Living in Place

    Living in place is the mirror opposite of The Great American Dream (TR).

Since World War II, we’ve been taught to desire more, bigger, longer, lower, wider, faster. We’ve been taught that Growth is Good, large is better, more is essential and adequate is never enough. Grow or die. If you’re not moving forward, you’re going backwards. Stagnation is failure.

Our heroes have been fast heroes: pilots, astronauts, winners of races. Even our politics is couched in terms of speed. We run for office, we win the race. We have frontrunners, laggers behind. In sports we’re Number one or we’re nothing.

This is not “human nature,” even if there were such a thing. Human nature is a bell curve of human behavior that goes from one extreme to the other, with a large mass of average in the middle. There is no human nature that is common to all humans.

There are, however, societies that reward and encourage specific human behaviors, and sanction and discourage other behaviors. Thus, in a society that rewards effort with monetary gain, we reward greed and avarice,  we abhor sloth and indolence, we look up to those who make the most money, who acquire the most things and who rule the most subservient humans.

Living in Place embraces the concept of “Enough.” Living in Place is a society that rewards conservation, thrift, curation, savings, and true conservatism. Living in Place is a society that knows the natural biological and geophysical limits of place and joyfully and creatively lives within those limits, as do all other living things.

Living in Place is the wave of the future. Why not climb aboard now and avoid the rush?

Self-Responsibility

The central principle of anarchism is self-responsibility. We cannot take care of each other unless we first and foremost take care of ourselves.

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.” Ed Abbey

We manage our own lives in ever expanding waves of inclusion that work their way outwards from between our ears to the entire planet. Self-interest is planetary interest. NIMBYs are us!

Along about twenty-five years of age, or thereabouts, we become responsible for our faces. Before that time, we are mainly a product of our parents and the socioeconomic realm into which we are born.

Once emancipated, however, we take on that responsibility to ourselves. True, there are some who find themselves in relatively greater systems of oppression, from which it is more difficult, though not impossible, to escape. And yes, some folks have health challenges to deal with in various degrees of difficulty. No one is dealt a double deck. No one gets out alive. It’s hard and it’s fair.

At some point we are all responsible for our face.

There is a widespread liberal attitude in the United States that society is somehow responsible for “poverty,” “disease” and “ignorance,” and that society owes us a living, health care and a “good” education. This has lead to the grandest welfare state in history, within which we still have ignorant, unhealthy people living in poverty.

It seems to me that the responsibility of society rests solely in lifting the oppression from individual humans imposed by other humans, and human institutions, thus allowing free human self-responsibility the fullest expression. When human social institutions decide for us what constitutes poverty, health and education, our self-expression is limited, curtailed, molded into a form decided by others rather than ourselves. We become caricatures of human beings, doomed to forever repeat ourselves as technocratic Xerox copies piled into the future.

I think it would be better to take control of our own health, seek medical intervention only for gross traumatic injury and life-threatening illness, if then; to decide for ourselves what level of consumption we wish to pursue, what level of pecuniary recompense fulfills our needs; and most of all, to direct our education in directions we find personally satisfying and rewarding, attending the school of life from birth to death: no classes, no bells, no diplomas.

Some call this anarchy, some, including myself, prefer to think of it as democracy, democracy taken serious.

Hayduke
Twin Lakes
Pacific Plate