how to save the world

My infatuation with Second Life, despite its infuriatingly non-intuitive and unreliable technology, is due to the ease and low cost of finding like minds, conversing, and creating communities of sorts within it. It’s a Petri dish, a place to experiment with models and tweak them and abandon them and try something else, before trying to do the same more onerously in Real Life.

I have tried to organize my networks, my fledgling communities of people I love, so that I can spend as much time with these people as possible. It’s a bit of a ‘herding cats’ exercise. Even though most of these people now can communicate with me (and each other) anywhere, anytime through GMail/GTalk, a lot of them don’t like that particular platform, or face technological obstacles using it. Some of the people I’ve come to love in Second Life, or though this blog, or in Real Life, won’t use GMail at all. What’s interesting to me is that the total number of people with whom I now communicate with any regularity is a little less than 150 — the famous Dunbar number of the maximum number of people with whom one can sustain a meaningful social relationship.

What’s more interesting is the research that Christopher Allen has done (see his chart, and the accompanying link, above) showing that, while 150 is perhaps the maximum, the optimal is either 6 or 50. This jibes with my intuition and my experience. When I wrote the story recently about a fictitious polyamorous community, the number of intimate lovers in it was 6. The size of ‘bands’ in prehistoric times was around 30-60, while ‘clans’ were around 100-150 people and ‘tribes’ 1000-2000. Just as there is a naturally occurring number of electrons in each shell around the nucleus of atoms, this suggests to me that 5-7, 30-60, 120-150, and 1000-2000 are ‘natural’ levels of the circles within circles of human social association.

Over the next while I’ll be writing about the research (primary and secondary) I’m doing on intentional community. In the meantime I’d be very interested in your thoughts on two subjects:

1. What are the ‘right’ sizes for intentional communities? My hypothesis is that the first circle (5-7 people) is optimal for intimacy, the second circle (30-60 people) is optimal for enterprise/economic activity, the third circle (120-150 people) is optimal for political association, the fourth circle (1000-2000 people) is optimal for mutual protection and security (with a buffer between each of the 1000-2000 person groups to ensure natural diversity between ‘cultures’ can emerge), and that any human association with greater than 2000 people in it will be inherently dysfunctional.
2. What’s the best way to deal with the issue of private property in intentional community? My instincts tell me that it was when civilization changed our worldview from us belonging to the land, to the land (and its bounties) belonging to us individually, that we got screwed up. But without private property, with everything as a shared Commons, how do we avoid the Tragedy of the Commons? And how do we liberate land that is currently private, so that we have a Commons within which to develop model intentional communities in the first place?

I did indeed carry out all my Mid-Year’s Intentions. So here we go again — my intentions for the next six months:

1. Love as many as people as possible, as much as possible, as often as possible, in as many ways as possible, openly, generously, without restriction or restraint, in ways that matter to them. Be appreciative, attentive, responsive, caring, useful. Show (don’t just tell) the people I love that I love them, every day, by being for them what they want and need me to be.
2. Live simpler. Buy less, use less, consume less, owe less, need less. Live lighter on the land. Love Gaia, the community of all-life-on-Earth. Be a part, connected, aware, alert. Know what she needs, what needs to be done, and act accordingly.
3. Engage in more conversations and practice to become a better conversationalist. Listen better. Articulate better. Pay attention better. More conversations with more people I love will require a better parsing of my time, more effective use of that time. More listening and watching and sensing and responding to body language. More relating stories that further understanding. More helping and suggesting and supporting. Less talking, less texting, less criticizing, less one-way writing. Less wasting time on conversations about things that are unactionable. Wasting no time at all with any of the mainstream information and entertainment media.
4. Create community. Find and connect and facilitate the people who can, collaboratively, understand what needs to be done to make this a better world and who can then, individually and collectively, freely, act on that understanding. Participate fully in community activities.
5. Breathe, be present, be still, in those moments when I am alone. In my zeal to spend more time in love, in conversation and community I must remember to allow some time for quiet, for reflection, for regeneration. Through meditation and other attention skills I intend to learn to be in the moment, every moment, to stop time, and to expand it.
6. Move more. Run, hug, dance, hike, cuddle, perform, swim, climb, caress, inspire, play, make art, make love. Our bodies are meant to move, to express, to connect. I must get out more, into places with room and time to really move.
7. Be more self-sufficient. Learn to do 20 things in the next six months that I currently rely on others to do for me. In the process, learn more about myself.
8. Be bolder. This is my ‘intention to intend’. Goethe said “there is power and magic in boldness”. Know when to stop talking and do something. Experiment. Make it up as I go. Take the first next step. Just begin.
9. Help entrepreneurs more. Part of discovering and creating better ways to live is discovering and creating better ways to make a living. I have learned a lot about how to do this, what works and what doesn’t. I need to share this more, person-to-person, principally through telling stories, and by talking more with entrepreneurs to learn even more.
10. Have more fun. Laugh, mostly at myself. Use humour and render stresses harmless. Play with children and animals to remember how to play, and then show other adults. Improvise. Flirt. Be silly. Make love a lot, joyfully, in all the different ways there are to ‘make love’. Smile at strangers. 

The biggest challenge I will face with these intentions is finding and making time for them all. This will require me to stop doing a lot of things I do now. That means I need to understand why I do these things now. Things are the way they are for a reason, and I need to appreciate that reason before I can start spending my time differently.

When I put this list together I originally started with ‘be a model for others’. After all, that’s the advice I give everyone else who asks me ‘what should I do to save the world’?  But I concluded I am not yet ready to be a model for others. Maybe in another six months, after I’ve realized these ten intentions, I’ll be ready. Or perhaps, merely by intending to do things that are useful, helpful, generous, and by doing everything I intend, I will become a model in the process.

That’s my list. What are your intentions for the first half of 2008?

Well, clearly I haven’t been able to articulate the argument to support my instinctive belief that model intentional communities (MICs), to be effective, need to be polyamorous. I’ve read all your comments, and thank you for them. I remain convinced of the benefits of polyamorism to the social health of a community, but what’s more important is that we start identifying and creating MICs that work, both for the benefit of our present civilization and for possible use by the generations that will grow up after civilization’s fall. So I’m not going to say any more about polyamorism*, at least not for a while.

I have been delighted at how many of my readers, and those I have spoken to about it face-to-face and in Second Life, agree that it would be more fruitful to create MICs, better working models of how to live, than to try to fight to reform the existing political, economic, social and educational systems. Just to reiterate, those MICs will need to agree on both essential capacities and operating principles for their members. My first crack at as possible list of each:

Each MIC will of course have to develop its own list, but as I work to create MICs both in Second Life and, later, in Real Life, these are the ones I would propose to start with. The idea would be to have an association, an alliance, of MICs, helping each other out with lessons learned, success stories, etc. Each MIC would be a circle within a circle, the larger circle being Gaia, the community of all-life-on-Earth.

In fact, I’m beginning to think of Natural Enterprises, the concept I outline in my book to be published in the Spring, as a specialized type of MIC. Natural Enterprises also require the above natural capacities and responsible, sustainable operating principles.

MICs are, by their socio-ecological nature, inherently complex networks. Dave Snowden suggests that, because the evolution of such networks is unpredictable, they cannot be planned or directed. What can be done, however, is influence their “initial conditions” — using attractors and barriers to ‘steer’ behaviour in ways favourable to obtaining and retaining members with the necessary capacities and who share the beliefs underlying the operating principles. That means the membership has to be self-selected and ‘discriminatory’ — diverse yet picky. This is a tough balancing act. The Natural Enterprises I know that ‘work’ the best have an almost ideal makeup of people — respectful, loving partners whose business capacities (‘Gifts’) are mutually exclusive and collectively sufficient to achieve the enterprise’s shared Purpose. Usually, I confess, the selection of members has been serendipitous and fortunate, rather than deliberate. Nevertheless, it’s the people in a Natural Enterprise who make or break it.

Same thing applies to MICs of people who want to live together. You want diversity, because MICs only work when their members are so interesting and lovable that they cohere — the members want to spend as much time with each other as possible, learning, loving, discovering, collaborating, innovating, making it work. This is so unlike modern disconnected neighbourhoods who are usually only physically together out of convenience. Because they lack cohesion, they acquiesce to the imposition of top-down, indifferent, modern hierarchical political and economic and social and educational systems on them, and ultimately, because their neighbourhood is incapable of self-sufficiency, become dependent on these hierarchical, irresponsible, unsustainable systems.

To be self-sufficient, responsible and sustainable, the MIC needs to have everything (the capacities, the space, the time, and the resources) to be independent. While I don’t know of any modern examples of this, my pioneer ancestors in the early 1800s were, of necessity (they were completely isolated), completely self-sufficient. Seventeen families (about 150 people in total) including Joshua Pollard’s family moved into 8000 acres in the lower Peel region of Canada together — no electricity, no communications — and thrived together as an intentional community. They lived in harmony with another IC — the Mississagua Indians — who sold the land away from the rivers to these new settlers. The two ICs lived completely different lifestyles, but both were self-sufficient, responsible and sustainable, and extremely comfortable, joyful communities (my ancestors, I’m told, loved to dance and sing, and opened the region’s first school and a subsistence tavern). Other than their large families, they adhered to the above principles and, from what I can piece together, had the above natural capacities. They were ultimately undone by overpopulation and, as their community became interconnected with other Ontario communities over the ensuing century, by a switch from self-sufficient permaculture to commercial monoculture, which proved disastrous when the economic recessions of the 1880s and 1890s hit and trade virtually ceased.

Modern ICs have had to try to work under modern constraints — a shortage of land, horrific overpopulation everywhere, depleted soils, an utterly interdependent, fragile, technology-dependent and resource-constrained economy, and the loss of knowledge of how to live self-sufficiently. Because most of them have not been very ‘discriminatory’ in their membership, and many have lacked commitment, capacity and/or principles, most have stayed small or disappeared, and have not had responsibility or sustainability as principles, so they are not useful models (if you know first-hand of any modern MICs that I could profile here, please let me know). Some of these constraints (shortage of land, depleted soils) will be hard for any MIC to overcome, but most require nothing more than re-learning what has been forgotten, and applyingsome sustainable, responsible modern knowledge and technologies.

And then just learning from trying, from experimentation, from collaboration, from innovation, what works and what doesn’t.

And just being a model.

Time to get started.

* I will be responding directly but briefly to comments on my Dec. 19, 20 and 24 articles soon, in the comments threads.