Making fire by friction using wheel and axle; Community

Yesterday I was reading about primitive survival methods. I read about how to start fires. We've seen it on cartoons - they sit there for hours spinning a piece of wood against another piece of wood, and nothing happens. That's a pretty accurate representation of reality.

The website explained how to troubleshoot this problem. For instance, the wood has to crumble into a very fine powder instead of large chunks. That depends on what kind of wood it is. So today, I went out with my camera and took a bunch of tree and leaf pictures so I could learn to identify trees. I recognize a few very basic trees - I might be able to say that something is an oak or a maple, and I can distinguish between pine trees and deciduous trees. But there are a lot of obscure things like ash and elder that I have no clue about. (The website people were in California, so they used California plants and trees. I would have to adapt it to local trees.)

When I woke up this morning, somebody was talking to me about starting fires by friction. They said that perhaps it had originally been discovered by accident when somebody made a wheel and an axle both out of wood, before people were using metal. Of course, this would be a very friction-intense wheel. It would be the exact opposite of what people are usually trying to do when they build engines and wheels with as little friction as possible. Then this cave-person loaded up the wooden-wheeled cart with a bunch of heavy objects and pushed it down a hill at high speed. Perhaps then the wheels caught on fire. Maybe it was a really big hill and a really heavy load on the cart.

I wonder if this would work? If it worked, it would be a great lazy way to start a fire by friction. It would be hilarious to see it actually happen.

The same site (http://www.primitiveways.com/fire_from_ice.html) showed a guy starting a fire by focusing light through a lens made out of ice. I love the idea and feel skeptical about it at the same time. They showed photos, but that's not the same as seeing it done in front of you, or actually doing it yourself - and doing it repeatedly and reliably, at will.

My interest in primitive survival methods is a rebellion against my whole 'domesticated' lifestyle. It's a desire to prove that I could do it myself if I had to. It's also anxiety from losing every high-paying job I ever had as a result of the intermittent economic bubbles caused by our monetary system. If I really lived in a primitive community, it would be okay to make progress and invent ways to make our lives easier. I'm more interested in finding ways to separate from the fiat money system, rather than preventing the community from inventing and making their own tools and things that might become gradually more advanced. So it isn't an anti-progress belief, or valuing primitive methods merely for the fact that they are primitive. The most important goal is to reduce the number of items that we have to purchase using money. (That includes matches and lighter fluid, which is why I looked into firemaking.)

If it were done in reality, we would probably start off with a lot of simple, basic items that were durable goods and wouldn't need to be purchased very often. It would be okay to go out there with a modern magnifying glass or some kind of tinderbox or flint that wouldn't wear out. But we wouldn't want to rely on items that had to be purchased again and again, like gasoline. Some pre-made durable goods would be okay, but we'd feel better knowing that we could do without them or make them ourselves eventually, or make substitutes for them.

I'd also like to avoid rent payments on our land, so it would have to be a squatter settlement or nomadic group. (That's not easy to plan. It looks like the group would always be in danger of government harassment, even if we were living on land that nobody was using.) Anyway, that's another topic. The whole idea is just at the fantasy stage, not a practical plan stage.

I sometimes look at things in terms of 'What is the root of all evil?' What is the most central, most important thing you know of that causes most of the problems in the world? Some of my answers have been 'government,' 'fiat money,' and 'drugs/chemicals/malnutrition/diseases.' Some people grew up in very strict religious households and are much more aware of 'bad religion/bad belief systems' than I am. I grew up in an agnostic household with no pressure to believe in any particular religion or philosophy. But I'm aware that bad belief systems are one of the roots of all evil.

Now, my latest answer to that question is: 'loss of community.' I can think of so many ways that my life would have been easier if I were protected by a community with a strong (but reasonable) set of rules and guidelines for how to live life, how to avoid dangers, how to learn what you need to know to survive as an adult. You're always surrounded by a community, but it's a community of people randomly thrown together who aren't consciously cooperating to achieve their goals. Many of their goals are in conflict with each other. And many of the goals that I want to see in the community exist only in small numbers of people who have to work really hard to find each other over long distances.

Anyway, I need to build a community that serves the purposes I value most, working with people who already agree and don't have to be convinced. They won't need to be paid to do research, because they themselves already want to know those same answers that I want to know.