“Change never comes from the powerful and proud [the hierarchy] – they have too much to lose and too little to gain. Change always comes from the common and humble – we have little to lose and much to gain. John Ikerd”
If we are to transform the way we live, we need to change our beliefs about different ways to live. “Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes. —Richard Dawkins/Merriam Webster Dictionary.” Memes are ideas that behave like an infectious virus travelling from person to person via personal communication, and more so today through such avenues as social media. Again, Daniel Quinn is ahead of the curve. “Our first invention for a new way of living must be a meme killer.” Since our current ‘civilization’ and its system is the problem, we need a new meme. Daniel Quinn gives a simple yet powerful one that has been emulated by many philosophers, “Something better than civilization awaits us.” Civilization as we call it is a Hierarchy of Control using food as a weapon, which is not the Social way that Humans Evolved! Since New tribalism is being confused with a movement to revert back to older territorial tribalistic systems, I will use the term NeoTribalism as a focus on moving the idea forward.
In our current system, people demand a 10 min break after 3 hours work, which is typical of a dependent organizational system. In a tribal system people are just devoted to what they do, which is typical of an interdependent organization. Dictionary: Dependent – requiring someone or something for financial, emotional, or other support. Interdependence is mutual dependence between things. If you study biology, you’ll discover that there is a great deal of interdependence between plants and animals. The key word here is mutual. Dependency is one sided and gains goes to the dominant system. Interdependent requires equitable interaction in which there is also mutual responsibility.
I recently saw the film musical The Greatest Showman, and while I thought it was a great musical, you won’t gain much real information about P.T. Barnum. But the film does bring up what seem like a couple of sentimental ideas that are really at the heart of who we are as humans. The circus is about death defying acts of skill and showcases of people that do not fit the pleasantries of gentile social norms (once called freaks in days gone by). I am not making any judgments here about people with genetic physical disorders – it simply was the way things were. In the musical, the circus people are a draw for crowds to come to the circus, but outside the confines of the circus they are treated as outcasts and ridiculed. Within the circus everyone was treated with egalitarian fairness. The top acts obviously got the best pay, but they were still required to ‘muck in’ with daily chores. Even the hands that mucked out the animals were treated fairly. There was no real hierarchy. The circus looked after everyone who was within the system – they felt like they were accepted fairly and everyone was accepted if they contributed. The boss, the ringmaster, might make the big decisions, but it was a stressful job and no one was eager to take on the task. They were all happy doing what they were doing and all interacting with each other with mutual support. It was a maxim during the late 1800s and early 1900s that “Kids of all ages would run off to join the circus” just because it was such a mutually supportive system for everyone within it and profit was merely to maintain the system and grow it. No one runs off to join Disneyworld with its $10.71 an hour pay and hierarchical bosses. Not that Disney doesn’t have a unique and efficient system of entertainment, but it is a typical corporation with profit and power as its primary goal and the welfare of its employees as a low priority.
Hierarchies are the bars of the prison that keep us trapped as inmates and in which the inmates are the primary prison guards keeping order within the system. Don’t get me wrong, we need Leaders, but NOT the Top-Down HIERARCHIES that control us. Tribes have leaders, but they do not have despots. If they did, tribal people merely abandoned them (or exiled them). Unable to walk away today, we have rationalized our plight with convoluted logic. We have come to justify the hierarchy as inevitable and for some reason the pinnacle of human achievement. We transcend the hierarchy with almost religious ferver. We have lots of revolutions to overthrow a hierarchy and replace it with…MORE HIERARCHY. I have talked about this in earlier posts. We DON’T need to overthrow the hierarchy, just leave it behind and create our own interdependent communities that don’t rely for day to day living on a larger authority. While the hierarchy has no defense against abandonment, we still need the infrastructure for modern living that is maintained by a system that now reaches over vast distances of the planet. So, some form of larger government(s) will always be needed, but it must be one that is driven by the people and not corporations and money . As many ecological philosophers have argued, our problem isn’t just that people are living a bad way, it’s that they are all living (or want to live) the SAME bad way. And while we continue to use metrics for success based on economics rather than people, we will still continue to live in a way that ruins the world for us. And that world is controlled by a hierarchy that thrives on greed and power.
As I have said numerous times in the blog posts, we buy in to this falsehood of the hierarchy because it is the way that reality is presented to us. We can’t ALL be environmental saints tomorrow, and don’t need to be. Nor do we tomorrow have to have a perfect world of peace and harmony and respect – although that would be nice.
Quinn lists his ideas for NEOTRIBAL (Intentional Community) BENEFITS as:
- Mixed competencies and willingness as equals to do all tasks in the tribe within our abilities
- Modest standard of living (Money is not the goal, but QUALITY OF LIFE)
- “Think-Tribally” – not expect set wages, but take what you need. Today within the hierarchy with uncompromising individualism we expect greed as normal, when in fact sharing is the norm in communalised systems. Think of a family potluck feast – like Thanksgiving in the USA – and how everyone contributes something to the feast and ends up taking home a share of the left-overs.
- “CRADLE TO GRAVE SECURITY” – only a system that looks continuously after ALL its members will work
A NeoTribal Intentional community or business IS ALL ITS MEMBERS – not employees. It is a group of people making a living together. No one right way, but each tribal community having its own unique way adapted to each unique area and purpose. The Tribe is an efficient social organization of making a living easy for all, while the hierarchy is easy living for a few and hard for rest. In the past, tribes lived together for territorial protecttion. A neotribal system may or may not involve living together. It will depend. There may be tribes of people living in intentional communities where many of the that tribe also work in venture capital neotribal systems close by, or even via online systems. We are entering a whole new world where the rules of the past no longer fit, but where the previous ideas of living mutually do fit. In the past tribes had boundaries that were fiercely defended, but neotribes will allow free movement with people having membership in more than one tribe.
The NeoTribal idea is as much psychological as it is physical. Tribal survival is about keeping overheads low, with a decreased interest in material accumulation, but possibility of capital expansion to benefit everyone – almost like a cooperative. I talk about this in my SL text. People will be more experienced generalists with some specialization as needed and which is beneficial to the tribe. Remember it is about making a living and finding a great place to live within. Communes are merely shared living together and are NOT tribes. Tribes are a shared way of making a living together. The question for tribal membership is “Can you extend our way of making a living to include yourself?” And why would we do that? Going back to my Spirituality 3 post, do you like Monday? WHY? How about Friday? WHY? What about Saturday? WHY? Imagine ‘psychologically’ that you could choose everyday to be a Friday or Saturday!!! That is the freedom that so many of my students, and people I have talked to about this at conferences, have loved about this idea of sustainable living. Being a part of something in which they were an individual working for the common benefit of all involved. It is about happiness and well-being and having flexibility to live a life of freedom and shared purpose. It is about breaking the box apart and transforming our thinking. All we can do is set up principles Sustainable Living like a rough blueprint and then leave the actually building to those who come after us. I do believe that given the option, neotribal systems will be an organic process that will ‘self-assemble’ into unique interacting systems. The Natural World is a great model to visualize this in action all around us. This kind of change terrifies some people who need a precise set of instructions and bulleted menus to follow. We have all been so indoctrinated into a way of thinking that we would rather suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune and stay in the rut we know rather than step out of the rut and blaze a new trail. Maybe a bit more about our thinking would be useful.
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