how to save the world

We all want to believe everything is going to be OK. So when things are going badly, the hucksters of phony miracle cures and reassurances come out in droves like worms after a heavy downpour. We get overweight, a thousand quacks will sell us diets that ‘worked’ for a small sample of people only because they were so desperate that anything would have worked for them, for awhile. We get sick, everyone from Big Pharma to faith healers will sell us something that will heal us, their cures’ efficacy based on doctored trials and hawked by disgraced physicians in white coats.

We get depressed, organized religion will pounce on us in our fragile state with promises, for a tithe, of absolution for our negative thoughts and deeds, salvation in the next, perfect, eternal life, and a community of uncritical people who will embrace us even when we loathe ourselves, and wacko psychologists will fleece us into paying for their wondrous theories and never-ending therapies, and cults will show us, if we give them everything including our minds, the one true way.

And in order to sell their patrons’ flawed and dangerous products, the whores of the corporatists will lie to us and prey on our desperate desire to believe that global warming won’t happen, that our beloved SUVs are better for the environment than hybrids, that ethanol and nukes will safely, cleanly provide all the energy we will ever need, and that the only thing that’s preventing a ‘victory’ in the Middle East is those Iranians, Syrians, and Palestinians, who need to be bombed into behaving properly.

So we get Exxon and Monsanto and other pathological corporatists paying scads of money to incompetent and greedy people to write phony books and articles, and then spending scads more to promote these fraudulent works, and to get morons in the mainstream media to mindlessly propagate the propaganda (and to shamelessly broadcast, as ‘advertising’, these same criminals’ deceptions — such untruths that, if they were directed against shareholders or investors rather than mere consumers, would land the perps in prison for life).

And we put up with it — the greenwashing ads and the fraudulent ‘scientific’ reports and the massive publicity given to the junk science and fictitious research put out by phony ‘think tanks’ and ‘foundations’ that are simply anonymous fronts (with Orwellian names like ‘Citizens for a Free America’) for these same corporatists — because we want to believe.

If we believe that we don’t have to do anything, or that nothing we do (or cease doing) will make any difference anyway, then we are free to do nothing, to go on doing what we were doing before. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is already so much we must do, to stave off the fear of not having enough, to meet the ever-increasing expectations of the boss, the family, the lawyer, the doctor, the police, the government, and nearly everyone else, that when someone tells us “you don’t have to do anything about that, it’s all a misunderstanding, we’re taking care of it” we will accept it no matter the source or its lack of credibility. One less thing to do, to worry about. More precious time for the easy and fun stuff.

It is just too much to ask us to be informed, and to think critically. Informed, critical thinking is the road to disbelief, to greater personal responsibility, to having to do more that we don’t really want to do. There is just so much stress in our lives already, we don’t want to know. We don’t want to think.

The corporatists, of every stripe, and their whores, understand this. They are playing us perfectly. We are now consumers instead of customers, disengaged cynics instead of citizens. We are not responsible. The corporatists don’t tell us what we don’t want to know. They tell us reassuringly what we don’t have to do. So, dumb and complacent, we don’t know, and we do nothing. And so we can’t complain. It’s our own fault, but now we’re helpless.

Funny thing about information, though. It’s like a genie that won’t go back in the bottle. You learn a little, you can’t unlearn it. You start to pay attention, and that gets you thinking, imagining, wondering. Pretty soon you don’t believe what you’re hearing, what you’re being told. You stop feeling helpless, and blaming yourself, and start to feel responsible, compelled to learn more, to become more informed and think more critically, to do something.

The ads don’t work anymore. You abandon the mainstream media for information sources that are still credible. You find yourself buying less, buying more critically. You discover that learning more creates stress but also makes you happier, more alive, more self-sufficient.

You no longer don’t want to know. You know. You are no longer free to do nothing. You’re free to do something.

Some of the people you know seem to get this. They’ve been going through the same thing you have. But what about everyone else? Daniel Quinn would tell us there’s no point in trying to persuade them, argue with them, until they’re ready. Until then we have to just wait.

But there’s so many of them.

What do we do? Can we afford to wait, while so many people remain the victims of whores in five thousand dollar suits, the apologists and front men and hucksters and lawyers and politicians of all major parties and dirty trick squads of the corporatists whose pathology ruins our world, and who keep so manyin their thrall?

If people won’t understand until they’re ready, how can we help them be ready, help them set themselves free?

I think part of it is that there are so many people to choose from, today, to make community with. In pre-civilization times, and in indigenous cultures, you were born into a community and, from puberty on, you had only two choices — stay with it or leave. Communities were sufficiently small that it was easy to know everyone in the community well, so that choice was pretty simple. The concept of monogamy is, most anthropologists now seem to think, a consequence of civilization and the need to reduce sexual competition when we started to live in settled towns, with strangers. So when it came to selecting partners for sex and for work, pre-civilization humans had their entire community to draw upon, and didn’t have to choose. Except for the brief and natural pair-bonding just before and just after a woman’s pregnancy, pre-civilization cultures were polyamorous, not just in the sense of being sexually promiscuous (the word means ‘shared equally’, not excessively or indiscriminately), but in the broader sense of deeply loving everyone in the community.

This community-wide love-bond makes Darwinian sense — it would be hard to imagine a better recipe for evolutionary success than a community whose members loved each other intimately and passionately, and were not restricted in sexual activity to monogamous pairings. These communities would look after each other diligently, raise all their children collectively, and (since love brings with it joy) do whatever it took to keep the community healthy and thriving.

I suspect we still have the instinct for this type of community coded in our DNA, which is why civilization culture leaves us full of longing, and produces unnatural stresses and antagonisms (jealousy, loneliness, envy, distrust, greed, acquisitiveness etc.) because of the way it compels and constrains us in how we are allowed to live, work, socialize and behave. We intuitively want to belong to community, not family, not city, not country.

Most intentional communities fail. Even die-hard enthusiasts of the concept admit this, and try to help those looking to create and sustain such communities to learn from these failings.

I would argue that the reason they fail is not that people don’t work hard enough at them — if they are natural human social arrangements they shouldn’t have to be hard work. They should be easy, and fun. I would suggest they fail because (a) they don’t have the right people in them, and (b) people have unreasonable expectations of them (i.e. they create or join them for the wrong reasons).

In our modern civilization we don’t love people easily. We tend not to give love until there is some reciprocity; we’re stingy with it. We frown on both emotional and sexual promiscuity (again in the broad meaning of the word, not its modern negative connotation) — it is seen as a sign of immaturity, naivety, insecurity, unfaithfulness, even mental illness. This is all part of the civilization indoctrination we get from birth, what e e cummings calls “making us everybody else”. We don’t trust others implicitly. We move around so much that we get to know thousands of people superficially and very few people intimately. We are pushed into monogamy, and restrained by the limits of ‘family values’, to love only one person (or at least, only one at a time), which means we get very little experience or practice loving, and as a result we never get very good at it.

The people I have spoken to about intentional community tend to like the idea conceptually but be very idealistic about who their community might contain and how it might work. Almost everyone wants it to contain lots of people their own age, and lots of young, physically attractive people of the opposite sex. They want it to be industrious (everyone doing their share of the work needed to ‘maintain’ it) and intellectually stimulating. They want its members to be open and generous.

This is a fantasy, not a vision. It is precisely this absurd level of expectation that causes so many marriages to fail, or to be miserable for one or both partners. It is a recipe for disappointment.

The only social construct that we exempt from these high expectations is friendship. We love our friends without demanding so much. This isn’t because we’re easier to please when it comes to friendship than we are marriage. We’re just more accepting. We demand less because we’re happy with less. This has more to do with abundance than fussiness: If a friend lets us down, we always (most of us) have other friends. Not so (for most of us) with lovers — they’re always in short supply. Furthermore, we tend to ‘make’ friends when we share experiences with strangers — friendships emerge, they are discovered, not chosen.

I suspect that if most of us were to try to imagine who we would have in our ideal intentional community, after getting past the fantasies anyway, we would fill it with people we could imagine having as friends. That is where the ‘age thing’ comes in, I think — we are so sorted into age cohorts in our modern world (nursery schools through to work peer groups and even alumni groups) that we tend to think of friends as being people of our own age, because these are the people we spend most of our lives with and share experiences with. We tend to make few friends among those of other generations because we share so few experiences with them. As a result ‘generation gaps’ are huge, because there is no shared life context, and hence no mutual understanding.

In fact I think we are inherently capable of becoming close friends with almost anyone, of any age. We are made to make friends — we are by nature a social species. Put two strangers together and have them share meaningful experiences and chances are they will become close friends. And I think the suggestion that few people can provide intellectual stimulation to those of us who are experienced, informed and curious, is sheer arrogance.

Another issue in our choice of community members is beauty. We are repulsed by ugliness (and even, in today’s demanding world, by plainness), by the manifestations of physical old age, and by frailty (physical and mental). So ideally we want all our community members to be young and beautiful — even if and when we are not. There is some evidence that in pre-civilization communities beauty was much more common than it is today (because the more attractive and healthy people had the most children, and fewer of them at that). But although a proportion of all age groups in pre-civilization cultures died prematurely (mostly by being eaten by predators, a few from diseases when conditions were overcrowded), these cultures had lots of octogenarians (until the malnutrition and disease that came with civilization made old age, until very recently, a rarity). Somehow they must not have found old, naked, healthy, physically fit bodies repulsive, which suggests that our modern aversion to old bodies has more to do with their flab and their manifestations of civilization-caused diseases than with lack of smooth and supple skin.

The third issue in our choice of community members is industriousness — we don’t want those we live with to be lazy, or messy. We want them to ‘do their share’ of the work that must be done. This, too, is a modern social malady. There is no need for us to have to do much work at all if we agree to live a radically simple life. If we don’t have a lot of things we need to buy or maintain, there is no need to work to buy and maintain them. All we really need is food, which is insanely plentiful and cheap, and modest, maintenance-free shelter, which is today technologically simple to create. Everything else we can make or do for ourselves, if we want it, and comfortably do without if we don’t. Almost no work is required, so we should not care how industrious our fellow community members are.

So while I would want my intentional community to include those I already love deeply (provided they were prepared to join an intentional community with me), I am not at all fussy about who the rest of its members are, as long as they are natural people — by which I mean curious, imaginative, observant, open, generous, healthy and fit. Beyond that the community should be diverse in age and gender, and able to agree on a fairly simple set of values and principles for living together. That’s all. This is the way we lived, joyfully, lovingly, for most of the millions of yearsbefore civilization.

How hard should it be now?

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well — for we will not fight to save what we do not love.