Natural Education, Natural Enterprise, Natural Community: Creating a Virtuous Cycle

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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’sgoing by itself!