Communities that Abide Revisited
By Dmitry OrlovApril 07, 2015 "ICH"
- My tropical wanderings have taken me to the exact same spot where I was last
year, when I took the photograph that ended up on the cover of the book
Communities that Abide:
I took a number of pictures of this tree, during different
times of day, until I got the one I wanted: the tree is deserted, with the
entire colony out foraging for fruit and insects, except for the everpresent
sentinel. And then, one rainy morning a few days after I took this picture
there was the roar of a chainsaw, and then a loud crash. I came out to look,
and the dead tree was missing. Instead, there was a large number of
Oropendola up in the sky, circling around the spot where their tree had
stood in uncharacteristic silence. The object lesson of the Oropendola just
became a bit more poignant: this is what collapse looks like.
I soon found out that the tree's roots were on an adjoining property, and
that the owner of that property killed the tree by pouring a foundation slab
over the roots and then, once it was dead and declared a hazard, hired some
locals to cut it down. That person also owns a gift shop, and Oropendola
nests sell for $75 apiece. The chainsaw gang charged her $300; there were
about 50 nests. I saw them sitting in a wheelbarrow and stole one. The
object lesson of the Oropendola became even more poignant: what destroyed
their habitat was the profit motive.
The birds circled about for an hour, and then regrouped. They posted
sentries on the neighboring tall trees, and spent a few hours drilling:
flying back and forth between trees single-file and having the sentries
check them out and in again, as before. A day later they started collecting
grass for new nests. (They first assemble a giant stockpile of long strands
of grass in the crook of a tree, and then start weaving.) Three days later,
they didn't seem any less happy than before the calamity, and a lot louder
(apparently, there was a lot for them to discuss).
The object lesson of the Oropendola is now complete. We are nesting in a
dead tree. The tree was killed by somebody else's profit motive. Our
communities will abide because 1. we are self-sufficient, 2. we have the
ability to self-organize and recover in the face of calamity, and 3. we are
not tied to any one place but are mobile.
Since then the Orapendola have established a new colony, almost
as big as the old one, on a tree some 10 meters away from the tree that was cut
down. It is in the picture above. And so, it appears I chose appropriate mascots
for the book: their community does abide.
Also since then my tropical wanderings took me to a place where I could observe
some human communities that may or may not abide. I spent a couple of months
house-sitting a property in a place called Tierra Oscura, sometimes translated
as “Darklands,” which is situated in a lagoon within the Bocas Del Toro
archipelago in the northeast of Panama. The archipelago has always been a
favorite playground for the Panamanians themselves: the erstwhile dictator and
CIA asset Manuel Noriega frequented Bocas Town on holidays, while the current
president of Panama likes to spend weekends in one of the cottages near Red Frog
Beach on the nearby island of Bastimentos.
But the last decade or so witnessed a remarkable transformation: the archipelago
has been discovered by wealthy Gringos, who have moved in in their hundreds,
buying up bits of coastal land and building houses on them. About a dozen of
these houses have sprung up around Tierra Oscura, inserting themselves between
the far more modest houses of the locals. Seeing an opportunity, another
tribe—the Chinos, or Chinese merchants—moved in and opened stores catering to
the Gringos as well as the locals.
But the locals are still all there. There are a few distinct tribes. First,
there are the Indios. They live in shacks roughly nailed together out of
rough-sawn boards and roofed with corrugated sheet metal, some on land, some
over water nestled in the mangroves. They generally lack electricity and rise
and go to bed with the sun, although they do sometimes run a generator to light
up and amplify a party. They generally don't have pumped water, and gather the
rainwater that falls on the roof using large blue plastic tanks. They don't have
much furniture, and sleep in hammocks.
They do have chainsaws (important in a place where trees sprout up as soon as
you turn around) but most of the work is done using the universal tool of
choice, be it chopping down plantains, shaving coconuts or killing snakes: the
machete. Of the tools of modern civilization, their most prized family
possession seems to be a smallish outboard motor. The motor is essential for
getting their cash crop—cacao pods—to market, where they exchange their winnings
for large bags of rice, which is a staple.
But mostly they get around in cayucos, which are dugout canoes. Of these, the
most ancient ones seem to be the most highly prized. Cayucos start out tippy,
but get more stable with time as they become waterlogged below the waterline
while their freeboard dries out. Indios of all ages, including kids as young as
three and four, can be seen paddling around the lagoon at all hours, fishing,
going visiting, or going to and from school.
They do have cell phones and laptops, and, not having electricity, frequently
brought them over to the house we were house-sitting to get them charged. Unlike
the neighboring Gringos, who would also charge their cell phones, but made it
abundantly clear that they didn't want any Indios on their property, we would
invite them to hang around as much as they liked. Our dock became a favorite
fishing spot of theirs, with as many as four cayucos lurking underneath it at
any one time.
Sometimes an entire Indio family would spend part of an afternoon with us, and
while their devices were charging their kids would play and watch cartoons with
ours. They would eat meals with us, which consisted mostly of stuff that grew in
the back yard. This gave us a chance to get to know them a little. They are
mostly shy and not at all talkative (they are bilingual, but for some,
especially the kids, Spanish is pretty much tierra incognita). Nevertheless, I
managed to find out a lot of details over time. For instance, some of them have
a wild sense of humor, and a keen appreciation for the absurd.
The other local tribe I got to know a little bit are the Afro-Antilleans. These
work in a number of trades. Some ferry passengers and cargo between the islands
in pangas, which are large fiberglass boats with powerful outboard engines, and
are the main form of transportation in the archipelago, there being almost no
roads but thousands upon thousands of docks. Some work in forestry, the building
trades, or as mechanics. They are bilingual, speaking perfectly good Spanish,
plus a sort of English which, to the untrained ear, doesn't sound like English
at all. It took me several hours of listening to them tell stories before I
could actually understand everything that was being said. Think of rapid-fire
Jamaican English, but with most of the vowels rationalized to more closely match
Spanish ones.
I have been told that the Hispanics—the descendants of the conquistadors—also
form a separate tribe, but I was unable to discern their distinctness. They seem
to float in a sea of Spanish-speaking culture along with everyone else.
But the most distinct tribe of all (if it can be called that) are the Gringos.
They inhabit houses that wouldn't look out of place in Florida, except that they
are also “green,” meaning that they have rainwater collection systems, and
rooftop solar panels with battery banks and inverters to run the various pumps,
refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, lights and—don't you dare forget—the
giant plasma TV that is the centerpiece of most of their living rooms. In a
place where windows are generally just holes with wooden shutters and some
netting, the Gringos put in plate glass windows and sliding doors. Since all of
this stuff has to be guarded 24/7, they employ locals as “watchee men,”
sometimes even building little shacks for them to live in. A more economical
option is to get a free house-sitter, who lives in the “big house.”
House-sitters are recruited from among the Gringos, because the locals aren't to
be trusted.
Unlike the other tribes, the Gringos are predominantly monolingual. Some do
speak passable Spanish, but most don't speak it well enough for extended dialog
or storytelling. Almost none make any effort to lose the atrocious English
accent, which makes Panamanian Spanish, with its crisp vowels, cloudy consonants
and staccato delivery, sound like somebody is trying to speak Spanish while
gulping down mashed potatoes. Few that I've noticed partake of the many gems of
Latin American literature, be it Gabriel Garcia Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges or
Pablo Neruda. The sense I got is that most of them treat Spanish as a necessary
evil, to be spoken so-so for the sake of those locals guilty of the cardinal sin
of not speaking God's own language, English. One appalling case is an individual
who has lived in the area for years, and is yet to bring himself to mouth a
simple “¡Gracias!”
In contrast to the locals, who get around in a cayuco, or a panga with a
smallish outboard, the main form of transportation for the Gringo is the
speedboat, powered by an outboard in the 75-150 horsepower range which burns
through somewhere around five gallons an hour. With a typical round-trip to go
shopping taking an hour or so, this adds up to a lot of gasoline, and the amount
of time spent queued up at the fuel dock is a constant source of annoyance.
Also in contrast to the locals, who tend to take a purely functional approach to
land management, some of the Gringos hire locals to do their landscaping, and
maintain their compounds in immaculate condition—ready to be featured on the
glossy cover of Better Homes and Gringos, perhaps? In a country where the
average day-laborer makes somewhere around $10-12 a day, such a lavish lifestyle
would be impossible to maintain using local resources.
In spite of these societal rifts and fault lines, the relations between the
Gringos and the locals are mostly amicable and cordial, but there are some
notable exceptions. The locals have two modes: peaceful, and, failing that,
spit-your-teeth-out not peaceful at all by any stretch of the imagination. The
tipping point between the two is tricky to discern, but raising your voice in
anger, using expletives or ethnic slurs, making threats and ultimatums,
attempting to extract an apology (the locals never apologize for being
late on anything) are all dumb moves—unless you happen to enjoy spitting your
teeth out.
Still, some Gringos do apparently run afoul of these simple rules. For instance,
the late owner of the house we were house-sitting got almost killed—simply by
being confrontational and combative with some of the neighbors—and died soon
thereafter from the injuries he sustained during the confrontation. Some other
Gringos I either met or heard of are still alive, but, given their demeanor
vis-à-vis the locals, a life insurance policy on them wouldn't be a bad
investment, if only they were a bit younger and healthier.
Such thumbnail sketches are fun to write, but there is a point I am building up
to maybe making. And the point is, not all tribes are made equal. Communities
composed of members of these tribes will not all do equally well, or badly. For
instance, the Indios and the Afro-Antilleans will do fine. If the Indios find
that they can't sell their cacao for rice, or if the Afro-Antilleans find that
their trades aren't earning them enough to buy food, they will switch back to
fishing, and growing and eating yucca and plantains.
By the way, yucca is ridiculously easy to grow. You take a yucca stem and break
it into pieces, each about two hands long (it snaps like chalk). Then you poke a
hole in the ground with a sharp stick (any sort of ground, even red clay).
Scrape some seafood off a piling and dump it in the hole as fertilizer and soil
amendment. Insert the piece of yucca stem in the hole, and tamp it down with
your foot. The only tricky bit is that the piece of yucca stem cannot be planted
upside-down, or it will refuse to sprout. Each planting will yield one or two
large tubers. The drill then is to wash the dirt off, peel off the bark, hack it
into pieces, boil the pieces until tender, and serve. The only hard work is
ripping the tubers out of the ground. This, along with plantains, takes care of
carbohydrates; the fish takes care of protein.
But what of the Gringos? Well, first of all, they don't match my definition of a
community, because, to the extent that they are a community, they are a
retirement community (the average age is well over 65) and my stipulation is
that a community must be able to reproduce itself biologically. Secondly, their
special status in the archipelago derives from the umbilical cord that ties them
to the western financial scheme, which is falling apart. (The fact that Social
Security is not long for this world, along with all the other rickety financial
scaffolding they rely on, is a favorite subject of discussion, along with the
assorted conundrums of health care, both local and state-side.)
And so, as far as the ability of the Gringo to abide in Panama's waterside
jungle wonderland, it will be determined by just one thing: the ability to go
native, to learn to live and work alongside the locals. This is by no means
impossible, but the cultural resistance of the average Gringo to going native is
simply stupendous, for, with some laudable exceptions, never has a generally
somewhat plain and nondescript group of humans elevated itself in its own
opinion so far above the rest of humanity, all, mind you, on the basis of very
transitory material opulence made possible by a rigged financial scheme that is
on its last legs.
At this point, the obvious futility of writing this essay becomes apparent,
because my bottom line is this: “Don't be a Gringo.” Except that I am writing it
in English, meaning that it will be read mostly by Gringos. Is this the end,
then? Well, no, because some of you reading this are young enough and
independent-minded enough to actually go ahead and go native. And some of these
might then, together with the other natives (or gone-natives) form a community.
And for these few, here again are my XIII commandments of Communities that
Abide:
I. You Probably Shouldn't come together willy-nilly
and form a community out of people that just happen to be hanging around,
who don't have to do much of anything to join, and feel free to leave as
soon as they get bored or it stops being fun. The community should be
founded as a conscious, purposeful, overt act of secession from mainstream
society, a significant historical event that is passed down through history
and commemorated in song, ceremony and historical reenactment. A classic
founding event is one where the founding members surrender all of their
private property, making it communal, in a solemn ceremony, during which
they take on new names and greet each other by their new names as brothers
and sisters. The founding members should be remembered and revered for their
brave and generous act. This makes the community into a self-aware,
synergistic entity with a will of its own that transcends the wills of its
individual members.
II. You Probably Shouldn't trap people within the community.
Membership in the community should to be voluntary. Every member must have
an iron-clad guarantee of being able to leave, no questions asked. That
said, do everything you can to keep people from leaving because defections
are very bad for morale. One good trick is to give people a vacation when
they need it, and one good way to do that is to run an exchange program with
another, similar community. There need not be an iron-clad guarantee of
being able to come back and be accepted again, but this should be generally
possible. Those born into the community should be given an explicit
opportunity, during their teenage years, to rebel, escape, go out and see
the world and sow their wild oats, and also the opportunity to come back,
take the pledge, and be accepted as full members. When people behave badly,
the threat of expulsion can be used, but that should be regarded as the
“nuclear option.” On the other hand, you should probably have some rules for
expelling people more or less automatically when they behave very, very
badly indeed (though such cases should be exceedingly rare) because allowing
such people to stick around is also very bad for morale.
III. You Probably Shouldn't carry on as if the community doesn't matter.
The community should see itself as separate and distinct from the
surrounding society. Its separatism should manifest itself in the way its
members relate to members of the surrounding society: as external
representatives of the community rather than as individual members. All
dealings with the outside world, other than exchanging pleasantries and
making conversation, should be on behalf of the community. It must not be
possible for outsiders to exploit individual weaknesses or differences
between members. To realize certain advantages, especially if the community
is clandestine in nature, members can maintain the illusion that they are
acting as individuals, but in reality they should act on behalf of the
community at all times.
IV. You Probably Shouldn't spread out across the landscape. The
community should be relatively self-contained. It cannot be virtual or only
come together periodically. There has to be a geographic locus or a
gathering place, with ample public space, even if it changes location from
time to time. The community should be based on a communal living arrangement
that provides all of the necessities. A community living in apartments
scattered throughout a large city is not going to last very long; if that's
how you have to start, then use the time you have to save money and buy
land. A good, simple living arrangement, which minimizes housing costs while
optimizing group cohesion and security, is to provide all adults and couples
with bedrooms big enough for them and their infants, separate group bedrooms
for children over a certain age, and common facilities for all other needs.
This can be realized using one large building or several smaller ones.
V. You Probably Shouldn't allow creeping privatization. The community
should pool and share all property and resources with the exception of
personal effects. All money and goods coming in from the outside, including
income, pensions, donations and even government handouts, should go into the
common pot, from which it is allocated to common uses. Such common uses
should include all the necessities: food, shelter, clothing, medicine, child
care, elderly care, education, entertainment, etc. Members who become rich
suddenly, through inheritance or some other means, must be given a choice:
put the money in the pot, or keep it and leave the community. This pattern
of communal consumption is very efficient.
VI. You Probably Shouldn't try to figure out what to do on your own.
The community should have collective goals and needs that are made explicit.
These goals and needs can only be met through collective, not individual,
actions. The well-being of the community should be the result of collective
action, of members working together on common projects. Also, this
collective work should be largely voluntary, and members who are fed up with
a certain task or a certain team should be able to raise the issue at the
meeting and ask to be reassigned. It's great when members have brilliant new
ideas on how to do things, but these have to be discussed in open meeting
and expressed as initiatives to be pursued collectively.
VII. You Probably Shouldn't let outsiders order you around. It's best
if the community itself is the ultimate source of authority for all of its
members. It should have a universally accepted code of conduct, which is
best kept unwritten and passed down orally. The ultimate recourse, above and
beyond the reach of any external systems of justice or external authorities,
or any individual's authority within the group, should be the open meeting,
where everyone has the right to speak. People should only be able to speak
for themselves: attempts at representation of any sort should be treated as
hearsay and disregarded. You probably shouldn't resort to legalistic
techniques such as vote-counting and vote by acclamation instead. Debate
should continue until consensus is reached. To reach a consensus decision,
use whatever tricks you have to in order to win over the (potentially
vociferous and divisive) opposing voices, up to and including the threat of
expulsion. A community that cannot reach full consensus on a key decision
cannot function and should automatically split up. But this tends to be
rare, because the members' status depends on them putting the needs of the
community ahead of their own, and one of these needs happens to be the need
for consensus. Decisions reached by consensus in open meeting should carry
the force of law. Decisions imposed on the community from the outside should
be regarded as acts of persecution, and countered with nonviolent protest,
civil disobedience, evasion and, if conditions warrant, by staging an
exodus. The time-tested foolproof way to avoid being subjected to outside
authority is by fleeing, as a group. Oh, and you probably shouldn't waste
your time on things like voting, trying to get elected, testifying in court,
bringing lawsuits against people or institutions, or jury duty.
VIII. You Probably Shouldn't question the wonderful goodness of your
community. Your community should have moral authority and meaning to
those within it. It can't be a mere instrumentality or a living arrangement
with no higher purpose than keeping you fed, clothed, sheltered and
entertained. It shouldn't be treated in a utilitarian fashion. There should
be an ideology, which is unquestioned, but which is interpreted to set
specific goals and norms of behavior. The community shouldn't contradict
these goals and norms in practice. It should also be able to fulfill these
goals and comply with these norms, and to track and measure its success in
doing so. The best ideologies are circularly defined systems where it is a
good system because it is used by good people, and these people are good
specifically because they use the good system. Since the ideology is never
questioned, it need not be particularly logical and can be based on a
mystical understanding, faith or revelation. But it can't be completely
silly, or nobody will take it seriously.
IX. You Probably Shouldn't pretend that your life is more important than
the life of your children and grandchildren (or other members' children
and grandchildren if you don't have any of your own). If you are old and
younger replacements for whatever it is you do are available, your job is
primarily to help them take over and then to keep out of their way. Try to
think of death as a sort of bowel movement—most days you move your bowels
(if you are regular); one day your bowels move you. As a member of the
community, you do not live for yourself; you live for the
community—specifically, for its future generations. The main purpose of your
community is to transcend the lifespans of the individual members by
perpetuating its biological and cultural DNA. To this end, you probably
should avoid sending your children through public education, treating it as
mental poison. It has very little to do with educating, and everything to do
with institutionalization. Also, if a child is forced to recite the Pledge
of Allegiance in class, that creates a split allegiance, which you should
probably regard as unacceptable. If this means that your community has to
expend a great deal of its resources on child care and home schooling, so be
it; after providing food, shelter and clothing, it's the most important job
there is.
X. You Probably Shouldn't try to use violence, because it probably won't
work. Internally, keep your methods of social control informal: gossip,
ridicule, reprimand and scorn all work really well and are very cheap. Any
sort of formal control enforced through the threat of violence is very
destructive of group solidarity, terrible for morale, and very expensive.
You should try to enforce taboos against striking people in anger (also
children and animals). Use expulsion as the ultimate recourse. When dealing
with outsiders, don't arm yourselves beyond a few nonlethal defensive
weapons, don't look like a threat, stay off the external authorities' radar
as much as possible, and work to create good will among your neighbors so
that they will stand up for you. Also, be sure to avoid military service. If
drafted, you should probably refuse to carry weapons or use lethal force of
any sort.
XI. You Probably Shouldn't let your community get too big. When it
has grown beyond 150 adult members, it's time to bud off a colony. With
anything more than 100 people, reaching consensus decisions in an open
meeting becomes significantly more difficult and time-consuming, raising the
level of frustration with the already cumbersome process of
consensus-building. People start trying to get around this problem by hiding
decision-making inside committees, but that is incompatible with direct
democracy, in which no person can be compelled to comply with a decision to
which that person did not consent (except for the decision to expel that
person, but most people quit voluntarily before that point is reached).
Also, 150 people is about the maximum number of people with whom most of us
are able to have personal relationships. Anything more, and you end up
having to deal with near-strangers, eroding trust. The best way to split a
community in two halves is by drawing lots to decide which families stay and
which families go. Your community should definitely stay on friendly terms
with the new colony (among other things, to give your children a wider
choice of mates), but it's probably a bad idea to think of them as still
being part of your community: they are now a law unto themselves:
independent and unique and under no obligation to consult you or to reach
consensus with you on any question.
XII. You Probably Shouldn't let your community get too rich. Material
gratification, luxury and lavish lifestyles are not good for your community:
children will become spoiled, adults will develop expensive tastes and bad
habits. If times ever change for the worse, your community will be unable to
cope. This is because communities that emphasize material gratification
become alienating and conflicted when they fail to provide the material
goods needed to attain and maintain that level of gratification. Your
community should provide a basic level of material comfort, and an
absolutely outstanding level of emotional and spiritual comfort. There are
many ways to burn off the extra wealth: through recruitment activities and
expansion, through good works in the surrounding society, by supporting
various projects, causes and initiatives and so on. You can also spend the
surplus on art, music, literature, craftsmanship, etc.
XIII. You Probably Shouldn't let your community get too cozy with the
neighbors. Always keep in mind what made you form the community to start
with: the fact that the surrounding society doesn't work, can't give you
what you need, and, to put in the plainest terms possible, isn't any good.
Over time your community may become strong and successful, and gain
acceptance from the surrounding society, which can, over time, become too
weak and internally conflicted to offer you any resistance, never mind try
to persecute you. But your community needs a bit of persecution now and
again, to give it a good reason for continuing to safeguard its
separateness. To this end, it helps to maintain certain practices that
alienate your community from the surrounding society just a bit, not badly
enough to provoke them into showing up with torches and pitchforks, but
enough to make them want to remain aloof and leave you alone much of the
time.
Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American
engineer and a writer on subjects related to "potential economic, ecological and
political decline and collapse in the United States," something he has called
“permanent crisis”.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com
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