 
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 92 01:58:06 EDT
From: wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us (Bill Eichman)
Subject: just do it
To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
Message-Id: 
Organization: The Heart of Gold BBS, Lemont PA
Comments: Validated

From: Thom_P@A.CUU
Subject: Re: Hard Head
To: Bill Eichman 

>Me too! Here's a method: make economics as irrelevant to your life as possible.
>Live as close to the bone as you can. (Who here has read _Walden_? Good!
>Absolutely indispensable to any American who wants to think about society.)
>If you can live on $5000 per year, you win. What incredible freedom!

Yep. That's how come I can sit here and type these words into the net.
I've organized my businesses such that I actually work about 2-3
days a week, and study, write, experiment, garden, and think the rest
of the time, pay all my bills and child support, and still this year
should be able to save about 5 thou. (I spent the 5 thou last year
paying off old consumer debt...)

But, for me, it's not enough. I want more computer access, more tools
for my craftshop, more land. I know and appreciate what voluntarily
limiting my consumption has done for me; yet, I want for myself a mix
of the two worlds. I don't see any reason why I can't arrange it, so I
expect to have my country lifestyle and my kilns and computers too!

>One last thing I'm thinking of. Two names come up again and again in
>my reading: Bill Mollison, the Australian "Permaculture" theorist, and
>some Japanese guy who wrote a book called "One Straw Gardening" which is
>a system of farming that requires you do do as little as possible. Essentially,
>once you've got it going, all you do is go and gather the food you need when

Permaculture is harder than it sounds, and I say this in firm agreement
with the method. To do it well, so well that getting food is as simple
as you describe, requires a large body of practical knowledge that can
only be gotten through years of experience. The permaculture landscape
has to be fitted to the environment and the site, and the garden evolves
through experiment. Takes five years to get one really going.

Gardening, growing your own food is harder than they would seem to be--
they all require skills which we moderns have largely forgotten.

All of which can be overcome but determination and enough energy to
overcome the various obstacles.

>it's ripe. So imagine this: a bunch of people living together as vegans,
>all of whom know what they are interested in -- mainly matters of the spirit
>and intellect, so there's focus and discipline and a lack of interest in
>extraneous activities which dissipate resources -- and they're living
>communally, which means they've bought a home and land in a semi-rural area
>such that they're all paying, on the mortgage, no more than they'd been paying
>for rent before (see budget above) with the important difference that that

Well, as I've said before, when I was younger, I had a vision of
communities which was very close to the type of thing you're describing.
I tried to motivate my friends to help me do it-- many were very
enthusiastic about it, but very ordinary money problems and the
pressures of ordinary life seemed to foil every attempt, and I couldn't
make it happen, at least not in any ordinaryily understoood sense. Now,
I had a hell of a good time, and had some incredibly deep friendships,
and, when i compare my life to those of my contemporaries I can see that
I've already been extraordinarily successful in creating a community and
the community life I wanted. I may not have gotten a community started
as quickly as I imagined I could when I was 21 and freshly graduated,
but I learned a lot, and am still trying. My vision was very much like
yours, the simple rural life, voluntary poverty, a lifestyle devoted to
exploring the possibilities of mind and conciousness and the human
relationship with the nature of this planet. Years of effort have
changed it a bit.

I still want that type of lifestyle for myself, and, since I am a pretty
self-reliant fellow, I'm building it for myself with or without the
company of others.

Unfortunately, there are less young thoreaus around than you might
think, and a surprisingly large number of them cave in to the demands of
what the dominant human tribe likes to call the real world. It's hard to
believe what the pressures will be like when you're in your early
twenties. In order to keep them from caving in, in order to get more
people a chance to live in the communities, I propose a certain "high
road-high tech" approach to the communities.

What I would say to you is simply, vehemently, _DO IT_. I'm already
doing what you're talking about trying to do, and I'm talking about
trying to do something even larger than that. There's no conflict at all
between the scenarios I paint and the scenarios you paint.

But scenarios are scenarios, and they don't raise babies. This talk will
only start to matter to most people when real property, a real roof,
real food, beds, and income are involved. Assume that I fully and
absolutely want you to succeed in your scenario-- now what I need to
talk about is _How_?

How are you going to do it? Your vision sounds fine-- how do you get
there?

>"He who does not eat need not work." -- Henry David Thoreau

I think I'll also mention that much of what you've proposed has been
tried before-- in a sense, you're rediscovering the essential themes
of the late sixties and early seventies communal 'movement'. There are a
good few dozen books that go into that experiment; have you read much of
them?

What I thought, as I was reading these books, was that it was clear that
the hippie communitarians were done in by a lack of emphasis on the
practical, and too great an emphasis on the spiritual. I decided that,
while I had my own intensely spiritual goals in building a community,
that if I wanted the community to survive, I needed to emphasize the
practical. I'm definitely using that as a guiding principle as I'm
talking here. I tend to think that ultimately my hard headedness in
this will benefit us all. ;-)

>Here's another possibility: excellent agricultural land in Northern
>Virginia (my favorite part of the Country so far) can be rented for
>~$50 per acre per year, so long as it is used primarily for agricultural
>purposes. A complete home solar energy system, 12V converters, etc, and
>a semipermanent dwelling (a yurt or geodisic dome) can be had all for
>an investment of between ten and fifteen thousand dollars. One can easily
>imagine a family living in their geodisic dome on the edge of the woodlot
>next to their large hand-cultivated plot of land. Figure the whole thing
>working out to $3000 per year for five years ... it could be an excellent
>option for some people.

Yes, this might well be possible. It reminds me of some things I said in
another essay type thing I've been writing, about an idea I call the
"community campground".

>>places-- it would be great to have some mountain retreats, but mountain
>>retreats won't work that well as a women-and-children attracting
>                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>I've seen this sort of sentence on this maillist before and I don't really
>understand it! What is with this us vs. them implication with women, as if
>"they" are going to have completely different needs? The communities which
>I am a part of will always be composed of individuals, some of whom are
>in all likelihood going to have uteri. You know? I expect to be married
>some day; it is not possible that I could marry anyone who wouldn't have
>lifestyle ideas compatible with mine.

Regarding women, your milage may vary. There do seem to be a larger
number of the fringe rainbow/dead women who are more seriously
interested in communities these days than there were when I was in my
twenties. And a moderate amount of interest from members of the
eco-action student group.

But, my experiences and those of my friends, which I observed, led me to
feel that unless these communities provided a lot more of the
"securities" of modern civilized life, that women were not as attracted
to them as men were.

Have you discussed these ideas and plans much with women? Maybe you
could make a point of discussing it with some women in the next few
weeks, and give me some input about the talk.

You don't have to worry about what I say about women. As long as you can
find the right partner and friends, and get your own family started,
that's all that matters. I'll enjoy discussing this with you again when
you're in your late twenties.

But, I'm going to continue to make plans based on the idea that the
communities have to have certain features to make them attractive to
women, or they'll tend to fail.

(Keep in mind that my imagined goal, which you may find pretentious,
_is_ to build comunities and families that last, adapt, and grow. It is
hubris to imagine that we can do anything _about_ the fate of humankind,
but for me this is a matter of artwork, a choice of will. I can do
anything I will, and the most interesting thing I see worth doing is
building enough of these communities so that thousands of people like me
can live in them. There's an orgasmic teleological climax that I wish to
create-- getting there is going to take lots of time and thousands of
people. But It's what calls me, so thats what type of community I'm
trying to build. (Along the way I'd expect to be able to help you build
the type of community you want...))

Everybody has to figure out their own best plan and go for it with all
their heart and power.

>Bill, whose last message I am still responding to, likes to use the somewhat
>shocking phrase "corporate tribe", I like to use the phrase "family

Corporate tribe is shocking, eh? Well, that's the nature of words--
different words attract different groups of people. I guess this is
where that memetics stuff comes in-- the use of words as somthing like
viruses, which get assimilated and transmit ideas.

You see, based on the way I view things, it's the _corporation_ aspect
of the tribe, that is, the group that wants to start a community, that
is what makes it more attractive to women! ;-) ( Maybe the logic sounds
wild to you, but don't discount it out of hand.) The solidity of the
paperwork, official shares and votes, the businesslike arrangements of
the corporate structure makes issues of money and labor clearcut and
enforceable. All the hassles over money and who worked longer than who
are tremendously reduced, and when problems arise the corporation has
bylaws definging how to settle the dispute. And, the corporate format
gives the tribe official power, official immunities from certain types
of debt, and a number of other benefits. The corporation runs the
community, and everybody is an owner-employee of the corporation. Well,
it sure seems like a fine idea to me, and it answers a lot of the
negative criticisms I've explored in the past.

Much too long, and only a fraction of the ideas explored. Later, Bill


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