tiny steps back toward sanity … the key is to appreciate those steps

The tiny steps will be seeming so terribly inadequate. The very, very incremental progress of our movement will give many a sense of hopelessness. The key is to retain realistic perspective.

It’s simply a very long way back.

So what will happen is this: Many who commit to the movement will have in mind a restoration of sanity. There will be frustration as it’s recognized that we can only take tiny steps in each generation.

The best thing that can happen is realistic appreciation of those steps and where they lead.

I define “real community” as being place-based, with locally-oriented interdependence, sharing of resources, participatory self-management, and stable face-to-face ongoing familiarity. Such was the norm for almost all of the history of human lifeways: family-clan-community-tribe in a territorial place, cyclical and stable generation after generation.

The pattern within hypermodern society is an insanity of instability, hypermobility, transience, far-flung families with little sense of place. Almost no real communities. The kids go away to college and they don’t come back.

In our ecovillages there is some extent of turn toward the sane alternative. Some sense of and commitment to place. A degree of relocalization and interdependence. Some sharing of resources and participatory self-management. There’s more in the way of stability and face-to-face ongoing familiarity than in the society at large. But the extent is limited. People still mostly work “externally” for the institutions of the Leviathan. They’re preoccupied visiting far-flung family members. They have a limited amount of time to devote to the maintenance and sustenance of the community, so a considerable amount of that work is outsourced to institutional goods providers and service contractors. There is still plenty of transience.

The steps in the right, better, alternative, toward-sanity direction are small. For hope and encouragement we need to envision the road ahead, where those steps lead.

https://stevenwelzer.medium.com/the-original-communitarian-lifeways-f8d06a5f66a7