Exodus to the promised land
When Moses lead his people out of Egypt into the desert, he was travelling apparently in "no man's land", a place unclaimed by humanity.
Is there any such place left? Where might a modern day Moses lead his people?
Just a curious question in regards to thoughts of economic collapse. Well, if not collapse, then a generally high unemployment and failure of the money economy to "work" for a good number of people.
Biking around the city sometimes I see homeless people with their signs asking for money, or the more active "Will work for food." Overall I can avoid such people and overall they don't seem to have much interest in approaching bicyclists. Still I'm in danger if they can get a conversation going with me. It's not a problem in sharing some money - the problem is I worry that my little money isn't really helping them AND that a good fraction of any boon granted by me may end up going for cigarettes or other nonessentials that make life bearable on the bottom of the bottom.
My brother was homeless 18 months ago when I kicked him out. He went through his second annual "treatment program" this Winter to avoid the cold. Now he's back in a housing deal IF he can find income to pay his rent. My relatives think I'm cold for not helping him. I did help him with $115 last summer when he could get a car which would help him get to a job, but the car didn't last a week. Even had the car lasted, I probably was enabling him to drive without insurance, so was I really helping him?
Is there a place for rejects like my brother - who have limited skills in a "modern" world? Even if he has money, he doesn't seem to have the skills to manage it. I'm not saying living on the bottom is easy, but I do imagine many people end up on the bottom terminally BECAUSE of a lack of management skills.
How much can we blame drugs and alcohol for holding people down? Do people on the bottom resort to drugs BECAUSE they are on the bottom, or are they on the bottom because of drugs?
It seems hopeless to me to imagine people like him ever "making it" in the modern world. The only hope is that someone comes along to take care of him. He made it through 2+ years of marriage, and only succeeded in achieving bankrupsy as a result - and a daughter whose child support is YEARS behind.
He IS a hard worker, but it does seem like his 20's passed him by and soon 30's also with his insanely poor diet of fast food, coke, cookies, and tobacco may finally be catching up on him and he'll be a physical cripple before another decade passes, unable to do physical work like he's done when he was younger. Truly, it seems like a downward spiral of self-destruction. He's unable to take care of himself well enough to offer anything sustainable from the world, and to the degree the world pushes back and MAKES him fight for survival, he'll kill himself slowly or quickly.
Whose responsible for his sorry life? Who can change it?
Unfortunately it is stories like my brother that make me be unable to be "prolife". My brother was adopted and according to my mom was sick frequently as a baby and cried continually and when school came along he clearly had learning disabilities. I imgine perhaps his mother was an alcoholic or something.
Bringing a baby into the world like that seems worse than death. I mean if a mother is unable to take care of her own health, she brings a baby who will grow into a child and adult without the intelligence and skills to thrive. SURE, no one can predict these things - and perhaps only some, like my brother fail to thrive, and most do well, for all I know. Still, it pains me so greatly that I can not be prolife. Is it better to die quickly before you're born or slowly over a lifetime of misery? How can anyone with compassion be fully prolife?
Being so gloomy as I can be is not a good idea I'm sure. It allows me the freedom to not really care - because I can't believe I can make a difference.
Actually when I began this blog I was thinking more of my recent question if economic downturn would eventually send people back into the rural land where they might be able to make a living somehow from nature.
It is a hopeless vision from the point of view of people like my brother. I look at farming and I see a science and art of vast proportions. It's not something that a person can learn from trial and error. Of course it depends on the scale of effort. A person can garden from trial and error, but NOT if they must survive from the results. The skills of a rural life are skills that ideally are passed from childhood and are slowly gained into adulthood and then passed to the next generation.
A hunting and gathering lifestyle is not clearly any more likely to succeed from trial and error. Overall I imagine "country folk" can survive in multigenerational poverty from a previous age of more abundance. I can imagine such survival comes as a slow and steady depletion of the natural systems that can support a simple life, especially if population rises and the inefficiencies of past behavior are not corrected over time.
Overall it is clear that only within "community" is there any hope for a group of people to maintain themselves within the contraints of their environment. Without community, without some top-down renewal, I imagine any group of people will overextend themselves and deplete their support systems.
I think to my idea of a "Martian Colony" on earth. Rather than trying to spend 100s of billions of dollars to get a small group of people on the moon or mars, why not try the same on earth? Much cheaper, much easier, and yet not clearly within our reach, at least with regards to our standard of living.
It does seem the "natural" vision for "living off the land" is to imagine the pioneer farmers pushing back nature, cutting the sod, and trees to build their home and squeaing out an existence. That's apparently how our nation was developed. Small scale effort followed by further and further consolidation.
The whole idea of "building a community from scratch" seems overwhelming to me, but I can see a little how it might work. Perhaps it needs a "religious" focus of some sort. It seems to me that there must be some sort of connecting force to hold people together. This religious focus need not be too theistic - just the idea that God provided this world for us and that we can work WITH nature for our own survival. It's quite natural belief, at least before we were bamboozled by the thought that nature was merely a store-yard of resources to exploit.
I must admit I am pretty well sold to the idea of a militaristic level of organization for community building. A military force is a fair model because it BEGINS on the assumption of COLLECTIVE first, individuals second. Everyone has a place and work is done for the collective rather than directly for financial reward.
I'm not sure how far this model can extend, and I'm not sure how it differs from a capitalistic model of every person for himself and letting greed lead work. I accept this military/communistic focus is of limited scale. It is a hierarchy of power which CAN become very large in scale. Maybe part of the issue is what scale has the power. Capitalism puts absolute power for individuals. Communism puts absolute power on the supreme leader. Perhaps socialism is the middle ground - giving power closer to the bottom.
It is interesting that in general groups are not trusted from the outside. Mainly religious groups when they start holing themselves up away from the wider culture.
AND it does go against the "American values" to suggest community has power over individuals. It is "unamerican" to suggest that a community should be able to restrict capitalism within it's membership, to restrict capitalism from the outside from interacting with individuals within.
Well, my "ideal experimental community" would outlaw the use of fossil fuels WITHIN the community. No natural gas, no oil, no gasoline, no coal. AND no buying products made from these sources OR transported with these substance. That would be a radical community from the modern point of view. It would perhaps be like the Amish communities which have a religious focus against modern inventions they can't build themselves or power themselves.
My purist view is probably flawed - the idea that people can't mix - that the entire community must agree to these restrictions. On the other hand, I don't easily see how to mix them.
One model would say "Take a 'dying' town" somewhere in rural america, and lead a group of wild environmentalists there to start their vision. It's tough to have to deal with "neighbors" who don't all agree, but it would in sorts be a hostile take over of a town. If the newcomers become a majority, they could dominate all the local laws and eventually drive away all the oldtimers who are not interested.
I think there is a group call "The Free State Project" http://www.freestateproject.org/
interested in a population takeover of the state of New Hampshire.
Well, they seem to have somewhat of a different focus that me - leaning towards Libertarian view of "maximum individual rights", "Minimum government". I have nothing against them and I welcome their experiment - somewhere else from where I will be!
I can see in part I am just as much an elitist and idealist as the Libertarians. When I think of a "person", I think of an abstract, well educated, skilled, intelligent, public-minded, individual who wants to be a part of a cooperative collective effort for the greater good.
I don't see people like my brother. I don't see mental illness. I don't see people who value a quick buck or gambling or senseless consumerism or drugs as a part of their daily lives. In fact overall my vision is very utilitarian, and holds some resentment towards others who don't have a strong work ethic.
Overall, I see the biggest flaw in my focus is I can't well see past survival. I can't see people's needs for pleasure, for novelty. I can't see people's NEED to work through their own addictions on their own time and self-destructive behavior. I can see how easily I would propose laws "for people's own good" that prevent destructive behavior.
I can see it is possible that a "first generation" of dedicated fools like me might survive and even thrive on a "virtue train", or at least make a good show, but how do you teach virtue to a new generation? Overall I imagine a virtuous generation will raise children BEST able to make their own way.
This is one of those divergent problems of E.F. Schumacher. Freedom versus responsibility. There's no final answer on either side.
Still, I wonder, what does a community do with its "rejects" - those members who are unable to control their addictions, unable to face their demons honestly, unable to live without hurting others?
Partly I imagine every population may have 10-20% of the people who are simply unable to live as independent adults.
Well, let's take this further if I dare. I have an elistist attitude that says that some people should NOT be parents, YET nature overall doesn't provide a mechanism for limiting parenthood except for luck.
An elitist attitude says that parenthood should be seen as a privledge rather than a right. AND even if you deny the perspective partially, clearly there are people who are not capable of being good parents who, if left to their own decisions, WILL have child after child. I must admit that I don't accept the premise that individuals have the right to breed without limitation from the wider society. It is only a matter of how much control is offered.
Take the "Martian colony" ideal. A colony on a hostile landscape MUST consider what level of population and reproduction it can handle. It is not FAIR to make reproduction a "first come, first served" operation. That is imagining we say "We can handle 10 births this year", and the first ten pregnant are accepted and the rest are forcefully aborted. In the "Martian Colony" ideal, children would have to be "applied for" and accepted.
WELL, given perfect birth control, that might work, but do we REALLY forcefully abort unintended pregnancies?! My heartless approach says YES - it is the only way to discourage people from having children without permission. On the other hand, we MIGHT allow substitutions. If woman "A" gets pregnant, AND she can find another already promised a child license but not pregnant yet, could "give" the license away. Of course that creates an economy where child licenses could be SOLD. Who knows - perhaps capitalism might have a place, but I'd be worried.
Limiting births on earth colonies has some other dynamics. Specifically it is ANTI-evolutionary. If one community limits births, while another grows without limits, then the larger group can eventually through sheer numbers crowd out the "responsible" group, OR through war itself exterminate the smaller group.
Isolated colonies are fun to imagine, but they need to be respected within a larger framework of defense and laws that protect minority rights from a stronger group.
Another name for colonies might be "Tribalism" - the idea of a group of people working together for their collective survival AND limitations upon joining from the outside.
Exclusivity is ALSO an unamerican value. You can't have a company and exclude people from being hired because of their racial or community/tribal affiliations. You can't rent housing out while excluding people. Laws of inclusivity are true modern ideals of equality and access to opportunity.
Tribalism may have some positives, and exclusivity may be necessary, but it is not without a dark side.
I suppose heterosecual marriage might be the ONLY exclusive collective sanctioned by individualistic culture. There's no equality of access to marriage. Marriage is a mutually agreeable decision. There's no power to compel anyone to marry anyone else just BECAUSE they're open for marriage.
I'm not really sure what the limitations of exclusivity in associations are. If I start a "club", can I say "No women allowed"? Why not? However if I start a business, I can't discriminate against women and refuse to employ them.
Well, back to my "commune", perhaps the best model for it would be as a corporation, within the modern view. A group of people start a nonprofit corportation and combine business and housing as collective ownership. Members are all salaried employees and agree to be paid whatever income the group decides, and overall the salaries can be small since people will have many basic needs met by the group, and much net income can be invested back into the community.
So "benefits" come from membership. Membership can be restricted by certain requirements of behavior - INCLUDING reproduction - and members not following the rules can be forced to leave. Ah, great fears of a dictatorship arise in my mind, but there's no reason democracy can't flourish within a corporation. A rule can be made for 2/3 majority decision or even Consensus if they like!
I must admit I am attracted to the idea, at least for exploration. A corporation might be inclusive in not discriminating based on individual racial, gender background, but still be exclusive in discouraging people from joining who are not interested in the collective rules.
Lots of fun thoughts, but must go now!
Is there any such place left? Where might a modern day Moses lead his people?
Just a curious question in regards to thoughts of economic collapse. Well, if not collapse, then a generally high unemployment and failure of the money economy to "work" for a good number of people.
Biking around the city sometimes I see homeless people with their signs asking for money, or the more active "Will work for food." Overall I can avoid such people and overall they don't seem to have much interest in approaching bicyclists. Still I'm in danger if they can get a conversation going with me. It's not a problem in sharing some money - the problem is I worry that my little money isn't really helping them AND that a good fraction of any boon granted by me may end up going for cigarettes or other nonessentials that make life bearable on the bottom of the bottom.
My brother was homeless 18 months ago when I kicked him out. He went through his second annual "treatment program" this Winter to avoid the cold. Now he's back in a housing deal IF he can find income to pay his rent. My relatives think I'm cold for not helping him. I did help him with $115 last summer when he could get a car which would help him get to a job, but the car didn't last a week. Even had the car lasted, I probably was enabling him to drive without insurance, so was I really helping him?
Is there a place for rejects like my brother - who have limited skills in a "modern" world? Even if he has money, he doesn't seem to have the skills to manage it. I'm not saying living on the bottom is easy, but I do imagine many people end up on the bottom terminally BECAUSE of a lack of management skills.
How much can we blame drugs and alcohol for holding people down? Do people on the bottom resort to drugs BECAUSE they are on the bottom, or are they on the bottom because of drugs?
It seems hopeless to me to imagine people like him ever "making it" in the modern world. The only hope is that someone comes along to take care of him. He made it through 2+ years of marriage, and only succeeded in achieving bankrupsy as a result - and a daughter whose child support is YEARS behind.
He IS a hard worker, but it does seem like his 20's passed him by and soon 30's also with his insanely poor diet of fast food, coke, cookies, and tobacco may finally be catching up on him and he'll be a physical cripple before another decade passes, unable to do physical work like he's done when he was younger. Truly, it seems like a downward spiral of self-destruction. He's unable to take care of himself well enough to offer anything sustainable from the world, and to the degree the world pushes back and MAKES him fight for survival, he'll kill himself slowly or quickly.
Whose responsible for his sorry life? Who can change it?
Unfortunately it is stories like my brother that make me be unable to be "prolife". My brother was adopted and according to my mom was sick frequently as a baby and cried continually and when school came along he clearly had learning disabilities. I imgine perhaps his mother was an alcoholic or something.
Bringing a baby into the world like that seems worse than death. I mean if a mother is unable to take care of her own health, she brings a baby who will grow into a child and adult without the intelligence and skills to thrive. SURE, no one can predict these things - and perhaps only some, like my brother fail to thrive, and most do well, for all I know. Still, it pains me so greatly that I can not be prolife. Is it better to die quickly before you're born or slowly over a lifetime of misery? How can anyone with compassion be fully prolife?
Being so gloomy as I can be is not a good idea I'm sure. It allows me the freedom to not really care - because I can't believe I can make a difference.
Actually when I began this blog I was thinking more of my recent question if economic downturn would eventually send people back into the rural land where they might be able to make a living somehow from nature.
It is a hopeless vision from the point of view of people like my brother. I look at farming and I see a science and art of vast proportions. It's not something that a person can learn from trial and error. Of course it depends on the scale of effort. A person can garden from trial and error, but NOT if they must survive from the results. The skills of a rural life are skills that ideally are passed from childhood and are slowly gained into adulthood and then passed to the next generation.
A hunting and gathering lifestyle is not clearly any more likely to succeed from trial and error. Overall I imagine "country folk" can survive in multigenerational poverty from a previous age of more abundance. I can imagine such survival comes as a slow and steady depletion of the natural systems that can support a simple life, especially if population rises and the inefficiencies of past behavior are not corrected over time.
Overall it is clear that only within "community" is there any hope for a group of people to maintain themselves within the contraints of their environment. Without community, without some top-down renewal, I imagine any group of people will overextend themselves and deplete their support systems.
I think to my idea of a "Martian Colony" on earth. Rather than trying to spend 100s of billions of dollars to get a small group of people on the moon or mars, why not try the same on earth? Much cheaper, much easier, and yet not clearly within our reach, at least with regards to our standard of living.
It does seem the "natural" vision for "living off the land" is to imagine the pioneer farmers pushing back nature, cutting the sod, and trees to build their home and squeaing out an existence. That's apparently how our nation was developed. Small scale effort followed by further and further consolidation.
The whole idea of "building a community from scratch" seems overwhelming to me, but I can see a little how it might work. Perhaps it needs a "religious" focus of some sort. It seems to me that there must be some sort of connecting force to hold people together. This religious focus need not be too theistic - just the idea that God provided this world for us and that we can work WITH nature for our own survival. It's quite natural belief, at least before we were bamboozled by the thought that nature was merely a store-yard of resources to exploit.
I must admit I am pretty well sold to the idea of a militaristic level of organization for community building. A military force is a fair model because it BEGINS on the assumption of COLLECTIVE first, individuals second. Everyone has a place and work is done for the collective rather than directly for financial reward.
I'm not sure how far this model can extend, and I'm not sure how it differs from a capitalistic model of every person for himself and letting greed lead work. I accept this military/communistic focus is of limited scale. It is a hierarchy of power which CAN become very large in scale. Maybe part of the issue is what scale has the power. Capitalism puts absolute power for individuals. Communism puts absolute power on the supreme leader. Perhaps socialism is the middle ground - giving power closer to the bottom.
It is interesting that in general groups are not trusted from the outside. Mainly religious groups when they start holing themselves up away from the wider culture.
AND it does go against the "American values" to suggest community has power over individuals. It is "unamerican" to suggest that a community should be able to restrict capitalism within it's membership, to restrict capitalism from the outside from interacting with individuals within.
Well, my "ideal experimental community" would outlaw the use of fossil fuels WITHIN the community. No natural gas, no oil, no gasoline, no coal. AND no buying products made from these sources OR transported with these substance. That would be a radical community from the modern point of view. It would perhaps be like the Amish communities which have a religious focus against modern inventions they can't build themselves or power themselves.
My purist view is probably flawed - the idea that people can't mix - that the entire community must agree to these restrictions. On the other hand, I don't easily see how to mix them.
One model would say "Take a 'dying' town" somewhere in rural america, and lead a group of wild environmentalists there to start their vision. It's tough to have to deal with "neighbors" who don't all agree, but it would in sorts be a hostile take over of a town. If the newcomers become a majority, they could dominate all the local laws and eventually drive away all the oldtimers who are not interested.
I think there is a group call "The Free State Project" http://www.freestateproject.org/
interested in a population takeover of the state of New Hampshire.
Well, they seem to have somewhat of a different focus that me - leaning towards Libertarian view of "maximum individual rights", "Minimum government". I have nothing against them and I welcome their experiment - somewhere else from where I will be!
I can see in part I am just as much an elitist and idealist as the Libertarians. When I think of a "person", I think of an abstract, well educated, skilled, intelligent, public-minded, individual who wants to be a part of a cooperative collective effort for the greater good.
I don't see people like my brother. I don't see mental illness. I don't see people who value a quick buck or gambling or senseless consumerism or drugs as a part of their daily lives. In fact overall my vision is very utilitarian, and holds some resentment towards others who don't have a strong work ethic.
Overall, I see the biggest flaw in my focus is I can't well see past survival. I can't see people's needs for pleasure, for novelty. I can't see people's NEED to work through their own addictions on their own time and self-destructive behavior. I can see how easily I would propose laws "for people's own good" that prevent destructive behavior.
I can see it is possible that a "first generation" of dedicated fools like me might survive and even thrive on a "virtue train", or at least make a good show, but how do you teach virtue to a new generation? Overall I imagine a virtuous generation will raise children BEST able to make their own way.
This is one of those divergent problems of E.F. Schumacher. Freedom versus responsibility. There's no final answer on either side.
Still, I wonder, what does a community do with its "rejects" - those members who are unable to control their addictions, unable to face their demons honestly, unable to live without hurting others?
Partly I imagine every population may have 10-20% of the people who are simply unable to live as independent adults.
Well, let's take this further if I dare. I have an elistist attitude that says that some people should NOT be parents, YET nature overall doesn't provide a mechanism for limiting parenthood except for luck.
An elitist attitude says that parenthood should be seen as a privledge rather than a right. AND even if you deny the perspective partially, clearly there are people who are not capable of being good parents who, if left to their own decisions, WILL have child after child. I must admit that I don't accept the premise that individuals have the right to breed without limitation from the wider society. It is only a matter of how much control is offered.
Take the "Martian colony" ideal. A colony on a hostile landscape MUST consider what level of population and reproduction it can handle. It is not FAIR to make reproduction a "first come, first served" operation. That is imagining we say "We can handle 10 births this year", and the first ten pregnant are accepted and the rest are forcefully aborted. In the "Martian Colony" ideal, children would have to be "applied for" and accepted.
WELL, given perfect birth control, that might work, but do we REALLY forcefully abort unintended pregnancies?! My heartless approach says YES - it is the only way to discourage people from having children without permission. On the other hand, we MIGHT allow substitutions. If woman "A" gets pregnant, AND she can find another already promised a child license but not pregnant yet, could "give" the license away. Of course that creates an economy where child licenses could be SOLD. Who knows - perhaps capitalism might have a place, but I'd be worried.
Limiting births on earth colonies has some other dynamics. Specifically it is ANTI-evolutionary. If one community limits births, while another grows without limits, then the larger group can eventually through sheer numbers crowd out the "responsible" group, OR through war itself exterminate the smaller group.
Isolated colonies are fun to imagine, but they need to be respected within a larger framework of defense and laws that protect minority rights from a stronger group.
Another name for colonies might be "Tribalism" - the idea of a group of people working together for their collective survival AND limitations upon joining from the outside.
Exclusivity is ALSO an unamerican value. You can't have a company and exclude people from being hired because of their racial or community/tribal affiliations. You can't rent housing out while excluding people. Laws of inclusivity are true modern ideals of equality and access to opportunity.
Tribalism may have some positives, and exclusivity may be necessary, but it is not without a dark side.
I suppose heterosecual marriage might be the ONLY exclusive collective sanctioned by individualistic culture. There's no equality of access to marriage. Marriage is a mutually agreeable decision. There's no power to compel anyone to marry anyone else just BECAUSE they're open for marriage.
I'm not really sure what the limitations of exclusivity in associations are. If I start a "club", can I say "No women allowed"? Why not? However if I start a business, I can't discriminate against women and refuse to employ them.
Well, back to my "commune", perhaps the best model for it would be as a corporation, within the modern view. A group of people start a nonprofit corportation and combine business and housing as collective ownership. Members are all salaried employees and agree to be paid whatever income the group decides, and overall the salaries can be small since people will have many basic needs met by the group, and much net income can be invested back into the community.
So "benefits" come from membership. Membership can be restricted by certain requirements of behavior - INCLUDING reproduction - and members not following the rules can be forced to leave. Ah, great fears of a dictatorship arise in my mind, but there's no reason democracy can't flourish within a corporation. A rule can be made for 2/3 majority decision or even Consensus if they like!
I must admit I am attracted to the idea, at least for exploration. A corporation might be inclusive in not discriminating based on individual racial, gender background, but still be exclusive in discouraging people from joining who are not interested in the collective rules.
Lots of fun thoughts, but must go now!
posted by Ares Olympus at 4:00 PM
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