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Thursday, December 29, 2005 Neighbor post(Note: I recently posted the following paper on the Ideas and Opinions board in my neighborhood of Twin Oaks community.) Sweet are the uses of Austerity Piankhy 11/17/05 When I first came to Twin Oaks I wrote an O and I paper about healthy vs. unhealthy economies. I spoke about malproduction, malconsumption, maldistribution and mal-employment as all equally present and dominant in a sick economy. About malconsumption specifically I wrote, “When anesthesia is the primary commodity, pain is the primary reality” and tried to point out how it is the pain of a meaningless life (a fear-based, alienated “life” dedicated to distraction from the relationships, responsibilities and destinies inherent in existing at all) that makes so much anesthetic Malconsumption necessary. I also tried to describe what a healthy progressive economy of Good Consumption, Good Production, Good Employment, and Good Distribution might look like in general and here at T.O. in particular. I don’t remember getting much response to all this by anybody one way or the other. Since then we have lost the ability to consume as much as we used to. The easiest response to such an event is to try to maintain the status quo by various means such as expanding Tofu etc. and that is what we have done. It seems though, that we are having trouble motivating ourselves to do the amounts and kinds of work that is implied in this response. I imagine that in part such a lack of enthusiastic response is due to the less-than-consensual way, that the decision was made to move in this direction. And I think that there are other reasons. But I think that on a deeper level such reluctance is based on the same impulse to lead a different and more meaningful kind of life that brings people into community at all—even to a community such as Twin Oaks. I mean, the opportunity to live in fear, in addiction, and in denial of the inevitability of death and change, to trade Living for survival, to sacrifice the present moment as well as the long term future for short term illusory “security” and “comfort”, --all of this is available everywhere. It is the very “American Way of Life”, in defense of which our country is willing to kill or suppress anybody from anywhere. Needless to say, none of this is very inspiring and attempts to make it seem inspiring have very much the same vapid quality as those corporate managerial pep talks that are intended to make you feel guilty for not dedicating your soul with genuine enthusiasm to the efficient and impeccable production of electric toothbrushes, eyeliner, or any number of stupid things that don’t need to exist in the first place and that shouldn’t be produced in that way if they did. What attracted me to the vision of Twin Oaks when I first came there, at least as it was expressed in the By Laws , was the stated commitment to moving toward a less competitive and more ecologically sustainable world. I felt that I could fit my own intention to Live and not just survive, and my own conceptions of healthy culture quite nicely into such a vision. I neither looked for, nor do I remember seeing any guarantee of some constant level of consumption. I understood myself to be agreeing to work, to do the work of surviving, not for the sake of survival and consumption itself, but for the sake of Living and the vision of responsible Living that I felt I shared—at least in part--with the writer of the bylaws and with the other people who were here. I don’t believe that such a vision and such motivations are completely dead here and I think that some latent reluctance to participate in a moving even further away from that is in some part behind our so-called “labor problems”. To continue a metaphor alluded to earlier, we seem to be being exhorted to a kind of economic warfare for the protection of a “way of life” that no longer seems to reflect the ideals or spirit of the “original constitution”. Though some people seem to mistake the soldierly camaraderie of combat (competition, business) itself as real and meaningful community, regardless of what is being fought for, others have more conscience and more good will than that. We all do on some level and the tension between that level and the more superficial levels in us that are eager to pretend that courage and loyalty lie in defending rather than challenging a way of “life” that has in large part become a distraction from every thing that really matters, is I think the source of the problems. At this point, it seems more likely than not that this deeper voice, the voice on behalf of which I am writing, will ultimately be drowned out by the distractions and phony problems of the response we have so far chosen to the “threat to our way of Life”, which Pier Ones’ dropping us constituted. It’s more than likely that people will scare and shame themselves into being ‘good soldiers” and the status quo will be regained and even strengthened. Still, I feel that its kind of my duty to express that this does not have to be our response to “Austerity” even now. Even now we could decide to put surviving in its place (it makes a good servant but a terrible master) both by letting the choices that are being forced on us be guided by the spirit of the bylaws rather than by the spirit of fear and inertia, and by recommitting to the work of Living that I think is the essence of that sprit. Of course I have my own ideas of what this means and of how it could be done; others have theirs. The point of this paper is just to share the concern and to start the conversation. Since my posting of what you have just read, I have come to the understanding that Twin Oaks (which is close to 40 years old as a community) is on the verge of, or at the beginning of, some kind of communal Mid-life Crisis. I am hoping it will be a healing crisis and that we will come out on the other side of it as people having had the courage to affirm and act on the things that really matter in the face of inevitable change and dissolution. I think that in our case (and I have already broached this subject in a recent meeting) this affirmation may involve our becoming a different kind of non-profit (perhaps a hybrid of the 501d we are, some kind of educational 501c3, and a land trust) , as well as the re-evaluation and restructuring of our system in the light of our renewed commitment to egalitarianism, cooperation, and healthy ecological ways of life. It seems clear to me that the present unhealthy economic system, having evolved out of the dominant culture of Apart-ness, Competition, Alienation, exploitation and the factional identity politics of patriarchy, racism, and nationalism etc, is in implicit and structural denial of all of the values we say we affirm as a community. I am thinking that a non-profit status for Twin-Oaks will not only reflect this truth to ourselves and to the world, but that it would also help in the restructuring by leading us to examine and correct the ways in which those values have been distorted and, in some cases, compromised all together, within our own institutions, by our accommodation to capitalist imperatives. I would like to be at Twin Oaks to help all of this happen, but I think time is not on my side. My stay at the community is becoming more precarious as conflicts between myself and some of these very compromised institutions increase. A particular example of this is me getting fired as a result of asserting my self in a conflict with someone who manages an area where I work. The Manager system at Twin Oaks is a somewhat dubious compromise of egalitarianism in the interests of competitive efficiency. Managers do not get any more allowance or any more credit for the work they do than anyone else here (though they can manage things so they do the more of the kind and amount of work they want in their area), but some compensate for this (at least some of the time) by misusing the power they have to bully or intimidate, or preemptively reject, members of their crews and otherwise feed neurotic preferences or egotistical urges. Such people are not necessarily bad people and often they are not even conscious of what they are doing. And since the only requirement for being a manager seems to be a willingness to be one, some managers simply don’t know how to deal with other people very well at all. I personally don’t believe we need managers—various crews have gotten along fine for long periods without them—and so I have never tried to be one. I confess actually to a tendency to ignore hierarchies (which tend, after all to be non-egalitarian, factional identities) and relate to others equally as Individual-Persons, expecting the same from them. Such a way of behaving has more than once led to the kind of assertiveness (not aggressiveness, I don’t think, but just unthinking acts of self-respect) that is just not going to fit in with any kind of “command and control” managerial style. I want to say that it is also true to that, since I am always putting the work of Living over the work of surviving in my life, I don’t usually make for the most efficient employee. I am usually only “good enough” at jobs that are only about survival and the status quo and I don’t apologize for this. If being a responsible individual-person and a good capitalist worker are mutually exclusive identities—and very often they are—I will always end up choosing the former. As a result of this I got in a verbal argument with one of my managers which I guess happened out of accumulative frustration about co’s preference for putting up nasty notes rather than even once talking face to face with her co-workers about any mistake or problem. The inciting incident seemed to be my own initiative (after some few written exchanges between us) in taking down some insulting “reminders”—all written yells, full of bold print multiple underlines and exclamation points, broadcast to all but usually only the result of one persons error, and replacing them with polite signs containing the same reminders but with “pleases” and “thank yous”. This got me another note which threatened me with being fired. On seeing my “boss” and being refused either a mediated or unmediated discussion about the issue, an argument ensued (I hadn’t meditated yet that day) and I ended up getting fired. Up to this point this particular manager had never once communicated with me about work (although I guess co talked about me a lot to others) either in writing or verbally, in two years. Any way, at the moment I am short of enough work to make my labor quota, and am sort of discouraged about the likelihood of the whole thing repeating itself with whatever new manager I end up working with. Power corrupts and exploits, and the pressures of capitalism and competition in general all push even the best intentioned in that direction, even at a place like Twin Oaks. So maybe I should leave. The question of course, is not whether or not to fight this trend but whether or not there are other places where I would have more success in fighting it. How really likely is it that Twin Oaks’s mid-life crisis will be met with courage and honesty—even with my presence there? Is there enough tinder here to support the fire of healing that I want to start, or is it so soggy that I will end up having my own fire extinguished by trying? And can I become hot enough to light even such an increasingly soggy situation and still make quota? Is there better tender somewhere? Where is the best place for me to catalyze my own healing together with that of others and the world? Or, rather than leave, should I try to become a manager myself? Or even a planner? Is it not better to have persons who really believe in the spirit of the bylaws and who don’t believe in hierarchy, in places of power than those who are likely to succumb to it? And yet would not such a compromise constitute a character weakening false position? Or is it just good sense under the circumstances? I don’t know, but what I know about my self is that, in the long run, I am probably more prone to the trap of arrogant rejection of others than to that of ingratiating submission. Which I guess is an argument for staying on for the time being. The Idea though, is to meet the challenge in a positive, creative, and sophisticated way that falls into neither of those extremes and that is equally friendly and compassionate to my self and to this community, which in some ways is a really miraculous place. Right now I think the best thing to do is to do my best to keep up my practice of healthy culture here while applying my imagination and creativity to the problem, whether the problem ends up being how best to leave or how best to stay, in this neighborhood. Supplement: By way of an epilog, my “boss”, who was trying to hand over the manager job anyway before all this happened (she tried to justify her behavior to me as trying to turn over the job “worry free” to someone else), quit early and the new manager said she would start with a clean slate. So, so I have my “job” back and the situation is at least temporarily resolved, though I don’t like it that my ex-boss (who is not any more a “bad-person” than anyone else) is probably still mad at me. And of course the potential is just as present for the whole thing to repeat itself with this or some other manager. posted by: piankhy | 21:21 | comments Wednesday, December 14, 2005 Life-Dance entry
Neighbor: Must success come as a healing crisis? Individual-Persons become“Men” and “Women (when that means more than genitals) out of weakness and fear more than anything else. Gender roles are unnecessary uniforms whose poor fit reveals itself in proportion to ones self-knowledge. “Coming-out” as an Individual-Person seems to mean renouncing them as more of the identity politics of faction. But to do this sustainably requires human courage of a very high degree. I have tries this “publicly” in my neighborhood requesting a second person references of “co” or “z’” or “P”). Will my community help me here? Even If they don’t it was a good and neighborly gesture. Citizen-of-the-world: Volunteering at a community center in c-ville. Mostly organized by anarchists. Again, the factional identity politics, the challenge of coming-out as an individual-person (I almost feel this must be without qualification now). I will try to give a workshop there soon which might do the trick in a way that individual conversation doesn’t seem to. Am I ready for this? Do I have inner consensus for this? Is it too Public? I am life-dancing a little with L At least we are still rubbing the sticks if healthy ritual together even if only at long distance. Still more smoke than fire. Support. And what of my Blogs? –My pamphlet? Listening…Soul: More clarity here but less practice. No longer going to UU church. Apart-ness and competition seem sometimes to be the very essence of creeds. Have yet to find a reliable venue especially suitable for the cultivation of Good Faith. Do I need one? I think the world needs one. Am I ready to create one? Listening... There must be many people who are non-dogmatic without being complacent. (I suppose complacency itself implies a kind of dogmatism even if it is unconscious). Is agnosticism different?Individual: Back and forth with eating. Still mostly raw I think. As with so many other things, sensitive to the one-sided projections of others in this regard. Still doing a good amount of Chi Gung. Could meditate more often. A vision quest this winter? Next one at old rag or white oak. The Facilitation Breath is a great invention/discovery and is still alive in me. Still doing Life-Dance parties alone and with others. Slacking a little on check-ins. Listening…more life-dance walks, more cleaning of my room, less reading perhaps…more writing perhaps…all the same something is happening to my energy…alternately feel strong, vulnerable, on the verge of transcendence and perpetually in healing crisis…Is this individuation? Family: Sign-making project for tupelo.
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thanks to squidfingers for the background