Answering Beyond Civilization
In his book, Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn retells a story of his
wrestle with understanding his feelings about what I call failure in
self-expression within the cultural limitations of the modern civilization
he lives in. I view my tribal wish as a struggle with the same problem. His
focus stays throughout the book on the logical compromises in modern
cultural development, rather than what I think of as the more direct
approach of musing about ways to buck other peoples' emotional immaturity
without forsaking them and having to give up their psychic encouragement,
or inventing trickery to use on them and having to live among people acting
like zombies.
He expresses the belief that the tricksters of our culture actually
benefit from their activity and have a life that he might appreciate
living. One of my neighbors recognized me as such a trickster and expressed
the same absurd belief. I see the trickster position as only better in that
the nature of the estrangement problem stays in view in spite of immersion
in the muck of it.
Mr. Quinn recommends walking away from the trickster influence, which I
guess may be a vital first step for some, in getting a clear head. His book
ends with a remark that he sees the book as a preamble to the story that
others will finish, suggesting that escape was a far as he got with the
matter.
I was raised to be a small time trickster, like a woman, but inescapably
aware of the big scale moral implications. I was never really hypnotized,
even in public school, because of my family training. All my life I've
alternated between charismatic leadership and horrible feeble loneliness in
a sea of apparently contented zombies. The other tricksters I've appealled
to insist that this is the best arrangement that they can see as possible.
They scold me for my bad attitude and ugly group dynamics, insisting that
the poverty and chaos of sincere friendship with non-tricksters cannot lead
to any worthwhile social expression.
The main drawback to my social sentiments, that my wife and neighbors
keep me reminded of, is their feeling that the resulting styles of
expression are often ugly to them, to the point of disgust, oppression and
inability to find a restful heartwarming focus anywhere in my domain; I
think this feeling results from their association of refuse, decay and
unplanned expression with disease, tragic neglect and psycho-therapy, rather
than low cost, mild ecological impact and sincerity. A three year old
screaming happily or drawing random pen marks on an antique coffee table or
leaving the trash can dumped out after exploring it's contents is only
grimly forgivable for my more elegant friends. Adults that I facilitate in
similiar activity occasionally inspire the waving of weaponry, even on the
part of other adults with an equivalent license.
This matter of ugliness looks to me like the main devisive force
preventing warm-hearted culture and family or tribal feeling; more than any
intellectual conflict or jealosy or divergence of aspiration. I observe
people bumming each other out severely by the almost inevitable unintended
trespass of filthy debris they leave in the kitchen while they eat. I
observe the wince of grimness evoked by dangerous stuff left heedlessly in
reach of a one year old, or second-hand smoke, or the smells of toilet and
laundry. To some the cobbled vehicles are a depressing eyesore, to others
the exhaust and noise of motors in constant use wears on their peace of
mind.
What's worse, I've determined little real agreement on what blesses and
what oppresses. Many people never notice the kitchen filth or have no
feeling about it at all, and have no compulsion to prevent creating it.
Some see an unintended obstacle course as an opportunity to prove or
practice some kind of special ability, and causually create them for others.
I'm studying compost so the smell entrances me but air fresheners and
cigarette smoke spook me. Rotting wood on my house gives it character to me
whereas atrophy of someone's body looks tragic and depressing. Overbooked
promises worry me severely, even if they're someone else's, whereas a lack
of commitments and interests seriously offends some other people. Living
often in the wilderness, I have gotten familiar with the gross rudeness of
animals, enough so that I can view eating meat as easily inspired by the
ugliness of them. In my youth, the smog over my city had me seriously
questioning having any more to do with the place, in spite of deep
sentimentality.
I see ugliness as an inescapable part of use of a conceptual identity. I
cannot escape creating what even I call ugliness to some degree; something
I can hide from others but not something I can hide from myself. So if
someone derides me for how ugly my life is, or how ugly I am, the images
that evokes are mass confusion. The best compromise I've determined for
myself, or for anyone, has been to avoid focusing where I feel revulsion or
tragedy; and doing the best I can to view everyone else from their own
biases rather than my own.
The regular modern retail economy looks to me to be expressing an ideal
that maybe represents some kind of consensus, declaring that every space
visible to a non-employee even occasionally must be kept as tidy and sterile
as a motel room, 100% of the time. Every item not overtly intended as
deliberate positive display must be stored out of sight and everything must
be exhaustively indexed so that only seconds of esthetic compromise are
necessary to obtain anything for use or presentation. A large array of
things can be laid out to facilitate a project but only in a tidy display
that is likewise subindexed for the period of activity and maintained tidy
and clean. Any visible item or structure showing the slightest sign of decay
or staining must become a major priority for remedial effort, displacing
regular work. Exploratory or artistic initiative is only allowed if purely
conversational or else completely secret.
I find this mostly offensive, feeling far more at ease at the steel
salvage yard or an as is junk store, but I can generally find some other
people in a regular store whose eyes I can see it through instead.
I have met a lot of people who maintain this standard in their living
space by accepting a zen-like primitive level of resource access in a huge
expensive place, using a lot of paid services and unnecessarily new
materials, doing a bare minimum of exploratory visible or audible activity,
and heavily policing children and roommates (or not having them ar all). I
have lived that way myself for many years, even while saving money for my
present house. I helped develop the Glass Plate Game to make use of the
conversational loophole, invented miniaturized forms of artistic, practical
and mechanical creation that I could easily hide, and developed secret and
miniaturized methods for sleeping, food preparation and tool use.
I have some preference for a tidy appearance for my own non-living
things but I have no trouble living with complete chaos of expression where
a creative potential would otherwise be sacrificed. Hense my present house
tends towards being a riot of barely organized visible crude resources and
projects, with much cobbling and no organized cleaning; and nothing living
gets limited or trimmed unless destructively invasive. Particularly, I block
or resist any use of threats for any purpose. Only the front yard cooperates
even partially with the retail economy ethic, with a giant sailing ship to
help inspire tolerance of a creative environment.
Nearly all the work for money that I've done has been in the industrial
economy. Those businesses had little to none of the sterility ethic, and
some even encouraged my creativity, for novelty or workspace improvement. I
wasn't very appreciative of that though, due to what appeared to be a
staggering cost in every sort of ugliness.
The products were generally at least tolerable. Building or furniture
construction, musical composition and intellectual discourse, moderated by
exchange in the overt economy, showed striking cleanness of presentation at
least, if not actual beauty. But inevitably I associated commercial
offerring with what I saw while working; mono-crop forestry, poisonous
chemical use, smog, humiliation and hypnotic control of me, emotionally
unreadable associates, textbook style avoidance of controversy, and
validation of majority narrow-mindedness and hysteria. The products often
strike me as quite ugly even if I need them myself, but almost no-one else
I know appears to have these grim associations.
I've seen and participated in a lot of different kinds of industrial
activity, most of which I think would be assessed as seriously ugly by most
of the people I know, worse than anyone's home. The small scale ugliness of
home industry, dumpster diving, junk collecting, cobbled repairs, muddy
storage of materials and the like strikes me also as far less ugly than the
more total disregard of esthetic reverence and ecological impact at the
motor home, bicycle, sound absorber or sewing factory, or lumber mills, or
chicken processing plant, or christmas tree farms or family farms where I've
worked.
Even the sight of clean tidy stores reminds me of washing windows with a
seriously toxic ammonia solution or running a huge horrible sounding floor
waxing machine. The swept new parking lots remind me of the toxic stench of
asphalt and the nasty whine of leaf blowers. I really abhor encouraging any
of that industrial activity with my own money and I have enormous tolerance
for other people who find some other ways to express their material
fetishes; even if their poverty is involuntary, their periods of inactivity
are due to depression, and their creativity has no hint of polish or
wisdom.
Purchase of service is really hard for me also, because of the
inevitable emotional confusion from the deliberately artificial expressions
of the workers. That kind of world looks horrible to me too; like it is
deliberately feeding the mistaken communications, loneliness and formal
estrangement that sabotages my attempts at intimacy. The theatre work I did
struck me as extreme this way, especially when I ushered and hung out in the
audience.
Thus for me the commercial offerrings are a massive illusory beauty, a
sham covering a mountain of nastiness that big scale conceptual identities
can somehow rationalize and hide from the political public. Whereas the
slum I live in looks to me like a thin veneer of slime disguising an
emotionally fragile human wonder from those who delight in making a
prostituted circus out of anything amazing. When I get directly harrassed
for being offensive, I do my best to be constructive within insane
limitations, white washing my local choreography enough to get out of being
a target.
The term tribal has lately become very hip among the people I associate
with, joining the word love in the realm of virtually worthless terms (for
conveying useful meaning). But the word is in the title of my website so I
feel compelled to make an attempt at reclamation.
My dictionary defines tribe to mean a group of people with a presumed
common ancestor and tradition of life meaning and activity under the
direction of a single benevolent autocrat. The book defines tribal as
meaning any behavior or tradition that can be stereotypically considered
characteristic of such a group.
I need for the term tribe to be defined as a group of more than eight
people (and few enough that all are known to all) that maintains, in any
context, unconditional emotional and psychic harmlessness towards each
other in spite of deliberately deepening familiarity and natural heirarchy.
Or said a different way, I define a tribal relationship to be one that can
render emotionally unnecessary the use of privacy, formality, inebriants and
hypnotic activity, the methods of the tricksters.
Mr. Quinn writes that he thinks the resistance to tribal sharing arises
from his culture (not his local economy) having multiple levels of political
power and social legitimacy (that he refers to as heirarchy), and from peer
pressure, to either compete solitary and heartlessly in the big scale
faceless market or take a position of robotic activity arranged with formal
indifference (or a combination of both). His local economy has few visible
examples of coop employment, expressing wholistic democratic friendship
between the workers, as opposed to brutal solitary avarice.
He suggests that his participation in a small group of people employed
together, as an expression of their wish for financial stability for each
other, would answer his concerns; particularly in that such a group would
be less inclined to create on a scale so massive, what he calls pyramid
building, that most of those involved have little or no creative part in the
process; and layoffs would happen responsive to real financial needs of
those working. In telling stories from his own experience though, he
describes a very aloof busy life, with even his wife's struggles being
unknown to him. His coop experience is very minimal and stayed very formal.
He notes the example of a teenager described in one of his stories, who
focuses his life entirely on relationship development and adopts no
artificial matters of solitary or large scale importance. Determining that
his frame of reference utterly fails with everyone he is familiar with, the
fellow kills himself; as I tried to do for the same reason at about the
same age.
Two and a half decades of development and participation in loosely
tribal forms of business and housing and combinations of both convinces me
lack of tribal contact in my own life cannot be actually resolved by any
kind of negotiated associating, whether involving employment or not; that
negotiation of any kind poisons something essential in friendly personal
contact, or any genuine attempt at accountability. Significantly, the normal
style of independent practical ambition in modern culture that he refers to
as the Taker frame of reference never caught on in my life or the life of
his teenager example, whereas it did in his life; so even at the age of
seventy his negotiative business imagination is still busy inventing and
poisoning his relationship developments.
I believe that his bias against heirarchical relating also poisons
tribal relationships; I've never seen or read about any tribal relations
that were actually negotiative about anything technical, nor am I open to
the possibility. Only matters of personal dignity and related feelings have
been exempt from heirarchical control in some tribal sharings that I've
studied. I think a tribal heirarchy that attempts to control individual
dignity expresses what I call evil, and that this is maybe what Mr. Quinn is
thinking of. I believe this issue is the main trouble with organized
religion and what looks to me like the main weakness of nearly all the
businesses and marriages that I've seen fail.
I think the questions he raises are well stated and vital; I think he
speaks for a substantial number of people who, in my view, are seduced and
confused by the offers of technical complexity in the modern economy, into
spiritually trifling with all their close associates. I've decided that the
apparent trifling is mostly not actual, that most everyone develops genuine
sentimentality with anyone they are physically present with or compelled to
engage with to any substantial degree; and that tribal emotions result,
continually being lost in the economic shuffle or destroyed due to horror
about the inevitable heirarchy involved; and continually rising again even
into old age. My approach to the dilemma has resolved towards merely
promoting stability in the cast of people in my direct physical life,
embracing and adapting to the limits that puts on my physical autonomy and
lifestyle, mostly forsaking the economy as a human forum, and being
conservative in my expressions of appreciation, to avoid the inevitable
mistakes in comprehension and unintended hurt feelings that causes.
The result in my life has been little or no visible co-ordinated sharing
of even a simple meal with anyone, even my wife (mainly due to rejection of
heirarchy). She speaks bitterly of that lack of overt sharing and the
others echo her sentiment and focus their lives towards some kind of shared
events or projects with friends; but none of them show any more inclination
than I do towards actual submission to negotiated tyranny. Only spontaneous
temporary heirarchy succeeds in unifying any of us in a light-hearted way.
To me a tribal business, as Mr. Quinn describes, would be a society of
mutual whining; a tedious and physically taxing illusion of friendly regard
that I could tolerate only to the degree that I genuinely needed the
resources it produced. I prefer temp service, seasonal or free-lance odd
jobs for friends. Having grown up very poor, I am adapted to a trivial level
of use of resources, equivalent to about $2200 a year. I actually spend
about $800 a year in cash, so odd jobs assisting friends with their houses
has more than covered that. I currently (2001) have about $6000 in
uncollected pay for odd jobs and $2400 in savings.
Tribal Associations I've Participated In
With * means I was a co-originator, # entry very difficult for newcomers,
@ means living space and work were both shared.
Tribal businesses (cooperative ownership):
-- * ZigZag literary magazine 3 months 2 people
-- @ Evonuk's Family Farm 3 seasons 8
-- * The Glass Plate Game 2 years 2 to 5
-- The First Alternative Grocery 2 years about 200
-- The Van Buren Street Cafe 1 month about 30
--#* Camino Scale Models manufacturing group 6 months 2 to 3
-- Baird christmas tree harvest group 1 month about 12
--# Burley Design Cooperative manufacturing 2 years 20 to 30
-- * Cooperative Type typesetting company 2 months 5
-- Grower's Market Grocery 6 years about 200
--# @ Hoedad's tree planting company 6 months about 300
-- Courtyard Cafe 3 years 5 +
-- Sara's property management 3 years 4 +
-- @ Icky's Tea House 6 weeks 20 or so
-- @ Alpha Farm 3 days 5 (at the time)
-- @ Kaliflower Bookbindery 1 week 12 or so
Tribal households or clubs
-- Summer Palace Theatre 2 seasons 30 or so
-- * East Amazon Apartment 8 years 4
-- University Carnival Theatre 2 seasons 20 or so
-- * Center for Peace Conversion 6 months 15 to 20
-- * 1915 Hilyard 2 years 12 to 18
-- 840 Washington 1 year 5 to 6
-- *@ Spencer Butte woods campground 2 years 3
-- 1941 University 2 years 7 to 9
-- * Ferry Street house 3 months 4 to 11
--#* 3rd Avenue house 5 months 4
--# 11 Washington 3 months 4
--# River Road house 4 months 8
-- * Gooble Dell 12 years 4 to 21
None were organized communes or required philosophic agreement for
participation. I suspect that philosophical communes fail like businesses,
primarily due to poor management. I have visited several successful
communes, most of them many years old and quite wealthy, but have been put
off by the collective demand for much tedious and uncredited labor. In all
my tribal involvements I kept my resources private, even with lovers, and
encouraged everyone to do likewise. I cannot stay positive in outlook in the
face of intimate opportunists raping or robbing the product of my
initiative, and I feel terrible being unable to offer initiative.
While doing the character identity at 1915 Hilyard, I lost clear
awareness of separate initiative, but I had already established clear
resource boundaries before I switched identities. I think that that might
have been unimportant to me at the time but I believe it was vital to the
success of the tribal warmth for the others.
Everyone, both inside and outside of a tribal sharing around me, appears
to be wary, I think because they justifiably fear each other's meanness. I
fear their meanness also and most are shameless to show their willingness to
curse or sabotage or ridicule, on the slightest rationale if they feel
crabby. A tribe is to me a glass house, but not to most others. Most of my
associates relate to their own tribal comrades as brutally as they do the
grass in the yard. I have met only a few people who appear deliberately
careful to preserve tribal warmth, and none have anything at all to say
about tribal theory.
Do people outside a tribe generally fear a tribal group's psychic power?
Not the one's I've been in. I observe though, that most people in tribal
groups misuse their unusual confidence in ways that oppress their neighbors,
inspiring policing action. I constantly have to campaign to my roommates not
to do that with our tribal power and sometimes someone will even press me
to use it cruelly. I think modern tribes will have to be very psychically
moral to survive.
The Davidians, for example, were heedless of their neighborhood
influence; I think, ironically, their privacy from the neighbors contributed
considerably to the worry they evoked. The Jews likewise are especially
known for overt indifference to emotional issues, especially those of
outsiders, so I would expect them to draw fire. When the police did a drug
bust in the trailer in my backyard, I visited a whole bunch of neighbors to
tell them about it and ask what they knew about the matter.
The tribes I have been in have the tendency to spawn mob psychic
oppression or even terrorizing of their own members, resulting in stagnation
of the spiritual and emotional maturing of both the individuals and the
group; and ironically the promotion, in those groups that endure, of the
same senseless avarice and grasping after symbolic material dignity that
regular civilization does, often with planned projects so massive that
individual creativity gets suffocated. The abuse or eviction of the young,
the old and the eccentrics like me inevitably results.
That I have seen, real democracy guarantees the empowering of immature
and fatally ignorant leadership and authority, and the burnout of wiser
leaders. I think that this is due to a democratic consensus that validates
deliberate heckling and brutal discourse, forcing into obscurity anyone who
is too concerned about subtlty of feelings, their own or anyone else's.
A joint business relationship or cooperative does something similiar, by
forcing democratic negotiations among the members and the cash valuing of
members. The tribe becoming a democratic public business looks to me like
what actually disintegrates tribal cultures, by forcing less economically
competent members to scramble for dignity through choreographic ambition or
straight up criminall activity.
That I perceive, small scale traditional tribes have little or no
awareness of "earning a living" prior to negotiations with outsiders, and
choreographic ambition on the part of men often involves effects that in
capitalist terms is destructive or predatory. The Geographic magazine
describes tribes destroyed intentionally if they pose a perceived criminal
threat, due to being overtly amoral towards outsider property rights. This
appears to be quite as true even if the outsiders are also tribal, and even
if the tribe is a modern group.
In a subculture that includes traditions of verbal trickery or policing
of intimates, which most economically advanced cultures seem to, the only
emotional defense that I can see open to a weak or disadvantaged person is
to create choreographic barriers through privacy or formality (forsaking
tribal contact) or else the mounting of some form of physical or emotional
attack on the antagonists that drives many of those affected to forsake
tribal contact. I observe some children tirelessly trying again and again to
seed some kind of tribal sharing, but all the people I've known eventually
burn out and develop hypnotic activities and establish choreographic privacy
and formality instead.
I've read about cultures in South America that deliberately omit
traditions of personal criminalizing or clever social competition among
intimates, with reasonable success in sustaining tribal contact, and I had
considerable success guiding the group at 1915 Hilyard that way while I held
a character identity.
My belief is that only leadership by people with a character identity
can answer this challenge. The people I've met who maintain a powerful
character identity are all women and unfortunately nearly all have little
or no motivation to anchor tribal kindness. They generally find temporary
or illusory tribal sharing to offer much greater opportunity for novelty and
exciting feelings, and most women who lead seem indifferent to intense use
of emotional cruelty in a tribe. In spite of being at risk of catastrophic
emotional confusion and mental illness, many women believe they should
actually promote overt policing social structures that use overt emotional
punishments, and they often voluntarily participate.
Women who I've seen or read about leading also promote the retail
sterility ethic. They advocate the building of stages for normal living that
are visually and audibly isolated, often at considerable cost to construct.
They promote the use of physical or psychological inebriants, such as
condiment food and television, to cope with the resulting hysteria and
loneliness; and overtly campaign for their use among the young and among the
men with emotional issues. I have not met any powerful women who have
expressed to me comprehension or even an interest in being moral about this,
even those who wish to live tribally, and I have met no man with a powerful
character identity, able to anchor a tribe through kindness.
I have seen some men try though; and read of others. I've seen men get
seduced into believing in the actuality of a significant past and shared
dreams for the future in artificial tribal sharing that they are able to
lead, and then watched their catastrophic suicidal disappointment when they
have a day of emotional weakness that exposes the actual indifference of the
others.
I have considerable experience with tribal business, several that I
helped originate, and am totally burned by the illusory historical
feelings. I need my actual isolation and friendlessness to remain obvious,
at least to me, for my own mental health. I will define a tribe as a group
of people who are emotionally harmless to each other regardless of context,
a group with an actual past and future that rules their real feelings,
likewise regardless of context.
That I have observed, conventional heirarchical business doesn't
actually thwart tribal sharing at all; it just permits privacy and
formality, allowing peoples' actual cold-heartedness and indifference to be
overt. I have thus much more faith in tribal sharing that rises in the
regular economy, and I have seen it and been included somewhat. The
foundation of constant social mixing that it rises within generally destroys
it though, so I don't seek anything that way. My wife often reports of
successes that way though, at businesses that she goes to frequently.
I foster tribal sharing in my neighborhood by being stable
choreographically, harmless as possible to my neighbors' and roommates'
feelings, and facilitating of cheap housing, free food, essential equipment,
and an easy space for visitors and children. Perhaps that results in what I
could call a tribal circus without a clear territorial boundary or any clear
political definitions.
I have lived at or been employed at many places that I would describe as
not tribal or even anti-tribal. The differences that makes a context seem
tribal to me are the absence of what I call the criminalizing ethic, and the
feeling of welcome, the feeling that at least one other person there when I
arrived or who arrived after me would see me and silently express an
appearance of tepid appreciation, even three degrees of warmth, prefering my
presense over my absence.
The criminalizing ethic is my word for the unusually easy and natural
manner of logic that many people singly, or as a society, develop to
convert stupidity, ignorance and mental illness, what I refer to as idiocy,
into a crime. Being fairly intelligent, wise and generally well grounded, I
have seen a lot less punishment and assassination of character in my life
than most of my associates, and thus have less of a grim outlook about the
prospect of intimate involvement than nearly everybody else.
As a teenager I bought into legitimizing the criminalizing ethic. I had
little heart for punishing but I accepted the idea of it and would speak
with self-righteous condescention about other people who failed to grasp
something that I had a handle on or who were hysterical. Though nearly
everyone is a straight-forward target this way, my father was a particularly
easy one, especially after my parents got divorced.
He paid for us to spend two months with him in Ethiopia when I was
fourteen; and while there I was quite struck by what a huge blessing the
absence of the criminalizing ethic in Ethiopian society was for quality of
life there, and for the quality of his life in particular; since he was not
much inclined to criminalize anyone, even verbally, at that point in his
life. Oddly he once spoke of that as what he considered to be one of his
failings as a parent.
Between that tendency to criminalize mental incapacity and the absence
of an easily definable shared choreographic dream that gave anyone real
emotional significance to anyone else, all of the standard middle class
polite sort of homes and businesses that I've known, even homes shared with
a supposed lover, have been places where the others expressed no more
evident cheer at my presense than strangers at a public library. That I
could perceive, my living spirit added absolutely nothing to their lives,
created not a flicker of sparkle in their day, even with my sisters and
parents.
This vacancy of feeling is what compelled me at the age of 19 to drop
out of college and abandon my normal rented room to be a bicycle tramp. I
wandered all over the area of Lane and Benton counties, always seeking
any kind of cultural environment where anyone showed the slightest
appreciation for the living presense of anyone else there, where I might
have hope of being part of a human sharing that offerred at least a glimmer
of the sparkle I saw in the two month stay in Ethiopia.
All of the tribal sharings I originated were attempts to kindle some
kind of interpersonal significance between some people, of any sort at all.
I was not fussy about the details. I was willing to compromise anything in
political correctness or technical sanity for a feeling of positive human
presense.
My present houshold is a real success for me in that way. Though some
of the roommates never indicate any aspiration towards developing any
positive human sharing, the place as a whole allows enough creative license
that even the coldest cynic cracks at least a tiny bit of warmth, a tiny
bit of appreciation, for the presense of witnesses to their living spirit.
Though the intensity seems generally quite meager, it never feels like the
sterile polite coldness of the public library. For a fellow like me who has
seen so much emotional drought, the establishment of a consistent trickle
inspires enormous reverence, overlooking any amount of poverty, clutter, bad
taste in decoration, foul smells, stupid arguments and filth.
My overt tolerance of human chaos and physical debris has quite
horrified and disheartened quite a few of my more conventional associates
as well as my wife, but I can see no going back with this. I cannot bear to
be a solitary neurotic, and polite orderly people destroy me by isolating
me from other people and by confusing me about my place in the script of
their life.
I concur with the last three of Arthur Janov's definition of primal
needs:
- to be able to grow and develop at my own rate,
- to be physically touched in a friendly way, and
- to be emotionally stimulated; every day.
All of these criteria are as basic as breathing to me; none can be
compromised for long without a cost of creeping insanity, self destructive
desires, cynical self talk and probable suicide; and all three require
emotionally non-competitive intimacy.
I would rephrase Mr. Janov's definition though to say neurosis is the
result of intolerance of one's own idiocy; self-intolerance that is. I
imagine that that gets started as a way to cope with danger, because idiocy
inspires anger, resulting in real threats from other people. And among the
people that I've gotten to know personally, idiocy has been universal, in
some form or another; and nearly everyone appears to get busted for it quite
early in life. Somehow my life worked out to protect me from getting busted
by anyone til I was eighteen and way past being impressionable. My wife
scolds me calling me the guiltless wonder.
Idiocy has been a challenge for me though. In my tribal experience,
intolerable idiocy has been the apparent main divisive force, compromising
general sanity whether or not it got criminalized. Some kind of noncombative
defense against the influence of idiocy has been critical to both preserving
my sanity and preserving a tribe.
I have put a huge amount of thinking into tricks to limit the damage to
my equilibrium or that of my group without having to invoke guilt or worry
in anyone. For example, I deliberately seek opportunities to dramatize my
disappointment about someone in a humorous or ironic expression that leaves
explicit my welcome of the person. If I feel actually crabby I focus on
anything else for awhile because I have to be in a goofy mood about the
matter to be successful in preserving the dignity of the trespasser.
Maintaining my own technical independence with every practical challenge
has been helpful. If I accidently validate the shame that inspires
involuntary assistance from someone, then I often see stuff get broken,
unwise purchases happen and extra resentment get directed at shameless
people. Assistance has been great and even a special intimacy, where
friendliness, and not necessity has inspired it. So I have exhausively set
up all functions in my house maintenance, personal hysterias, tool access,
heavy lifting or hauling, and physical abilities, to not need anyone else and
to not even look like I do, but nevertheless staying ready to design a
script for anyone who seems interested in playing a part.
Likewise, I generally politely refuse a request for assistance. Some
people have shown ability to be cute and light-hearted about their lameness
though, making my participation actually a wonderful intimacy, so I believe
that total independence isn't necessarily the best arrangement, just the
best I can generally do.
Guilt monsters and mud slinging rise out of artificial feeling creation
also, often while randomly hanging out. A lot of fellows I've met deny that
feelings can even be deliberately created at all, and a lot of women I've
known have very detailed entitlement issues about it; resulting in some very
bizarre arguments.
The fellows who deny feeling origination, and women who deny
accountability, tend to also use religious style devices (to manage their
own feelings) that are inevitably a serious emotional load or source of
confusion for any bystanders or forced participants. I've had to evict or
drive away some people for this, not being able to come up with another
defense. As visitors, those kind of people seem actually helpful though, in
creating a vivid contrast to the psychic harmlessness of the household,
inspiring greater reverence; and helping keep the household innoculated
against forsaking the mass of puzzling strangers who lean toward scapegoating
groups like ours, and thus inspire revenge from those in my household.
I view the emotional entitlement issues, that women campaign about, as
being the result of the formal personal encounters that I call traditional
psychic rape; such as planned social events, formal punishment or revenge,
or large scale building projects. I think that Daniel Quinn and many others
recommend a complete forsaking of large scale civilization to cope with
this, but I don't think that helps. The forms of feeling origination that
force portrayal of an individual identity, such as a friendship phone call or
a birthday scenario done for someone, inevitably create guilt monsters no
matter how small the scale. I discourage and avoid any coercive
choreographic inventions, or places like public school where they are
routine.
If circumstance compells me to formally manage someone's emotions one on
one, or otherwise cope with life from an autonomous, or what I call heartless,
identity, then I'm as sly as possible about it to avoid unresolvable bad
side effects. Since being sly has generally poisoned deeper trust feelings,
I dodge any context where I'm often forced to cope through being sly.
I have found that I can considerably reduce psychic issues if I keep my
personal life at a one person level of industrial sophistication as much as
practical. Much of modern society involves use of equipment and buildings
that are impossible or hopelessly difficult for a solitary person to
produce, resulting in an unspoken rejection of individual initiative in
producing music or bicycles or window installation or printed books or
philosophical speeches. Everyone at the library gets thus forced into the
role of audience to the building contractors and polished authors and
musicians who've practiced 15 years the same song over and over. I think
this massively promotes self-intolerance, and a kind of creative
invisibility that keeps everybody estranged and puzzled about everybody
else.
I know plenty of highly skilled and intelligent people but none of them
could contribute to the library environment at the direct human level
without appearing ridiculously amateurish in whatever they creatively
contributed in noise or action or construction. At the University of Oregon
student union there is even an explicit sign at the lounge grand piano
stating that no-one may perform there who has not tightly choreographed and
exhaustively practiced what they present. At Oregon State University there
is no sign at the equivalent piano so a roommate and I one day each took a
turn. We both were in the muse so perhaps we weren't scolded because the
enforcers were fooled or maybe the music was just too nice to shut down or
maybe that place is covertly friendlier; but not one person looked over at
either of us with a look of welcome, and so I could only survive there for
an hour or two in a year. I must have a place where the message is Play
That Box!, show us what a piece of work you are, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculty, in apprehension how like a god!
One person may be no match for the apparent beauty of a well organized
society but they are still astounding to me and worthy of awe and I think
the preservation of their sanity critically requires an open forum for
continuously making that obvious, at least to them and their friends; to
block individual expression because it's socially awkward is a tragic
disaster. That much I think comes across in Mr. Quinn's book as being, at
least theoretically, his viewpoint also.
Exploring Resource Based Economy
The last some forty years of my life have involved several dozen major
and minor explorations of relating to other people in a resource based
rather than monetary based form of social and intimate sharing. Recently,
with the movie Zeitgeist Addendum, filmmaker Peter Joseph has challenged me
and everyone to consider the workability of resourced based or non-financial
society; so I am inspired to reminisce, and consider what has limited such
a form of social network in my life.
Like perhaps most people my age, my first introduction to resource based
economy was in the late 1960's with the television program Star Trek. My
family at the time had a very ghosty black and white television introducing
me and everyone to the brand new technology of theatrical portrayal studied
at home. Almost all story shows at that time presented a resource based
culture, of people engaging their entire life focus on constructive and
friendly possibilities without any regard to establishing personal equity in
any way. Star Trek stood out for me as the most thorough and motivating
study of the idea. The theme of the show was endless exploratory effort on
the part of a seamless beehive of friendly people, all encouraging each
other, through overt adoring remarks, to develop human and technical
wonder.
In grade school, in the Boy Scouts and at home with my sisters I echoed
the same spirit, and everyone around me appeared to join right in, though
with a puzzling technical and political feebleness, and often a mysterious
combativeness in my absense. The Scout troop survived entirely on minimal
dues, and my parents remained strangers and had very little money to work
with. Always, the people around me had to primarily depend on clever use of
what was at hand, and the skills of those present, with any product always
owned by a nebulous us that included anyone who believed themselves to be
part of it.
Until high school, none of my schools used grading or any kind of
comparison of merit. Likewise my Scouting associates ignored the rank and
badge thing, and my family had no tradition of merit or sovereignty
assessment. Two months of one summer in Ethiopia showed me a culture even
more extreme this way, and notably inspirational, in the humor and liveliness
of the people there, convincing me that a life focused on achievement of
choreographic sovereignty of any kind is berserk and emotionally fatal.
As a young man, cast out of school, Scouting and family into a
puzzling culture of brutal choreographic sovereignty, for which I had
little preparation, I commenced a lifelong series of attempts to re-enter
the apparent American society or create some new semblance of the Star Trek
social structure. At fifty years of age I have no striking success to report
but quite a bit of data about the subject.
Presented with the monetary based economy fairly late in life, I
presumed initially that my lack of adaptation to choreographic and
spiritual sovereignty was due to immaturity on my part, and not a systemic
failure of the culture around me as Peter Joseph appears to suggest. Having
learned to live outdoors in the Scouts, and feeling quite spooked being
isolated inside a building, my initial sovereignty involved camping gear, a
bicycle, and a motorcycle, with secret stash places, mostly on public land.
I had little experience or imagination involving buying things that were
to be solely for my own use. I found the use of commercially finished
equipment to be humiliating and disappointing compared to what I made myslf.
Thus I quickly discovered that occasional odd jobs were entirely sufficient
to live on. Seeking employment became primarily a social device for meeting
people and seeking cultural involvement, though my lack of interest in
earning a lot of money was often a sore point with some of the more
ambitious people involved.
Sixteen of the business ventures I touched or joined were cooperatively
owned and managed. Where the work involved large scale ambition, such as at
Burley Design Cooperative or Alpha Farm, I felt considerable pressure to be
ashamed of my normally goofy primary life focus. At Alpha Farm this was
especially troublesome, due to the complete absense of priviledge or
compensation awarded to the more industrially focused people. Even at
Burley, where workers each get a sovereign paycheck based on hours of work,
I was resented by many and eventually evicted for working too few hours.
I decided that a culture of accomplishment was a mistake, used as a
basis for intimacy. I found life to be much kinder in a context that granted
avaricious or ego-maniacal people emotional safety in some kind of
collective honoring of what they had manifested. Where naivette of the
partcipants made the extent of someone's contribution unclear, or emotional
immaturity had people heedless of it, I found that the monetary system, and
the coldhearted boundary defining that attends it, made for much less
unintended hurt feelings, resulting in far easier actual intimacy, and
oddly, less cold-heartedness. I evolved to keeping financially and
materially autonomous even from my wife and child, not even holding food in
common.
Oddly I notice a widespread tendency for people to recommend sharing of
physical resources while maintaining choreographic formality and
politeness, what I call choreographic sovereignty. The Venus Project couple
in the Zeitgeist movie appear to promote this view. In their internet
presentation they appear to have no roommates on their 25 acre estate,
though they have three self-contained houses and several other buildings.
They also panhandle the visiters to their site, suggesting that their
musings and modeling hobby are worthy of substantial payment from
strangers.
I have puzzled about panhandling, and gambling, and con games and theft.
As a child I found the generosity of grownups and the government to be
amazing and somewhat unnerving. As a teenager I began to strive to establish
adult dignity, to be clearly established as an autonomous person, worthy of
honor, or at least minimal respect. I found the generosity of other people
to be a challenge to that, a humbling or even humilliating influence to be
avoided. I abhored being viewed as a leech but I abhored unneccesary labor,
so I often gave the unintended appearance of being stingy or being a beggar.
To deliberately seek something for nothing appealed to me, but not at cost
to someone else.
Borrowing money likewise has always spooked me, as a dignity compromise,
not for being a leech but for being infantile or lame. When I've been
offered a loan at no interest as a specific sponsorship of expediting
something I'm doing, I've accepted, but owing money feels sour to me. I
once capitalized a business by soliciting investors, but the business failed
and, though all the investors got their principal back, I lost too much
sleep over disappointing everyone. I have been loathe to complicate a risk
that way ever again. To start my own lottery by issuing stocks would look to
me like an invitation to the investors to become sinister, inviting them to
gamble on an increase of value without honest work.
The majority of the people I've known have few of these reservations. I
actually view the resourced based economy idea as an example of the common
view, wherein everyone can be defined as innately a leech on the world
around them, with no possibility for the sort of dignity and large scale
emotionally defended creative initiative that I aspire to. I require
despotic rule over anything I am going to put my heart felt creativity
into, because to compete over a project that I'm dreamy about is too
painful.
I read an article by Margrit Kennedy, a German professor, which
describes in great detail the history and exploratory forms of large scale
money systems. She expresses clearly the same reservations that I have,
seeing the money based economy as essential to preserving human kindness,
and not a root of evil at all. She believes that the practice of offering
loans at interest is the real financial source of warfare and poverty.
My own belief reverses that causation. I think warfare and poverty arise
from a shared tradition of honoring aquisition of something for nothing
at someone else's expense. Whether the aquisition happens in a money based
economy or a resource based one seems to make little difference in the
social consequences, so I would withdraw validation from both usury and
resource based entitlement. Now that the whole earth is getting recognition
by many as a shared inheritance, the wild mushroom hunter and a land owner
selling oil rights can be rationally seen as violating some kind of public
trust.
So I view money and defined ownership as a ways to define and limit this
kind of brutal avarice, things to eliminate through disuse rather than
deliberate prohibtion. In nearly all examples, I observe criminalizing of
cultural expression to result in greater interest focused on it than would
result from a clear common experience of what a drag it is, so I advocate
preserving the money economy in a form like present nude beaches or online
war games, a lively encouraged black market but no honored regular market.
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