Third stage. From tent bootcamps to
intentional communities.
I hope, friends, that we don't slide into "
Lord of the Flies".
A completely logical development of tent boot camps is the idea of making them permanent.
It's even easier than you think. Even people in the impoverished post-Soviet space can buy a country house (dacha) and gather there with friends, organizing a permanent place, and not a temporary tent boot camp.
The experience of various religious cults also shows that people united by a common idea can create small villages.
To be honest, these cults were not always good and sometimes the authorities dispersed them, including using not only the police but also the army. And this was the case in many countries around the world (For example, cases:
1,
2,
3,
4 and
the case of the rebel priest who spoke out against the leadership of the church and secular authorities, but this article on russian only, Google Translate needed).
But these are all negative examples that are on the lips of society, and that is why people often distrust intentional communities. Especially in the post-soviet space.
But there are positive examples:
Twin Oaks,
Acorn, Freetown Christiania.
So not all intentional communities degenerate into religious cults. And not even all religious cults adhere to strict totalitarianism. Amish, in my opinion, is a pretty decent social movement. Although I have a negative attitude towards the rejection of technical progress and,
for obvious reasons here, towards sexism in clothing for women.
BTW I am atheist. I believed in God, but russian orthodox church killed my faith. But the truth is not only the russian orthodox church , but also independent reading of the Bible. I read the Bible and I lost faith.
Richard Dawkins' books put everything in its place. I don't believe in God. BTW main reason I don't like Bible is sexism in Bible.
However, I like it when a common idea unites people. And I want to do this too.
However, I am worried that we could slide into totalitarianism and all sorts of ****. The same
Synanon was started as a good idea, but they rolled it into ****.
And I want to tell some soviet experience. It was like novel of
Yevgeny Zamyatin '
We', but in one big house and In Real Life.
Communal House of the Textile Institute
The Bolsheviks built a house in Moscow with essentially barracks-like communism. There were no apartments, there were living capsules, the residents were subject to a strict order and lived strictly according to a schedule. Like in the army, prison or monastery.
Video about this house at russian with English titles.
Such a model can be the basis for an intentional community. But I think that we are not ants, but kinky people.
While minimizing personal property, common property can be a good way to save money for the entire intentional community.
In the same Twin Oaks community, for example, there is a clothing library and shared transportation (cars).
We also can to manage common labor and share income for all intentional community.
We can also use limited consumption of goods, sharing some items so that the overall costs are lower. But people should have personal items such as e-books, smartphones and laptops. People should also have their own personal medications, personal hygiene items, and the like.
As for clothing, I support the idea of emulating Twin Oaks. We should have our own shiny nylon uniform and a library of civilian clothing so that our employees can get to the nearest city. I believe that we should not draw attention to ourselves by wearing the same shiny nylon uniform in the city.
Also we can use Swedish philosophy of
Lagom for our community consuming. But, by the way, the living cabins (capsules) from that house in Moscow are an interesting idea. As is general PE. Yes, morning PE in shiny nylon is mandatory.
But there are risks of sliding into totalitarianism and schizophrenia.
First of all, these are economic factors.
There is such a term -
tragedy of the commons.
The
tragedy of the commons is the concept that, if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a
pasture, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether. Even if some users exercised voluntary restraint, the other users would merely replace them, the predictable result being a "
tragedy" for all. The concept has been widely discussed, and criticised, in
economics,
ecology and other sciences.
But:
For example, another group found that a commons in the Swiss Alps has been run by a collective of farmers there to their mutual and individual benefit since 1517, in spite of the farmers also having access to their own farmland. In general, it is in the interest of the users of a commons to keep them functioning and so complex social schemes are often invented by the users for maintaining them at optimum efficiency. Another prominent example of this is the deliberative process of granting legal personhood to a part of nature, for example rivers, with the aim of preserving their water resources and prevent environmental degradation. This process entails that a river is regarded as its own legal entity that can sue against environmental damage done to it while being represented by an independently appointed guardian advisory group. This has happened as a bottom-up process in New Zealand: Here debates initiated by the Whanganui Iwi tribe have resulted in legal personhood for the river. The river is considered as a living whole, stretching from mountain to sea and even includes not only the physical but also its metaphysical elements.
So, in principle, people can agree on the rules for using common property.
And here the internal political question of the intentional community itself arises.
All the problems of those bad religious communities and movements like Synanon were because they had authoritarian leaders. Little dictators of intentional communities.
I propose to create a free society with collegial management. For example, as it once was with the
Zaporozhian Cossacks. The blood of these guys flows in my veins too. I am a person of mixed ethnicity. So I don't see any something bad in
this))) [
Wiki about the picture]
I can totally say they were cool guys. So may be it would be good idea to make this in shiny nylon and without their sexism, that Zaporozhian Cossacks had in time of
Sich.
By the way, yes. Another important point is the protection of one's own intentional community.
Not all authorities will take a positive attitude towards a group of young men and women who dress the same and follow the same discipline.
One of the simple ways to defend yourself is to be mobile and run away quickly.
Therefore, minimalism, Spartan conditions and starting the movement from tent boot camps are a good idea. People can run away quickly, people can limit their spending, and people can quick pitch tents in a new place and then think about land buying in new place and creating a new intentional community.
Another way is to do something useful for other people, not only for us. So that local residents, who will be our neighbors, stand up for us.
A simple way of such useful action is environmental protection. Volunteering in this sphere. But real practical volunteering. That is, you don't need to climb the chimney of the plant with a poster, but you need to help clean up garbage, where local authorities do not clean it well, you need to plant trees.
Here is an example of how all this can be organized:
Civilian Conservation Corps
The CCC performed 300 types of work projects in nine approved general classifications:
- Structural improvements: bridges, fire lookout towers, service buildings
- Transportation: truck trails, minor roads, foot trails and airfields
- Erosion control: check dams, terracing, and vegetable covering
- Flood control: irrigation, drainage, dams, ditching, channel work, riprapping
- Forest culture: tree planting, fire prevention, fire pre-suppression, firefighting, insect and disease control
- Landscape and recreation: public camp and picnic ground development, lake and pond site clearing and development
- Range: stock driveways, elimination of predatory animals
- Wildlife: stream improvement, fish stocking, food and cover planting
- Miscellaneous: emergency work, surveys, mosquito control
Some of what they did I studied at my university. My university education is in the field of environmental protection.
If we do something useful for other people, then other people will stand up for us if some government gets offended by us and starts persecuting us.
Another way is to accept people from our other intentional communities. I use the plural deliberately. There can be many intentional communities of shiny nylon fans, not just one on the entire planet. Therefore, if somewhere some government disperses one community, then its members drop everything and move to another.
This will require some effort from community leaders. We need to help each other when it comes to communities. Including when people are displaced because of wars, persecution or natural disasters. I mean, when there are communities, they need to interact with each other and help people from one community to move to another if disaster hits the first community. There needs to be a network of communities.
And once again about political governance. So that we don't have our little dictators, I believe that communities should have a collegial elective system of governance.
Communities also have every right to different rules of conduct for participants, so that people have a choice. And communities need to be made a lot, creating their network and establishing interaction between them. And as I said, in order to establish relationships with people who will be our neighbors, communities should engage in volunteer activities that are useful for society. For example, volunteer activities to protect the environment.
