Village Blog - big_ideas

Truth & Paradox

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 04:13:13 +0200

In A Different Drum Scott Peck made the point that the truth always has a paradoxical quality to it. He used the example of the bible stating that being Christian is simultaneously about doing good works and having God’s grace save you from the need to do good works. This is observably a big issue for Christians and I’m not sure I’ve met any who have a good handle on it. They’re hardly an exception though

This idea that real truths are inevitably paradoxical has stuck with me and it’s been particularly interesting watching the recent debate about cities with Jason and Ran. It also occurred to me that we’ve been this way before, with Jason behaving in a relatively rude manner and the other party extending him some grace so the debate can continue.

The first time I saw it was early last year when we were trying to decide whether being a hunter-gatherer or a permaculturist was a better way to get through the impending crash. I think it was all prompted by an essay by Toby Hemmenway. As I recall Jason told Toby his thinking was ‘dodgy’ on the subject - a tad unnecessary but Toby let it slide.

While it was true that Toby’s initial argument lacked hard academic rigour what he was trying to do was find his way forward to a new understanding about the crash. I’m thinking the same thing about Ran’s ideas now as I said about Toby’s essay: Let’s not attempt to close him down because the argument is a bit loose, at the core of it is a really important idea that needs exploring, and that’s much moreimportant.

Like it or not people are going to try living in cities for a long time. Things will be hard enough psychologically during the crash and the last thing city dwellers will want to do is shift out to country living. They will feel psuchologically more secure in a city and will be drawn back to that environment - so we’d better figure out how to make it work, for a few generations at least.

Ran quoted an email of mine the other day:

“You could always decide to call these sustainable cities villages, or maybe large villages, and still keep the definition of cities nice and clean."

“Never!” said Ran in his reply back to me and then used it to make a point about disliking nice and clean. What I was really trying to say in the email was; fine give Jason his clean definition of city and lets get back to the debate and see what we can learn. Frustrated as I was by the turn it was taking.

In actual fact I totally agree with Ran about that and what he said gets to the core of what this posting is about, if we try to keep things nice and clean we close off the other side of the paradox and lose sight of the real, complicated, messy truth. Ran seems to have a good instinct for this, and I loved that out of the debate he, the archetypal anti-civ blogger, produced an essay entitled How to Save Civilisation.

Getting back to that earlier debate, after insisting that I needed an answer to whether permaculture or hunter/gathering was the answer to post-crash life I ended up posting this article full of wonder at how we ever came to be in an arguement:

….Not surprisingly it soon became apparent that a combination of the two might prove to be the best solution of all but what I wasn’t expecting was that it would turn out that both approaches already combine elements of the other to such an extent as to make the debate almost pointless. In fact, the opposing concepts of either being totally in charge of our food production or totally leaving food production to mother nature existed only in my head. In the real world it turns out that:

(a) Many of the cultures that we thought were hunter/gatherers were actively managing their environment to increase levels of natural food production and…

(b) The aim of permaculture is to create an environment where food can be ‘grazed’ at leisure.

Put like that I can barely tell the difference between the two …

The same thing happened recently with the issue of whether people should expect chaos or community post crash and of course the answer turned out to be that we should expect both.

Then there was; are eco-villages a better option than forming a tribe and disappearing into the forest; in the end I concluded the best way to form a tribe was to form an ecovillage first and lo; Jason (coming from the opposite direction) said that Anthropik’s path would be to buy some land next to a forest park and use that as the tribes base to get themselves started.

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THE COMMUNITY APPROACH V THE ACADEMIC APPROACH

Yes, I’m frustrated by the futility of the way these debates proceed, they’re too destructive and too exhausting and they seem to produce false dichotomies. I’m looking for something better.

Scott Peck (from A Different Drum again):

“…because it integrates diversity, in community partial ideas tend to become whole ideas, and the initially simplistic thinking of community members tends to become complex, paradoxical, flexible and sane.

In all honesty I don’t think that Jason values the relationship as much as the need to win a debate, I’ve seen him leave mile-long responses to people on blog comment sections which can be a very overwhelming experience and not especially helpful.

The need to close down EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of an opponents argument is a profoundly different approach to trying to zero in on the core of the debate. It’s about obliterating your opponent and it’s very forceful – essentially the literary equivalent of a good thumping.

This destructive approach is both a cause and a result of a person’s desire to keep their argument unchanged but the destruction of the relationship (community) ensures that debaters remain isolated and have less of a chance of nuancing their views with an understanding of the paradox.

Of course combat seems to be the very nature of academic debate (which we are supposed to revere) . It doesn’t surprise me that academic methods are destructive since academia’s first priority is to reinforce the hierarchy and it’s values (including separation from self, community and land), and this means avoiding communal style collaboration. I remember a lecturer at architecture school who taught design in a genuine collaborative environment - he was of course universally reviled by the other lecturers.

Ironically it was at university that I learnt the concept of synergy and it’s that ‘greater than the sum of it’s parts’ thing that I love about this circle of blogs. However as I learned at the time you need at least an element of community for synergy to work.

I have to admit to a feeling of trepidation every time I visit the Anthropik site – in fear of what new calamity I will encounter there. Not so at Ran’s site, even when he uses my comment to bounce a debate in a particular direction it’s not done in an insulting manner.

Where I’m going with this is that I believe that the academic method is a very flawed way of chasing the truth, not just because it zeroes in on the details and loses the big picture but also because it uses combat as a debating method.

Whilst it’s true that an argument that can withstand immense criticism must be a good one the war-like nature of the debate puts the proponent on any new idea immediately on the back foot and they have to ‘dig themselves in’ to withstand the assault.

It’s a real waste of time and energy in it’s own right but also because the proponent of an idea is the person in the best place to be critiquing it - after all, who else knows it so well. I know this is a strange idea for our culture, I’m expecting most people will be pretty sceptical of it and I would be too if I hadn’t observed Ran doing this very thing in some of his writing.

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I’m aware that this posting includes quite a bit of implied and direct criticism of Jason Godesky. Initially I was (and still am really) quite hesitant about doing this and I realised that I was feeling some kind of pressure about it. I don’t know how stuff like this can work across the internet but it happened a lot in the Derrick Jensen discussion list so I’m kind of familiar with it. In any case we should always respond to pressure like this and work to free ourselves of it.

I don’t have or want a problem with Jason, I gain immensely from his writing and there is far more to be gained from keeping the peace – but not at any cost. His behaviour errs on the destructive side at times and I’m hoping he will get the opportunity to see that sometime. It’s true that I wasn’t a lot different ten years ago so there’s hope for everyone.

In the permaculture v hunter-gatherer debate I referred to above I remember Ran linking to one of my postings on the subject with the comment that he was burned out by the whole thing. How would it be if we could debate in a way that energised people instead of wearing them down? How would it be if the debate could be effective without having to be so damned ‘robust’.

Hold on to Your Kids

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 13:08:00 +0200

I’m reading Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Neufield and Gabor Mate. Ostensibly about how to parent children it points to an issue that seems capable of bringing about a total societal failure – if it hasn’t already.

I’ve always been suspicious when people complain how each new generation of teenagers and young adults is worse than the last, in some ways my view is justified because those sort of statements have an element of washing a person's hands of the problem but Hold on to Your Kids is showing me that there is an awful lot of truth behind it as well.

The basic thesis is that parenting is a lot easier and flows a lot more naturally when a child is properly attached to their parents. They say big problems arise when a child becomes peer-oriented and that we are seeing this more and more amongst our teens but even amongst children as young as seven.

The book is referred to a lot on the Continuum Concept list and I was interested in it because it discussed the issue of how poor parenting (read; excessive discipline or control) could destroy attachment with the result that parenting would become a lot more difficult. It does indeed do this but what has really grabbed my attention at the moment is the discussion of what happens after the attachment is broken and a child changes from being parent oriented to become peer oriented.

Gordon Neufield says that the attachment between parents and their children has a double purpose of making it easier for a parent to handle the immense difficulties of parenting and it ensures that the child stays oriented on the parent who's behaviour they model and who’s cues they follow. It also ensures that the child never strays far from the parent so making it easier for them to look out for their child, and that the child is instinctively wary of strangers (people who they are not attached to) and likely to reject or ignore them in some way.

What happens when a child becomes peer oriented is that they start to seek the company of their peers and to reject the parents, all as a natural part of their attachment instincts. They no longer place any value in what their parents think and will probably actively dislike anything to do with their parents or their values or tastes.

The authors go on to say that the normal transmission of culture from generation to generation is short circuited by this phenomena and that instead of the children learning their parent’s values (which are usually not picked up until adolescence) they pick up on the values of their peers. More specifically they pick up on the values of whoever the dominant members of their peer group may be, regardless of the character of that person.

Worse still the biggest influence on them now becomes whatever is being fed to their peer group via the mass-media in the form of pop icons, meaning that at the crucial point in their lives when they are cementing their values in place they are effectively being parented by Britney Spears.

So all those fears about the state of the new generation are true – they really are a scary bunch. Quite what is going to happen to society when they achieve a measure of power as adults is hard to predict but it doesn’t look good.

To look back to my generation I can see that a lot of people did sort themselves out and became functioning members of society, however we can be a pretty unforgiving and un-empathetic bunch. I find it easier to look at the generation before mine, the baby boomers, where we see a narcissistic bunch of people fixated on staying youthful and divesting themselves of their responsibilities at an age when they are supposed to be fulfilling the roles of elders. According to Gordon Neufield no one actually wants them to be elders but they could at least try.

The boomers may be scorned by me and many others but at least the hippy culture they came from, while hopelessly shallow, did champion ideas of peace, love and brotherhood. Presumably my generation will be much worse and that we will likely achieve total societal failure at the hands of the generation who are currently receiving their values direct from the music videos of MTV.

Maybe.

The other possibility is that they will eventually become responsible workers when the need for money to survive becomes an issue, they’ll toe the line in a grumbling sort of way but they will also be the sort of easily-led, soft-willed individuals that the powers-that-be really like to see forming the bulk of society’s herd.

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend the book, it has introduced me to a new, much deeper understanding about the relationship between parent and child and I’m looking forward to learning how to prevent the imminent implosion of western society.

Stupid Stupid Stupid Scientists (an objective assessment of what they can teach us about raising kids)

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 02:35:00 +0200

Warning: Contains some ranting.

I keep seeing the phrase ‘development of empathy’ used in a way that implies that empathy starts off at a ‘zero’ level in a child and gradually builds up as they get older. A possible conclusion you might reach from this is that the people who say this have never met any children – except that there are too many people who say it. They’re so wrong that I would suggest to them that really we need be more concerned about the loss of empathy that seems to occur across a person's life span in this culture than how to develop it inthe young.

I’m sure every parent reading this can think of a hundred ways that their children have displayed empathy. I’ve found an article by the American Psychological Association summarising the science in this area and basically I’m going to tear it to shreds - but in a fair and balanced kind of way.

First problem; it’s called “What Makes Kids Care”.

Stupid! You can’t make anyone care, you can only LET them care. Trying to force a person to care will almost always have the opposite result.

To be fair to the article the use of the word ‘make’ is so ingrained in our culture that we don’t usually notice it – but then that’s the problem isn’t it? We can only ever conceive of getting something to happen in our culture by using an element of force - or if we’re advanced, trickery.

The news is not all bad about our scientists though, they are beginning to cotton on to this empathy in children idea.

Researchers used to believe that a sense of real caring about others came as people grow into adulthood. But now studies are finding that children can show signs of empathy and concern from a very early age.
For example, a study by psychologists Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Ph.D., Marian Radke-Yarrow, Ph.D., and Robert King, Ph.D. observed children whose parents were hurt somehow -- either physically (e.g. father having a bad headache) or emotionally (e.g. mother received bad news and was crying). They discovered that even very young children had a pretty well-developed sense of empathy.

So now they have real evidence that even young children have a pretty well developed sense of empathy.

Stupid!! The evidence exists in every child that was ever born. Well, maybe not quite every child, You’d have to surmise that scientists lack any kind of useful people skills (including the ability to empathise) if it’s taken them several centuries of research to uncover the easily observable fact that children do in fact have empathetic skills.

Next comes the What Can Parents Do? section. To their credit they have bought up the issue of modelling and it’s supreme importance in the scheme of things but…

They also want you to praise your child for showing empathy.

Stupid! Other scientific research has shown that praising a child for any task or action replaces their already existing intrinsic motivation with ex-trinsic motivation and basically they lose interest in doing whatever it is you have praised them for. They will still do it of course, but only if you are around to praise them for it.

Next they deal with Effects of the Outside World. This includes advice about monitoring TV and movies which is undoubtedly a good idea. Unfortunately it also advises parents to give their kids books to read that ‘promote compassionate behaviour’ and to educate them about famous altruists by taking them to museums.

Huh? Alright, it’s not stupid but it is very, very lame. If that’s the best way we’ve got for getting to our kids then we’ve already lost.

The article ends on a good note by pointing out that none of the approaches they’ve suggested will work unless there is a pre-existing ‘indestructible link between parent and child’.

But then they don’t tell us how to make the link indestructible.

They’ve just mentioned the most important aspect of bringing up an emotionally healthy child and then they drop the ball and forget to mention specifics.

The truth is they probably don’t know. Since we’re not allowed to mention co-sleeping, long term breastfeeding, non-coercive parenting, home schooling or the idea of picking up a crying baby in the mainstream there is little chance they were going to go there. The concept of non-coercive parenting, which all those issues contribute to, is probably the most dangerous concept of all to the establishment since they rely on parents beginning the work of breaking in children and disconnecting them emotionally from other people. In actual fact society in it’s current state couldn’t exist unless efforts were made to destroy empathy in children.

The reason the article mentioned this disconnect issue but couldn’t go anywhere useful with it is, as discussed in Disciplined Minds, that the professionals and scientists consulted in this article will be incapable of coming up with anything that will produce a healthy child unless it doesn’t conflict with the first priority of meeting the needs of the people who run our society.

Another irony in this is that we hold scientists up to be the most priestly members of our society. They’re people we go to for advice and yet they aren’t allowed to use empathy or people skills in their work. In fact they often display a very poor ability to cope with social situations themselves. How on earth are they going to tell us anything really useful, like how to be happy and fulfilled? Or how to build connections between people and how to build genuine community?

The only ‘scientist’ I’ve found who knows how to build community, M Scott Peck, learned his stuff by combining science and religion – to howls of outrage on both sides I might add - but not from normal people, who buy his books in droves.

The other problem with scientists (And I’ll have more to say about this issue later) is that their position at the top of the tree and the corresponding arrogance that comes with it only serves to further compound their blindness of what’s important

It should be no surprise though, that in civilisation we should revere the very worst state of the human condition. Cold emotionless scientists serve ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ very well, but they are unlikely to do anything good for us normal people.

saving the world

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:50:00 +0200

I’ve given up trying to help people and I’ve given up trying to save the world, instead I’m just going to do my own thing and hopefully a few people will be interested. I’ve learned that people don’t want to be helped. And I’ve learned that the world doesn’t want to be saved.

I’ve also learned that maybe trying to help everyone else is a substitute for something else. And I’ve learned that that it’s a good way to disconnect from people, to turn them off. I guess I was lucky to start doing a radio show, that way I could talk about the issues the concerned me and the people who wanted to listen could do so and the people who didn’t could just switch off and everyone was happy. (I say everyone but there was this one guy who kept ringing up and demanding that I play music instead of interviews…).

I don’t know if I ever converted anyone like I intended to. I know I changed a few minds about a few issues but whether anyone had a wholesale mind shift like I did the day a guy in Canada handed me a Noam Chomsky book, I don’t know. It’s what my ego wants of course.

Lately I’ve concluded that rather than trying to change a lot of the world a little bit I could change a little bit of the world a lot. More specifically I could change the world of my friends and family a whole lot by changing myself. (Easily done by shutting up and listening).

You might think that if I’d figured that out I’d be doing well but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. Like my radio show the readers of this blog can turn me off whenever they want but if you were to experience my views in person you’d be in for quite a different experience. It doesn’t help that my father (and main role model throughout childhood) was a school principal and prefers to address people rather than talk to them, or that I am quite excited by some of the issues I wish to discuss but really no one deserves a badgering about an unknown issue like I can do. These days I tend to swing the other way and say nothing at all and am then quite nervous when I do speak up which is hardly any better.

Karen is much better about this, she doesn’t try to tell her friends anything but when they are having a serious conversation and one of them admits that they don’t feel like being so hard on their kids, or so rigid with their baby schedule she is able to encourage them to listen to their instincts. It’s much nicer and very effective to affirm someone else’s instinct like that – especially when they are in an environment that discourages the loving instinct just letting someone know they’re not alone is a powerful thing.

This ties in to what I've been reading in The Different Drum. The chaotic second stage of the community building process outlined by Scott Peck is often characterised by people trying to force help on each other. Really it's an attempt to create community by eradicating the differences between people. Unfortunately true community doesn't arrive until people stop doing this and start to accept their differences. Outside of a community building workshop people can just walk away or be obstinate but just like a primitive villager has no where else to go people in Scott Peck's workshops have committed themselves to staying the distance so eventually they learn from it, empty themselves and move on into a true state of community. True community is also characterised by the fact the people become good at listening.

Scott Peck says we areunableto stay in commuity because our old habits of seperating ourslves from other people will come back in unguarded moments. I wonder how many generation it will take to lose that tendency.

It also ties in to some of the man stuff I wrote about a few posts back;

…I’d like to be engaged and really listen to people who talk to me but it seems to require such a lot of energy to do that – to be specific it seems to require a lot of emotional energy which I just don’t have.

Probably the emotional energy thing is a part of our problem. If we’re being honest though another part is that we shouldn’t have to bother with unimportant people when, as men, we have so many other important things to do…

I wonder how much space, time and ego-death I’ll need before I am ready to just listen to people.

The Different Drum

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 11:00:00 +0200

I’m in the middle of reading a book by M Scott Peck called The Different Drum and it’s really knocked me over. I need to get this down so that I can move on to further chapters where no doubt I’ll have more to write. Basically though I think the book is going to be very important to me from here on in.

A Different Drum is about building genuine community. In the book genuine community is defined as being much more than people with common interests or geography, it’s about creating a place where it is safe to be vulnerable. From the description of what takes place in the community building workshops that Scott Peck has run I’d say the atmosphere created during the period the group is together is the closest thing I’ve come across to the preconquest consciousness that is discussed in this essay by E Richard Sorensen. Naturally I’m quite excited about it, not just because I’ve often pondered about how good it would be to get into that state but also because it sounds like a hell of a good time.

To be clear, what Scott Peck seems to be achieving is not the living in the moment aspect of hunter gatherer cultures so much as the creation of an environment where people are safe to let their defences down and where they can allow their true thoughts and emotions to interact with others.

All through my life there have been momentary flashes of true community where I felt unconditionally supported, maybe with a circle of friends, or a design group at university or for a brief time living with other single people. I think my interest in living in a village stems from my desire to get those moments back or even better to make them semi-permanent. Life in civilisation has taken me in the other direction but I think that A Different Drum might be able to provide a blueprint for myself and anyone else who wants to change that. I’m sure I’m not the first to have said this though.

The book is reasonably old and I’m not sure if you will have heard of it or not. I’ve never seen any of Scott Peck’s books discussed in this circle of blogs although I have read two others (The Road Less Travelled and People of the Lie) which I found on my mother’s book shelf. I thought they were excellent books but I can see how they’ve gone under the anti-civ/primitivist/crashblogger radar. Scott Peck was an army psychiatrist who later became a christian and his books were exceedingly popular, in fact The Road Less Travelled spent years in the NY Times bestseller list during the eighties - prior to reading the book I thought The Road Less Travelled was just a poetic phrase. Maybe it was.

Anyway, that’s the background. Here’s some specifics. Scott Peck says there is a 4 stage process to achieving community:

First is psuedo-community where everyone pretends to get along (I’m sure we’re all familiar with this) but it’s all quite boring and meaningless. Then comes Chaos where people give up being nice and start to air their differences. It’s often characterised by people forcibly trying to help each other (something else we’re probably familiar with too).

Third comes Emptiness but only if people are prepared to give up their pet issues and ego-projects. I think the point of the Chaos phase is to emphasise what happens if people aren’t prepared to put their egos to death and to provide motivation for moving to stage three. This may have similarities to what people have been calling anomie.

Finally comes true community where all members are in complete empathy with each other regardless of the diversity of their backgrounds and any previous disagreements.

Scott Peck gives a multitude of examples of groups who go through his community building process and says that he can pretty much guarantee to bring any group (and any size of group) of people into community now that we have learned the rules that govern the process.

After writing the book Scott Peck set up the Foundation for Community Encouragement in order to realise his aspiration of spreading community. Part of the organisation’s philosophy statement has this to say:

There is a yearning in the heart for peace. Because of the wounds, the rejections, we have received in past relationships, we are frightened by the risks. In our fear we discount the dream of authentic community as merely visionary. But there are rules by which people can come back together, by which the old wounds are healed. It is the mission of the Foundation for Community Encouragement to teach these rules, to make hope real again, to make the vision actually manifest in a world which has almost forgotten the glory of what it means to be human.

Frankly I can’t think of anything that I could add to that.

As I said at the start this book appears to be unknown amongst this circle of blogs but I think it will have some application for all of us. The more thinking that is done about a post-crash future the more people are coming to realise that being in a community may be the most important factor in ensuring an individuals survival. Not to mention it’s place as an indicator of health and happiness in the here and now.

Derrick Jensen started talking about a future ‘rebirth of community’ a while back and it seems to be a growing theme in Jason Godesky's writing. I see it in his plans for the 2007 Mountain Festival unconference where they intend to use open source technology to structure the event - and in this quote from Tamarack Song which he has reprinted for a second or third (do I hear a fourth?) time, in the same article.

We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork—basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you'll go back to the life that shuns these skills.

That’s only a part of the quote. I reprinted more of it in this article which, upon re-reading, seems to have sparked some very interesting comments pertinent to this discussion.

It’s hard to find a more compelling argument for community building in the entire primitivist back catalogue but so far there hasn’t been much action to follow the talk. I’m not accusing anyone of slackness here though, I think the whole things is a mystery to civilised people but A Different Drum could go a long way toward changing that and enabling us to ‘sit in a circle with our clan mates’.

In the book there were a number of comments by Scott Peck that mirrored what I have been reading from Primitivists including a comparison between the spiritual journey undertaken by healers in Fijian and !Kung societies and those taken by Christian nuns and monks, along with a brief description of the story of The Fall that made me wonder if he had been reading Daniel Quinn (or maybe it’s the other way around). Of course it’s not the main theme of the book at all but hopefully it indicates the potential cross-over here.

I know I could easily be accused of jumping on something that I’ve been desperate to find and building it up to be more than it is but it feels like the real deal. I also found an interview of Scott Peck done about five years after he set up the Foundation and he was still saying the same things then, albeit with a degree of refinement, so I’ll take that as a good sign.

And here’s another one. Reading this has triggered a memory of finding a website advertising the services of a couple who teach permaculture in New Zealand. I think I originally looked at it because these are the rather entrepreneurial pair who initiated the Eco-show in New Zealand. On the site they offer to lead a permaculture design course which spends some of the time focusing on building community using lessons learned from A Different Drum.

Brian Innes writes: The benefit of this approach is that it sets a basis for trust and risk taking which generates group unity and efficient decision making. This encourages flair and creativity in design and is reflected in the quality of output of the participants when doing design exercises.

I’ve written about the hard time I had at architecture school but there was one design group that I did enjoyed during my time there where we designed as an actual group rather than in competition with each other. It’s one of the glimpses of community from my past and because of it I had already been wondering if there weren’t possible application for doing awesome and effective design in community. But that’s another posting.

In any case I see serious potential to make use of this book. One of the recurring themes I am seeing, especially in the comments sections of anti-civ blogs, is the sheer frustration and loneliness that people are experiencing because they hold to a viewpoint that is so uncommon in our society. In fact it seems to be the one area in which we are all doing poorly.

This book won’t necessarily help with finding specific people but it does show that genuine community exists in spite of differences and that it may even build on those differences. If you get a chance to go to a community building workshop it would be well worth it, not only will it be a terrific buzz but in this situation people will probably be perfectly happy to hear your beliefs.

dropping out and going home

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:10:00 +0100

Devin left this comment at Frank Blacks:

"All I really want, in the deepest sense, is to be loved and appreciated for who I really am. I don't want to be lonely. All I really want is to go home.

All I really want is to go home."

That resonates with me so much it gave me goosebumps. That phrase; all I want to do is go home' pretty much sums up everything I do, not just on this blog but EVERYTHING.

Except there isn't a home for me to go to, I'm probably going to have to make one.

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I'm amazed at how sophisticated this dropout discussion has become since it was started almost accidentally by Casemeau.

For a while I've been wondering about gathering together people's droping out stories. They can (and should) range from people who've gone as far as leaving their country to office workers who haven't made a move but have had their head turned upside down by reading something inspiring.

This blog is not the place to do it really, Ran and/or Dan have more control over their sites than I do but maybe an independant site would work too, I don't know.

The idea first came when Casemeau wrote his dropping out story, there's something illuminating about a person's personal experience that no end of advice-giving can duplicate and I find I'm really fascinated by it.

Maybe I should just invite people to send in their stories, I'm scared of starting anything like a project right now, or making a 'thing' out of it, but what do people think - good idea or bad?

Dropping out

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 09:35:00 +0100

There’s a fascinating discussion happening on Living in a Van Down by the River about dropping out. It started off with a worrying attempt to define what dropping out was until Devin turned up and reminded everyone that “Dropping out is not a fucking club”.

He pretty much summed up the spirit of dropping out at the same. Aside from the semantic impossibility of being ‘in’ an ‘out’ club there is also the danger of creating a new ‘thing’ that would merely end up being something else we need to drop out of. It’s something that seems to happen to most ‘out’ groups, often because they are co-opted back into the system but if not then because the whole act of creating the ‘in’ group is such a civilised behaviour.

Ran has talked about the difficulty of finding a phrase to describe how he lives and acknowledges that he’s uses ‘dropout’ because there doesn’t seem to be anything better. The biggest problem I have with the word which is that it doesn’t reflect the dynamic nature of what we are trying to do round these parts. It’s widely acknowledged that people within the system do their damnedest to avoid change but we all need to be aware that it’s our journey and not where we are relative to others that’s important with dropping out,

The town I live in is considered to be a pretty radical place, full of hippies and other non-conformists but after living here for 5 years it’s become apparent that the hippy style is just that; a style. It’s something for people to wrap their identity around and I’ve become aware that people who I once thought were quite radical haven’t changed the whole time I’ve known them and even worse they give me the same looks that purely mainstream people do if I talk about something that extends them. I actually feel kind of let-down by the situation, they’re just as conservative as right wingers, the only difference is where they started from.

Although I’m wary of creating a definition of dropout I am also being pretty clear that a dropout should be defined by their movement. This means that if (for instance) Casemeau were to spend the rest of his days living in his van and not changing then I would say he was clearly less of a dropout than a corporate paper shuffler who is saving up their money to buy a homestead out of town.

All that aside though, there is a point where ‘dropout’ has even bigger problems which is that it defines us totally in relationship to civilisation. I think it’s awesome when people start to detach themselves from the system and it’s great to see how far they get. My hat’s off to each and every one of you but at some point we need to stop looking over our shoulder and figure out where we actually want to go. Not just because we’d be in a better position to inspire others to join but because it’s something we really need to do – maybe more than anything else.

All through this debate the issue of how we civilised people lack a proper identity is pinpointed as a major issue, we’re aware of how it even threatens to derail the discussion itself. My hope is that the task of building a new culture that properly suits us, preferably with other people, will help to ground our identities. Maybe it’s the other way around – or maybe it’s work that has to be done concurrently.

It’s hard to know how it will all work out but the very act of undertaking this kind of journey will undoubtedly bring us into conflict with inner demons, it’ll be pretty obvious when we need to take our eyes off the horizon and turn inward and fortunately for us there are those who have already trodden this path.

Lesson from the Bushmen

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 05:42:21 +0100

I’ve often seen Ran write about how we need to develop a culture that in many ways is like a hunter/gatherer community but has the wisdom to cope with encounters with civilised culture. I was always a bit sceptical about how this might work in practice but I’ve just discovered a piece of anthropology in a link that Jason left at Free Range Organic Human which gave me an inkling of what this culture might be like.

Eating Christmas in the Kalahari is an account by Borshay Lee of how the Bushmen taught him a lesson in managing the arrogance and coercion that lies at the heart of our culture.

searcherer

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 08:25:00 +0100

This posting was kind of prompted by Ted’s current state of searching. I sort of knew I was on a search but until I hadn’t realised that my outward search was a response to very specific inward needs.

I always feel slightly confused when people start talking about categories of thinking, like anarcho-primitivism or Marxism or Progressive-ism or whatever. I always feel like an outsider who doesn’t quite get it, but then I’m never that interested in sticking to a particular category so maybe that’s why.

I'm trying to get to the bottom of stuff and mostly it seems to be quite a subjective, personal thing, which is why there’s not a lot of academic rigour about this site. It seems to be important to figure out who I am in order that I don’t identify with someone else’s dogma and end up wrapping my identity around.

Anyway, if I resist the urge to fit into a particular crowd – or more accurately please the members of that crowd and then zero in on what I feel like I most need that might be a way of finding out what really matters to me. It might be better than trying to fit myself into a particular subset of anarchism for instance, and it definitely will be easier than trying to read a really wide cross section of writers to see where my place might be. In other words, I need to look inward and find out what’s there before looking outward at what other’s are doing.

I think this can work even if we’re full of walls and defences like I am because our greatest needs are usually screaming at us in a really loud voice.

For me than, this need is for people. I need people around me, maybe like, I don’t know - a tribe. Except these days I might be better off aiming for a mere community. Regardless this is what has been driving everything I’ve been looking at on this blog even if I didn’t realise it.

However the weird thing is, I feel like I’m fairly alone in this need. I see a lot of interest in outdoors kind of skills or solitary spiritual quest sort of stuff but who of us is building community? - the thing we’re going to need most of all in a crash situation. Maybe it just isn’t apparent because we’re online or maybe the online stuff is our substitute community - in which case we may all be in severe danger. I seem to have gotten onto a topic Ran was discussing recently, it’s not where I was intending to go but the fact that it’s written itself in may be significant.

Civilisation is incredibly isolating and incredibly good at separating us from each other. Having this strong community on line kind of increases the problem because I have been developing a lot of ideas but no one around me (except Karen) can even begin to understand what I am talking about. Half the time I don’t know what to discuss with people in my social life these days.

I’m aware that this is not very coherent and I’m not entirely sure I’m going with it, but mostly I just want to put a stake in the ground. I always feel the pressure to fit in with what’s going on around me, to live up to some kind of image to be honest, I’m not very interested in rewilding, going primitive, bringing down civilisation (in fact a part of me is dead against that) or studying anarcho-primitivism. I just want some people you know.

Getting to the heart of it

noreply@blogspirit.com (Aaron) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:00:00 +0100

There's a discussion going on over at Anthropik that I'm going to respond to here because it gets to the core of what this blog is about. Or at least what it has come to be about.

For the uninitiated, I started this blog to track my long term plans to set up an eco village. OVer the time of my writing however I have come to understand that the village will merely be a setting for what I'm about to discuss here:

In the discussion I just mentioned, Casemeau commented.

A mistake that we tend to make when speaking of abuse is to only think about it in its very obvious and dramatic forms. Then, if none of these has happened to us; if, say, we haven't been punched by a parent, or even yelled at, we think the discussion doesn't apply directly to us. A widespread form of abuse that I'll bet everyone has suffered from is the denial of our true selves by (usually) our parents. This takes place invisibly, every day. An example is like this: "Oh don't cry, sweetie, it's just a broken toy." Or like this: "It's a sad occasion, but you must be brave." In physical abuse, the bruises and broken bones can heal quickly. What imprisons the child for decades after the bones have healed (until death, even) is the emotional need to bury the true self which cries when it is appropriate to cry. This allows the child, literally, to survive. This same damaging imprisonment is effected with seemingly good parenting ("Oh don't cry, sweetie."--This response to a crying child seems so right!)

I couldn't have put it better myself. Jason responded with:

I disagree with the use of the term "abuse" to cover something like that. The fact of the matter is, even in a tribal society, you have to know when it's OK to express yourself, and when you need some self-control. If you accept that, then the rest of this is a sliding scale.

For all his excellent research I think Jason misses the point here. The real problem with coming to grips with this is what it implies about out parents - which is that not only have they hurt us but that they are the principle means by which civilisation and it's abusive rules are passed from generation to generation. In the context of an (online) anti-civ community like this circle of blogs this is a hell of a thing to say and a good reason to keep in denial about it. It should surprise no one that I have yet to tell my own parents about this blog. Clearly I can face this truth but equally clearly I can't yet deal with it adequatley.

Unless we can face and deal with this aspect of civilisation no amount of violent insurections or well meaning alternatives are going to make a blind bit of difference. We could be living in the forest making fire with a bow and using permaculture to supply food and still carry civilisation within us.

As it is I can't see how we can do more than water down the civilisation within us a little bit each generation.

The real reason I know this is not because of how my parents treated me but because of how I treat my kids. I have as much information available to me on how to break this cycle as anyone else but I am still not free of the temptation of mis-using my power over my kids. It could be as simple a thing as inventing a reason they can't do something simply because it would involve me getting off the couch.

The fact that most people reading this will probably say that what I've described is not really a big deal and hardly worthy of the title power abuse or even mis-use is an indication of just how far we have to go. Kknow this though, Behaviour like this is something that normally WOULD NOT happen in a well-functioning tribe.

Of course to improve our behaviour as parents we need to work on ourselves first and I can't speak too highly of what I see in Casemeau, Ted, Dan and Ran's blogs. Often when I sit down to write about an issue I end up concluding that to solve it will involve doing some internal work (as opposed to the much more popular option of fixing the external world).

I don't think my message is a particularly popular message. I fear that I may have inherited the dictatorial, communication style of my father but I also know that the solutions I advocate to our problems are damn hard to enact and maybe even impossible without a tribe or village to support us. Certainly most people are not in a position to focus in this area - especially if they are in the middle of trying to raise children.