IS: Land-integrated intentional society
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I know a lot of people who dream of living in community (relational co-housing or co-living), and a lot of people who dream of living in greater connection to land (through farming or forest). I'm attracted to elements of both, myself — in my ideal society, greater connection to nature and humans would absolutely be integrated into every part of life and living as a bedrock norm of the culture.
The "how do we get there?" and "how do we succeed if/when we do get there?" questions motivate a lot of what we do inside Intentional Society: our emphasis on perspectival development and relational practices seem like prerequisites for being the kind of people that can create, maintain, and thrive in that kind of different-than-conventional society. If we can become the kind of people we want to be, then further structural and institutional reforms can support us in that being and becoming.
That path to structural development supporting our whole way of living, well that takes a lot more than "show up to video calls" to create that fully integrated and realized societal vision for ourselves. We generally know now that you can do an awful lot online in the space of human connection and development — and that it's not everything. We live in the physical world most of the time, and we want to be in secure/committed loving/learning relationships both offline and online.
"Just move to a commune/IC" doesn't seem like a viable move right now for me or most people. Even for post-conventional individuals it's too different, too big of a trust/commitment leap to make all at once, the economics are clunky, and the coordination challenge is immense. However. I've recently been seeing more concretely the potential matrix of different spaces that could support a human-first (vs land-first, which I think is the wrong order) societal reorganization that integrates land, and the journey support for people to move at a developmental-and-relational pace from conventional to intentional society.
The personal journey is one of connecting and of deepening over time — connection to self, connection to others, connection to systems/nature/whole. Whether virtual or local, it starts casually, very adjacent to "normal" world, in something like a VillageCo gathering. Those whom that field calls to deepen would find their way into a developmental-relational group like Intentional Society, developing post-conventional perspective-taking and the capacity for deep relating. Then the next layer is to build inter-dependent bonds with a small crew/squad/cell of trusted almost-family, at the economic (like Intentional Ventures is exploring) and life-support level.
You can notice that I've described a path inward through (roughly using Microsolidarity terminology) the crowd, congregation, and crew layers of connection and belonging. Thus far, I think this can all be done online. But! The dimension of IRL (in real life) starts to become more and more possible as your relational bonds get stickier and stronger. I think the trick here is to not force an abrupt cut-over to land-based stickiness. Stickiness isn't bad, in fact it's good (the antidote to this "atomized" age western culture), but we need intentional and trusted bonds, relational connections that help us bridge the virtual-to-physical gap.
The "physically move to" options [monastery, eco-village, intentional community, residency, neighborhood] should be done with your squad of ride-or-die homies, is I suppose my main point here. Which isn't to say that it can't be part of forming or reshaping that crew — It's just becoming more obvious to me that "move somewhere radical and hope the secure-loving-relationships part works out" is the primary killer of most intentional community dissolutions. (This is what I mean by land-first being the wrong order).
So yes this journey of connecting and deepening needs support in physical spaces too, and I've been to a few recently that are equipped to support various short-to-medium term incubation/experiments: Sites like Elkenmist and Atlan Center in my neck of the woods, and then of course Life Itself hubs and Future Thinkers Village and Liminal Village and many others globally, even pop-up cities like Edge Esmeralda. Some of these are focused on being learning villages of equipping, and some want to be long-term as well, with permanent-ish residents anchoring Dunbar-sized proto-B villages.
All these physical nodes together can support land-integrated intentional living journeys toward villages and even larger agglomerations of intentional society and culture. Adding land into a human-first web needs the larger web to support making those moves... If a squad wants to try land-integrated living (which takes ownership, not just renting a house together), it's a tough go on their own: tough to even gather enough resources, and you need marriage-level commitment to buy land together. But a honeycomb-village IC made up of discrete cells/squads... then you can get the benefits of deep land connection, the efficiency of shared resources and specialization, and the agility of a single group house. That agility bit points at the mesh web of villages at the next layer that would create more of the resilience and adaptability that so many ICs lack today.
The multi-depth, multi-location matrix of spaces and places required to support of these journeys from the conventional to the intentional... surely will take a movement, itself grown over time. Can Intentional Society turn into an intentional society? Potentially it's a movement that we can organize under the Second Renaissance banner, one that likely also qualifies as a network state too at some point. Relational and economic, virtual and physical, a society living out the next stage of cultural evolution.
if we play our cards right, ya know?
Cheers,
James