I've been chatting recently with my European friend lugon, of fluwiki
fame, about the recurring frustration many of us have trying to move
from ideas to actions. Progressives seem to agree that natural
education (unschooling), natural enterprise (making a joyful living
doing something important that you love and do well with people you
care about), and natural (intentional) communities make sense. But to
most they seem to be just an ideal. Why are there so few success
stories of these? Can we ever hope to scale them up or replicate them
across the globe so that they replace the existing, dysfunctional
systems?
I think the reason for the frustration is that the
dysfunctional systems, for all their flaws and the immense damage they
do to our psyches, our societies and our environment, constitute a
vicious cycle, each element reinforcing the others. It's not
sustainable, but it does tend to hold itself together until something
gives and it all flies apart. I've illustrated this in the red cycle in
the chart above.
Our traditional education system teaches
learned helplessness, and does not teach us how to make a living for
ourselves. It perfectly feeds the industrial
business-political-economic system, which wants an excess of cheap,
frightened, obedient, dependent labour. As wage slaves we assemble into
alienated bedroom communities, where the place we live is dictated by
income and proximity to job, not sense of place or kinship with
neighbours. These soulless communities are strictly utilitarian, and
have no capacity to teach people, so education is closeted in
institutions apart from the real world, where the propaganda can be
propagated without any dissonance from reality.
This vicious
cycle is self-perpetuating, but it is not sustainable. Pathological
corporations destroy the environment and disregard human well-being in
the relentless pursuit of profit at any cost. Alienated communities
engender crime, poverty, disparity, stress, anger, despair and
emptiness. The education system is loathed by its inmates, and serves
as little more than an expensive incarceration for excess, untrained,
and not-yet-obedient labour.
Most of us know, intuitively,
emotionally, and (if we have the time and opportunity to become
informed) intellectually, that this system is not how we were meant to
live, and not an optimal way to live. So we try experiments (the black
arrows in the chart above):
- We try unschooling our children,
or ourselves, as Holt and Gatto and Illich and Esteva have espoused.
But it's hard -- it takes a huge effort because it's so uncommon that
the ability to learn from each other is not available. We have to do
everything ourselves, so the experience lacks the social interaction it
should have when it is a collective self-discovery of the world, of how
it works, and a collective exploration of ideas to make it better. So
we may, reluctantly, give up and go back to the traditional education
system.
- We try to become entrepreneurs, creating sustainable,
responsible enterprises, but we can't find working models to follow --
every other entrepreneur has seemingly fallen into the industrial
economy traps: the grow-or-die mythology, trying to manage and motivate
employees, loss of control, the stress of marketing solutions instead
of just researching and responding to unmet needs. The deck is stacked
against us, and we can't find others with the imagination to explore
better ways to make a living. So we may, reluctantly, give up and go
back to traditional jobs.
- We try to create intentional
communities, but as soon as they larger than a family they seem to
self-destruct. People don't seem to know how to achieve win-win
consensus. Zoning authorities block all activities that don't conform
to the single-family residential model. The ideas of personal ownership
of property and personal privacy seem so embedded in the culture that
anything that compromises them sets us conflict.
The record of
all these experiments in living a natural life is poor. Why is this? Is
the only life we know the only life we can ever again hope to know?
I
think the problem is that we give up too easily. This is understandable
-- it's like riding a bicycle for the first time. Until you get up to
the speed where movement and stability self-perpetuate, it seems a
frustrating and hopeless endeavour.
We need to keep in mind
that, as the green cycle in the chart shows, there is a natural economy
cycle that self-perpetuates and self-reinforces just as powerfully as
today's dysfunctional vicious industrial economy cycle. We just need to
get it moving fast enough. We need to get more experiments going, in
tandem, reinforcing each other. If we offer unschooling and we offer entrepreneurship skills and we seek to buy from local natural enterprises and we work to build and network together self-sufficient natural intentional communities that offer an environment for learning in community, all together then will start to see these efforts reinforcing each other and creating a virtuous cycle.
Lugon
suggests a three-step process for getting past inertia, for getting
this virtuous cycle going fast enough that is keeps going through its
own momentum:
- Vision: Get a bunch of us together, bunches of
bunches of us together, to start imagining how this virtuous cycle
could work, perhaps using Open Source, telling stories of this Natural
Economy as if it already existed.
- First Next Steps: Each of us,
personally, can then intend to take the first steps to become part of
the realization of this vision, and connecting with others and sharing
all of our personal, collective, next steps. one step at a time, like
pedaling that tipsy bicycle a little faster, a little faster.
- Contagion:
We need to get others to believe that the Natural Economy is possible.
Starting with those who are not brainwashed, who are informed, who
care, who have the capacity to imagine and to intend. And then, as we
start to get some working models of the full cycle in motion, spreading
the contagion further, the incredible idea that the Only Life We Know
is not the only way to live, that there is a better way.
I
like it. I'm inspired to dust myself off, shake off the bruises, stop
looking at the bicycle I've constructed and get back on the damn thing
and this time, pedal and keep pedaling and not stop until....hey, it's
going by itself!
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11:09:49 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
