Intentional Society: This is hard
hard and possible and beautiful, all incredibly so...
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What has struck me this week is a re-recognition that what we're trying to do together is hard. I say this not because we're struggling or have had a setback, but simply because culture and humans are so complex, and that complexity so interwoven and unconscious, that it's quite rare and unusual to be even attempting something like this.
This thing we are attempting is to create and inhabit a new and better culture together — a transformed and transformative way-of-being that supports a stable field of high human capacity and fluidity. We want to find it, live it, and see it well enough to keep it and spread it!
Most people don't even see their "way of being" as being a thing, since it's indistinguishable from the default culture they're swimming in. Then most of those that do see a "better world that our hearts know is possible" don't know how to "find the others" to try to get there communally, and get diverted into "self help" and internal (only) change. Most of those that do seek transformative community, well, the many failures of intentional communities are louder than the successes, and then most of the successes seem pretty inaccessible or un-replicable.
There doesn't exist a set of cultural rules that will make a community culture metastable within the ocean of conventional culture all around it. It's a chicken-and-egg bootstrapping of both people and process, being and doing, holding and having. This is hard.
But it seems possible, and we've already started doing part of it! There's a flywheel already spinning, and gradually increasing the weight, speed, and momentum of that flywheel seems accessible to us through our core motion of awareness-acceptance-integration. Perhaps it will fly apart at some point when the gravitational shearing of the difference from conventional culture becomes too great to bear. Or get stuck/limited/capped by that difference rather than breaking.
But I'm struck by not just the difficulty, but also the opportunity. Standing on the shoulders of all past giants and giant societies, we see farther in a way that indicates that it may have just now become possible, after all human history, to be able to access a higher plane of the landscape in a metastable way that needn't tumble right back down the hillside. The birth and blossoming of this beautiful dream orients me, and anyone else (inside or outside Intentional Society) that can see it, to walk toward it one step at a time, through patches of fog but guided by the pull of the dazzling moonlight.
Do you see it? Does it call to you? Come see if we feel the same gravity, the same possibilities, and perhaps share the path to get there while already being there, bit by bit.
Cheers, James