 
To: Bill Eichman 
Cc: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU,
        Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: Re: just do it 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 12 Sep 92 01:58:06 EDT."
              
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 92 21:03:47 -0400
Message-Id: <10362.716432627@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU>
From: Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU


What is everybody
else doing? Right now I'm seemingly the second-most active person reading this
list; I'm surely not actually the second-most active person. Please help me
out and put the dangerous implications to an end.

>>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

What's ordinary life? :-) Sounds like "extraneous activities which dissipate 
resources" to me.

Seriously, I will be the last person to be surprised if any of the visions I
have recently outlined comes to be in a recognizable form. But we both agree
that they are darn good starting aims, yes? The effort of pursuing them will
create marvelous by-products.

Again and again I'm reminded of the Kilgore Trout short story which is a
dialogue between two pieces of yeast, aware only that they are suffocating in
their own shit, and unaware that it is carbon dioxide and that they are
making champagne.

>Unfortunately, there are less young thoreaus around than you might
>think, 

Uh ... none? How can there be any less than none? 

>It's hard to believe what the pressures will be like when you're in your early
twenties. 

Oh, this must be more of this "ordinary life" business I didn't understand
earlier ... :-) I keep my life is so free of pressure that some people find it
tiring -- usually when I'm shedding their friends' responsibilities and 
entanglements that they want to lay on me just like they do everybody else
in normal social situations.

>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?
>
>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, 

Give me twenty-four years. I sometimes think of encouraging everybody to
retire early, say at fifty, and then we pool our resources, freedom, and
experience to do some things. It might not be possible beforehand. I won't
be surprised if it's not. But it'll be worth trying to see if it is.

As I've mentioned before, it turns out that I think I'm a Taoist, and that 
can all be described, perversely, for the purposes of this conversation, 
thusly: Misconceptualization Kills. Think things right and then get out 
of your own way and let the consequences
crystallize. My chief studies, now, are not funding or material,
but are devoted to figuring out what sort of conceptual structures about
the world my visions imply (and what visions my conceptual structures about
the world imply), boiling them down as simply as possible, and infecting
people with them. Eventually the visions will begin to coalesce all by 
themselves. "When the Master leads, all things run properly, yet no-one 
knows she is there." This has already worked on a small scale: my experiences
at the Ashram bear this out. Every way of thinking implies a way of acting:
find the way of thinking and you're done. (Except for the incredibly hard work 
of daily life, of course, but that's taken for granted!) "There are a thousand
hacking at the branches of evil for one who is hacking at the root."

>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. ;-)

My reading so far on the hippie movement and the hippie communitarian
movement has made me think that they were done in by biting off more than
they could chew: trying to synthesize too many divergent spiritual elements
into a coherent whole, trying to incorporate everybody and his brother
in a very egalitarian way without regard for their maturity or discipline,
and trying out unprecedented social arrangements. All at once! Eeeeeeeeyow,
what bravery. (I am sure that this is an idiosyncratic reading, reflecting
my particular concerns to a large degree.)

As I've indicated before, all of my practical plans are built around the
idea of isolating the elements of the final vision and learning how to 
make them work one at a time, always as the side emphasis of a (fairly)
normal group community such as we know can work. At some future date
when the participants are ready, we take our knowledge from the 
string of group house-experiences and throw it all together at once.

And, of course, that's just the plan. Maybe once in a million lifetimes it
would actually work out like that.

Tom

******************************************************************************
         Tom Price  |  tp0x@cs.cmu.edu  |  Simplicity, simplicity
******************************************************************************
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