are listed above) since the industrial revolution.

      S: As the inevitable decline of western civilization continues, more and more people will be looking for alternatives. It would be nice for these to be created earlier than later, when resources are less available and cognitive decline increases.

17. P: People are afraid of the negative aspects of cults (such as loss of individuality, suicides, psychological boundary violations by leaders) to consider that the reason cults are successful so often is because they meet real human needs that are not met in the mainstream civilization, such as a sense of belonging and safety, communion with other people in the cult, and a shared reality around which to create meaning.

     S: Provide a sense of belonging to the family/pod and the community by encouraging some individuals to pursue a talent in designing activities which encourage communion (singing, dancing, ritual, plays, storytelling, deep discussions, group therapy, games, hot tubs, saunas, sweat lodges, etc), as well as encouraging economic interdependence through CSC. Also provide training on the negative aspects of cults in order to avoid those. Also Issac Bonnewits' ABCDEF.

*CSC Agreements (between pods, or between individuals? TBD):

1) Providing a good or service that at least 90% of the people in the community agree is needed.  Individuals can thus focus on developing skill, responsibility and expertise in an area that resonates with their soul, akin to majoring in a field of study at a university. For more resiliency of the CSC, individuals can also have “minors” in areas that are not their primary focus, but hopefully someone else’s focus; Individuals can thus focus on developing skill, responsibility and expertise in an area that resonates with their soul. 

2) Providing a 'market' for someone who's providing a good or service in the community, even if it's of lower quality or higher 'price' in some way, with mechanisms for improvement available, as discussed below;

3) The strategic closing of production loops, so that inputs and outputs of each producer are provided by and to other producers (including non human ones) in the village, or eventually in other similar villages; and

4) Communal practices and rituals that allow us to express grief and joy and encourage belonging and interdependence. Some people could even major in organizing or facilitating these.   

5) Ostrom Principles for monitoring people (within a pod) and pods (within the community) who get too aggressive against other people or pods, and the power to give proportional punishment or withholding of benefits from such people or pods, as well as clearly defined boundaries for pods and the community and any communally owned land.

A longer rationale for CSC:

We think the fundamental flaw in all mainstream economic and political systems is their large size/scale (the benefits of large scale are outweighed by the costs), whereas the fundamental flaw in all intentional communities is their over-dependence on the mainstream systems, and their neglect of the problems of too much sharing or equality (tragedy of the commons, freeloading, brain/talent drain). Intentional communities either have too much sharing/communalism or too much “homesteadization” whereby families have their own homesteads and jobs in the mainstreasm economy, with very little economic and cultural interaction with other homesteads. We proactively address these flaws in both the mainstream and intentional communities, from a holistic approach, integrating economics, psychology, governance and environmentalism. We propose a much smaller economic and cultural scale of a few hundred people, and an even smaller domestic scale of highly interdependent homesteads of between 2-10 people (aka "pods"). This has the advantage of much individual freedom at work, more love in the domestic sphere because it only involves highly resonant people, primary accountability to the group, personal care for and from other members of the domestic sphere, a radical dependence on the local nature and the local community for basic needs, and care about the outside world. The benefits and costs of these will all be discussed below. In presenting these, it's sometimes hard to not mix the economic, psychological, government, and environmental parts. Either  the benefits or costs can be more neatly subdivided, but not both (or maybe this can be done by someone?) :

Economic rationale

1. Individual freedom with work encourages initiative and innovation, which are good for individual productivity and group adaptability/fitness. However, we need to discourage big egos that can create jealousy and resentment. Also, especially in pioneering stages, work parties may be more efficient.

2. Accountability to the group (by CSC and Ostrom agreements and enforcement mechanisms) discourages free loading, one of the main problems of groups where there is much sharing. However, we need to discourage totalitarianism and give people domains of time and space where they can explore their creativity or relationship with other beings without being stifled by the group.

3. Personal care for and from others creates a safety net, an insurance against accidents to individuals. Contrast this with large impersonal institutions which usually fail to provide good personal care. I am not sure yet whether we also need to implement "high cost signaling" mechanisms which are common in both mainstream and many ICs (for example, you can't take more than a small amount of assets out if you leave) to create more loyalty and discourage people from leaving too easily.

4. A radical dependence on local nature (enforced through stories, rituals, and striving for almost no imports or exports), combined with foresight and group monitoring, reduces the occurrence of the tragedy(overexploitation) of the commons. It is easier to care about local nature than nature far away, the dependencies are more obvious. Also it is easier to monitor people locally, harder to hide nasty practices. Last, it encourages people to see themselves as part of nature, which besides the psychological benefits (to be discussed below) keeps most of their contributions inside the community. The costs are further discussed in #5 of the psychological rationale section.

5. Care about the outside world is insurance against accidents or threats to the whole community. Neighbors or other communities can help if bad luck befalls the community. The costs are dilution of the energy that goes into the community.

Psychological Rationale

1,2. Individual freedom and a craft-mentality (as opposed to a machine-operator mentality) with work encourages states of flow (especially when combined with group accountability), which contributes to happiness.

2. Economic accountability to to the group (based on CSC agreements) encourages a sense of belonging, which contributes to happiness (though it could also contribute to stress if one falls short of one's commitments). The accountability to the group can also be encouraged though giving credit for designing and participating in ritual, storytelling, art, teaching/learning workshops, group dance, music making (and listening to others in the group as opposed to electronic music), well-being meetings (probably at the pod/family level), as well as encouraging adults to take care of other people's children. All these activities provide "community glue", which contributes to trust and a sense of belonging and reduces the need of people to leave (brain/talent drain)

3. Personal care to and from others is one of the essential ingredients of good relationships, which also contribute to happiness. Also, it encourages trust and generosity, which discourage hoarding and excessive inequality, which contribute to social unrest, jealousy and violence. Personal care also makes it easier to give feedback, so people can improve their skills, both at work, psychologically and socially.

4. A radical dependence on local resources encourages a radical dependence on one's community members since one can't do everything, and one knows who provided ones goods and services, as well as whom one is producing these for. Beyond resources, a radical dependence on nature gives one a sense of belonging as part of nature (a factor in happiness).

5. Care about the outside world through encouraging of a humanist and deep ecological worldview, prevents the negative side of tribalism from creating the conditions for war with the outside world and encourages active peace with the outside world. It can be encouraged by a limited flow of information and even more of goods and services, since CSC intentionally limits flow of goods and services to and from the outside world, with the exception of similar communities (a tradeoff since this can also help care for the outside world). The limiting of resource exchange with the outside world needs to happen gradually as to avoid burnout. In addition, careful screening of prospective members based on both well-designed surveys and long trial periods will be implemented so as to avoid "negative selection" for freeloaders who are attracted to the benefits offered by the village, but may not be willing to pay costs, such as loyalty and accountability to the group, less availability of consumer goods than can be gotten in the global market, less convenience at times with less labor-saving devices, respect for agreements and enforcers of them (such as peacemakers and productivity monitors, this is not hard for more conservative people, but might be hard for more liberal ones).

Governance rationale

1,2,3,4. The first 4 practices provide community glue, and reduce the interpersonal conflict that arises when people do not like, trust or need each other (yet are forced by an economic system or proximity to interact with each other) thus reducing the need for large scale group governance (in particular, hierarchies and burocracies). Smaller governance groups such as families and pods are encouraged and make governance less complex and more manageable. Ostrom principles will be implemented to avoid the over-exploitation of common resources (by making public goods also have proportional private costs), monitor both productivity (of individuals and pods) and well-being of individuals (which in a community can also be partially looked at as common resources), as well as encourage both participatory governance(give people a real voice in things that affect them and others they care about) and nested governance (leave them alone or allow them to choose a pod-representative/peacemaker with things that they or others do that don't much affect others outside the family/pod, which has its own governance). It is possible that some people (e.g. peacemakers and productivity monitors) will have managerial roles, but not of everything, just specific areas, thus reducing the dangers of concentrated power. It is hoped that all the activities (besides purely economic) that encourage community glue, will also reduce the need for complex legal agreements, of which compliance is mostly based on fear of punishment.

5. Bigger governing bodies will need to be built (and initially existing ones tolerated or reformed from the outside world). This has already been covered in #5 for psychological rationale section.

Environmental rationale

4. A radical dependence on local nature encourages a deep ecological worldview, which sees one's community members, both human and other species as being intricately interdependent. With such a worldview, it is more difficult to want to hurt other people or beings (though sometimes it may be necessary). This radical dependence on local nature will be encouraged by relearning hunter-gatherer skills and pre-industrial skills (from known experts and experimentation), as well as encouraging innovation with permaculture ideas and appropriate technology.

5. A more global environmental consciousness, will also be encouraged though being more abstract, is harder to encourage. It can be done through travel and education (though we may not have much resources for long-distance travel, the young especially might need to do it). Also, as has been mentioned when the humanist worldview is not present, people can just move on and keep degrading nature, or steal from more peaceful tribes if they don't take care of the nature around them.

**Example of sacred values: individuals have a sacred core merely by existing, and they are valued for this core primarily, before their value as useful to anyone else. The purpose of life is to commune more than to control and in order to commune, we value these 4 relationships between individuals and :

1) their community; 2) their sacred creative source; 3) their ecosystem; and 4) their surrounding society

To commune or to control?

That is the question, more than "to be or not to be". And unlike the Hamletian question, the answer is not binary.

We have both these impulses within us, in common with all living things. So many of our motivations and actions can be at least partially reduced to control or communion, sometimes a mixture of both. Many originators of religious movements have urged us to let go of control in order to achieve communion with each other, with nature, or with a deity. Buddha wanted us to commune with the source of being, by letting go the controlling nature of our egos and minds. Jesus wanted us to let go of the instruments of control (monetary savings, material possessions, religious rules) in order to commune with each other and with God. And yet, control has proven hard to eradicate. 

Control is needed to avoid being predated by opportunistic freeloaders from within our family, village, company or nation. The early Christians had to learn that "he who does not work does not eat". A loving church that focuses only on communion is a good breeding ground for freeloading behavior. 

Control is also needed to avoid being over-run by competing groups or individuals from outside. The early Christians had to learn to convince the Romans to join them and then to mount a military response (not always defensive) to the muslims. 

And control is needed for scientific and technical mastery of nature.  Here we see that absolute control of nature is not possible or desirable, because we are part of nature. We must also commune with it in order to survive and thrive.

From hunter-gatherers who learned how to control wood, bone and rock in order to fashion simple tools that increased their efficiency in hunting, gathering, staying warm and safe, to scientists and engineers who learned to control genomes and nuclei to accomplish amazing feats that go beyond survival and comfort, we have an increase in control, but not so much in communion. Hunter gatherers had to learn to commune with animals in order to not drive them to extinction, and also because there were benefits to communing with them. Some of the benefits were spiritual, for example learning to embody strength, loyalty, freedom, determination and courage that we can learn from some species of animals. Other benefits were more mundane, such as having dogs for protection, cats for rodent control an so on with all domesticated animals. Note the difference between hunter gatherers spiritual relationship to animals (and plants) and modern farmers, who see the animals (and plants) as tools to be controlled. Things have evolved towards less communion, more control. And this has metastasized into the human realm, where now most people treat each other as tools to be controlled rather than holy beings to be communed with. This we can call the instrumental mentality. Fear and social anxiety are the result.

Of course there are exceptions: Einstein valued imagination over knowledge, and awe over logic. Schrodinger thought there was only one mind that could be accessed by all individuals.  But in general, people today see each other as tools for career advancement, money and safety acquisition, sex, social status, and as potential rapists, suers, zombies, terrorists, or other various enemies and incarnations of evil that can be used to project unto one's anger, hatred and unprocessed traumas.

Men yearn to commune with a feminine archetype of pleasure, inspiration, abundance, mirth, justice, nurturing and ecstasy. Women yearn to commune with a masculine archetype of strength, confidence, big picture vision, courage and persistence. But the instrumental mentality ruins it. The desire for sex, especially, because of its overwhelming nature, especially in young men, can ruin the potential for communion, when the desire or its intensity is not reciprocated. And conversely, when women see men as mostly instruments for money, status, comfort and security, and also see them as disposable when they are not good enough instruments, there can be no hope of communion between the sexes, or even in gay relationships where people see each other in these ways.  On the other hand, when the masculine and feminine want to commune with each other, sex can be a great instrument for such a communion.

Not only are couple relationships trampled by the instrumental mentality, but higher levels of human organization are destroyed or made extremely unpleasant, such as villages, workplace communities, intentional communities, nations.

Even if we are able to restore a mentality of communion, it may be equally important to create activities that encourage communion because humans do not live by stories alone. Can we start valuing the kinds of games, dances and rituals that encourage communion? We already have group sing-alongs, music jams, bands and choirs. We need more of them and have them be more common instead of being relegated to specialists. We can add discussion groups (of books, movies and suggested topics), storytelling and dancing and music around campfires, hot tubs, sweat lodges, and ecstatic, ego-transcending, entheogen-assisted bacchanalian rituals. Ah, my heart hurts when I think of the gap between how we could commune with each other vs how we are. At least we have dogs and gods, rivers, oceans, prairies, deserts and lakes to commune with. But nothing beats our own species for communion.

 

the 5th wave of feminism

The original promise of feminism was to transcend genetic, epigenetic and cultural evolution and to provide more opportunity and happiness for everyone, maybe with some birthing pains. It was supposed to be a liberatory ideology. What has happened instead is to continue further along the tracks set after patriarchy started, of gynocentrism, pedo-centrism (i.e. "women and children first"), alpha-male-centrism, and most (beta) men's perceived disposability unless they devote all their energy to providing for women's and children's needs and keeping their place in the hierarchy (yes, I know that this seems blasphemous and absurd to most people who have been indoctrinated in mainstream feminist ideology), as well as some ugly views of women that lead to nastiness towards them (such as rape and general disrespect of their boundaries).

Part of the problem was that most feminists did not learn about cultural and genetic evolution (or else thought that culture was much easier to tweak than genes, and that Darwinian mechanisms of variation, competition and selection did not apply to it) and thought that patriarchy was some kind of a conspiracy by men to oppress women (e.g. EO Wilson, the founder of socio-biology, had ice water poured over his head by feminists, during a speech), instead of a system that gave certain alpha males an advantage in wealth and sexual opportunity, most women an advantage as far as safety and peace, and certain groups that adopted patriarchy an advantage in warfare, productivity and genetic diversity. To change a cultural system can be just as difficult as to change a genetic system. The source of variation is not just random mutation but conscious ideas about how the system works and how it would respond to change. Even if we were extremely skilled at such modeling (which we're not), living systems are an intricate web of interdependencies, and most single (or even double or triple) changes are not going to lead to an improvement. An evolutionary stable equilibrium is hard to change, whether genetically or culturally. Another issue was that many feminists thought that the oppression of women that happened in most agrarian societies (there are still a few existing) was going to carry forth into industrial and post-industrial societies, despite the fact that patriarchy gave no evolutionary fitness advantage (but was vestigial) to most individuals in, and to these societies in competition with other societies. This made their claims of being oppressed by men or patriarchy in post-industrial cultures seem non-sequitur at best, and like vicious, self-serving lies at worse.

At some point in our pre-history, when resources were plentiful, population low and competition scarce, our ancestors were non-patriarchal and non-monogamous. Most of them were hunter-gatherers, though perhaps Minoan civilization is an exception. The divine feminine was able to express itself in art and loving one's tribe. But at some point as population increased, groups that invented patriarchy were able to outcompete groups that didn't in both war and agricultural productivity. Alpha males found it helpful to repress female sexuality in the masses with the help of the church, burkas, female genital mutilation, witch burning, and general violence-induced stress, and to confine any remnant left to monogamous marriages for the masses. That way most non-alpha men would be docile, pacified, kept from too much competition with each other which would weaken the state or the fiefdom. A bit of sex with the wife would keep them from outright rebellion during their youth, when they are most likely to rebel. And a bit of respect for their natural tendencies to serve and protect women and children was a win-win for the village and for the beta men. The situation wasn't so bad for most women, as they were protected from warring nations, unsolicited sexual advances, dangerous or back-breaking work, and had much opportunity for creativity in the domestic sphere. The divine feminine was hiding, but not totally banished.

On the transition from an agrarian patriarchy/monogamy to the present, with the help of feminism: With the industrial revolution, new opportunities arose for work that did not require much upper body strength, so now women were initially prevented by tradition from partaking in this work that men had no particular advantage doing (unlike agrarian work). Most men who are not alpha got even more competitive with each other and also now with women, and also garnered less respect from everyone, because masculinity was not as valuable, and some feminists made it appear toxic. They were even more marginalized than before (in the military, dangerous or stressful jobs, family court, #metoo type witch hunts), even more disposable. They were made into debt slaves, killed, genitally mutilated, had to endure the shame of being unemployed, separated from their children, had to endure living without much empathy or love from anyone unless they fell in line with the program of dedicating all their life energy to a wife and children no matter what the cost to themselves. They had to repress their feelings and just be useful and productive, or at least pretend to be productive doing shit work, when there were jobs to be had. Men's feelings and life just do not matter unless they are alpha or fall in line. My personal situation has not been so bad as for most men, but I was till able to see through the deception of it.

Most women became more unhappy because they have more responsibilities and are put in competitive stressful careers which they thought they might like, but didn't. Also, they became more unhappy because they are not usually as turned on by men who are not confident and decisive and able to be aggressive at times. The divine feminine went into hiding and women became more masculine.

There were feminists who tried to make the point that the problem is patriarchy, not men, but that was too abstract for most people. Especially since Patriarchy etymologically means rule by fathers. Not just the 0.01% alpha fathers. And also because patriarchy in the west seemed to be declining, yet men seemed to be worse off than in countries where patriarchy was still strong.

There are a few asymmetries in the relationship between men and women under non-tribal conditions that are not usually talked about in feminist circles. First, most young men are much more needy of sex than most young women, for proximal biological reasons having to do with testosterone, and for evolutionary reasons as well having to do with the fact that men can impregnate many women at a time, whereas women can only be impregnated by one man and then there is a long waiting period before they can be impregnated again. As anyone who has studied negotiation knows, if one side needs something more from the other side, the more needy side is at a disadvantage and the less needy side has power over the more needy side. It's also something that is seen on the population level, not just individual negotiation level, as an example of supply and demand. There is not as much demand for sex (from men) by the population of (heterosexual) women, as there is demand for sex (from women) by the population of (heterosexual) men (women want provisions and protection more than sex). Since the supply of sex by men to women exceeds the demand, the "price" or value of male sex will be low as far as the population of women is concerned. Whereas since the supply of sex by women to men is far below demand, the value of female sex will be high as far as the population of men is concerned. 

The second asymmetry is that though women can get most of their emotional needs met from other women, pets, and children, the same is not true for men in non-tribal conditions. In non-tribal cultures most men are not very good in being nurturing and kind, especially towards other men or pets. As I've mentioned in another post, monogamy thus forces them into an emotional prison with one sole emotional connection to their partner.

The third asymmetry is that on the average, and also for evolutionary reasons, women value safety more than men and are less willing to take risks than men, and especially during childbearing years are less interested in taking on themselves the risks and competition for resources that it takes to obtain food and possibly shelter, and defending against marauders (all these things now represented by ability to make money). Combine this with lower upper body strength and spatio-temporal reasoning (which were more needed in defense and farming in agrarian cultures) and its not hard to see  how the ugly trade of sex/emotional intimacy for material resources evolved. The same supply and demand reasoning that leads women to have more power in sexual negotiations gave men more power in money negotiations. And of course men and women have tried to compensate for these imbalances by making prostitution or more subtle modern equivalents such as some forms of marriage possible and lucrative for both sexes. But in industrial and post-industrial cultures, men no longer have this bargaining power, except where it is vestigial. Safety is not much of an issue (except when a feminized culture over-reacts to various threats, from pandemics to terrorists to white supremacists, to communists, welfare mothers, child molesters, etc), upper body strength mostly isn't in high demand, and spatio-temporal reasoning might only be needed in a few STEM fields and trades (where men outcompete women, despite the fact that everyone in these fields wants more women to join them, and misguided beliefs about discrimination). Thus this asymmetry is already addressed in post-industrial culture.

In tribal cultures, the first asymmetry is mitigated by sex being more available for men from many women. Women do not pin all their economic hopes on one man, but on the tribe as a whole, and feel much safer (when there is no inter-tribal warfare at least) and do not need to guard their sexuality as an economic bargaining chip in exchange for safety and provisions. Sex can even become a way to ease tensions and increase group cohesion, as in bonobos. Also in tribal conditions, there is more connection to the sensual natural world and to other ego-transcending rituals besides sex, which mitigates the need for sex as the only mechanism of ego-transcendence. Last, in non-patriarchal tribal cultures there is much emotional bonding among all tribe members, also mitigating the need for sex, which is partially an emotional need, not just a physical need. This addresses the second asymmetry above. The asymmetries are still there (and are even celebrated), but they don't lead to the same prostitutional ugliness in tribal cultures (at least before they come into competition with other more violent tribes, or modernity) as they do in agrarian, industrial or post-industrial cultures.

The fact that we live in a post-industrial culture, not a tribal one is the first obstacle to transcending our evolution. The second obstacle is that trauma from the past is still determining to a large extent our present behavior, feelings and outlook. There is the past trauma of genocides, broken treaties, mass die-offs during epidemics, wars, forced relocations, kidnappings, slavery, witch burnings, normalized rape, beta male disposability in everyday life. Until that is addressed and integrated there is little hope for transcendence. We already mentioned the third obstacle to transcending evolution: the immense interdependence of parts of a culture.

The problem for MRAs is that they acknowledge the evolutionary pressures for women to get certain privileges and for most men to be disposable but they still think it's unfair and they won't admit that they are traumatized by the past. Most of them have no trouble with women having equal opportunities as men. I doubt most of them would want to live in a Handmaid's Tale kind of world. I think most MRAs share the original feminist desire to be treated as if they matter, not as being disposable or only valued for their use to women and alpha males. Their hatred of feminism is of the injustice that has only increased as a result of certain kinds of feminism, the hijacking of the original liberatory ideology by power hungry women and alpha men. But also that they don't want to recognize the female trauma of the past, during real patriarchal times, or of the present in cultures that still are patriarchal.

We need another wave. A wave of love for all people, letting them find what their gifts are, and helping them match them to the needs of their community, regardless of their biology, but not in spite of it. We need to rebuild communities, relocalize economies, and revalue the positive aspects of masculinity and femininity, instead of being immersed in the toxic aspects of both. But it won't happen without grief and trauma work and the recognition of the other genders' or culture's trauma, which might be different than our own.  And it won't happen without recognizing something sacred in life, that goes beyond evolutionary motives and economic transactions. It also won't happen without an understanding of social, psychological and biological evolution and the deeply ingrained cognitive habits of our culture which has proximally served the evolutionary trajectory it has taken. It may not be necessary for most people to have this understanding, but it would help if at least the leaders and pioneers of the 5th wave developed such an understanding.

Pioneers can be women like Cassie Jaye, Karen Straughan, Christina Sommers-Hoff and Janice Fiamengo, if they can team up with the more spiritual feminists like Starhawk, Lynx Vilden, Sue Monk Kidd and Pema Chodron.

the 6 values for resilient, temperamentally liberal communities

In Alanon, the first step towards recovery from alcoholism is to recognize that there is a problem and the alcoholic's current strategies of dealing with it are not working. We have a tendency (unless we've done some inner work) to try to pretend that we don't have a problem, that the problem is with something or someone else (and sometimes it is!) or to distract ourselves with other pseudo-problems which give us a dopamine rush, but do not address the real problem (e.g. addictions). Such is the case, I believe with the liberal (I don't mean classic liberal, I mean temperamentally liberal, as in very open to new ideas and experiences)) intentional communities movement. There is large turnover, there is a low community survival rate, there is much unhappiness, there is no or little replication or growth, and/or there is nothing radical (e.g. a neighborhood association that does not challenge the status quo) but instead of learning from conservative (or rather more precisely, traditionalist) ICs that have much smaller turnover and much larger survial rate, we pretend that we don't have a problem, for example to redefine community to mean what already exists everywhere in cities or workplaces or rural homesteads, or to define success in purely subjective terms that are independent of retention, survival or turnover rate. We pretend moreover that we can't learn from conservative ICs because we think their success is due to religious brainwashing, or we pretend that the real problem is racism, or patriarchy, or capitalism or individualism. It's not that these other things are not potential problems, but the fact that there are conservative ICs that have figured out how to keep members, tells us that these can be dealt with and surmounted. Or we keep hoping that somehow all the other people who have left were just not a good fit to our community (but nobody fits for very long except the original founder or founding couple, except when people get stuck and can't leave), that they need something else (but no community is able to provide for their needs), or are wounded (but everyone is wounded). I've talked previously about how conservatives do better on the so-called unifying values of respect for authority, group solidarity and rallying around the sacred/keeping out harmful-to-community (profane) behaviors, whether from internal free riders or external threats. Liberals in ICs would be wise to learn how to embody these values better. I want to re-examine these values, not just the 3 conservative ones, but the other 3, from the perspective of how they can be used to create strong communities that are offering an alternative to our declining mainstream culture. Jonathan Haidt looked at care/compassion on a national or international scale or in the abstract. He did not try to ask in his survey about care/compassion in the family, or in intentional communities. If he had surveyed questions on the smaller levels, I doubt he would have found liberals score higher than conservatives on care/compassion. I'm going to look at each one of these, how they can help a community and how they support each other. 

1. Care/compassion for others: is easy to feel in the abstract, but hard when other people's needs conflict with one's own. It can definitely help create group cohesion when individuals feel valued by others. The group that values its individuals is the group that has its own individuality and cohesion. It can happen at the level of the family, or the level of the community. It even happens when individuals value themselves, because those individuals are a community of different cells and organs, different gut bacteria, different brain/personality parts. As the size gets larger than a village of 100 or so people, it is harder for the humans to care much about all the other individuals and care/compassion decreases beyond that level, though liberals are able to have care/compassion in the abstract for outgroup memebers better than conservatives. Coming from western culture as it has developed lately, most people have trouble even within a small family of 2. In many liberal ICs people have trouble making eye contact with each other, or being vulnerable and responding to each other's feelings if the feelings are too deep. But looking at communities like the Bruderhof, the 12 tribes, the Brotherhood of Christ or other traditionalist communities, it is apparent (even without formal surveys) that there is much love between the members of these communities. A religion or ideology can encourage care and compassion for others, but at the root this must be a choice that people make when they join. It can happen that people are too absorbed in their own trauma to either extend love to others or be open to it from others. This can be negotiated, as long as it's not the default. Being open to support from community members in times of trauma is a skill that can be learned with much positive benefit. Many people coming from mainstream culture are not skilled at this. Also being open to supporting others emotionally can be beneficial for getting out of a personal funk. 

2. Group solidarity: "Conservative" rituals that require practice and coordination, and sometimes hierarchy and a sense of the sacred, like folk dancing, animal sacrifice/hunting, playing orchestral or choral music, and participating in church services can create hive-like states of consciousness, where the parts/individuals become a super-organism/individual. But there are liberal equivalents in ecstatic/improv dance and jazz or improvisational folk music or "cult-like" group spiritual or entheogenic ceremonies and services that can do just as well. Also certain games and group activities can encourage group solidarity. Another important ingredient is having a common mission that is ongoing and where progress towards it can be monitored. Apocalyptic missions are self-extinguishing when the apocalypse consistently fails to show up. Common enemies can unify, as can hardship and competition with other groups, but they are not sustainable (unless the competition is not too extreme). 

3. Individual autonomy: It's a no-brainer that if people only focus on this one and don't understand the tradeoff with group solidarity, that it will destroy any community. However, the tradeoff can be minimized if individual gifts are actively matched to community needs, so there is more individual autonomy with work. Also the tradeoff can be minimized if people are free to have their domestic sphere only with people they choose and feel most comfortable with, and then invite (or be invited by) others into their sphere. The danger here is sliding into "homesteadization" where there is not enough other community glue besides sharing meals. Children can help with community glue, but a culture that centers around children is a dead culture because the adults have no life apart from the children. Children need to learn that there is a life that they can aspire to, not just one they leave once they are adults. In addition people could have individual occupations that may not be useful to many in the community and yet still contribute to their own happiness. Happy individuals are a solid foundation for a community. 

4. A sense of the sacred and the profane: A sense of the sacred could be due to a unifying religion or ideology, and/or a unifying mission. It is most effective when it imbues all of daily life, as well as marking special occasions with such solidarity-encouraging activities discussed in # 2 above. For liberal communities, patriarchal gods are not a good idea. More appropriate are nature spirits, or pan-entheistic deities. Humanism seems to be too cerebral and not sensual enough, so such values as pacifism, no usury, organic food, population control and diversity are fine but not in the category of the sacred and the inspiring on a communal level. A mission needs to keep being sexy, cool and inspirational for many generations. A sense of the profane is important to prevent internal (free riding) as well as external threats. Liberals tend to prefer gentle rehabilitation to punishment of free riding, but either way the important thing is to impose a cost on free riding to dis-incentivize it. 

5. Justice--this is partially about preventing free riding and jealousy and encouraging conflict transformation. Justice is about having small Gini coefficient in the distribution of ratio of each individual's benefit to cost. Many liberals don't understand this and think justice is about equality of benefits or of costs. Having good arbitration processes like restorative justice and good communication like NVC is important. Justice is something that many more warlike tribes did not implement--it was the alpha male and his consorts that got most of the benefits and the least costs. Most of the gentler tribes that had more internal justice did not get to pass on their genes and memes to us and so we are mostly wired for chimp-like hierarchical injustice, instead of bonobo-like justice. One would naively think that liberal feminist values would remedy this kind of evolved injustice, but the opposite happens. Most men's needs (except the alpha) become secondary to most women's needs, and people are not even aware this is happening. Most men sacrifice their health and put themselves in danger for the community. Most women in communities are not even aware that men have much needs and feelings, as men are encouraged to repress those. This kind of injustice is not sustainable, though most are blind to it. These things also happen in conservative communities but the difference is that there men get respect, gratitude, and other benefits for their sacrifices, so the benefit to cost ratio is more equal between men and women in conservative communities (more justice). However some conservative communities like the amish have injustice for women....

6. Respect for authority. It's fine to have gentler, flatter hierarchies than in mainstream, but even bonobos have hierarchies, mostly based on social capital competence. Hierarchies need not be oppressive. Leaders need to be supported and monitored. More experience and competence should translate into more weight in decision making (topic specific) if the community is to survive and thrive. Liberals who don't get this are not community material and should go work in a mainstream company where they will feel totally oppressed. Many liberals bring leaders down, even competent ones. Communities should not waste the talents of good leaders by getting rid of them.

Witch Hunts (part II): Blacks, Jews and "Racists"

In the first installment of this series (part I), I talked about a rather outlandish and rare witch hunt and its corresponding group of maleficiaries (as opposed to beneficiaries), or alleged conspirators (or sometimes alleged lone actors), child molesters. It's not like people who are accused of child molestation (and might even be child molesters) have it easy. Their lives can be ended or ruined, but it happens relatively rarely. In contrast, the maleficiaries that this essay describes have been historically much more commonly scapegoated, and like accused child molesters, the consequences can be dire for them.

I'm thinking of Jews and Blacks. We'll start with Blacks, because at least on the surface of the Zeitgeist, their scapegoating seems much more relevant, but we'll see that the shadow of Jews lurks right underneath our collective subconscious.

Before we go on, I must state that I am a cultural (but not religious) Jew, and have no ill (and mostly good) will towards anyone, or any group, including Jews, Blacks, liberals, conservatives, alt-right, alt-left, etc.  (but I hope that the alt right people don't stop reading here as a result of this confession and virtue signaling). I also have much respect for (but not much knowledge of) native african Black cultures (all native cultures, actually), as well as the incredibly resilient Black culture that grew out of white american enslavement of african Blacks. This caveat is necessary to avert the inevitable accusations of being a third type of current scapegoat and Jungian shadow projection, whenever one deviates from the culturally accepted narrative of race, the "racist". Even if one does not deviate, mere accusations of "racist" can be used strategically to blacklist (no pun intended, but the word hearkens back to when Blacks were the equivalent of the current "racists") someone or demolish their reputation, something in common also with the "molester" category of scapegoat. Unlike many people today, I don't care if I am blacklisted due to this essay, because I hope to soon be independent of the mainstream system of economic enslavement that makes people afraid to speak their minds. It is more complicated when it comes to my reputation. My friends, who know my heart, will not be fooled by any sort of accusations against me. But I do hope to reach others who do not know me with these ideas, and so I do want to protect my reputation, as much as is possible under the circumstances, from accusations of racism, which might limit the extent of the reach of these ideas Probably in vain, alas, because Jungian Shadows can't be reasoned with. Like the greek Cassandra, I have warned about these shadows in this blog for a while, that one can't deal with them on the rational plane, but that deep psychological work is required in order to integrate them and avoid a positive feedback where one person triggers the shadow in another, and where a mob amplifies all its individuals' shadows. So I realize that the only people who will be able to read this will be ones who have done some inner shadow work.

Also, before we talk about Jews and Blacks, I'd like to talk more about calling out "racists" as defined by cancel culture. I haven't studied it much, but it seems like Stalinism, Maoism, or shunning in anabaptist communities (like Amish, some Mennonites, Hutterites, or Bruderhof) had similar mechanisms, though instead of "racist", they had "capitalist, regressive, bourgeois, class enemy, counterrevolutionary,  English", etc. Perhaps similar also to the reign of terror of the french revolution. Someone is accused of being evil/other, they have to make a public confession, if they don't, the pressure increases (whether by threats on life, livelihood or reputation) and then they are punished in some way, either shunned, sent out to the gulag, imprisoned, tortured or killed. The anabaptists are able to forgive,  less so with the Stalinists or Maoists. Not so sure about the SJWs, are they able to forgive? Also, the SJWs so far have only tried to get people fired or blacklisted, or tarnish people's reputation in some way, not imprisoned or killed (though the mob that went around with baseball bats looking for Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein might have had homicidal intent, and the killer of Marc Angelucci is still on the loose and may have been an SJW). See the caveat at the bottom of this essay.

Many times those making the accusations have righteous anger, which I do not want to dismiss. However the system of giving an immediate benefit to accusers (of racism, sexism, rape, molestation, whatever the lucrative witch du jour is), without a proportional cost, is a system that is unstable to a productive, sustainable and collaborative group structure, instead being taken over by what game theorists like Elinor Ostrom call free riding. Tragedies of various sort ensue: ecological tragedies such as the Tragedy of The Commons and Global Warming, Sociological Tragedies such as Reigns of Terror and Gulags, and economic tragedies such as externalization of costs.

Interestingly, the mechanisms operating in more right wing environments seem to be different, for example in Nazi Germany, ante-bellum south or McCarthyist US. There, it is very clear who belongs to the evil group (Jews, Blacks and Communists in the 3 examples above), whereas in these left wing environments this needs to be sorted out. I think this might be because leftists have more trouble with boundaries than rightists (according to Jonathan Haidt's empirical research), so establishing the boundaries is more messy, and anyone is suspect of not belonging, though everyone is in principle welcome if they just do the right ritual (which usually involves adopting a religion or an ideology and confessing one's sins). Eventually clear self-from-other recognition mechanisms do evolve (perhaps the whole attempt to label all white people as evilly-evil "other" is an example of evolving boundary simplification and self-from other recognition). There are probably analogue mechanisms operating in biological systems with evolution of immune systems. It is also possible that some of the white liberal people who are using "racist" callouts as a strategy are seeking to uphold the status quo and maintain power. This was discussed here https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/american-narratives-rescue-game.html

The other hypothesis I have is that the leftist movements, being initially much more inclusive, compassionate and egalitarian than the rightist ones, are more prone to be taken over by free riders in the form of dictators, unless (like the anabaptists) they develop some form of punishment or withholding of rewards, and the calling out is an evolution towards effective methods of punishment.

So we have, going back to native people in Africa, tribes who are nomadic or semi-nomadic. As with most such tribes (not only in Africa), there is a strong bond to the rest of the tribe and the nature around. Life is to be enjoyed in the present, or near future, not the far future at the expense of the present. A big part of the enjoyment comes from relationship with others in the tribe, and with the natural world. This cultural connection to land and tribe of Blacks is mostly severed (by the actions of real racists, not by people whom one might merely dislike and snarl at with the use of the word "racist") upon arrival as slaves in the New World, and into a culture which values the far future (even past physical death into a life of a future in heaven in its theology). The severing of connection to land and tribe is not completed in the rural ante-bellum south, but progresses even more upon immigration to cities and even more as the unifying enemy of the white plantation culture is removed, and many of the men being incarcerated with the remaining men (due to decreased competition for mates) now having incentive to "play the field" instead of commiting to a family (I'm not a fan of monogamous marriage, but I do see it as a stabilizing social force in the kind of culture we find ourselves in the west. Most tribal cultures, including african ones, are not monogamous) . What is left from the vibrant culture of tribe and land, is a present-discounting religion and the pale ghost of a nuclear family, to share food, music, worship, love and conversation with (but no longer work), things that were previously shared with the whole tribe or community. And then, even that last social glue and source of pleasure in the present and near future is weakened by drugs (a source of pleasure in the present, but also of pain in the future, naturally appealing to tribal propensities for present enjoyment) and insufficient availability of good work for most Black men, because that good work, which is limited in present system, mostly goes to white men, who for systemic historical reasons (having nothing to do with genetic racial traits, but do sometimes have a connection to the cultural differences mentioned above, or systemic discrimination like less investment in Black schools) are sometimes more qualified for it (as in most blacks may not be as good at ruthless capitalism, because they care too much about other people, unless they're gangsters), and sometimes not, with the Black men personally (not systemically) discriminated against by white racists. By "good work", I mean work which does not separate a man from his family, allows for self-respect, the expression of natural masculine gifts (such as upper body strength, strategizing, and spatio-temporal skills), and the appreciation of those gifts by family and direct beneficiaries of that work (not only through monetary compensation).

Discrimination against Black women also happens, but is less deadly (as in affecting life and livelihood), and limited to symbolic acts like not being allowed a seat at a restaurant or bus. Racist laws gradually change towards less discrimination, and greater opportunity for Blacks is aided by affirmative action laws. Some Blacks adapt to white culture and get out of poverty.

For sure, systemic and personal racism contributed to this situation (as described in previous paragraph) and still has echoes into the present. But to continue this situation, it is not necessary for white individuals who have anything to do with poor Black people to possess any sort of personal racism against Black people; or for any white person to be more "racist" than a baseline of xenophobia common to Homo Sapiens, that has evolved for thousands of years from living in tribes and coming up against other tribes who saw or did things differently and sometimes threatened or killed our ancestors. It is only necessary for the external economic system and internal poor Black culture that depends on it for survival to continue as before. To ease the pain of poor Black people, liberals tend to want to change the external economic system to a more socialist one, whereas conservatives want to change the poor Black culture (by, e.g. strengthening the family through positive economic myths of bootstrapping and opportunity, and Christian ideology). When liberals see Black people rebelling, their inclination is to feel guilty and afraid, and alleviate those feelings with self-confessions of imagined personal sins and ill-understood subconscious motives. They have a model based on altar calls in protestant churches, or confessions with catholic priests. Whereas conservatives are afraid and get ready to defend themselves. And the SJWs want to back them up against the wall further, ironically creating the very white supremacy they initially were afraid of (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1sJgjG5AF4 for a brief video analysis of this).

That is not the only conservative response to Black rebellion, and the dissatisfaction with life they might feel as their culture, like Black tribal culture, also disintegrates with the relentless onslaught of modernity and the depletion of natural resources that previously helped create abundance. The alt-right also start theorizing about how the frustrated and sometimes violent Blacks might be foot soldiers for some nefarious conspiracy, of.... You guessed it, history's favorite scapegoat, The Dreaded Ashke-nazi Jew (sic, you can't make this s**t up) Cabal of Financiers/Bankers, working to promote the dreaded New World Order, with the help of big (aka "socialist") government, Academia, Feminists, Liberals, the United Nations and Big Liberal Corporations like Google and Facebook. Yes, folks, "They" are coming to take away our freedom, houses, land and livelihoods. I worry that the "a few bad jewish apples in the financial world" meme, might mutate into "kill all the Jews", as it has a few times in the history of western civilization, but my conservative friends assure me it isn't so, or at least I will be spared, especially if I stay away from finance (or any kind of abstract mental activity), keep to agriculture and give them good deals on meat (just kidding about the latter).

Before you liberals shrug off this alt-right way of thinking, consider that the alt-right is not totally crazy, and actually have some intellectuals in their midst. There IS an over-representation of Jews in finance/banking, science, liberals, high managerial posts of big corporations. A taboo subject in today's cultural climate, but one which I want to dig up, shine light on, and integrate into our consciousness, in the Jungian tradition, with the hopes of also unifying the right and left parts of our body politic.

The western Jews (ashkenazi, and the sephardics who did not migrate to the muslim world), like the american Blacks, also have a unique cultural story. After being expelled from Israel about 2000 years ago, some were able to find a niche making a living during the middle ages by lending money, which was a forbidden occupation for Christians at the time. They also were frequently ousted and were not able to bring many belongings with them, so money and jewelry were convenient for a high value to weight ratio. Not allowed to own land and sometimes not allowed to join craft guilds, they instead developed more intellectual occupations, lived more often in cities and developed a more cosmopolitan outlook, whose natural outcome is towards a globalist outlook, whereas Jews that have become settled on land (e.g. in Israel and in Brooklyn;-)) tend to become more parochial and sometimes more conservative as well, and the "best" Jews are the one who experienced both worlds, since then they can empathize with both conservatives and liberals and be peacemakers and unifiers. Women were unusually (for the times) respected and valued not just as breeders or family peacemakers, but also for their intellectual gifts. And the Jews had, even before the diaspora, a culture which valued scholarship and intellectual debate (more accurately, collaborative dialectic conversation) as a way to hone the intellect and improve the search for truth, a precursor to the scientific method (which also includes observation and experimentation). There need not be genetic components to this constant intellectual improvement; cultural mechanisms of variation, heredity and selection may suffice. There might be genetic components to "Yidishe Kopf" as well (though I am not aware of evidence for a genetic component to intelligence), which would benefit from inter-breeding and having the smartest men (rabbis) bred to the most fertile women (as well as strong community support for the rabbi's family), both cultural practices in Jewish culture. IQ tests do not establish anything about genetics, and cultural mechanisms (and sometimes biases in how the questions are phrased, or what kinds of questions are picked) are sufficient to explain variation among cultures, but I wanted to include the possibility that there are genetic factors operating as well, hopefully without upsetting liberals. So we see that all these conversationally taboo aspects of Jewish culture have mundane explanations and that allowing for variation among cultures is not racist at all.

Besides the polarizing and potentially violence-inducing aspects of the 3 witch hunts discussed here, the problem with witch hunts in general is that they distract from solving real problems, instead giving a momentary relief. The real problems I see with our culture are the following (7 deadly sins):
Economic:
1. Depletion of cheap petroleum (inability of renewables to power industrial levels of consumption)
2. Overpopulation (too many individual and social resources going towards competition over scarce natural resources)
Social
3. Too much inequality, which has been shown to lead to social strife and instability, and to psychological stress in certain primate species such as H sapiens. You might still think this is at its root caused by Blacks, Jews or racists, but this essay is a first step to refuting that belief.
4. Not enough community to commune with, and to provide meaning to one's work
5. An educational system that does not promote deep historical learning, so as to enable avoiding repeating mistakes of the past
Ecological
6. feedbacks for human actions are too long and too slow, allowing for externalization to others, or others and oneself in distant future. Global warming is an example. Would be better to have local feedbacks because they affect the people causing the disturbances in a fast and direct way, allowing for correction.
Psychological
7. Unprocessed trauma (ideologies that promote a lack of personal responsibility to process it, and unavailability of local community to help individuals process it through grief rituals), leading to Jungian shadows and their projection unto mutually created and imagined enemies

Given all this, I would hope that SJWs would stop focusing on racism and consider other sources for their own problems and those of poor Blacks, that poor Blacks would think about other options besides turning the tables of wealth and privilege within the current economic system (as in creating alternative systems to become independent of current system, including learning from their ancestral tribal cultures), and that alt-right people would stop fearing Blacks and the alleged cabal of Jews, and instead focus on recreating some of their heritage village cultures. I would also hope that more Jews would learn more about how globalization has hurt many people and whether its disadvantages might outweigh its advantages, or perhaps think about how to address the disadvantages while keeping at least some of the advantages.

A supporting video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGt733yw3g

Caveat: I am using the terms SJW and cancel culture in a non-derogatory way here, contrary to the common usage. I do not condone demonizing/zombifying these human beings (that would be hypocritical, since the whole series of posts argues against witch hunts), though I think they are currently hurtful and destructive, ignorant of world history, and seem ideologically possessed, without offering a constructive, practical alternative. They over-simplify a complex external, multi-causal situation by finding one cause, systemic racism (or white privilege, patriarchy, colonialism, etc), for the present problems of poor black people (or our civilization in general), that is easy to rally around, and one common enemy, personal racists (or white supremacists, men, Europeans, etc). So much easier than trying to understand the complexity of the situation and then from that understanding to do something to actually change the lives of poor black people (or all of us) for the better. Or to understand their own internal shadows that they project onto the "racists" (and the other "enemies") . Still, I think a human to human conversation with them is possible if they are separated from the mob.