Another Hometree destroyed - Dale Farm eviction

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

If I was isolated, I would rapidly turn completely insane

I was not talking about isolation.
I was talking about small groups of people.
Imagine living together with friends rather than live alone.
In fact the paradox in a city is that it at the same time has massive amounts of people - but also people in fact are isolated. The remedy is then to visit friends or go to a club. So one shuts itself off from what makes a city - one does not interact with 99.9% of the people living there - does it still have a benefit for ones own well being to have all of them around? Or would it not be more rewarding to only have to deal with people one knows and not needing to ignore the others in the subway or street?

Certainly isolation is not good - most humans would go insane if they have to be completely alone and isolated. But I say that having too many people around is also damaging - in two ways, one is because one has to ignore these masses of people - you cannot say "hello, how are you" to every person you meet on the street - and the other is because this in fact leads to a certain isolation with people spending wuite some time sitting in their flats alone with a TV or computer.

As you peobably have the image now of me calling for people sitting around the campfire with no computers and no warm water, let me say that this is merely one option for this particular issue. There are plenty of "intentional communities" of all sorts - from co-housing to rural villages and in some of them people have their own house or flat, use computers all the time and watch TV. In addition they cook food together, have evenings around the campfire, work together to improve their community, maybe grow food together, take care of each others kids or pets and have weekly movie sessions with a video beamer.

Originally Posted by txim_asawl

indeed, a smaller, somewhat tribal-oriented group works best, considering group dynamics processes.

Thius has been said quite frequently here, that the ideals I advocate - more egalitarian, democratic, socially controlled structures in which each person has a meaningful task and place and is respected for what he does - that all this works only on a small scale and cannot be applied to mass society. The argument is then made that mass society is a given and that thus these ideals are impossible to be reached. Now what if mass society was not a given? I think it does not have to be and in fact it cannot be. It has to go because it causes so many problems. That does not by definition mean that people have to become trapped in tribal groups they do not like, that the only acceptable housing would be log huts and that people cannot have laptops - it just means that the immediate social vicinity of each person is overseeable. That a person can know his environment, the physical locality as well as the human and nonhuman beings living there. It does not mean he can not also travel, go someplace else, build new relationships or whatever - it just means that it makes much more sense to break down a mass society into smaller, cooperative pieces that in itself can show these otherwise idealistic or utopian properties of democracy, freedom, social support and relationship.