Monday Morning Manifesto

Toward an initiatic, no-ownership society

To be honest, I haven’t read this book, but I read Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom, which makes the same arguments. I agree with him. The concept is, basically, what I am proposing. I think that AI, which is currently “decoding and synthesizing” reality, could be used to re-code and resynthesize reality, according to these principles.

Every now and then, I feel the need to declare my political position and propose my activist action plan. Here I intend to do this in the clearest, simplest possible terms — after that, if you want, we can argue about it.

I believe that the best way to do this is, first, to envision the world I would actually like to see. Then I will work backward to define the steps to achieve it.

I imagine this is how Steve Jobs built the iPhone, which must have seemed an impossible dream at first: First, Jobs had the vision. Then he had to assemble all of the puzzle pieces he would need — supply chains, rare minerals, software, hardware — to make it happen. This took many years.

Probably we can all agree that the way things are going now, human civilization will soon collapse and our species will most likely go extinct. Therefore, people must be ready, on some level, for a truly radical alternative or a new fantastic adventure.

Personally, I desire a future world where everyone, more or less, is turned on, psyched, inspired, happy, and in a continuous flow state most of the time. I believe this is, more or less, our innate, natural condition, as children show us. Therefore, I want everyone — anyone who wants it — to have access to ecstatic states and direct experience of transcendence, as well as compassionate care and support, whenever they need it. I would like work to be voluntary, with people’s basic needs (food, housing, healthcare) met in a secure fashion by society as a whole.

The Earth Is Hardware; Ideology Is Software

Of course, we must take into account the “hardware” of our planetary reality (minerals, plants, fossil fuels, fresh water) and the “software” of human language, culture and ideology, which manifests as political, economic, and social systems. While we can, theoretically, upgrade and fine-tune the software in many ways, we can’t as easily change the hardware. This means we have to accept limitations (at least temporarily — eventually, perhaps, we can learn how to mine asteroids and build settlements on other planets. I don’t think this should be our immediate priority, however).

At the moment, we find the great mass of humanity imprisoned in a post-industrial global consumer monoculture that exploits, controls, and extracts. Through our daily activities, we rapidly degrade the "natural capital” of the Earth, causing mass species extinction, and so on. For the most part, people are not even having a wonderful time while participating in this entropic desecration. Unsurprisingly, many feel guilty, detached, alienated, and depressed.

In my desired future world, we want the people of the world consuming the absolute minimum while they experience joy, love, connection (with each other and with nature), and transcendence to the absolute maximum.

Luckily, joy, love, connection and transcendence are cheap thrills. In fact, if a community is designed well and people feel a shared sense of mission and purpose, they get all of those great things as free bonuses. Therefore, rebuilding — designing templates for — local, participatory communities based on trust, shared experiences of joy, and mutual empathy has to be an essential part of the package.

Because we have radically overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth, we essentially need everyone (except those who contribute to the quality of existence through their creative expression) to focus on work that enhances the resilience of our communities or the Earth’s regenerative capacities. At least for the time being, until we come back into some kind of balance.

Therefore, we must eliminate most (if not all) forms of debt, mortgages, rents, and so on. In fact, we have to radically redesign our economic system so that it supports collective human and planetary flourishing.

Also, there is no reason that people who work in certain fields (finance, speculation) should be rewarded so excessively while so many other human beings — due to bad luck or sad circumstances — grovel for bare existence. We are, after all, one human family. It is time that we acted like one. This means that capital must be distributed far more equitably.

If not absolutely equalized, the amount of wealth that separates the poorest person in society from the richest should be limited to some generally agreed-upon fraction. Say, something like 1/5th. After all, in my future social model, people’s basic needs are taken care of and they no longer pay rents or have debts, so there is little need for large excesses. The richest person can possess no more than five times what the poorest person has: To be honest, 1/5th still feels like a compromise to me, but compromises are sometimes necessary.

This massive reduction in wealth inequality will have incalculable social and cultural benefits.

With wealth apportioned sensibly and all work directed at the urgently necessary mission of replenishing the Earth and restoring healthy and participatory communities, we can get down to business together.

We will finally live in a world that is intelligent, kind, and makes sense, unlike the current situation, which is stupid, cruel, and incoherent.

I mentioned “transcendence,” above. One of my pet theories is that humanity’s future — if we are going to have a future — will involve a polarity reversal. Instead of focusing on material accumulation and physical attainment as the main goal, we will focus on the exploration and intensification of consciousness and subtle levels of super-sensible perception. We will seek to investigate the wide variety of what Professor Tom Roberts calls “mind-body states.” This includes various forms of trance as well as “miracles” such as the mastery of subtle energy systems, telepathic seances, lucid dreams, astral projections. As a collective societal goal, we will support those who seek self-realization, leading, ultimately, to attaining the rainbow body at death, as we find in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

Another way to explain this is that we will return to the age-old focus on initiatory discipline and applied shamanic technologies for helping the individual reach a level of realization or enlightenment, as a social project. This will have many positive effects on society as a whole. As Manly P Hall writes in The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

The time will come when the secret wisdom shall again be the dominating religious and philosophical urge of the world. The day is at hand when the doom of dogma shall be sounded. The great theological Tower of Babel, with its confusion of tongues, was built of bricks of mud and the mortar of slime. Out of the cold ashes of lifeless creeds, however, shall rise phoenixlike the ancient Mysteries. … The unfolding of man’s spiritual nature is as much an exact science as astronomy, medicine or jurisprudence. To accomplish this end religions were primarily established; and out of religion have come science, philosophy, and logic as methods whereby this divine purpose might be realized.

The Dying God shall rise again! The secret room in the House of the Hidden Places shall be rediscovered.

What we are seeing today with the elite’s fascination with psychedelics, meditation, mindfulness, transformational festivals, and so on, is a crucial indicator of where our attention, as a species, is moving. Let’s accelerate that momentum.

We are, right now, in a dire state of emergency: We confront an ecological catastrophe that threatens all of us, rich and poor. No matter what we do, this crisis will deepen in the next years and decades. Everything we count on for stability and security is under threat. But we are frozen, incapable of addressing the crisis with  comprehensive and rigorous logic from within the current system. Once again, this tells us that profound systemic change is needed.

Toward a No Ownership Society

I realize that many people will immediately reject my ideal future state as a form of Communism, repeating the stereotyped idea that Communism and socialism are failed ideologies. As a matter of fact, my view goes beyond Communism: I do not think the “State” or the workers should own the “means of production” or whatever. I think we should go further and eliminate the concept of ownership entirely.

In the Middle Ages, they employed a legal concept of “usufruct”: You have the right to continue using something — a house, a tool, a garden — as long as you are using it productively. I consider usufruct a reasonable basis for a sane society, rather than ownership.

The elimination of ownership will create a lot more spaciousness for the individual and for communities. Obviously, for people to live together harmoniously in a post-ownership society, there will have to be a great deal of trust between them. At the moment, social trust has largely been broken. It seems very difficult, almost impossible, to restore it. But it can be restored.

We will probably need something like a period of general amnesty and forgiveness — forgiveness of past crimes, sins, and debts. This will require a process of confession, perhaps some kind of restorative justice leading to a collective absolution and restitution. The past must be made transparent, assimilated, so we can walk together into a guilt-free future world.

This brings me to a crucial aspect of both the “What” and the “How” of my future ideal: To a great extent, what I am envisioning will be a new human society, marked by a new quality of illumination, by the revelation of the Sacred, by ongoing communion with the divine presence that expresses itself through all natural and worldly phenomena.

In other words, the basis of this new society is an initiatory “religion” (with no dogma or hierarchy) that sweeps from the elite sectors to the multitudes in a short period of time, based on compassionate action and selfless sharing. In other words, “unconditional love” becomes a living activity rather than an abstract ideal.

Next time, I will explore this future model in more depth and also propose the steps needed to bring it about. Also, I have the URL therevolution.io, which, for those interested in helping with this project, we could use as a launchpad. Let me know in the comments if you want to get involved.