Chapter 30: Cultural and Philosophical Precedents
In approaching our Transition, it is important to focus what it is we want to create, design, build and live in that will be more productive and better for our morale, well-being, happiness, and sanity. We will want to avoid overly focusing on what we want to get away from. It would be kind of silly to initiate a Transition with absolutely no idea what we want to achieve, or to actually succeed in supplanting the economic power structure and then have no idea what to strive for, what to paint on the fresh canvas that we have given ourselves.
The results of an incompletely thought-out revolution can be seen in Iran. The Shah was an oppressive, murderous dictator, so most Iranians supported Khomeini to get rid of the Shah. Iran got yet another murdering dictator in his place. Similarly in the United States some people voted for Trump because of wanting a change from typical corrupt politicians, but in so doing quite possibly brought the United States and maybe the world to the brink of disaster and destruction because of many of the regime’s actions and policies.
Good, applicable ideas can be found in diverse places, sometimes in some of the last places where one would think to look. For readers interested in direct democracy, The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi (1975) is worth studying for its proposals on governance: basic people's congresses in which every adult takes part in decisions, and economic principles such as "partners, not wage-workers" and "the house belongs to the one who lives in it." Two cautions. First, the book also argues that a society's law should come from custom and religion, which this project does not share; we favour law made openly and democratically by the people it governs. Second, in Libya itself the system was never carried out as written: real power remained concentrated in Gaddafi and the revolutionary committees, and dissent was harshly suppressed. Good ideas are sometimes poorly carried out, or used as a front for something else entirely, in politics as in business and engineering, where a sound idea can be fraudulently claimed, or promised only to win support and never delivered. That does not make the idea itself wrong. It means each idea should be judged on its merits, and tested honestly.
Nor is this kind of governance Gaddafi's idea alone. Assemblies in which everyone takes part, and enterprises run by partners rather than employees, appear in many places. Some grew up naturally: the New England town meetings, held since the 1600s; Switzerland's open-air cantonal assemblies, the Landsgemeinde, still held in Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden; the councils of the Haudenosaunee; consensus decision-making among hunter-gatherer bands; and the assembly of ancient Athens, open to all its citizens. Others were built deliberately: worker cooperatives such as Mondragón in the Basque Country, founded in 1956; the general assembly of the kibbutz; the Paris Commune of 1871; participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where residents have helped decide the city's spending since 1989; and the rotating councils of the Zapatista communities in Chiapas. (See Documented Alternatives.)
Sources: Landsgemeinde; Participatory budgeting (Porto Alegre, 1989); Mondragon Corporation.
Karl Marx also had some excellent ideas that should not be abandoned.
There are of course many other sources to look at and learn from. While we learn from such sources, we must also activate our brains, creativity, observations and experience to come up with new ideas of our own. Whatever we come up with, we will do well to take a large, inclusive perspective and strive to avoid the trap of becoming dogmatic, inflexible and arrogant. We will be undertaking an ongoing process of discovery that hopefully will never become a box that we try to force ourselves or each other into.
The author lived for a time with a small semi-nomadic community that prefers to remain unnamed, so it is not named here. In the author's experience, theirs is one of the healthiest, most positive cultures the author has known: classless, symbiotic, run by consensus, socially sophisticated, creative, and thriving. The author saw no fixed hierarchy, no form of currency, no enforced gender or other roles, and very little possessiveness or aggression. They seemed to the author to be among the happiest and freest people anywhere, with remarkably healthy relationships. That is one person's observation, not a study, but it fits what has been documented elsewhere. The San (Ju/'hoansi) of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania are egalitarian foragers who have lived for long periods without money or fixed rulers, share food widely, and actively cut down to size anyone who boasts or tries to dominate (Woodburn 1982; Wiessner 2005). The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) governed themselves through councils that sought consensus, with clan mothers choosing chiefs and able to remove them. These and other cultures have kept such ways of life going for generations, often among aggressive, invasive, acquisitive neighbors.
The decision-making the author witnessed in that community is in many ways superior even to direct democracy. When a decision has to be made, everyone gathers together, including children. The pace is relaxed. Each person, in no particular order, speaks their ideas and perceptions. While one is speaking, nobody interrupts and all listen. They don't directly answer each other to agree or refute what each other said. Each just speaks their truth. This closely resembles the talking-circle traditions documented among many Indigenous peoples.
In the course of the process, a consensus develops. There comes a point when everybody knows they are on the same page and action is taken.
Sometimes various people add information, like "The water supply is drying up and doesn't look like it will last the summer" or "Two of our neighbors are gearing up for a fight and right now we are right in the middle. I think the sooner we're out of here the better" or "On my way back here I noticed plentiful food about 250 clicks east of here," etc...
This mode of operation is of course more straightforward for them since it is their culture, They grew up with it. For us who didn't grow up with that paradigm, it will be necessary to relearn some things in order to master it. But we humans have the ability to learn new skills, knowledge, and perspectives throughout our lives, and it is known that doing so is very healthy, and education and cognitive activity are among the factors linked to a lower risk of dementia in later life (Lancet Commission, via Alzheimer Europe, 2024).
On the subject of learning better communication skills, the Nonviolent Communication approach developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg is one we would benefit from studying together (Center for Nonviolent Communication).
More useful books, cultures, web sites, scientific papers, social experiments, business and social models, and other helpful information is to be found. We will have the best success if we search and keep alert for information, knowledge, techniques, examples, precedents, and other sources and generously share that knowledge in large and small scale collaboration.
We will be erecting new paradigms and pioneering their implementation in the human community on a large scale. But the “territory” is not completely unexplored. We will benefit from the wisdom, observations, successes, failures, and experiences of those who have embarked upon versions of them before us.