Monday, February 23, 2009

only you can prevent false scarcity

I have been increasingly thinking about survivalism. Today I read a post from the Washington Post about this computer programmer guy and his family. They (he?) figured out the safest place in the world based on a number of criteria and decided to relocate to New Zealand. Not sure having things like that broadcast in articles confirms the status, and I've thought of relocating to places ranging from the rural locales outside the city where I live to the Canadian Maritimes, British Columbia, Virginia, a Caribean island, Hawaii, somewhere in central or South America (Costa Rica, Belize,Venezuela, Chile, Peru, Argentina, ) to Europe, the steppe, anywhere peaceful, and relatively uninhabited.
What I came to realize a bit earlier, it's not where you locate, it's who you locate with. Maybe I'll be fine just outside of town, or even in town, who knows. What I do know is that it will be different everywhere. I know that I don't want to be an outsider stranded halfway around the world from where I belong.
So I had an idea to form a survivalist collective with friends and family. I will ask people who I know if they are interested in agreeing to try to meet up and find each other somewhere safe and liveable. We can come up with ideas and probably multiple networks and work on pooling our resources without dislocating and bugging out too early.
I'm not your typical survival type. I believe a society is reinforced by it's tolerance and it's ability to resolve conflicts in ways that benefit the most people. I believe education as a tool of critical thought is the defacto foundation for sound decision making crucial to any participatory democratic society. I am pro gun, pro self defense, eco-imperitive, anti authoritarian, inclusive wealth equals sharing anomaly. The next world will be on a smaller scale, with spiritual challenges and rewards, with human interaction and celebration the root source of our will to go on as opposed to the techno-economic straightjacket that suffocates us and ransoms us out piecemeal with paychecks and gadgetry. I believe rent and interest equals exploitation, and things on too large of a scale poison their surroundings . We should only pay as far as things cost, and scale can yield us a livealble sustainable world with plenty of room for everybody to contribute what they are good at, or to further develop what they could be good at. Overcoming the scarcity mindset is a meditative purpose of mindfulness. Also, by the time we actually produce the things that sustain each other we will find the cure to 90% of mental illness and alienation we experience currently. We will experience the evaporation of the idiocy of opinion replaced with the dull grit of practicality which can polish us into something evolved instead of obscuring us in a cloud of hot air. The fall will be marked with people dying foolish deaths and in as far as society can prevent sectarian bloodshed such as has been found in Iraq, sub saharan Africa, or Afghanistan so will it be successful. Once a place goes down that road, don't expect it to end, time to move on. So we have to preserve peace in as far as possible and first order is destroying conventional notions of ownership and distribution to alleviate the despair that would otherwise arise from false scarcity, thereby restoring a sense of community where we are all ultimately responsible to each other to preserve the liveability of our surroundings and the safety of our families and friends.

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