Tom, I've probably misunderstood this article because I'm wondering what level of possession it is to which you refer. You have lived a somewhat nomadic life and by your own admission have scraped by on very little remuneration, largely due to others taking advantage of your goodness and kind nature. A leap into the unknown is what you do because you have little to lose but for those like myself who crave security above all else (because I really could not cope without it!) it is only the knowledge that I own outright the very modest roof over my head which allows me to sleep at night. I accept that you are looking at a much bigger picture which as a defeatist I cannot even begin to comprehend!!
Hi Laura - many thanks for taking me seriously on this! - and yeah, let's say straight away that I'm what I'm saying will sound challenging, to say the least...
I'd suggest that there's two ways to look at this: one, in terms of child-development, and the other in terms of possession-based versus responsibility-based cultures.
On the child-development side, we're basically talk about the difference between the behaviours of the 'Terrible Twos', versus a child who's beginning to understand the concept of sharing and social-responsibility, and also responsibility over longer periods of time, which typically starts at around three years old, and builds onward from there. (If you're a parent, you'll know all too well about that, I think? - _especially_ the un-joys of the 'Terrible Twos'? :-o )
In essence, we live in a culture that I describe as 'paediarchy' - 'rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish'. In short, a culture based on a reversion to the worst of the two-year-old - which is why, culturally, we're in such deep doo-doo. If we live in that type of culture, we're all but forced to follow the same kind of behaviours even just in self-defence. But if we keep on going with that, it will literally kill us all. That's the challenge.
Now, crucially, here, a responsibility-based economics _doesn't look much different than a possession-based one_. Your ownership of your house and home remains essentially unchanged: you still live there, no-one's going to challenge you on that. You care for the house, it's your _home_, you have real commitment to it - all of which proves that you're an appropriate person to maintain it, appropriately _responsible_ to maintain this shared-asset on behalf of the society as a whole. There are only two conditions under which this might change: one, where you no longer wish for that place to be your home (e.g. you want to downsize, or upsize, such as because of family changes - children moving out, elderly relatives moving in); or the other where you've trashed the place so much that you'd have demonstrated that you're _not_ 'response-able' enough to maintain it appropriately - in which case you really shouldn't be there. (Yes, there are important questions about who gets to decide that latter point - e.g. risks of racism and so on. There _are_ good ways to tackle that risk, but it'll take too long to explain right now - is it okay to skip that for the moment?) In both those cases, there's none of the risk that get in a money-based economics, where you could end up getting stranded - it's simply a move to somewhere that more closely matches your need - either a smaller place, a larger place, or somewhere that's more resilient against irresponsibility.
You worry about "it is only the knowledge that I own outright the very modest roof over my head which allows me to sleep at night" - in this scenario, _no-one can take it from you_, unless _you_ choose otherwise. That's _very_ different from the current context, where one wrong move with a mortgage (literally, 'death-pledge'), or, in the US, one significant health-issue, can see you out on the street in seconds. In short, what I'm describing is _more_ secure, not less - that's a point I suspect you may not have fully grasped as yet?
It's complicated - I _know_ it feels complicated, and frightening and all that. Once you _do_ grasp what's going on, it'll become clear that it's actually much, _much_ simpler than the current mess. The challenge then, of course, is to make it real, against all of the pressures from those who (mistakenly) believe that the current way benefits them.
To give you a real-world example, consider the state of the Scottish clans before around the mid-18th century, when they were running of what was essentially a responsibility-based economics, versus what happened to them after the English forced them to shift to a possession-economics. (Much the same happened to the Welsh, but the shift is less clear-cut, more spread out over a period from around the mid-13th century to the mid-19th - whereas with the Scots it was literally overnight.) Prior to the change, crofters held the land on the basis of responsibility, as assessed, monitored and supported by the clan as a whole. After the change, all of the lands were now the private possession of the clan-chief - and what soon resulted was the Highland Clearances, after the chieftains' sons gambled the money away and the English thieves and parasites declared that they now possessed everything. Not A Good Idea...? That would be exactly you, if you lived at that time: kicked out of your home to make way for some foreigner's sheep. What would you and your family do then? - because that is the ultimately-_inevitable_ outcome of a possession-based 'economics'.
Are you responsible for your home? - if so, you own it. But in a possession-based 'economics', no matter how certain things might seem, you can be kicked out of it at any moment, whenever some paediarchal parasite decides they want to possess it instead - and, like a rabid two-year old, has no interest in what you need, but only in whatever might satisfy whatever their immediate whim might be. Like so many other cultures, you'd find yourself literally 'dispossessed'.
Now expand that problem to a fully global scope, scale and timescale: everything run on the random whims and random greed of a culture dominated by the 'Terrible Twos'. _That's_ the real challenge here...
On "You have lived a somewhat nomadic life and by your own admission have scraped by on very little remuneration" - yes, these days that's largely true, though little to none of that was by choice. If there's one thing I desire most, it's to have my own quiet retreat - much like you, in that sense. I used to have exactly that, some years back - an admittedly too-large house on too much land, where I planted trees, literally by the thousand. (See 'Sometimes it takes a while...', http://weblog.tetradian.com/2020/12/28/sometimes-it-takes-a-while/ ). I lost that6 place because a business-partner stole from me so much that the only way to pay off their debts was to sell my home. I spent 15 years looking my after elderly mother, in her home, so there was no way I could have a home of my own, nor any way to gain an income either - so that when that came to an end, I was almost literally out on the street. Three times now - arguably four - I've either rebuilt an entire industry or created one from scratch (desktop-publishing, whole-enterprise architecture, to name two of them) - yet as an innovator, it's only others who make any serious money from that work. My real curse is that I see the world in a different way than others: and whilst I've been proven right time and time again, it's always been too late for me, the damage has already been done. Metaphorically very John the Baptist in that sense...
So that's what Small Changes is about: setting the groundwork for the huge changes that are to come - that _must_ come - if the human species is to have much if any chance to survive beyond perhaps the end of the current century. One of those changes is the systematic eradication of all forms of possessionism - we have _no_ chance to survive unless that does happen, and happens soon. (Yeah, I know that probably sounds crazy,-alarmist and worse - but then perhaps note my track-record in business and elsewhere, where I routinely deal with timescales from microseconds or less (e.g. satellite-communications) to upwards of a hundred years (e.g. healthcare), and where the longest timescale I've had to deal with, for _a legally-mandated business issue_ about hazardous-waste compliance, was _a quarter of a million years_...) I'm 70 years old now, so little to none of this will happen in my own time, of course - but if I can help others be more prepared for these changes, that at least I'll have done something useful with my life. That's what responsibility _is_... - and to me at least, that's what responsibility _demands_ of us. This makes more sense now, I hope? But thanks again for the question, anyway.
Thank you for sharing all these thought triggering pieces of information. In many situations your story made me look into the mirror as they match my past. In other respects, our gained fears make us see the same things different.
You might remember that I escaped a communist country in my early thirties. Some of the concepts you mention related to responsibility based culture and economy were the foundation of the culture I escaped. Exactly as you mention, houses and lands were commonly owned and distributed as per needs of the community (first) and individual (next). If you were senior, you would get a small apartment in an apartment building. If you were a young family with children, you would wait in line to be allocated the apartment of a family that shark in numbers for one reason or another. Same was with many other necessities of life, including healthcare, nutrition, vacation spots, location of your work, promotion, and so on. Theoretically, all seemed efficient and sustainable. Theoretically, communism is a good philosophy. Theoretically.
However, we are driven by homo sapiens sapiens minds running on homo sapiens sapiens hardware. We have inherited a large set of behaviors that are hardwired and pretty much non-social. Ego needs would frequently drive abuses and freeloaders, narcissists, and tyrants have a great time in a responsibility based culture (it is their perfect grow medium).
Unless we speciate, we get another miracle mutation in our genome like the one that branched us off chimps that would make us essentially ethical socio-economic beings, we are doomed (in my humble opinion) to live with and struggle to manage our behavioral inheritance
And if it comes to speciation, both me and you are likely on the deprecation list :)
You might have listened to David Schmachtenberger talking to all kind of other high IQ individuals like Yuval Harari and such. They point to another alternative to speciation - an AI governance over our species that would not be vulnerable to the dark side of our inheritance.
I would rather have the speciation than be subject for the AI to become emphatic to the rest of the non-AI :)
And now that I did all this mental exercise, I will go and eat some privately owned food out of my privately owned fridge :) (as a trivia, the wait time for a fridge in my communist era was 7-11 years, unless you were a social priority - that is a high ranking member of the communist party or a blackmarket swindler or a social priority assessor or a......)
Agreed, much of this _may_ look scarily close to a communist model, and as you say, you've had a lot of first-hand experience of what can/does go wrong in that type of model. Which is really important here, because your experiences there can really help us all design ways o avoid those kinds of problems in future.
Remember that this isn't just a theoretical exercise: in essence, we are in a _global-scale_ 'on the polder situation - we _must_ find a way to work together, or we're _all_ going under water (metaphorically or literally). The whole thing is strictly about pragmatics, not grandiose political-theory.
As you know far more than I do, communism looks like a great idea but communism-as-implementedI - particularly soviet-style communism - has, uh, a few problems, shall we say? :wry-grin: Interestingly, most of the English non-soviet social-based communes of 1920s-1930s slowly transformed into mainstream monastic-style religious-communities, which do seem to work well but won't scale much beyond village-level (typically the Dunbar Number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number , ∼150), and also require a particular type of spiritual/social worldview that most people don't/can't hold. So no, neither of those approaches will work sustainably at the scale we're talking about here.
Yet if nothing else, both of those models _can_ help us as lessons here - even if, in the soviet case, more as examples of what _not_ to do...
Again, you have first-hand experience that I don't - so please correct me if I'm wrong here.
A couple of base-points to build from. As I understand it, the root-level for pretty much all of this is the huge bottom-up social-rethink happening in England before, during and immediately after the English Civil War - basically the first half of the 1600s. Christopher Hill's 'The World Turned Upside Down' provides a good guide to all of this - the roles of the 'masterless men', the Diggers, and so on. Probably the main document that comes out out of this is 'An Agreement of the People' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Agreement_of_the_People , https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/1647-the-agreement-of-the-people-as-presented-to-the-council-of-the-army . All of it gets suppressed, of course by Cromwell and the other Grandees (the oligarchs, in present-day terms - but various parts of it resurface later in a lot of other places: for example, the 1688 English 'Bill of Rights', the 1787 US Constitution, _and_ in 1867 Marx 'das Kapital. And a core part of the soviet revolution has has its formal basis in exactly the same type of event as 'An Agreement of the People': a conference between 'the people' and the Army the latter being the first time that this happens for 370 years!
So yes, both US capitalism and Marx-style communism are literally branches from the same root. And in both cases we can see which bits get missed or dropped. In the US, it becomes a charter for slave-owning oligarchs, possessionist, money-based, hierarchical, and built on 'rights' without responsibilities - all of the themes that we now _know_ don't work in the longer term. And _all_ of those errors are retained in soviet-style communism:
-- it's still possessionist - the only change is that 'the owner' is now the state, rather than the previous oligarchs;
-- it's still money-based - which leaves it wide-open to reinstatement / recreation of an oligarchy
-- it's still hierarchical, in this case centred around 'the party' - which again leaves it wide open to recreation of its own variant of oligarchy
-- it's likewise still based on 'rights' without responsibilities - which is why your fridge takes a decade to arrive, but also why 'party members' get priority over everyone else
And in _none_ of these frameworks - US-capitalist, soviet-communist, or whatever - do we see _any_ checks or mitigations against rampant paediarchy and the therefore-inevitable Putin- or Trump-style crybaby-tyrants.
Oops...
We won't survive those mistakes much longer. If we're to have _any_ chance of long-term survival - not just as individuals, but as a species, or even a liveable planet - then _all_ of those have to go. No possessionism; no money; no enforced hierarchies (no 'some are more equal than others'); no responsibility-free 'rights'; no space for paediarchies to arise. _No_ exceptions, anywhere - because if we allow _any_ of those to continue, in any form at all, we're dead. It really _is_ as stark as that.
Oh, and the 'rule by AI' thing? - take a look at some of the later stories in Asimov's 'I, Robot' series - particularly the final story 'The Evitable Conflict'. Some, uh, _interesting_ ideas there...
Thanks again, anyway, I hope this is useful, and answers some of your (entirely valid) doubts?
Thank you Tom, great comments. I will only say this in support for your perspective - the only time I was completely relaxed and optimistic was ......call me and I will tell you the rest :)
Great article Tom, I think unless we can find some alternative way to live without the monetary system the addiction will continue, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift in how we perceive and see 'value' in ourselves and others. although a bit cheesy, there's a powerful quote from Michael Caine in the film 'Interstellar' - "we must think not as individuals but as a species"
On the money-economy, strong agree, though there's also a lot more that we have to eliminate if we are to have much chance to survive (or, preferably, thrive) into the future. I've already written a post on that, which will be coming up as an episode in the next couple of weeks or so - it was going to be the next episode, but I've realised I need to add a couple of other posts first to explain key points about method, about why this is important, and so on. In the meantime, this post on my weblog gives a bit more of the background: 'May Day, and a mayday for our world', http://weblog.tetradian.com/2017/05/01/may-day-and-a-mayday-for-our-world/
On the Michael Caine quote, yes, useful/important tagline, though I'd suggest it needs an 'and' rather than a 'but': "we must think as individuals _and_ as a species". (Or, to draw from the Deep Ecology folks, ..."as individuals and as a species _and_ as part of the overall ecosystem of the world as a whole".)
Just love this article Tom, most of the possessionism depicted by a hollywoodesque illusions of wealth, and a possession based model of success drive this global need for possessions. Moral values have no footing in tinsel town and thus the globe will continue to be mesmerised by possession based success criteria. On the other hand, the two most populace countries in the world being China & India are running out of demarcated space to expand into, and this mere fact will trigger hostilities as they fight for possession of land mass in the not too distant future.
Agreed on all of this, Robert - and "this mere fact will trigger hostilities" is one all too real example of how possessionism really does risk killing us all.
My main aim, though, is to find ways to sidestep the whole possessionist mess - and do so through a myriad of small-changes, because any attempt at visible big-changes will immediately trigger counter-action to protect the possessionist addiction.
One of the reasons I've done this reframe of possessionism as an addiction and/or an infectious disease means that it's not about blaming anyone - 'the rich', for example, or 'consumers' or whoever. After all, anyone can get caught up in an addiction, either by mistake, or through no fault at all of their own; anyone can catch an infectious disease in a pandemic. Framing it that way makes it clear that it's something we _do_ have to address, that we _do_ need to eradicate - but again, it's no-one's fault as such that it's out there and needs to be addressed. Removing blame doesn't trigger the same level of defensive reaction, and makes it easier to tackle.
Agreed, your point on the pandemic is particularly relevant where global scientists worked as part of a global team to arrive at a solution for Covid, but when it came to production we seen possessionism raise its ugly head and first world countries retained stock at the expense of the 3rd world, who do not have the same production capability.
Will this world ever realise that we are in this together, or will possessionism kill us all.
"Will this world ever realise that we are in this together, or will possessionism kill us all" - well, that's the question, isn't it? :-o
I still do have real hope that we can get things going through quiet small-changes, to sidestep possessionism in such a way that it simply becomes irrelevant, an old mistake of the past. Apply 'white-anting' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-anting ) to nibble away at its foundations; make possessionism seem boring and pointless, 'no fun at all', and so on. And we don't have to get _everyone_ in the whole world to understand that yes, we're all in this together: we only have to get a critical-mass of people to do so, and the critical-mass we need is really quite a small number. But we'll only reach that number if we set out to get there: if we don't even start because it all seems too big, then yeah, we won't have any chance to get there.
It ain't a revolution: after all by definition, revolutions only go round in circles. It's a bit more subtle than that: much quieter, much simpler (though always remember that 'simple' ain't the same as 'easy'! :-o )
Tom, I've probably misunderstood this article because I'm wondering what level of possession it is to which you refer. You have lived a somewhat nomadic life and by your own admission have scraped by on very little remuneration, largely due to others taking advantage of your goodness and kind nature. A leap into the unknown is what you do because you have little to lose but for those like myself who crave security above all else (because I really could not cope without it!) it is only the knowledge that I own outright the very modest roof over my head which allows me to sleep at night. I accept that you are looking at a much bigger picture which as a defeatist I cannot even begin to comprehend!!
Hi Laura - many thanks for taking me seriously on this! - and yeah, let's say straight away that I'm what I'm saying will sound challenging, to say the least...
I'd suggest that there's two ways to look at this: one, in terms of child-development, and the other in terms of possession-based versus responsibility-based cultures.
On the child-development side, we're basically talk about the difference between the behaviours of the 'Terrible Twos', versus a child who's beginning to understand the concept of sharing and social-responsibility, and also responsibility over longer periods of time, which typically starts at around three years old, and builds onward from there. (If you're a parent, you'll know all too well about that, I think? - _especially_ the un-joys of the 'Terrible Twos'? :-o )
In essence, we live in a culture that I describe as 'paediarchy' - 'rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish'. In short, a culture based on a reversion to the worst of the two-year-old - which is why, culturally, we're in such deep doo-doo. If we live in that type of culture, we're all but forced to follow the same kind of behaviours even just in self-defence. But if we keep on going with that, it will literally kill us all. That's the challenge.
Now, crucially, here, a responsibility-based economics _doesn't look much different than a possession-based one_. Your ownership of your house and home remains essentially unchanged: you still live there, no-one's going to challenge you on that. You care for the house, it's your _home_, you have real commitment to it - all of which proves that you're an appropriate person to maintain it, appropriately _responsible_ to maintain this shared-asset on behalf of the society as a whole. There are only two conditions under which this might change: one, where you no longer wish for that place to be your home (e.g. you want to downsize, or upsize, such as because of family changes - children moving out, elderly relatives moving in); or the other where you've trashed the place so much that you'd have demonstrated that you're _not_ 'response-able' enough to maintain it appropriately - in which case you really shouldn't be there. (Yes, there are important questions about who gets to decide that latter point - e.g. risks of racism and so on. There _are_ good ways to tackle that risk, but it'll take too long to explain right now - is it okay to skip that for the moment?) In both those cases, there's none of the risk that get in a money-based economics, where you could end up getting stranded - it's simply a move to somewhere that more closely matches your need - either a smaller place, a larger place, or somewhere that's more resilient against irresponsibility.
You worry about "it is only the knowledge that I own outright the very modest roof over my head which allows me to sleep at night" - in this scenario, _no-one can take it from you_, unless _you_ choose otherwise. That's _very_ different from the current context, where one wrong move with a mortgage (literally, 'death-pledge'), or, in the US, one significant health-issue, can see you out on the street in seconds. In short, what I'm describing is _more_ secure, not less - that's a point I suspect you may not have fully grasped as yet?
It's complicated - I _know_ it feels complicated, and frightening and all that. Once you _do_ grasp what's going on, it'll become clear that it's actually much, _much_ simpler than the current mess. The challenge then, of course, is to make it real, against all of the pressures from those who (mistakenly) believe that the current way benefits them.
To give you a real-world example, consider the state of the Scottish clans before around the mid-18th century, when they were running of what was essentially a responsibility-based economics, versus what happened to them after the English forced them to shift to a possession-economics. (Much the same happened to the Welsh, but the shift is less clear-cut, more spread out over a period from around the mid-13th century to the mid-19th - whereas with the Scots it was literally overnight.) Prior to the change, crofters held the land on the basis of responsibility, as assessed, monitored and supported by the clan as a whole. After the change, all of the lands were now the private possession of the clan-chief - and what soon resulted was the Highland Clearances, after the chieftains' sons gambled the money away and the English thieves and parasites declared that they now possessed everything. Not A Good Idea...? That would be exactly you, if you lived at that time: kicked out of your home to make way for some foreigner's sheep. What would you and your family do then? - because that is the ultimately-_inevitable_ outcome of a possession-based 'economics'.
Are you responsible for your home? - if so, you own it. But in a possession-based 'economics', no matter how certain things might seem, you can be kicked out of it at any moment, whenever some paediarchal parasite decides they want to possess it instead - and, like a rabid two-year old, has no interest in what you need, but only in whatever might satisfy whatever their immediate whim might be. Like so many other cultures, you'd find yourself literally 'dispossessed'.
Now expand that problem to a fully global scope, scale and timescale: everything run on the random whims and random greed of a culture dominated by the 'Terrible Twos'. _That's_ the real challenge here...
On "You have lived a somewhat nomadic life and by your own admission have scraped by on very little remuneration" - yes, these days that's largely true, though little to none of that was by choice. If there's one thing I desire most, it's to have my own quiet retreat - much like you, in that sense. I used to have exactly that, some years back - an admittedly too-large house on too much land, where I planted trees, literally by the thousand. (See 'Sometimes it takes a while...', http://weblog.tetradian.com/2020/12/28/sometimes-it-takes-a-while/ ). I lost that6 place because a business-partner stole from me so much that the only way to pay off their debts was to sell my home. I spent 15 years looking my after elderly mother, in her home, so there was no way I could have a home of my own, nor any way to gain an income either - so that when that came to an end, I was almost literally out on the street. Three times now - arguably four - I've either rebuilt an entire industry or created one from scratch (desktop-publishing, whole-enterprise architecture, to name two of them) - yet as an innovator, it's only others who make any serious money from that work. My real curse is that I see the world in a different way than others: and whilst I've been proven right time and time again, it's always been too late for me, the damage has already been done. Metaphorically very John the Baptist in that sense...
So that's what Small Changes is about: setting the groundwork for the huge changes that are to come - that _must_ come - if the human species is to have much if any chance to survive beyond perhaps the end of the current century. One of those changes is the systematic eradication of all forms of possessionism - we have _no_ chance to survive unless that does happen, and happens soon. (Yeah, I know that probably sounds crazy,-alarmist and worse - but then perhaps note my track-record in business and elsewhere, where I routinely deal with timescales from microseconds or less (e.g. satellite-communications) to upwards of a hundred years (e.g. healthcare), and where the longest timescale I've had to deal with, for _a legally-mandated business issue_ about hazardous-waste compliance, was _a quarter of a million years_...) I'm 70 years old now, so little to none of this will happen in my own time, of course - but if I can help others be more prepared for these changes, that at least I'll have done something useful with my life. That's what responsibility _is_... - and to me at least, that's what responsibility _demands_ of us. This makes more sense now, I hope? But thanks again for the question, anyway.
Thank you for sharing all these thought triggering pieces of information. In many situations your story made me look into the mirror as they match my past. In other respects, our gained fears make us see the same things different.
You might remember that I escaped a communist country in my early thirties. Some of the concepts you mention related to responsibility based culture and economy were the foundation of the culture I escaped. Exactly as you mention, houses and lands were commonly owned and distributed as per needs of the community (first) and individual (next). If you were senior, you would get a small apartment in an apartment building. If you were a young family with children, you would wait in line to be allocated the apartment of a family that shark in numbers for one reason or another. Same was with many other necessities of life, including healthcare, nutrition, vacation spots, location of your work, promotion, and so on. Theoretically, all seemed efficient and sustainable. Theoretically, communism is a good philosophy. Theoretically.
However, we are driven by homo sapiens sapiens minds running on homo sapiens sapiens hardware. We have inherited a large set of behaviors that are hardwired and pretty much non-social. Ego needs would frequently drive abuses and freeloaders, narcissists, and tyrants have a great time in a responsibility based culture (it is their perfect grow medium).
Unless we speciate, we get another miracle mutation in our genome like the one that branched us off chimps that would make us essentially ethical socio-economic beings, we are doomed (in my humble opinion) to live with and struggle to manage our behavioral inheritance
And if it comes to speciation, both me and you are likely on the deprecation list :)
You might have listened to David Schmachtenberger talking to all kind of other high IQ individuals like Yuval Harari and such. They point to another alternative to speciation - an AI governance over our species that would not be vulnerable to the dark side of our inheritance.
I would rather have the speciation than be subject for the AI to become emphatic to the rest of the non-AI :)
And now that I did all this mental exercise, I will go and eat some privately owned food out of my privately owned fridge :) (as a trivia, the wait time for a fridge in my communist era was 7-11 years, unless you were a social priority - that is a high ranking member of the communist party or a blackmarket swindler or a social priority assessor or a......)
Many thanks for this, Bogdan.
Agreed, much of this _may_ look scarily close to a communist model, and as you say, you've had a lot of first-hand experience of what can/does go wrong in that type of model. Which is really important here, because your experiences there can really help us all design ways o avoid those kinds of problems in future.
Remember that this isn't just a theoretical exercise: in essence, we are in a _global-scale_ 'on the polder situation - we _must_ find a way to work together, or we're _all_ going under water (metaphorically or literally). The whole thing is strictly about pragmatics, not grandiose political-theory.
As you know far more than I do, communism looks like a great idea but communism-as-implementedI - particularly soviet-style communism - has, uh, a few problems, shall we say? :wry-grin: Interestingly, most of the English non-soviet social-based communes of 1920s-1930s slowly transformed into mainstream monastic-style religious-communities, which do seem to work well but won't scale much beyond village-level (typically the Dunbar Number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number , ∼150), and also require a particular type of spiritual/social worldview that most people don't/can't hold. So no, neither of those approaches will work sustainably at the scale we're talking about here.
Yet if nothing else, both of those models _can_ help us as lessons here - even if, in the soviet case, more as examples of what _not_ to do...
Again, you have first-hand experience that I don't - so please correct me if I'm wrong here.
A couple of base-points to build from. As I understand it, the root-level for pretty much all of this is the huge bottom-up social-rethink happening in England before, during and immediately after the English Civil War - basically the first half of the 1600s. Christopher Hill's 'The World Turned Upside Down' provides a good guide to all of this - the roles of the 'masterless men', the Diggers, and so on. Probably the main document that comes out out of this is 'An Agreement of the People' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Agreement_of_the_People , https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/1647-the-agreement-of-the-people-as-presented-to-the-council-of-the-army . All of it gets suppressed, of course by Cromwell and the other Grandees (the oligarchs, in present-day terms - but various parts of it resurface later in a lot of other places: for example, the 1688 English 'Bill of Rights', the 1787 US Constitution, _and_ in 1867 Marx 'das Kapital. And a core part of the soviet revolution has has its formal basis in exactly the same type of event as 'An Agreement of the People': a conference between 'the people' and the Army the latter being the first time that this happens for 370 years!
So yes, both US capitalism and Marx-style communism are literally branches from the same root. And in both cases we can see which bits get missed or dropped. In the US, it becomes a charter for slave-owning oligarchs, possessionist, money-based, hierarchical, and built on 'rights' without responsibilities - all of the themes that we now _know_ don't work in the longer term. And _all_ of those errors are retained in soviet-style communism:
-- it's still possessionist - the only change is that 'the owner' is now the state, rather than the previous oligarchs;
-- it's still money-based - which leaves it wide-open to reinstatement / recreation of an oligarchy
-- it's still hierarchical, in this case centred around 'the party' - which again leaves it wide open to recreation of its own variant of oligarchy
-- it's likewise still based on 'rights' without responsibilities - which is why your fridge takes a decade to arrive, but also why 'party members' get priority over everyone else
And in _none_ of these frameworks - US-capitalist, soviet-communist, or whatever - do we see _any_ checks or mitigations against rampant paediarchy and the therefore-inevitable Putin- or Trump-style crybaby-tyrants.
Oops...
We won't survive those mistakes much longer. If we're to have _any_ chance of long-term survival - not just as individuals, but as a species, or even a liveable planet - then _all_ of those have to go. No possessionism; no money; no enforced hierarchies (no 'some are more equal than others'); no responsibility-free 'rights'; no space for paediarchies to arise. _No_ exceptions, anywhere - because if we allow _any_ of those to continue, in any form at all, we're dead. It really _is_ as stark as that.
Oh, and the 'rule by AI' thing? - take a look at some of the later stories in Asimov's 'I, Robot' series - particularly the final story 'The Evitable Conflict'. Some, uh, _interesting_ ideas there...
Thanks again, anyway, I hope this is useful, and answers some of your (entirely valid) doubts?
Thank you Tom, great comments. I will only say this in support for your perspective - the only time I was completely relaxed and optimistic was ......call me and I will tell you the rest :)
Great article Tom, I think unless we can find some alternative way to live without the monetary system the addiction will continue, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift in how we perceive and see 'value' in ourselves and others. although a bit cheesy, there's a powerful quote from Michael Caine in the film 'Interstellar' - "we must think not as individuals but as a species"
Many thanks for this, Neil!
On the money-economy, strong agree, though there's also a lot more that we have to eliminate if we are to have much chance to survive (or, preferably, thrive) into the future. I've already written a post on that, which will be coming up as an episode in the next couple of weeks or so - it was going to be the next episode, but I've realised I need to add a couple of other posts first to explain key points about method, about why this is important, and so on. In the meantime, this post on my weblog gives a bit more of the background: 'May Day, and a mayday for our world', http://weblog.tetradian.com/2017/05/01/may-day-and-a-mayday-for-our-world/
On the Michael Caine quote, yes, useful/important tagline, though I'd suggest it needs an 'and' rather than a 'but': "we must think as individuals _and_ as a species". (Or, to draw from the Deep Ecology folks, ..."as individuals and as a species _and_ as part of the overall ecosystem of the world as a whole".)
Thanks again, anyway - it really does help!
Just love this article Tom, most of the possessionism depicted by a hollywoodesque illusions of wealth, and a possession based model of success drive this global need for possessions. Moral values have no footing in tinsel town and thus the globe will continue to be mesmerised by possession based success criteria. On the other hand, the two most populace countries in the world being China & India are running out of demarcated space to expand into, and this mere fact will trigger hostilities as they fight for possession of land mass in the not too distant future.
Agreed on all of this, Robert - and "this mere fact will trigger hostilities" is one all too real example of how possessionism really does risk killing us all.
My main aim, though, is to find ways to sidestep the whole possessionist mess - and do so through a myriad of small-changes, because any attempt at visible big-changes will immediately trigger counter-action to protect the possessionist addiction.
One of the reasons I've done this reframe of possessionism as an addiction and/or an infectious disease means that it's not about blaming anyone - 'the rich', for example, or 'consumers' or whoever. After all, anyone can get caught up in an addiction, either by mistake, or through no fault at all of their own; anyone can catch an infectious disease in a pandemic. Framing it that way makes it clear that it's something we _do_ have to address, that we _do_ need to eradicate - but again, it's no-one's fault as such that it's out there and needs to be addressed. Removing blame doesn't trigger the same level of defensive reaction, and makes it easier to tackle.
Agreed, your point on the pandemic is particularly relevant where global scientists worked as part of a global team to arrive at a solution for Covid, but when it came to production we seen possessionism raise its ugly head and first world countries retained stock at the expense of the 3rd world, who do not have the same production capability.
Will this world ever realise that we are in this together, or will possessionism kill us all.
"Will this world ever realise that we are in this together, or will possessionism kill us all" - well, that's the question, isn't it? :-o
I still do have real hope that we can get things going through quiet small-changes, to sidestep possessionism in such a way that it simply becomes irrelevant, an old mistake of the past. Apply 'white-anting' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-anting ) to nibble away at its foundations; make possessionism seem boring and pointless, 'no fun at all', and so on. And we don't have to get _everyone_ in the whole world to understand that yes, we're all in this together: we only have to get a critical-mass of people to do so, and the critical-mass we need is really quite a small number. But we'll only reach that number if we set out to get there: if we don't even start because it all seems too big, then yeah, we won't have any chance to get there.
It ain't a revolution: after all by definition, revolutions only go round in circles. It's a bit more subtle than that: much quieter, much simpler (though always remember that 'simple' ain't the same as 'easy'! :-o )