Merry Christmas, everyone!
I wish you all peace, love and joy, learning and discovery in the year ahead.
We
have so much work ahead of us, but it will not be tedious -- it will be
astonishing, delightful, intentional, and, in a million small ways,
Earth-changing. We cannot fail.
:: Dave ::
In last week's article I attempted to explain why I thought it made more
sense to create new models than to try to fight or reform the existing
political, educational, social and economic systems. I promised to
write about why I think polyamorism is an essential element of
what I've called 'model intentional communities' -- models that
are not abstractions or concepts, but real working models, people
striving together with common purpose, showing rather than telling people a better way to live.
Let's start with what an intentional community (IC) is. Diana Leafe Christian defines it as an autonomous, self-managed, democratic association of people with
shared social, cultural and economic intentions and aspirations. My own definition of a model intentional community (MIC) is one that is:
- exemplary -- it works well, and represents the best of what ICs with similar focus and talents have to offer
- egalitarian -- it is non-hierarchical, has no dominant
leader, and is free of the coercive characteristics that can cause
healthy communities to decline into cults
- replicable -- other successful ICs could be created by following its example
- educational -- by spending time in it, you can learn a great deal, including how and why it is successful
- responsible and respectful -- members take responsibility for,
and are respectful of, the welfare of other members and their environment
- self-sufficient and sustainable -- it's not dependent on the largesse of outsiders, or on subsidies or low commodity prices
- diverse -- substantially different in focus, style, and/or structure from the other MICs
In a recent post,
I argued that for an MIC to be effective, its members probably had to
have most or all of 16 natural capacities: 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, and tolerance.
And in a follow-up,
I suggested that MICs should adhere to certain collective political and
economic operating principles: Stop at one child per woman, practice
radical simplicity, pledge to buy local, leave the Earth as you found
it, practice bioregionalism & permaculture, cooperate &
collaborate, practice consensus democracy, value everyone's time
equally, pay attention to nature, be self-sufficient, incur no debts,
be generous, organic and responsible, and understand and use the power of
relationships.
Diana's research suggests that the average active IC has about eleven
members, meaning it's about the same size as a pioneer family. My guess
is that that's not big enough to be self-sufficient and sustainable.
My argument is that our civilization society deliberately contrives to
keep our social units this small. It doesn't want us to be
self-sufficient and sustainable. It wants us to be dependent on it for
jobs, for money, and for the things that money buys, so we continue to
support it even though it is inhuman, degrading, tedious, and keeps
most of us in constant struggle and misery.
This civilization society is full of people in monogamous nuclear
family units. It's a society full of pain and disability, where
millions live in one form or another of imprisonment. It's a society
devoid of imagination, incapable of change, grim, conforming, obedient,
co-opted, brainwashed. Dependent and co-dependent. Obsessed with
security, possession, survival. Addicted to consumption. Mostly
joyless, tedious, jealous of others' power, possessions, beauty,
material and political and social and sexual success. The monogamous
nuclear family unit is held together by a 'marriage', which we are
taught is hard work, requires total commitment, struggle, sacrifice.
Just like our jobs.
The information and education and entertainment media brainwash us into
believing that this is the only way to live. They celebrate the arduous
overcoming of hardship, the practice of fidelity, self-sacrifice,
defeating the competition. The media adore the ritual of marriage, the
giving
of two people to each other, exclusively. Infidelity is always punished
in the end, in film, in music, in literature. Jealousy and
possessiveness are portrayed as natural,
evidence of love.
So it's not surprising that polyamorism -- a group of people who love
each other without restriction or restraint, with compersion (taking
pleasure in the pleasure that someone one loves finds in the company of
others) -- is viewed as suspect, greedy, selfish, disrespectful,
faithless, undisciplined, immoral, even exploitive.
There are four forms of love -- intellectual, emotional,
sensual/aesthetic and erotic. No one should be expected to love only
one person in any or all of these ways. No one should be expected to
fulfill everything that another person could want or need, to be that
lovable in all four ways.
Several
readers have told me that making the community polyamorous will only
make it harder to find members, harder to self-manage the complex
arrangements, elitist, and preoccupied with love among its members
instead of being a true, generous, outward-focused model for others.
The
important issue, I think, is whether such a polyamorous MIC would best
manifest the behaviours consistent with sustainability, responsibility,
generosity and self-sufficiency, and the operating principles listed
above. Would a polyamorous community be more likely to have fewer
children each generation, consume less, borrow and 'import' less, be
more peaceful and cohesive, freer, and, perhaps most important, happier
and better able to learn, imagine and adapt?
I think it would, but it's hard to articulate my reason for believing so, other than to say:
- my instincts tell me it would,
- I believe wild creatures live in community this way, and
- my
own joy loving many people without limit or constraint feels like a
natural way to live, one that most people would find joyful and
healthy, if they weren't so brainwashed to believe that monogamy is the
only way to live.
There are about two dozen people on my
current Love Conversation Community list, people I love deeply and I
think I would enjoy living in an MIC with, either in Real Life or in
Second Life or some other 'virtual' community, if those people were so
inclined. Most, but not all, are women, and heterosexual, though, and I
believe an MIC needs balance and diversity, so this group is not, and
could not be, an MIC, though, hypothetically, it might be the nucleus
of one. Some of these two dozen people I am intellectually infatuated
with -- I really love their minds, their imaginations, their creative
genius. Others I love emotionally -- they have a combination of
strength and sensitivity, and they care about much the same things I do
and articulate these shared passions and purposes well. They fulfill
something in me that is otherwise unfulfilled, and they have told me
that I likewise fill something in them.
Others I have an
aesthetic love for -- they are just beautiful people, physically, a joy
to watch, to listen to, to admire for their art, or the way they move,
their grace, their strength, their physical talent, their agility. And
still others I have an erotic love for -- expressed or (mostly)
unexpressed, likely or unlikely to be reciprocated, but present and
powerful nonetheless -- as one of them put it "we want to fuck who we
want to fuck", and it is our bodies, not our minds, that choose this.
It
is not even as simple as checking off which of these four types of love
I feel for each of these two dozen people, because there are different
aspects and means of loving and appreciating people in each of these
four ways. I may love one person emotionally for their generosity, what
they offer to me and to others, the way they exemplify openness and the
raw gifting of their soul. I may love another person emotionally for
their sensitivity, their perceptiveness, their 'emotional
intelligence'. I may love yet another person emotionally for their
energy, their intensity, and be attracted to them the way a moth is
attracted to a flame.
So the idea that I could or should love
only one person exclusively, and expect to get everything I would want
or need from them, and that I should strive also to be able to provide
that one person with everything they want or need seems like the stuff
of romantic fantasy, an impossibility, a recipe for disappointment. No
wonder monogamous marriage is such hard work -- so many compromises,
self-denials, frustrations, struggles to be enough, to do better, to
make the marriage 'work'!
I can see the value for a brief pair
bonding during a woman's pregnancy, and this is also manifest in the
natural world of wild creatures. For this period, some self-sacrifice
is necessary, and that requires a huge and personal commitment to one
other person. But once the child is born, the bond should relax and
re-permit polyamorism in all its dimensions, as the role of raising the child once it is born is a community-wide role.
My
sense (and the purpose of trying out different IC approaches is to
experiment, discover and learn what actually works, before presuming to
offer a model to others) is therefore that the members of a polyamorous
community would be happier, more relaxed, more trustful, more
knowledgeable about other people's feelings, beliefs, purposes, gifts
and passions (through greater intimacy), less selfish, less insecure,
less risk-averse, more imaginative and creative, more peaceful and
adaptive and resilient. Mainly just because they know more and know and
trust each other better, because there is an abundance of love, because
the support network is broader, because there is emotional 'safety in
numbers'. And also because there is more time and space for love,
conversation and community. Surely the consequence of this must be an
emergent collective understanding of a better way to live?
And
so, my intention is now to co-create with others not one, but a host of
MICs, different experiments, full of people who love each other
unequivocally. A dozen and then a hundred and then a million people,
walking away from the bankrupt and dysfunctional systems of our
civilization and discovering and learning together a better way to
live, through Love Conversation and Community. Evolving the principles
above in a way that works for each community, but with a shared vision
of sustainability, responsibility, and gentle joyfulness. And networked
together and with all-life-on-Earth, sharing stories of what works,
co-creating a whole new and resilient society, with zero hierarchy and
unlimited abundance. A natural society.
This
may be just my crazy idealism. But my instincts are not usually wrong.
At any rate, when we put this to the test of experiment and see what
evolves, we will know. I just can't imagine any community structure
working worse than the monogamous isolated nuclear family structure.
Despite all the propaganda in its defence, I am sure most of us can, in
time, see that that structure is both cause and effect of our
grotesque, greedy, hateful, thoughtless, violent, careless and
unsustainable modern civilization.
Are you persuaded? What
would it take for me to show you (rather than just try to convince you)
that a polyamorous MIC is probably the best model for how to live, a
model that we can create and offer to others? Do you still feel that
polyamorism is a distraction, a red herring in the collective search
for answers to our society's most pressing and intractable problems? Is
there a monogamous model out there that actually works?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
