Colin......your comment, above, came to mind when I read this at Chris Martenson's site, by Rob P offering an opinion on community:Amskeptic wrote: Believe it or not, I do believe that even if the whole ball of wax goes down, we WILL keep the modern engine going a while longer based on cooperative understanding. Meaning, after all the hatred that comes with the unfair system we have now, the Holy Crap We Have To Survive This! system will demand that we all just do our jobs because they need to be done. What drives every single working person in the country right now, bar none? We HAVE to make money. We have to hold in our hands, a terrible unfairness.
Steady, I'm just going to relate my views here - in regard to community building. Up until 3 years ago my wife and I were putting all of our efforts toward eventually building a community on our land in Illinois. I was heading toward retirement and we very much planned to start a small permaculture based community of maybe a dozen people as our legacy. We have no children.
Prior to that time we'd visited a number of communities. I even spent a summer at "The Farm" back in the 70s, so we really weren't new to all of it, but I still think we were naive about it.
I the last few years we've seen several attempts by friends and others to make small communities and we've talked a lot about other attempts with Bill Wilson at Midwest permaculture and others. It's important, I think, to note that these were all people in the US. These attempts have all failed or been extremely difficult. Because of this my wife and I have shifted our vision away from starting a small community.
I think I can encapsulate what the problelms are (from my asessment anyway). Firstly, people in the US, particularly the post WWII generations are very unusual. We're used to always getting our way. We grew up in a time of unusual possibilities and choices and we are not used to living with limitations. Furthermore, we are not used to thinking of the group first rather than our own needs (Very much unlike traditional Asian people - totally different psychology). We are also self absorbed in our own little dramas as if we are the only people on the earth. In other words Americans are not used to compromise, thinking of others first, flexibility, and sacrifice. We're also kinda lazy (knda??), with all those machines running on hydrocarbons doing everything for us all the time. Finally, I believe that we have literally lost a good number of basic interpersonal communication skills, particularly those related to conflict resolution. Becasue of what I've seen in recent years - failure by some of the best people I know, people I thought could have done it, I'm no longer up for it.
Now, if you're talking about Asia - to whatever extent it hasn't been infected by American consumerism and narcassistic individualism - it really is a different matter. My wife has a lot of history living in Asia, specifically Sri Lanka, India and China, so much of this is second hand and also through studying cultures.. I would say this: Those people - especially the more traditional ones not totally infected by colonialism - come up in a world in which they have to cooperate, they have to in order to survive. They don't know of anything else, or don't expect anything else, and they're used to it. Some of it is the identity structures of the culture - class, patriarchy etc - but at the core they have to cooperate because they have not been released from that need by the use of fossil fuels the way we have. They also don't come out of the history of individualism that really is there in the West. We are individual consumers with individual identities and "desires" paramount in our psychology. Many of them now want to be like us (Think China). But the point is, in my view, our natural, pre industrial state, involves a lot of cooperation by nessessity, but we lost all sense of that as we grew into consumer culture during the post WWII era. Now you have people who may not even be capable of it - or may be able to do it, but only with a great effort, or only under duress.
In my opinion, many people now, in this culture, are also, in one way or another what I would loosely call mentally ill for lack of a better term. Consumer culture has produced lots of anxiety, depression, addictions and other very dysfuncitonal behaviors. It's pervasive, but few see it as a product of the culture.
Now, the question becomes: as society becomes less complex and requires, literally, that people cooperate and work in community in order to survive, will the refugees from consumer land be able to do it? My prediction: not easily and not without a lot of gnashing of teeth and interpersonal conflict
