Jim H wrote:
Indeed my intention was to be critical of this insane expansion of administative bloat in the name of the leftist agenda, the intention of which is to subvert the invidual in the name of the collective, artificial, "identity" groups. And yes, we met at Rowe : )
Grover and I see eye to eye.. just a misread on his part.
I suggest mass movements are a little like the markets. They need to work through their own inner logic until they’re ready to flip. Actually, reason and logic has little to do with it; it’s the inner movement of some kind of life force ( maybe analogous to the holy spirit or an unholy spirit ). Then all you can do is ride the wave or be battered by it.
westcoastjan wrote:
… support will only come when the 'investors' are able to see what is in it for them. The ROI will not be monetary as per the normal system, but something much better - a future that is worth inheriting.Quote:
We therefore need to target the people who can help make this happen: the big wigs in venture capital, marketing and so on.Quote:
Most of us have not succeeded in getting even those close to us to buy into this type of belief system. We need pros to help us if we want to move this forward.By the way, " mile buichous " in Irish or " many thanks " Chris for the Griefwalker reference which I find invaluable and consoling
This whole discussion is a tough sell - hell’s bells, there are probably less than 100 people taking part in this discussion.
I respect what you said and understand it. But I am not talking about someone running a co-op getting venture capital. I am talking about getting a movement, a way of thinking, like the Crash Course, embraced by venture capitalists to take mainstream. Imagine for one second, as abhorent as it might sound, for Wall Street to get behind the Crash Course - to be active, committed partners in shifting the dialogue. That is what I am talking about.
The reality is we are all frustrated from the lack of traction. And as many have said, there is simply no will to change from the status quo, especially here in the first world. No one I know is willing to lower their living standards or change for the greater good. Ignorance remains bliss.
We have two choices: give up [and wait for the crisis to hit] or go on trying to get traction [and help reduce the impacts of the crisis]. As I see it we are an extremely small minority trying to shift thinking in the majority. It is indeed a David vs. Goliath story. But who won that one?
This is a giant brainstorming session. In spite of long odds, I choose go on and so I put forth something that may not be viable, but may trigger something in someone else. At least that is more than most folks do…
Jan
Been at this for my whole life. The Mennonite community, my neighbors, are as a whole resilient and quickly sustainable(they partake of the koolaid while keeping there hearts about the earth).
Kelsey,seperating herself from the other drafts, must be approaching parturition. Won’t be long till we need a Miller, and a Tanner/harness maker. Those skills are a keeping in whatever times might be coming
Settle your mare.
Robie, husband,father,farmer,optometrist
Been around a long time; don’t comment much, but this is an interesting topic.
I was a founding member of (the 26th?) official Transition Town in the US. It’s a great movement and the head, heart, and hands of Rob Hopkins are truly coming from the right perspective. But will TT work in the US? Not sure; ours has pretty much fizzled out. Here are a few notes if it helps anyone else as you consider making a movement.
We had some great times and success stories: established our TT in 2009; worked out group process and consensus agreements after many LONG discussions; got Richard Heinberg to give a talk here and 200 people showed up (=10% of the town population); started an annual community Earth Day event that continues still; showed the usual Peak Oil and Transition movies; led a half dozen community discussions focused on Energy Descent Plan topic areas; established a community TimeBank for sharing services; built a backyard chicken coop in one day.
But the group is no longer active, for many reasons, but in my mind it comes down to:
The all-volunteer group was committed to the cause but had little available time.
The community members have very little time to even think about these topics, let alone do something about them.
Our town already has a number of groups working toward some portion of sustainability - what’s different about the TT group? Who are we anyway?
The biggest one: we Americans are trained from birth to be independent individuals, each owning their own stuff, each wanting to do things their own way. Move away from that to putting the community and nature ahead of oneself? That is a huge identity shift!
I’ve come to a mindset kind of like what THC described: model sustainability as best I can in my own life and try to have some positive models available for when the SHTF and people are frantically looking for alternatives. Because if there are no visible, viable, positive alternatives that’s when things might get scary as people look to some strong, charismatic leaders who are pointing fingers at other groups/races/countries and saying that they are the cause of these troubles, not us.
I’m currently working on a Raspberry Pi wifi access point that can act as a community news center with a blog, file sharing, and personal messages (all local, no Internet required, can run on a 12V car battery). I figure it’ll work for some time and people will want to do SOMETHING with their phones when the Net goes down! I should stock up on solar powered phone chargers - could be a good barter item.
Paul
Chris, I like what you said about how our actions should be based on a moral level, not tactical. I agree; a moral approach has a lot more staying power than a tactical one.
Some possibly relevant thoughts from Richard Bach in “Illusions”:
Here is a test to find out if your mission on earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.
Seems like we’ve had a lot of nonsense, lies, and tearing of pages lately.
After reading in a San Francisco Chronicle article (decades ago) about limits to growth and how “we are in a transition period that no earth society has ever encountered”, my meditation teacher, Eknath Easwaran, commented:
Now that is why our work is so supremely important, because it is not based on any old pattern. It is not content with any halfway measures. Our values are completely different, our goal is completely different, and our mode of achieving the goal is completely different. In other words, it's an entirely different civilization. And I don't think I'm exaggerating unduly that people who lead the spiritual life seriously today are great pioneers, pioneers in an entirely different civilization.I think there are quite a few people looking for a new pattern that is not a halfway measure. Enough for a movement? I don't know. We all do what we can. Paul
If the limitation on your transition town was a lack of time by participants, that implies that a transition town needs a time-currency, and a time-economy, and above all a balanced time budget.
In other words, the transition town needs to – in general – generate more time for its participants than it uses, such that it represents a good investment of time. In order to do that, it needs to be able to first generate time, and secondly it needs to be able to exchange time, such that people can also profit from the exchange.
That’s no small function, especially when you also don’t want to be enslaving people (in order to have a sustainable program that’s worth having).
That’s where the bankers have you – because the money does represent time, and because they don’t have a problem enslaving people, thus generating the necessary balanced budget from which to fund further operations.
To put it shortly, banks are incredibly effective when it comes to waging war on their neighbors, and they are scalable. Can you do better than that?
… that war is highly destructive, and why our world is falling apart. But it is ALWAYS sustainable, because you can always destroy the little your neighbors have left, whatever it is.
Bankers: sustainability heros. Whod’ve thunk?
But no joke, if you’re going to get this sustainability back on track, you have two huge problems: how to deal with the bankers/destroyers/warriors, and how to make something that is more sustainable than war.
I’ve appreciated reading all the ideas and thoughts put forth in this discussion. One thing I haven’t seen laid out yet, though I might have missed it, is something I’m pursuing. So I feel like I need to try and present the idea here hopefully in a way that makes sense.
Pretty much all my life I’ve understood that I am fortunate to live in a time in history and place in our current time where I have absolutely astounding access to power, resources, and wealth RELATIVE to the rest of human history. I feel like this is true for almost anyone living in one of the wealthy western countries today. So the puzzle for me then was if so many have such great wealth and resources why do most of us find ourselves working so hard just to make ends meet? If I took the resources I had at my most impoverished time in life, working a minimum wage job earning $5000 to $10,000 a year back in the 90’s and could give them to someone living 2000 years ago would they not be fabulously rich? Is the difference just expectations and comparisons to those around me? While this is certainly part of it in terms of how we respond to wealth emotionally I think there are other factors at play.
We tend to squander our wealth fighting/competing others who are using their wealth to compete with us. We also live in a consumer culture that is constantly encouraging us, in ways both overt and subversive, to consume more. The essential story constantly being told to us is that to be happy, secure, comfortable, and fulfilled we need to consume more resources. It’s such a powerful story because it has a solid kernel of truth around which it is based. There is an initial base level of consumption which yields us an immense amount of improvement to our quality of life. However, from there, in what may well be an exponential function, it takes ever more consumption of resources to return rapidly diminishing improvements in happiness. This latter part is what consumer culture seems to work to hide.
At this point I don’t think I’ve said anything most of us here don’t know to some degree already. We live in a time and place of immense abundance. We then work hard to get even more of this abundance for ourselves, depleting resources and destroying our ecosystems in the process, to try and live a better life sold to us by our culture. We need to change our culture. How do we do that?
As I see it right now, in this place and time, self motivating incentives are in place if we use and share them. We simply need to recognize that there is a potentially imense gap between what we can earn and what we really need to live a high quality of life. That gap is savings, security, and even in today’s investment climate can become the means to early retirement. Would it motivate you to reduce your resource consumption if you realized you could retire in 10 years, or 5 years, or 2 years, or maybe even tomorrow? For most people I think the answer is yes, and it doesn’t really require a need to moralize, guilt or shame one into using less. The self serving incentive is there already. Collectively we just don’t see this as a potential thing that’s possible even though it is.
One of you here on another thread a while back mentioned the Mr. Money Mustache blog to me. I did look that up and this is where I became remotivated and focused on this as a personal goal. I had gotten into frugal living many years ago to get out of debt, and be able to have my dream job of being a studio artist become a viable career. However, once I got debt free I sort of fell off the path that would have taken me to financial independence. I’m now focused on that again. The major key that many miss when thinking about early retirement is that isn’t not so much about income. It’s really all about the difference between income and expenses. If you actually got your expenses down to zero (which really isn’t practical) then you wouldn’t need any income.
Back when I was impoverished working that minimum wage job I was able to get by on roughly $300 to $400 a month. I have to ask myself why can’t I do this today? This was in the 90’s and there has certainly been inflation since then. However, back then my biggest expenses by far were for rent and attending college. I no longer go to college and own my home free and clear. So my current goal is to see if I can get expenses down to $500 or less a month. If I can do that then just $150,000 invested at 4% interest would give me a passive income stream allowing me to retire to a modest life. I would have time to devote to what I wish as long as those wishes weren’t high consumption. I already know high consumption isn’t needed to live a high quality, fulfilling life. I’ve learned this quite well along my simple living frugal journey already. I have to imagine others pursuing this sort of path to financial independence/early retirement would learn it as well. From what I can tell among the movement that is already developing around this it is an extremely common theme to realize high consumption is not needed to find real happiness.
So if more of us modeled this approach, demonstrating it is real and viable it seems like a natural outcome to the incentives would be less resource use, less waste, a slower pace of life, more time to be with friends/ family and build community, and a general lighter load on our ecosystems.
What I see as a great thing is that if this makes any sense to you, or is of interest you don’t need any government program to start it. You don’t need a group of like minded people to do it, though that certainly would be nice. You can start doing it right now, today! I suppose if you have a spouse/family it would be a great boon to have them on board, but even if they aren’t lowering your expenses only increases your savings and lightens your load on the planet.
I have been following a similar path for six years being frugal and really trying to consume less. The kick in the ass is HEALTH Insurance! I just can’t wrap my head around any kind of affordable insurance. I can afford to quit work and just maintain my small business part time but stay at my current job just for the health insurance. I also learned a lot from the Mr. Money Mustache site. The people on the forums have loads of information about saving money as well as advice to stay on track.
… that if you are making $150k, you can’t live as if you’re making $15k, because the system – though it gives you access to enormous wealth – does not let you have that wealth, but instead relieves you of the wealth as you generate it.
Let’s start with the $15k. Along with that $15k you get 10% state taxes, anything from 5% federal taxes to MINUS 30% federal taxes depending on family size, various health and food subsidies… but most of all, people around you do not expect you to have money, so they don’t demand huge amounts of service and attention that drain you dry (including employers, family, neighbors, church, etc.)
Hop over to $150k, and you go up to 30% state and federal tax or more, but lots more than that…
Basically, it comes down to this: the bankers are funding your agricultural-warlike society’s wars. They are empowered to do that, by enslaving the majority of the population. You may actually find a way out of that… but until you deal with your country’r behavior and the bankers that fund it, then by definiton most people will not be able to.
And I’m not assuming you’re American. Every national government nowadays in agricultural-warlike, funded by bankers. The other governments were eliminated, or made subridiary (such as indian reservations, townships, and such).
The bankers go to whereever they can find assets, and drain them, regardless of the damage it does; then that drives a huge human need, that impoverishes you even if you do make $150k, unless you harden your heart… but that too is unsustainable.
Most people I know drive SUVs. This used to be an easy equivalence to “dumbass”… but lots of smart people drive them. They’re wasting our precious non-renewable energy-dense liquid fuels - but no one cares. Everyone has lame reasons why they “need” an SUV. If we can’t even get people to drive themselves in the most fuel-efficient cars (in fact, major auto manufacturers are planning to no longer manufacture cars, CAFE standards have been removed, etc) - we’re pretty much hosed. I think it’s the end of the before-times. The after-times will be bad.
There will be no movement for the reasons mentioned above by Paul. No time. People are too busy just trying to get by. Number 2 and probably most importantly you will never get enough people on the same page. I was in a sustainabilty group and that is the reason it ceased to function.
Everyone comes to the table with their own agendas. Not only their own agendas but methods of accomplishing said agendas. The people who run this site have the time to devote to a movement because it is their job. If you by some miracle get some kind of group together you will find that their are a few who do most of the work and the rest are along for the ride.
A very good exampl of a movement that was at the right time for the right reason and went nowhere was OWS. Millions lost jobs and millions lost their homes. In short order it dissapated.
If the population is the problem how many have no kids? How many have one? How many are at replacement? IMHO opinionif you are over replacement you are part of the problem. ( Hell if you are alive you are part of the problem)
What movement is going to tell Ganesh in Mumbai he can only have one or two kids and can’t drive a vehicle or get a computer and internet, or a smart phone or have a modest wedding for 2,000 people? Or tell Aziz in Nigeria he can’t have what a middle class American enjoys?
I have friends in Asia who are cutting down their sandalwood trees because thieves will come and steal them and kill you if they have to. Who is going to start a movement to do anything about the 75% of the world that are much closer to the edge that they can’t find some security from the resources that are stolen from them mostly by the insatiable demand of the West?
I for one am at a loss to answer any of those questions.
I had the great good fortune to meet Bucky Fuller in 1975. He said at that time we had at most 7 years to turn this around ( this being environmental destruction , energy, pollution etc) Well 1982 was 36 years ago.
I had the great good fortune to meet Bucky Fuller in 1975. He said at that time we had at most 7 years to turn this around ( this being environmental destruction , energy, pollution etc) Well 1982 was 36 years ago.
David Huang wrote:
If I can do that then just $150,000 invested at 4% interest would give me a passive income stream allowing me to retire to a modest life.westcoastjan wrote:
Imagine for one second, as abhorent as it might sound, for Wall Street to get behind the Crash Course - to be active, committed partners in shifting the dialogue. That is what I am talking about.Quote:
We have two choices: give up [and wait for the crisis to hit] or go on trying to get traction [and help reduce the impacts of the crisis].Thanks for the comments Petey, Michael, and Bytesmiths. I will try to respond later. My home internet is down and the library’s where I’m at now has become intermitant. I doubt I can get a considered reply sent at the moment.