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MTC's avatar

Good one. I feel pressed to add that many of these insights are common to the "crunchy" right wing that you covered recently. I'm old enough to have lived through 2 or maybe 1.5 back to the land movements that I witnessed and participated at the edges of in two countries. For the most part these experiments were not objectively successful and, as you mentioned, started from the left and tended to end up closer to the center right. That said, they had useful insights, which a truncated analysis and lack of perspective seems to have kept them from applying to themselves.

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Amy Yates's avatar

Interesting. Whats your take away from being a part of these movements?

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MTC's avatar
Jan 10Edited

Not sure that I took any really important insights from having been on collective farms in S. Korea and the Western U.S. Most of the people I met, and still know, were left of center and remained so, but overall the movement leaned rightward over the last half century. A trend that is not new and is well explained by the Hipcrime Vocab.

I'm really struggling to parse through my own thoughts on this as I write, which indicates how little analysis I have applied to my own experiences. There's so much good stuff in those efforts, the appropriate technology movement of the 70s, the analysis of petroleum depletion and energy return on investments of the peak oil movement, the environmental benefits of living simply and consuming less, the experiments with radical democracy that I associate with some of the communal efforts around agriculture and rural living. Some of the weaknesses were obvious and have become almost stereotypical. Almost of all of the experiments I saw involved religion, itself a declining force in post modern life, and almost all of them had a less than wholly realistic appreciation of the legal, economic, and material framework within which they had to operate.

They didn't all disappear. I have a friend who lived, maybe still lives, in the E. Wind Commune in Missouri. They are still there although I don't know what the social environment is like. The collective farms I saw in S. Korea are all still there but no longer collective. There are still two Shakers at a farm in Maine, the end of a 200+ year history of religious self sufficient communal life. And they are conservative but hardly right wing.

I guess my takeaways would be the obvious ones. Pay attention to what you believe and the principles upon which you are working as a movement, commune, collective... and make sure they jive with reality outside and inside that movement. Part of that would be taking what the movement believes to its possibly absurd but logical conclusion. Would it make sense if everyone did what the movement is proposing, are we really proposing anything? Just asking really fundamental questions about core beliefs/myths and operating realities. I notice, again obvious stuff, that disgruntled former communards often had edgy, if not outright right wing, ideas about collective efforts. So making it work seems to matter.

Many of these movements and groups had a dim view of material progress in general, associating it, perhaps rightly, with over consumption and environmental ruin. While their critique is good, an anti-development or anti-material progress narratives seem to lead to some fairly dark places. I would hope that isn't necessarily true because the critiques are necessary. They just need to be made with sympathy for the larger social realities that we live in. Fine to question growth but not, I think, to want to limit growth where it is most needed or to fail to understand what a lack of material progress might do to your own psychology over time.

It's difficult to sustain a belief or practice that isn't part of the mainstream and I notice that even the most vociferous advocates of non-mainstream beliefs end up not taking their own ideas that seriously or applying them in a meaningful way. John Michael Greer (one of the bloggers mentioned in the HV) seems like a good example. His theory of catabolic collapse and the associated ideas he started with in the Archdruid Report early in the 2000s, don't jive all that well with his current essays or his increasingly right wing fan base. This is often the case, right? You look at the history of a movement and end up wondering who is the real (fill in the blank)? True of larger leftist movements and even nations as well. I think an early sixties citizen of N. Korea would find the current state of affairs there shocking.

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Amy Yates's avatar

Thank you so much for your response! Really enjoyed reading it, learned from it and totally agree. I think that our species is fairly diverse and the diversity in thought and opportunity to explore varying aspects of our nature is essential for our wellbeing. There really is no utopia.

A project based and biological based approach to life makes more sense to me right now. I find it best to discovery community through shared efforts and not shared beliefs. And by using the biology of the earth snd ourselves as guides, we can appreciate more and be led by what works and not our thoughts.

I really find the right wing shift to be disheartening and feel that our leaders lack altruism. Power should be transferred and not accumulated. In a decade, I can’t see how it’s healthy to be a leader for more than 3 or so years. Usually by then the life force is stagnating and it’s time to start over with new energy.

I do hope we can get past the idea of growth and look at life more in cycles of change. Of course that means we need to idolize our own lives less, and maybe life itself less, and get on board with simply sharing time together and responding responsibly to the world around us

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