Will it work

A possible future sustainable moneyless network of communities

Ok, so, EOS proposes a socioeconomic system for a sustainable world. A moneyless, “Star Trek like”, system that builds upon communities that act like building blocks. Each community rules itself, manages its own waste and produces its own food and power. These communities then network together to handle projects that one community alone cannot. Experts manage the technical resources of the communities. All this works with in bounds such as basic human rights. This means we present a goal orientated system where power becomes distributed among the people and localised within communities with no centralised form of government. A sort of bottom up form of governance.

But I have a question:

Will it work?

Ultimately, building it represents the best way to see if such a system would work. Obviously, we cant expect to change over to such a system planet wide over night just to see if it worked. If it went wrong we could end up creating a worse disaster than we have now. However, we can build small parts and test them out. As things work we can then start adding to the system. That summarises the basic idea behind stepping tones as a plan to go from our current unsustainable system to a future sustainable system. We have started working on that with the bio-dome project but we have lots more to do.

Another way we could see if the ideas work involves looking at other societies in time and space and see if they have had something similar. I actually stumbled upon an article that Prof. Francis Pryor, the archaeologist, wrote that caught my eye as it talked about a similar bottom up form of governance:

“I’m fascinated by the extent to which we ordinary folk can govern ourselves without the top-down

A reconstruction of an Iron Age Celtic village in Britain

help of Big Men and leaders ‘up there’. And as a prehistorian, I have been given a unique handle on all this. Because before the Romans arrived (in AD 43) and gave us writing, we had to live our lives without written records. There were no bureaucrats, no civil servants and no politicians. Government was local and was firmly embedded within the community and its families. If you’re a chief or leader and you get big-headed, the family and the rest of the tribe would soon sort you out. It was an effective system and it gave us stunning monuments, like Stonhenge. It also oversaw the creation of the British landscape, our first road system, together with the foundation of many villages and towns, even if some of these were not fully urban, in the modern sense.

Put another way, bottom-up, family-based, political systems worked for tens of thousands of years and the proof is out there in the landscape. I’m not suggesting we should turn back the clock, but why have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater? Why have we abandoned localism entirely?” [Prof. Francis Pryor]

I'm not suggesting that we turn the clock back either but we in EOS do suggest a form of localism and the idea that early pre-Roman Britain worked with such a system does provide some evidence, although far from conclusive, that such a system could work. 

The Inca empire forms another example that shows something of our proposal could work. The Incas

Atahualpa, Inca Emperor

ran a moneyless empire in central America. They guaranteed a basic level of living with free clothes and food. Although they did expand through conquest to some degree they also persuaded other tribes to join their empire, which those tribes often did willingly. We have two aspects of our design here; moneyless socioeconomics and the idea of persuaded people through showing them something better.

Finding examples of communities could present a problem as the design allows for a variety of communities with their own culture and way of doing things; from religious to atheists or primitive to transhuman and much in between. However, we can find examples of communities that could fit in. Twin Oaks in the US could form one example. Set up in the 1960 and not only still around today but has sprouted a number of other communities to form a sort of network. Although not using energy accounting nor having experts managing the technology it does show some aspects of how a community could work and the idea of networking.

Although we don’t have anything conclusive, we do find bits and pieces here and there that suggest at least some of ideas could work. Enough to suggest that we present ideas worth investigating. It might work!

A quick overview of some aspects of human nature

The current scientific view on human behaviour tends to supports the idea that our behaviour results from an interaction between the environment and our genes. We also have certain characteristic behaviour that we call human nature. In this post I’ll give a quick overview of some aspects of human nature that I think we need to have an awareness of when thinking about the design for a future sustainable socioeconomic system.

 

All we do is all about sex

 

Raëlians at Love Hug Festival in Seoul, South Korea

 

Well, not sex as such but reproduction; producing more humans and passing on our genes. However, we don’t just do actions to increase our reproduction as we have reached a state of awareness where we can override our genes. However, much of human behaviour does centre around the need to reproduce; from basic survival to much of our social interactions to our sense of honour and fighting wars. 

People are stupid

We can see stupidity as an adaptive / maladaptive behaviour pattern where we knowingly or, at least, have the capacity to know that our behaviour will harm ourselves or others. From getting drunk to our socioeconomic policies; stupidity reigns supreme. Stupidity appears as a very common mode of behaviour and we all act stupid at some point in time. Note; stupidity does not equate to the opposite of intelligence. You can act intelligently and stupidly at the same time. In fact, to really exhibit stupidity you need intelligence. That also means humans rank as the most stupid animal on the planet!

People are not that stupid

Our stupidity does have its limits. We do not behave so stupidly, so far anyway, to wipe ourselves out. We also have enough intelligence to overcome our stupidity to a degree; rational thinking, for example.

We are deluded

We receive a bombardment of information constantly. The vast majority of it we don’t need at this moment it time. Our brain acts as if it has a filter that filters out unwanted information. To do that, the brain acts as if we have a simplified model of reality. If something doesn’t fit with the model it gets filtered out. Unfortunately that means we live in a world in our head that reflects reality and sometimes our model of reality deviates considerably from reality. That means we all act in some way or other as deluded but some of us display a state of being seriously deluded than others and have all kinds of deluded beliefs such as quantum consciousness, gods and demons and delusions of grandeur! The only way to get back to a model that reflects reality better has to do with pain; if we ignore reality too long it has a nasty habit of biting us where it hurts the most.

We are near sighted

We evolved in small communities that needed to survive here and now. That means we tend to see the world revolving around me, myself and I. Our thinking then extends out to others to encompass our monkey sphere of about 150 people.  Our here and now thinking means we have trouble planning for the future. This forms part of the reason why we can act stupid.

We are social

We evolved to live in communities with other people so we have evolved ways to interact socially. We understand others as people like ourselves. We project ourselves onto others which works most of the time so long as we deal with people from our own culture but we can often fail to understand people from other cultures.  This also makes us uncertain of people not in our group and we check our behaviour with others in our group. This can contribute to behaviour like the bystander effect or racism. 

bystander effect

We have poor understanding of how the world works

Following on from our near sightedness and sociability, we tend to fail to understand how the world works. We tend to use anthropomorphism as a way to explain natural events; why did that bad thing happen? The gods were angry! This also forms part of the reason we act stupidly.

We use violence

 

Algerian security services clashed with youth demonstrating over high unemployment and food prices.

 

I say “use” rather than “we are violent” because we spend most of our time at peace, even the most violent groups on the planet. We also have developed many strategies to resolve conflicts peacefully. So we have more the characteristics of a peaceful species than a violent one. However, we still will use violence to resolve political situations if we feel we can get away with it. Our bodies have evolved to use and survive violent encounters; the adrenaline kick, withdrawing blood from the surface, and fighting with our fists, for example.

Should we look at another direction?

The prevailing socioeconomic opinion says we have no problem with the environment and the environment will self-regulate to resolve any perceived problem will, thus we don’t really need to do anything, we can just carry on as we have done and all will work our right in the end. The eco-system may well self-regulate in response to the damage we have and continue to do but we have no certainty that an optimal solution for the eco-system’s perspective involves the survival of the human race. With our understanding of how such complex systems work and what we have done we should, as a matter of self-interest if nothing else, look toward the long term but we don’t.

It looks like the immense lag in the system could prevent us from achieving a sustainable state and we have a very real possibility of seeing not just a collapse of civilisation but also of the eco-system; we do not have time on our side.

Perhaps we should now look at sowing seeds so that we have a foundation (and I use that word deliberately) to build an alternative moneyless socioeconomic system after the collapse? We should

Alien Planet: space colonies as a starting point for sustainable communities on Earth

This idea has floated around my brain for some time and the recent postings that Mark Ciotola has done has brought the idea more to the fore. Basically, I’m thinking about how we should design a sustainable community. We have the basic idea that we build around communities that the selves have a sustainable nature but I want to extend that a bit and think of communities as a colony on an alien plant.  Think Mars colony on Earth. The reason I’m thinking that has not only to do with such communities/colonies have to have a sustainable nature anyway but also with their enclosed nature. In a space colony food production and waste management has to take place within an enclosed system and this aspect I think should form the foundation for a sustainable community on Earth. We treat Earth like an alien plant and we build, as much as possible, self-contained communities.  

Of cause, we don’t live on Mars and we can step outside and breathe the atmosphere so I don’t mean we should build like we really live on an alien planet.  Instead we take the idea of a space colony as a starting point for our design. If we build from the ground up with sustainable communities then we can build a whole civilisation from these logo bricks.