how to save the world

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?

At the same time, I think the criticisms that have been made of my recently espoused ‘Love Conversation Community’ philosophy-of-everything are unfair and a bit unfounded. Although this will be exceedingly difficult (I’ve been writing this article for three days, and keep scratching it out and starting over) it’s important that I give it a try. So here goes:

I believe that:

If you don’t share these beliefs, I am not going to be able to convince you of anything. It took me a long time getting here, and a lifetime of experiences and all the study in my Save the World reading list to understand this, but if your worldview is different from mine, if you’re not ready to appreciate what I believe (or vice versa), then we’re wasting time and energy debating — go save the world your own way and I wish you every success.

If you do ‘buy’ the beliefs above, but think I’m wrong-headed in how I’m going about acting on these beliefs, then please bear with me; that’s what I’m now going to try to explain.

The criticisms I have received on my recent articles generally fall into two categories:

1. That this ‘build new models based on love conversation and community’ approach is naive, romantic, impotent, and/or an abrogation of the progressive’s responsibility to confront and defeat our corrupt and horrifically destructive political, social, educational and economic systems, and
2. That polyamorism is a red herring, a distraction from what urgently needs to be done, and a self-indulgence.

Let me try to address the first one first.

Progressives have been trying to confront the existing power structures for centuries. These power structures are based on and sustained by hierarchy — centralization, inequality, the use of force against those who do not obey those with power. We are taught from birth to play our designated role in the hierarchy, whether that be in the red, orange or yellow band in the graphic above. We are taught to know our place. If we are brought up conservative, we are encouraged to strive to be closer to the centre, to ‘succeed’ in moving higher up the hierarchy (picture the graphic above as being a pyramid, with the red as the peak towering over the ‘lower’ rings around it). If we are brought up progressive, we are encouraged to work ‘within the system’ for greater justice, to make the hierarchy a little less uneven in wealth and power, and ‘fairer’ for those who work hard to move within it as they wish.

Criticism #1 above comes, I think, mainly from those who are ‘caught’ in the light green band, the semi-marginalized, the disaffected and conflicted liberal/progressives and conservatives who have been tossed out or partially disentangled themselves from our dysfunctional and ruinous civilization, the technophiles who dream of something better but can’t quite unplug from the mainstream ‘power grid’, the libertarian idealists who think that individualism is the key (and can’t understand why all those other individuals can’t get with their program), the co-opted (mostly young) counter-culturals who are really just feeding the Man, and those who because of personal misfortune or lack of opportunity haven’t had the opportunity to Just Walk Away from this hierarchy to the very Edge.

The hierarchy survives the disaffection of the light green band by feeding the myth that it can evolve, that it is open to revolution. So we have petitions and demonstrations. The ‘light greens’ are the Howard Deane and Barack Obama supporters, the ones who believe that we can find replacements to prevent collapse before The End of Oil and The End of Water, who believe that there is a political solution to global warming. They are the ones fighting for regulations to prevent corporatist oligopoly, massive global corruption, the wrenching despair of global poverty, and the despoiling of our planet, ever hopeful that numbers alone will bring them victory. They are the ones who think the right to clean air, water, food, and soil, to free speech, to security from despots, torturers, rapists, murderers, thieves and criminals, to justice, can be ensured through laws and law enforcement.

I ache for these people. I was one of them most of my life. I love their ideals. It should be possible. They have occasionally won great and important victories, briefly ‘beat’ the system. And if you compare civilization today to what it was at its worst, a few hundred or a few thousand years ago, there is the illusion that we are making progress, that we are moving inexorably in the right direction. The Man wants those in the light green band to believe — their hope pacifies them, keeps them distracted, keeps them co-opted, participating, keeps them from Just Walking Away. The Chinese built the Great Wall early in our civilization not to keep the Mongol hordes out, but to keep the newly enslaved and dubious peasants, the pawns of the new civilization, in. To keep them from Just Walking Away.

But if you compare today to the way we lived before civilization, before what Daniel Quinn calls ‘The Great Forgetting’, you can quickly see that there has been no progress. It’s a dream. From this distance, from a prehistoric perspective, from The Edge, you can see that our civilization, like all the civilizations that preceded it, is an exercise in untrammeled excess, careening over the cliff to its own collapse. We’re skidding at breakneck speed on sheer black ice into a chasm. Those in the red, orange and yellow bands can’t see it, won’t see it. Those in the light green bands are scrambling frantically to grab the steering wheel, the brakes, the accelerator, trying to get it back under control, yelling at the rest of us to “Do something!”. But those of us on the Edge, in the dark green, know it is far too late. We only have a little while before the crash, so we might as well enjoy our time, in love, conversation and community, as best we can. While we are physically in that spinning, hurtling, out-of-control vehicle that is civilization, in our minds and hearts we have Just Walked Away.

Activist Barbara writes “I assume you have abandoned your efforts on the social/political front and wish you all success in your personal life”. She is a victim of The Man — her disease is much more debilitating than mine, though both are diseases of civilization’s excesses. I completely appreciate her position, and why she feels this way. But I have not abandoned my efforts on the social/political front. I am building new models of how to live and make a living, based on conversation in small community with people I love, models of how a ‘political’ and ‘social’ and ‘educational’ and ‘economic’ ‘system’ should work, and can work. I don’t know if they can work on any scale before civilization’s collapse — I’m just a local model builder. I doubt it, in fact. But that won’t stop me building them. This is who I am and this is my Purpose. These models will not save the world, because I don’t think it can be saved. But they will enable us, here, now, to make a meaningful life together, to learn, to discover, to share joy, and perhaps to create a legacy for the seven generations to follow, some of whom will live or be born after civilization’s collapse — some models that they just might find useful as they build in the ruins left from the catastrophic destruction we have, with the noblest of intentions, wrought on our lovely fragile blue-green planet.

Our civilization will have one, and possibly two, legacies. The first will be the Sixth Great Extinction of life on this planet. It is already well underway, and accelerating at a rate we are only just beginning to realize.

The second, if we create it, in love, conversation and community, will be some working models of what we might have done differently if we’d only known in time. They will be the only important learning of 30,000 years of astonishing and ruinous civilization — the learning from our mistakes. We sit here, those of us on the Edge who I love so dearly, so ecstatically, amidst the Dark and Gathering Sameness of the World, building these models, quietly, joyfully, in the hope that, one day, they might be of use.

(Tomorrow — I’ll tackle criticism #2, that polyamorism is a self-indulgence andnot necessary to effective self-sufficient ‘model’ communities.)

 I remain convinced that

So in a recent post on this subject, I wrote about the social aspects (capacities and principles) of intentional (natural) communities. of which the most controversial was polyamorism (the principle of operation, and the capacity, to love everyone else in the community, exhibiting compersion, the antithesis of jealousy). My research suggests that most intentional communities succeed or fail for social reasons — their members either have the social skills and wisdom to make the community flourish, or they don’t.

But I think intentional communities, if they are to truly be models of how to live, should also be governed by certain political and economic principles. Here is a list of some of those principles:

1. Stop at One: In our horrifically overpopulated world, it is inexcusable to bring even a ‘replacement’ number of children into the world. At the same time, having some children in the community is important for diversity and renewal.
2. Radical Simplicity: Buy, make, consume as little as you must to live a full life. Waste nothing, reuse and recycle everything, cradle-to-cradle. Make rather than buy. 
3. Pledge to Buy Local: Buy nothing that is imported or transported long distances unless there is absolutely no alternative. Seek out and support, reciprocally, local producers and services. Buy organic, natural products. 
4. Leave the Earth As You Found It: Leave no enduring footprint. Amass no personal wealth. Give away everything you don’t need, so that when you die, there is nothing left.
5. Practice Bioregionalism and Permaculture: Plant native species that need no chemicals, irrigation or other unnatural maintenance to thrive. Learn what was meant to grow in the place you call home, the place where you belong.
6. Cooperate and Collaborate: Work with the others in your community. Learn, discover and develop everything collaboratively.
7. Practice Consensus Democracy: Let unanimous consensus emerge. Don’t resort to votes, divisive debate, manipulation or coercion.
8. Value Everyone’s Time Equally: By doing this, you can replace money with time as your ‘currency’ of human activity. And by putting time ahead of money, you show how trading off your time to get more money, or using money to ‘buy’ time, are foolish and addictive behaviours. And you make leisure time precious.
9. Study and Pay Attention to Nature, and Practice Biomimicry: When you have a problem living comfortably, study and learn from nature, and discover how she ‘solves’ the problem. 
10. Be Self-Sufficient: Learn how to do things yourself. Produce only what you need, and give away to others any excess you produce. Buy from others only what you cannot reasonably produce yourselves.
11. Incur No Debts: You can’t be a wage slave, or any other kind of slave, if you don’t owe anyone anything. 
12. Be Generous, and Pay It Forward: Give without the expectation of repayment. A community knows without having to keep score, and those who take more than they receive will know it, and be discouraged. 
13. Be Organic: Stay Small: Natural organisms self-regulate their size. When they get too big to self-manage, they split in two.
14. Be Responsible: Listen to the larger community, be responsible and responsive to it. Your reputation is critical to navigating through conflicts with conventional social, political and economic institutions.
15. Understand the Power of Relationships: Networking and creating alliances within and without the community is essential to resilience.

What’s missing? If you were to set up a Natural (intentional) Community, would this (along with the social principles from the earlier article) giveyou enough guidance to know what to do?