“My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” (from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. highly recommend it if you’re interested in having better dialogues and feeling less defensive in your life)
In the New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour – who pretty much defined the principles of “self-sufficiency” as a modern political movement – goes into detail about conflict and community-building. So far from today’s interpretation of self-sufficiency as an American prepper-homesteader isolated from their neighbors – self-sufficient in the sense of “alone” – he envisioned self-sufficient in the sense of “not needing to buy things,” whether that was buying things for pure survival or buying things just to feel good. Seymour felt strongly that a community of close friends, preferably meeting frequently in pubs with wood-burning fires and live music, was a hallmark of being especially practical and self-sufficient; and if you think about it, you’ll see that it makes sense.
After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing – if you want to create a way to live separate from society – you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.
And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”
In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.
Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.
So it’s worth having communication skills. As a matter of self-sufficiency.
If you have ever worked with the public, remember: the public will be part of your politically utopic community.
All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.
They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them … .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole “line them up and shoot them” thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn’t work out great for them either.)
The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.
And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community’s violence on and then pretend to move on, or … .
Etc.
If you want a cooperative, non-violent, non-coercive community, and especially if you want that to be the norm, you end up having to learn to work collaboratively and productively with the person who irritates and frustrates and upsets you most in the ENTIRE world. And if you can’t picture doing that, then maybe it’s time for some self-reflection about how you really want the world to work, and what you’re capable of contributing to that.
Reposting this quote from The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency just because I find it extremely funny:
“Do not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.”
You need to take the view that it’s up to you to uncover the amazing hidden talents of your local freaks n geeks 😘
amhrancas 