primitive subsistence community, losing jobs, diana leafe christian

the good thing about 'jobs' in the primitive subsistence community is that you can't really 'lose' your 'job' due to economic bubbles.

plant foraging specialist:

become an expert at identifying local plants and trees. classify plants as edible, poisonous, medicinal, or useful for tools and materials. memorize and record the locations of specific plants. know which plants are available at any given time of year. collect and prepare plants for use. expand your familiar territory outwards to other areas to help guide travelers, hunters, nomads, traders, and other people in their food choices as they move around over longer distances. sell, share, and distribute plants to community members.

would it be boring and depressing to live in a primitive subsistence community?

i call it 'the same four walls' syndrome: you feel stuck in one small, parochial village and feel a longing for a larger world community, with a greater ease of living and more modern conveniences and a more varied culture. a small subsistence community, with a small number of people, and a harsh lifestyle, seems like a bleak and depressing image. This is described somewhere in the book, "The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth-century America," which i have glanced through in Google Book Search. it did happen in some of those small communities out in the middle of nowhere: some people felt that it was too lonely and depressing.

this is why i fantasize about networked villages with traders and nomads who move around (on the land) and go from place to place. (right now, the community is only at the fantasy stage.) this would help get news from other communities, buy products they made, or meet new potential members elsewhere. i have also thought a little bit about communication methods, like an 'off-the-grid' informal telephone/radio system of some kind, or an internet over ham radio. that would connect people with a larger outside world.

traveling 'on the land' means: you walk, ride horses or other beasts of burden, or ride bicycles, and avoid using fiat money or trading with the mainstream community; you forage for plants and animals, and you bring a non-perishable food supply with you. you might travel at night, avoid being seen (if you wish), and walk through wooded areas or less-populated areas. hitchhiking might also be an option (although i personally don't feel comfortable with it).

i imagine a community whose goal isn't explicitly 'ecological,' but rather, economic. the goal is to use less and less fiat money, instead of using fewer environmental resources. those goals are slightly different in their focus, although they overlap greatly, because fiat money, and the borrowing and malinvestment of it, encourages wasting of environmental materials and resources.

defining the goals of an intentional community:

diana leafe christian has written two books about building or joining an intentional community. from the bits that i've read, those books look excellent. it's all practical information.

http://www.dianaleafechristian.org/finding_community.html

it fascinated me to read about the process of building an intentional community. different people have different goals, expectations, and realistic or unrealistic fantasies about what the community should try to do.

for instance, i like the idea of 'a job you can never lose.' that is one of the purposes of the community i imagine.

my life has been unsettled over and over again by layoffs, firings, quitting of jobs, and temp agency assignments coming to an end. i've gone into debt because of these periods of unemployment.

in addition to that, i am chronically underemployed even when i do have a job. this is because the laws require employers to pay people 'time and a half' (one and a half times your usual pay rate) for any hours worked over forty hours. employers never want to do that, so you are always stuck working forty or fewer hours. this forces everyone to get a second job, or remain underemployed. when you get a second job, then of course, you are working at the original 'low' rate at both jobs instead of the time-and-a-half rate.

(the WORST thing they could possibly do about this situation would be to make a new law requiring employers to 'share the overtime' if you had two jobs. they could divide your overtime between your two employers and force them both to pay you time and a half for your total hours worked over forty. i have a bad feeling about this. it seems so believable, i'm afraid they might actually try to make that a new law someday.)

diana leafe christian's books talk about how to express those ideas about what you want from your community. a job you can never lose? sure, you might get that. but realistically, as a subsistence farmer or small-scale for-profit farmer, you might have bad years, with bad weather, crop failures, and all kinds of problems caused by nature rather than by economic problems. so realistically you can expect a certain kind of job security by working in an intentional community, but you also know that you can never be perfectly safe or have everything perfectly controlled to avoid every unexpected disaster.

she writes about how to get a group of people to express those unrealistic expectations ('i'll never lose a job again,' 'everyone will always love me and i won't feel rejected,' 'i'll never be lonely again,'), and mold them into something which can be done in reality. intentional communities really do provide real, practical benefits for their members. but the expectations must be clearly defined and realistic.

she talks about how to enforce consequences on people who violate the rules of the community. as an anarchist, you are responsible for putting yourself in the role of government, while avoiding doing all of the things that you think the government does wrong. you must learn how to enforce consequences for broken contracts or other more serious crimes, and avoid using physical force, jail, excessive bureaucracy, and other things that you object to in the mainstream community's government. (i could call it the 'UNintentional community.')

when you look at the 'unintentional' community that surrounds you, you notice that everyone has different goals, and they are not all working together.

the diverse goals of a community:

this concept is helping me imagine how to interact with strangers who aren't doing things that i value. i was thinking of the goals of the community that i live in - stuff like 'spend lots of time and money to watch football, sit in the stadium, sit on tailgates, and sit in traffic.' that's one of the things my community values that i don't value at all. this is the 'what would i do if i had all that money?' fantasy. there are huge amounts of money associated with football in this town, directly and indirectly. (we often say things like 'if i had all that money, i'd find a cure for cancer,' or something.)

this is the concept of community goals. a large group of people ARE working together. there are some projects that can only be done with large amounts of money and lots of people working simultaneously. for instance, if you decided to bake a thousand cakes by tomorrow morning, you probably could not do this all by yourself in your own home kitchen.

in an intentional community, a lot of like-minded people are working together for the same purpose. you discover that there are lots of people who already agree with you about many of your basic goals, although they differ about lower-level values and goals. 'lower-level' means a less important or less urgent goal.

as i read diana leafe christian's web page, i feel that almost everything she says is familiar to me. she's expressing things that i was thinking all along, but didn't have the words to say.

it's exciting to look at a book written by an author who feels convinced that building a community is possible. she has experience troubleshooting the things that go wrong with intentional communities. and she also knows a lot about how to do it right.