 Of
late, most of my conversations have been about love, about conversation
and about community, specifically the creation of model intentional
communities that are essentially polyamorous in nature (i.e. membership
in the community is self-selected in such a way that all members of the
community love each other, equally, with no pervasive pair bonds). My
article Communities Based on Love
has sparked quite a bit of discussion on this subject, notably the 16
natural capacities I suggested members in such a community should have:
- deep capacity for love
- passion for the community's shared purpose/intention
- trust
- emotional strength
- sensitivity, openness, perceptiveness
- good instincts
- self-sufficiency
- honesty
- intelligence, critical thinking ability
- curiosity
- imagination
- creativity
- responsibility
- expressiveness
- flexibility
- tolerance
Many
readers thought this long list too onerous and exclusive, but I sense
that a Natural Community whose members significantly lack any of these
qualities would be extremely fragile. I also believe we are all born
with these capacities, and for most it's just a matter of
Letting-Oneself-Change to re-engender them.
I have already
begun, with a woman I have met in Second Life who I will call Eve, to
create one such community in Second Life to test whether all these
capacities are necessary, and to test my hypothesis that such
communities should naturally and advantageously be polyamorous. Eve and
I are beginning to explore the operating principles that might govern
such communities. I see these principles being fluid, emergent and
co-developed by the community members, so what we come up initially
with will be merely a first stake in the ground.
My recent
obsession with love, conversation, polyamory and community has been
such that I've also been talking with real-life friends (some of whom
are physically close and others whom I have never met face-to-face but
love nevertheless) about these principles. Some of these people I hope
to invite to be part of our Second Life MPNC (model polyamorous natural
community).
Here are some of the principles we've been thinking and talking about:
- Intentionality Principle:
The MPNC must have, and share, a common intention. The whole idea of
creating community is to achieve some shared purpose, without which the
glue of loving each other would probably not be enough to cohere the
community (that's why they're called 'intentional communities'). Our
purpose in this first MPNC might be simply to test and prove the
viability of this model of living together.
- Self-Management Principle:
The MPNC's membership must be self-managed. This means, for example,
that Eve and I must agree on who to invite next, and as we add members
we must all agree on any
additional members. This probably means size of the MPNC will be
self-limiting. Self-management also means that all important decisions
must be unanimous, achieved by consensus and not by compromise, pressure or 'voting' of any kind. The best real-life ICs
have a well-practiced dispute resolution process built on love, deep
mutual trust and respect, mutual support and strong, honest
communication, that our MPNC needs too. Just as importantly, the MPNC's
members must know how to imagine and create their way our of problems
and impasses. The best collectively self-managed groups I know are
mostly women's groups, and I think the MPNC needs to listen carefully
and learn from our women members how to self-manage better.
- Membership in the MPNC needs to be diverse and balanced. I've explained that the capacities of partners in a Natural Enterprise
must be 'on purpose', and diverse and mutually exclusive (don't want
too many people with the same strengths and weaknesses), and
collectively exhaustive (between them, the enterprise partners need to
have all the capacities necessary to their shared purpose). I think the
same applies to our MPNC: We want our members to be diverse, so that
while we all love each other equally, we love each other in different
ways and for different things, so that we move among the members in
love and in so doing fulfill different parts and needs of ourselves and
each other. If some quality is conspicuously missing from the members,
it's only to be expected that they will want to go outside the MPNC for
that quality. To the (considerable) extent the love of members for each
other is erotic, there needs to be balance between genders and sexual
orientations too, so that there is no scarcity of any form of love,
including erotic love.
- There should be polyfidelity within the MPNC.
As a perhaps controversial corollary of the above, to make the
community safe and stable, members should commit to limit their
romantic and erotic relationships to other members of the community. I
think the difference between a polyamorous community and a group of
promiscuous people is an important one. Commitment to community should
be a deep commitment, and if a member is unable to fulfill their
desires for love within the community, that suggests either the member
lacks commitment or the community lacks members with certain needed
qualities that would allow the member to find what s/he loves within
it. Just like a business partnership, you agree on who's in and who's
out, and commit yourself
to making the partnership work. Because the love between the members of
the MPNC is so deep, raw, and generous, its members are vulnerable to
being hurt, and therefore the MPNC must be an emotionally safe place,
one with an abundance of all forms of love accessible withing the
community, so that jealousy and possessiveness don't rear their ugly
heads.
- The members of the MPNC must feel, embrace and practice compersion and empathy. Compersion
is taking pleasure when someone you love is with or expresses love for
another partner (in this case, another member of the community). It is
the antithesis of jealousy. I think this is the hardest thing to learn
in a polyamorous community, even when there is an abundance of love
within the community. I don't know why this is, but I have experienced
this myself in Second Life. It hurts a bit to hear someone you really
love relating or demonstrating delight received from another lover. But
when you get past this, it's utterly liberating, as if you have finally
ridded yourself of the worst vestige of our current society's terrible
scarcity of love. Likewise, empathy
(the ability to perceive profoundly the emotional state of another)
must come to replace subjectivity, selfishness and proclivity to judge
others. Empathy is another capacity that in my experience most women
are much better at than men, so the women of the MPNC probably will
need to lead the learning of this practice.
There may well be
other principles, and perhaps we'll find some of these principles are
unnecessary or need to be changed. This is all about practice, and it
is through practice, in Second Life, and paying attention to what works
especially well and what doesn't work well, that these principles will
evolve into a set of principles that guide the flow of the community.
And it is through practice that we'll learn to become better community
members, lovers and friends. There is, I think, no other way to make
this work. And it is important, both to our broken modern society and
to the generations yet unborn who may have to create a new society from
the ruins of civilization, that we make it work. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
