Chapter 30: Cultural and Philosophical Precedents

In planning and implementing the Transition, it is important to focus primarily on what we’re creating, our goals and priorities, not on the current paradigm that we’ll be phasing out and replacing. We already know that that paradigm is nonviable. We will succeed best if we are proactive, rather than reactive, focusing on where we’re going. We already know where we’ve been. We must start with a fresh canvas.

Decisions and actions made from a mindset of reacting against a nonviable or destructive paradigm or regime, often have mixed or negative results. Often one evil is thrown out in favor of another evil. We will need to avoid “anything is better than this” thinking.

We will benefit from examining information and ideas from a wide range of sources, from scientific papers to such documents as “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx, the U.S. Constitution, and The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi (1975), whose proposals for direct democracy, such as basic people’s congresses in which every adult takes part in decisions, are worth studying with two cautions. The book also argues that a society’s law should come from custom and religion, which this project does not share; we favor law made openly and democratically by the people it governs. And 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. That does not make the idea itself wrong. Regardless of whether or not the principles put forth in such documents were actually faithfully implemented, if the concepts are valid and work when actually applied, then they need to be taken into account. Nor are such ideas any one author’s: assemblies in which everyone takes part, and work among partners rather than employees, appear in New England town meetings, Switzerland’s Landsgemeinde in Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden, the councils of the Haudenosaunee, hunter-gatherer bands, the assembly of ancient Athens, worker cooperatives such as Mondragón, the kibbutz, the Paris Commune of 1871, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre since 1989, and the Zapatista communities’ rotating councils (see Chapter 12 and Documented Alternatives). We will do well to look far and wide to learn from individuals and cultures across the world in space and time.

We’ll also need to apply our own creativity and problem-solving skills to devise new solutions and implementations that may have never come up before the Transition. Our success will require us to remain self-aware, inquisitive and creative. We must never put ourselves or each other into a box or become narrow, closed-minded and dogmatic.

There are living and historical examples of paradigms with similar principles to what we will be implementing. The kibbutzim in Israel are one example. The author has also lived with a small semi-nomadic community that prefers to remain unnamed. In the author's experience, their culture is egalitarian, casteless, governed by a non-adversarial consensus process, symbiotic and mutually-empowering. When a decision has to be made, everyone gathers, including children; each person speaks in turn, and nobody interrupts. This closely resembles the talking-circle traditions documented among many Indigenous peoples. The value they place on this way of life is evidenced by their conscious shared decision, many generations ago, to go to great lengths and make great sacrifices to keep it intact. In their case, this paradigm wasn’t implemented after a Transition from something else. It has always been their culture, which they value in the face of the many alternatives that they see in the world. It comes “naturally” to them. For us who will Transition from the current paradigm, a learning curve will need to be navigated as we learn how to operate along those principles. There is good evidence that it is achievable.

There is a web site devoted to Nonviolent Communication (Center for Nonviolent Communication) which is a good resource for people who want to learn the interpersonal communication skills that we’ll need. There are most likely other similar resources as well. We’ll do best if we share such resources and make liberal use of them.

If we scour the Internet, libraries, academic institutions and such, we will find multiple sources of techniques, principles, observations, knowledge, failed and successful experiments, and more that will help us greatly in filling in the details in implementing our new paradigm.

While it’s true that a paradigm like this includes some uncharted territory, there are definite sources of information that will be supremely valuable as starting points from which to learn. Others have trod some of these trails before, and we can learn a lot from them.