A key aspect of my vision of social evolution is the creation of societies.

What I mean by "societies":

• 500-5,000 people in population (or more? -- but definitely more than 150)
  • in contrast to a great many communal living efforts, which often intentionally or inadvertantly keep themselves at 20-100 people
• intentional -- societies wherein each person is there to carry an intention, a shared spirit, shared ideals
  • in contrast to mainstream society (for the most part,) that only very loosely carries conscious intention, spirit, and ideals amongst the controllers of the society
• both inward & outward facing -- engaged in the larger ecology of mainstream society and other societies
  • in contrast to cults, which are encapsulated, and consider their future to be separate from that of the surrounding society

I think that a lot of the efforts of the 20th century has been hobbled by a vision of small intimate (<100 people) communes, without any thought to engaging larger groups.  Many of these groups become relatively self-absorbed, and forget that they are there to make a difference in the world in practice, and to open doors for people who need out of the mainstream stasis.  Thus I've really stepped away from the word "community," because I feel that the word causes people to think "intimacy" and comfort, and forget mission.

(Interesting side-point/observation:  The Federation of Damanhur calls itself a Federation.  -- a Federation of Nucleo-Communities.  This rather neatly combines the intimacy of the nucleo-community -- which is about 20 people on average -- with the mission orientation of Federation.  Yes, Aaron, I'll speak to Damanhur on another occasion.)

"OK, OK," -- "But Lion, what does any of this have to do with social evolution?"

"Why should we be making societies?  Shouldn't we be trying to improve life for everybody?"

Yes, we should!  And that's the point!  If our societies don't exist for the larger world, what do they exist for?

"Okay, but then -- why are you talking abuot making something for people such that they make their own identity and their own ways?"

The short intellectual answer is:  Because what people need is difference.  The variation that modernity allows is incredibly narrow.  People think they have these incredible freedoms, and in many respects they do -- choice of product, choice of favorite TV show, etc., etc., but in terms of major life decisions and culture decisions, the degree of freedom the vast majority of people have is incredibly and vastly small.  For example, suppose you want to establish a zip line between two buildings?  (You see where this is going...)  Modern capitalism is incredibly good at creating diversity in the shopping market, but horrible at creating lives that people would actually want to live in (for the vast majority of people.)

But that's not clear enough.  That's a bad explanation.  Here's a good one, but it requires an exercise:

Ask yourself:  What is your ideal, dream society?

I've had people balk when I ask them this question -- because, they say:  "Well, my ideal society is one where everyone can do whatever they want."  OK, ok, I hear that.  But perhaps think of:  "What is your ideal, dream club?"  (The challenge is to awaken the social imagination.  It is not something people are used to exercising..!)  ...and imagine that the dream club had the capacity to re-arrange law, living arrangements, etc.,.  Or:  Imagine your ideal tribe.  Like an indian tribe or something.

Think of maybe 5-10 things that are different.

Here's a quick list I can make for the kind of dream society I might come up with some time:

• People can work radically different jobs, without getting "docked."  That is, if you work as a programmer for 3 years, you can work as a farmer for 2 years, and then as a teacher for 2 years, and then as a programmer again for 2 years.  (What would it take to support this kind of thing?  Perhaps an ethic of transfer, an ethic of continuous re-education, subsidizing education, changed social mores and social priorities, etc.,.)
• This people is simultaneously urban, suburban, and rural, in different capacities.  The system is set up for mobility.  But for myself, in the society of my dreams, the city is crucial.  So many new society/community efforts forsake the cities and flee for the hills -- but I think this is exactly backwards.  I understand that it's easy far away from the people, but I keep thinking, "If we are here to serve the people, and show people that there are new ways -- then why do we not embrace the city?  It's not like cities are going to go away.  They are too valuable, not just economically, but spiritually, for the spirit of a person."
• Creativity and research are the right of all people.  Novelty is highly valued by the society. 
• Sharing resources is a high value.  The society is about dream, first, and the people identify with the living force of dream.  If someone has a dream but not enough money for tools or time to deepen into the dream, people who have made a lot of money will, of their own volition, share the money for the dream and the training required for making the dream real.  It's important to understand that thsi society is about dream.  It is why we are here.  Not dreams of just putting the dollar value at a higher and higher level, but rather, dreams that have heart and meaning.
• A society of solidarity.  A shared commitment to the evolution of all of life, but especially to the other participants.  When we see strangers on the street, we think nothing of them, so very often.  But in the society of solidarity, the people are brothers and sisters.  And when we venture outside the society, these are people who just don't know that they are our brothers or sisters yet.
• A society of visionaries.  Every person is an artist, every person is a visionary.  This means we need time and tools for expressing through artworks, and delving into the irrational, delving into that within ourselves that is not expressible in the conventional words, the conventional language.
• A school of social skills.  There should be a place where people can learn the social skills that they lack -- whether learning to meet people, to speak before large audiences, to engage romantically, to interview, to become popular or to become a solider, to play myriad different roles.
• ...

I can go on and on, and you know -- some day I will.

Right now, though, I'm just trying to awaken the social imagination.

The problem is, when you ask people, "what are your dreams?", it's like there's a sheath around the imagination that keeps a person to just imagining about they themselves, for the most part.  "I want to be a ______," right?  "I want to have a ____________, and a ___________, and _________________."

But where do we ever touch each other in our imagination?

We have mistaken individualism -- the right of each person to be themselves -- with isolationism -- the idea that people should live in self-contained bubbles away from each other.  It doesn't just make us live in houses separate from each other;  More deeply, it prevents us from even imagining a better society.

If we can't even imagine a better society, how could we even hope to build one?  Much less -- we can't even remember that this is what we are here to do.  (A point I'll speak about later.)

Here's the algorithm:

1. Close your eyes.
2. Remember everything that connects you with love.  Or sing a mantra that connects you with love.
3. Find the place of deep love and joy and enthusiasm and limitlessness.  Find Spirit, and the Divine music, however your imagination finds it.
4. Now find all the people!  Love is just an abstraction if it isn't about the people.  :)
5. What are the people doing?  How do they look?  How do they feel?  What do they think?  How do they interact?

What we are looking for could be called the Kingdom of Heaven.  And if you know of anywhere better to aspire for, or anything better, at all, to do in life, I want to hear about it.

I'm surrounded by so much hopelessness and dispair and nullification;  But it's really important to fight against that.  Remember who you are and what you are here to do.

OK -- so, reigning this back in:

Why am I talking about people making societies, rather than making the one mainstream society better?

Because: People are different!  People want different things!  People have different natures!

When I close my eyes, and I look into my heart, to search for God, and to see our promised worlds, and when I look to the people, what I see is:  diversity, diversity, diversity.  I see so many different peoples, so many different dreams, and so many different ways...

Make no mistakes:  I am all for those efforts that life all of the people:  The civil rights movement for blacks, the civil rights movement for gays, the feminist movement whereby women win rights, and so on.  These are all very important things, and they require support.

But I can't help but notice that this "it's [inter-]national or nothing" creates a situation where everyone is fighting for a very limited bandwidth resource -- the attention of the entire people.  And I think it's really getting in the way of our evolution, as humanity.

People spend their whole lives looking for 15 seconds of influence, and the activists burn out.  I know, because I've seen it.  But I don't like this.  I just don't like it.  And I've seen how the system which we work by, which is basically nationalism, (because entire nations are the primary locus of meaningful reform,) makes it near impossible to experiment and diversify.  We have no ownership of our culture.  If you have an idea and want to try it, you have to spend 50 years of your life and get 100's of thousands of others to agree, and then you can try, to see if it is any good.  It just seems so slow and glacial. The whole idea that 600,000,000 people all need to live the same way...  Yuck!  That people can have no control over their culture, except that they go through the state or national government...  <shudder>

When I was in college?  At Mudd?  We had an ownership of our culture that I have never seen before or after.

I've lived in countless apartment complexes.  I can tell you:  In no apartment complex, did we ever come anything close to owning our culture.  We were not a "people," we were not aligned or connected by anything, save participation in the same legal framework.  We were not a "we."

I went to high school.  While there were cliques, we did not own our culture.  Rather, the school administration had power, and guided the student culture through the vehicle of ASB and the journalism class and the teachers.  We had more control of our culture than adults in our contemporary society do, though.

At my college, though, I think that was when we were a "we" and we had the most control over our culture.  But still, it is highly shaped.

Do you own your culture?  Do you belong to a "we" that owns its own culture?

I think this is a crucial question.  Because: Meaningful change is so often something that an individual cannot do.  "Oh, I want to live an environmental lifestyle."  Good luck trying to do that without the aid of an entire economy and infrastructure!

I mean, just look at the society you dreamed of, and then ask yourself:  "Okay, how long is it going to reach that, by making tiny incremental change over tiny incremental change, where any given tiny incremental change takes 30 years of millions of activists to make real...?"  OK, it took us 30 years (at least?!?) to agree that black people are not intrinsically inferior to white people?  What the hell?

I'm not saying that civil rights movements aren't important -- they are.  But if your entire model of social evolution is just national adjustments -- boy, do we need help.  Because it's going to be 1,000 years before a barely tolerable society is going to become real.

When I look out there at the miseries in the world -- I think the worst problem is gay rights (which is horrific,) or even the environment (which is downright lethal to all life here,) -- rather, I think the great enemy is hopelessness, dispair, and meaninglessness.  Because:  People who think life is meaningless are not going to be very inclined to fix the environment, or make the world fair, etc.,.  Rather, they're just going to try and get by -- for themselves, and perhaps their close family.  We need to make frames for meaningful action, -- by which I mean peoples.

It's late;  I'm tired;  I need to go to sleep.  I see I need to condense these ideas, making my case for social evolution by tribe & society clearer.

You know, I just look out there at "Who is living ecologically?"  And I see ecovillages and visionary societies.  That's who.  It's not individuals buying homes for their families -- rather, it's whole communities that are doing the legwork, the experimentation, and providing the test-beds that can roll out to larger society -- if larger society makes the choice to do it.

I'll order these thoughts on another occasion, to tighten up the argument.

See Also:

• Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (PDF)
• CommunityWiki:OrganizedCulture -- older thinking of mine, back in 2005.