how to save the world

B

I’ve already written about a few miniature truths that have emerged for me after a lot of thought and a lot of fortuitous experience; most of them are what I’ve learned about human nature in trying to make the world a better place:

1. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun (Pollard’s Law). There is no time left for what’s merely important, for ‘doing the right thing’. This law seems to govern all human behaviour, everywhere. Thanks, by the way, to those who tried to get this Law into Wikipedia, only to be told by the Wikipolice that “an idea presented on a blog does not warrant inclusion in Wikipedia”.

2. Things are the way they are for a reason; if you have any hope to change something, first understand what that reason is. It’s rarely obvious. Reality is evolutionary, and so is change.

3. Life’s meaning, and an understanding of what needs to be done, emerges, most often, from conversation in community with people you love. This is based on an idea by Nancy White and her colleagues. It is the key to changing anything, whether you it be the political or economic system, and whether you want to save the whales, stop global warming, reform education, spark innovation or anything else. 

4. Community is born of necessity. This I learned from Joe Bageant’s son (via Joe) when I visited him recently. Consistent with Pollard’s Law above, experimental, Intentional Communities can only succeed when their members have no choice but to make them work. 

5. To get people to change, first Let-Yourself-Change, to become a model that shows people personally, one-to-one, a better way to live, rather than just telling them what to do. — Gandhi, with a bit of amplification. 

6. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete, a working model of a better way, one that others can follow. — Bucky Fuller. You want to save the world? Do it bottom up, not top down. 

7. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead. Although many doubt that small working models of a better way to live are scalable i.e. that they could become pervasive in our society and actually replace what’s dysfunctional, there is evidence that only such models are scalable.

8. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
   to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.– ee cummings. 

9. Our civilization is in its final century. This is the important lesson of John Gray’s Straw Dogs. It doesn’t matter what we try to do to reform it, every civilization ends, and ours will be no different. That’s not depressing, it’s invigorating and liberating. The world will be just fine without us. We need to do everything we can to make the world a better place for those we love and for our children and grandchildren now, to reduce suffering. But at the same time we should live a life of joy, every day, a natural life, not a life of struggle and sacrifice to save what cannot be saved.

During my pilgrimage to Belize, I came up with two more miniature truths. Here’s the first of them:

• The key to Letting-Yourself-Change is to get rid of the gunk that you have collected throughout your life that prevents you from being authentically yourself.

When I was a child, I was wild. Not in the sense of being unmanageable — I was quite attentive back then. Wild in the sense of uncivilized, raw, open, unrepressed, natural. I am told I was constantly taking my clothes off, not to show off but because I found them confining, unnatural, and saw nothing embarrassing about nudity.

I was fearless (I did a photoshoot as a baby, hamming it up for the camera, that appeared on the front page of the local newspaper), I was imaginative (too much so for my neighbourhood friends, who couldn’t follow the games I invented), affectionate (my favourite game as soon as I could walk was ‘kissing tag’, since most of the kids my age in the neighbourhood were girls). Back then I struggled with communication (I didn’t learn to write reasonably well until my late teens, read little until then, and was nervous singing (I was a pretty good boy soprano) and talking in crowds.

And then all the trappings of civilization came rushing in — the cruel games kids play, the preference for cute, athletic, clever, funny, well-coordinated friends (I got pretty gangly-looking as I aged, my voice broke so my singing teacher lost interest in me, and I was terribly coordinated — I couldn’t swim or dance and my penmanship was illegible. I began to acquire a lot of the fears, doubts, and prejudices of the groups I desperately wanted to belong to, which were only made worse as my advances were rebuffed). I became a loner, and not even a ‘smart’ one.

By the end of high school, I’d acquired some talents that were popular, became a scholar, and regained my self-esteem in spades. But in the process, and even since then, I’ve picked up a lot of ‘stuff’ that isn’t me. I’ve become, in many respects, “everybody-else”.

My days are now terribly busy, even without family responsibilities to look after. My job and my book both have a lot of self-imposed responsibility, that I took on willingly and knowingly, because they’re consistent with my passion for supporting Natural Entrepreneurs and building caring communities working to make the world a better place. But it’s slow going and time consuming. My blog carries with it the responsibility to write useful stuff, often, and to at least try to respond to readers’ comments. Looking at a backlog of over 100 e-mails and months of unanswered comments (not to mention an obsolete blogroll and table of contents, that will take weeks of work to update) I can only groan at the workload that lies ahead of me.

In an article a month ago I wrote about how I thought I should ideally spend each day:

• 9 hours a day for sleeping and personal hygiene
• 2 hours a day for physical exercise — running, meditation, working out, yoga, hiking etc.
• 3 hours a day for play — learning things you love, having non-competitive fun, just paying attention and being in the moment, and expressing love and joy in different ways
• 3 hours a day for meaningful conversation — not small-talk, conversations with intention (this time could include meal-times)
• 2 hours a day for reflection — thinking, reading/watching/listening to actionable information and stimulating entertainment content, and deciding, thinking ahead, considering what it all means and what needs to be done as a result
• 2 hours a day for creation — writing, model-building, sketching, composing
• 3 hours a day for action — first/next steps towards doing important things, productive actions that make the world a better place
• 0 hours a day doing work that isn’t one of the above types of activities
• 0 hours a day for administration, paperwork, ‘non-value-added’ work
• 0 hours a day driving to and from places
• 0 hours a day shopping
• 0 hours a day waiting
• 0 hours a day for chores
• 0 hours a day for small talk
• 0 hours a day for reading/watching/listening to mindless, unactionable stuff

In fact, I’m not getting enough time for sleep, exercise, play, meaningful conversation, reflection, creation or action. Why? Because my life is full of time spent dealing with all the commitments I’ve taken on. And because I’m spreading myself way too thin, taking on too much. I keep forgetting how to say no. My twelve suggestions for making more time for what’s important in that earlier article just aren’t working. I suspect I’m caught up in Pollard’s Law myself, procrastinating on doing things that are important (and which I mostly really want to do) but that are time- and energy-consuming, in favour of things that are easy, undemanding.

But underneath all that, I think, is this growing sense that I’m not myself. The real, authentic me would not take on commitments that would be unreasonable and tedious to discharge. The real, authentic me would not procrastinate. The real, authentic me would not find himself fretting about my work backlog, or watching TV because I’m just too tired to do anything else.

So if (as I claim above) things are the way they are for a reason, what is the reason for this? How did I become “everybody else” and stop being “nobody but myself”, as cummings put it? I think it may be because, like most people, I respond to attention and appreciation, and love — and when I get it I agree to do almost anything to keep it coming. With love such a scarce commodity in our terrible world, is there anything we won’t do for it, including becoming “everybody else”?

I think this is why I’m such a visceral believer in polyamorism, even though I haven’t been able to make the argument for it very articulately. If I felt, as a did as a young child, that I was surrounded by unqualified love, that it was everywhere and eternal, would I then stop taking on commitments I don’t want and can’t keep? Would I then stop changing myself into what I’m not, adding all this gunk that isn’t me, just to nurture a scarce and uncertain commodity that is naturally abundant?

Is the lack of love, in family, in community, everywhere, what’s behind the loneliness, the desperation, the anomie that we see everywhere in our society, which becomes pathology and violence and misery and cruelty?

I suspect the gunk we accumulate is mostly protective, the stuff of fear and uncertainty and anxiety over the potential loss of intimate connection, which we all need to survive.

It’s not yet an intention, because I’m not sure I can do it, but I’m going to start working to be fearless about the loss of attention, appreciation, and love, to believe that it can be abundant, and to start saying no to things that are not really important to me, regardless of the consequences. And to do fewer things, the things I’m really good at (imagining possibilities, and writing) better, and exclusively. Perhaps in so doing I can become, for the first time in my life, a model — of courage, of generosity, of authenticity, of getting important things done.

And in so doing, perhaps I can become, as I was as a young child, raw, naked, wild. Nobody but myself.

Likewise, the Garifuna of Belize, who bailed out of shipwrecked slave ships over three centuries ago, had no choice but to make their Accidental Community work, and its culture remains, improbably and against all odds, prevalent today in much of the country.

Meanwhile, the Intentional Communities of the world have a low success rate and an average population of just eleven people. They are the product, often, of affluent, comfortable people who have selected each other carefully and patiently, and who have a shared passion that most Accidental Communities lack. They are experiments of joy designed to discover what works and what doesn’t, by learning from failure. They never reallysucceed, most of them, perhaps because they don’t have to.

Not only is this economical, it’s a wonderful way to discover how other people really live their lives, and to learn and experience their ‘stories’.

I was privileged to have the opportunity, on only a couple of days’ notice, and on impulse, to spend last week visiting Belize, the home of essayist, journalist and storyteller extraordinaire Joe Bageant, author of the moving and brilliantly satirical Deer Hunting with Jesus.

Joe has largely walked away from civilization (a lovely home in Virginia) and now lives much of the year in a tiny cottage by the Caribbean Sea in the village of Hopkins. Whatever he earns from his writing he shares with the Garifuna family on which his cottage, and the 600 s.f. cottage where his hosts, Len and Marie* and their six children (and three dogs) live. A third cottage (the raised bungalow in the picture above), which Joe helped build and finance, now provides rental income for the family, and an affordable home for a hardworking immigrant family from Guatemala. I bunked in with our hosts in return for paying for groceries for the family during my three day stay (very inexpensive by our standards, a lot by theirs) and a few gifts I bought for the youngsters.

Their home is quite affluent by Belizean standards. They have a small TV, a stereo, and a compact (mostly empty) refrigerator. All the lights in the homes here are compact fluorescents, which gives the place an eerie pale glow at night. Len brings home leftovers for the dogs from the tourist resort where he works. As a result, their dogs are well fed compared to most, a lot of which are strays. (All the dogs seem to be the same medium size and similar black and brown mixed colouring — I guess for evolutionary reasons.) The minute I showed our hosts’ dogs affection, however, they began to push each other away, vying for my attention (it’s not in the culture of the people there to play with or pat their dogs). From that point on they followed me relentlessly, though I never fed them. Just like humans, it seems, relationships and attention and love are more important than any other sustenance. Just like my daughter on her recent trip to Costa Rica, I wanted to adopt and ‘save’ (and neuter) all the dogs I saw in Belize, most of which were emaciated (and some near death).

We in the world’s affluent nations have ruined the Belizean economy. The fisheries that once sustained them have been ruined by overfishing and industrial pollution. So the locally-grown rice and beans, and hand-made tortillas, are the staples on which they live (despite the huge groves of citrus trees, there was not that much local fruit — the citrus is almost all squeezed and concentrated for export). These are supplemented with many expensive, imported, packaged foods. Other than staple foods and wood, as one local citizen I spoke to put it, “everything we buy in this country is imported”. Imports are too expensive for most residents, and most of the packaged imported foods (Coke, candy bars and chips) are the same addictive, empty calories people all over the world are addicted to.

Non-food imported goods are mostly Chinese crap (just like everywhere else). Because of their poor quality, and the fatalism of a people who know that a hurricane could easily destroy everything they own in a heartbeat, there is not much motivation to maintain or repair anything. Global warming will not be kind to Belize, though this danger is almost unknown to its people.

Because of this dysfunctional economy, the country is an enormous irony: Against a backdrop of bountiful provenance and staggering natural beauty (Cousteau has made both their rainforest and their offshore cays internationally famous) almost everything man-made in this country is in disrepair. Construction projects sit unfinished, most wood buildings are sadly weather-beaten and dilapidated, rusty metal scrap is piled by roadsides, plastic garbage blown from everywhere litters the beach and yards (except for those scrupulously maintained by their owners, like our hosts). It is simply too expensive to maintain buildings and infrastructure. Part of the modest tax revenue of the country is misspent, to be sure, but even if it weren’t there wouldn’t be enough.

Just as in affluent nations, the people of Belize work too long and too hard (often at multiple jobs), get exploited by the rich, and do whatever they can, day and night, to make ends meet for their families. They have neither the time nor the money to maintain and repair things. So just as in affluent nations, infrastructure is crumbling — roads, bridges, sewers, water pipes left unfixed and unreplaced long after their intended useful lives. Road and other projects are started just before elections and then abandoned.

We are all, rich and poor, living beyond our means, living unsustainably. While affluent nations borrow more and more to consume more and more, and then throw away more and more, struggling nations borrow more and more (from the usurious IMF) to compensate for what has been stolen from the people by the complicity of greedy affluent corporations and corrupt local officials, to try to provide for their oversized (seven children is average) families. The combination of affluent nations’ overconsumption and struggling nations’ overpopulation is destroying our planet. None of us can hope to repay the debts (to creditors, to future generations, and to nature) we have so recklessly piled up.

The people of Belize (all the different cultures I saw there) are strikingly attractive. They spend more on beauty aids and hair care than on clothes, which seems to me a wise sense of priority. And just like us in affluent nations, they live by Pollard’s Law: They do what they must, then they do what’s easy, and then they do what’s fun. (Or perhaps, being more physically fit than us, they do what’s fun before they do what’s easy.) Like us, they have no time or energy or resources left for what is merely important, for what should be done or would be nice to do.

One of my reasons for visiting was to learn what it is like to live in a real community. With such large families, many of the people of villages like Hopkins are related, and immediate family size (8-10 people) and extended (3-4 generation) family size (40-80 people) are very close to the optimal community sizes I wrote about in my recent post. Poor as they are, these communities appear to be peaceful, loving, happy, and relatively crime-free.

They are not, however, intentional communities, and I had an interesting debate with Joe about whether intentional communities (whose members self-select and agree to be bound by shared principles and ‘intentions’) could ever work as well as these accidental communities bound by simple common ancestry. I continue to believe that intentional communities (hard as they may be to establish and find members for) should ideally work better than struggling nations’ accidental communities. I would acknowledge, however, that both likely work better than the anonymous, transient, accidental communities of affluent nations (suburbs and urban condos), built for the profit of developers and whose members have nothing in common except proximity to workplace. More about accidental vs. intentional communities later this week.

It’s very easy to understand the explosive growth of the cities in struggling nations once you’ve spent a few days with a family who lives in one of them. Once the seven or more children in the family finish school (in their mid teens) they really have no other choice but to migrate to the cities to find work. College is unaffordable for almost all families, and parents are only in their mid-thirties when children reach majority, so there’s no room for them at home or work in their home villages. Only one (usually oldest male) child will likely inherit the family home (and often the father’s livelihood). The rest end up in the cities. The fisheries are in decline, and the farms are mostly run by conglomerates with no need for more labour.

No surprise, then, that cities are rife with desperation, alcoholism, drugs, theft and other crime and chronic, hopeless unemployment. If you’re a young woman, even a good school record is not enough (unless you’re wealthy or land a rare scholarship) to expand your life choices beyond early marriage (and young motherhood) or low-paying domestic work, or both. The same population growth that offers some security in old age, eyes to watch over your possessions, and built-in baby-sitting and role models for younger children, also feeds this cycle of urban explosion and despair.

In Belize, the Internet is the white man’s addiction and the Internet Cafe is the white man’s hangout. To young Belizeans it’s just a vehicle for downloading music. These Cafes are otherworldly not only because of the colour and accents of their denizens, but because these denizens’ average age is at least three times the Belizean average. A few rich Belizeans have cellphones with texting and MP3 players, but most get their music fix from bootleg CDs, radio and dance clubs. Reggae still rules in Belize, though rap and (in the Garifuna South, anyway) local Punta music are also popular. My beloved Soca is “only for the old and the tourists”.

It’s really hard to gauge the influence that religion plays in Belizean life and culture. The Catholic Church runs most of the schools (with some government subsidies) and among parents you’ll find some fervour for spiritualism (among the Garifuna, it seems, it is one’s ancestors, more than god(s), who provide both guidance and punishment for one’s sins). But religion doesn’t seem to be a big factor in family size, belief systems or behaviour.

Why, I kept asking, do young women keep having so many children when birth control is available, accepted and necessary to get out of poverty? Large, unplanned families are, for them, what urban/suburban living is for us affluent nation city dwellers — the only life they know. There are simply no models of a different, more viable, sustainable way to live for them, anymore than there are models of self-sufficient, sustainable, responsible, loving, community-based living for us to follow.

There is much we could learn from them, and much that they could learn from us. But much of our ignorance, our inability to imagine possibilities and conceive of better ways to live, are, it seems, universals. We cannot follow whenthere is no working model to show us where to go and what to do.

Tomorrow: Part Two, and more on Intentional vs. Accidental Community.

* The real names of the family members have been changed to protect their privacy.