1. Are you actually proposing that everyone live this way?

We are not telling people what to believe, or even to believe anything. The design specifications are written to help those interested in sustainability and flourishing to look into and unravel a “bigger picture” that may facilitate the emergence of a more fulfilling societal environment. The specifications provide a common base of understanding. We are all explorers here, and what we have written is just some of the exploration that has come before and our integration thereof. With that said, it is true that we are proposing a particular way of living that could be scaled up to the population size of the planet, so it would be false to say that were aren’t proposing a way of living for everyone.

One could call the project an experimental approach to living differently with the recognition that the socio-economic system we have now is also an experimental approach to living. In fact, we have learned a lot about ourselves and the ecological tolerances of the planet over the last several millennia, though particularly in the modern era. And with the knowledge we have acquired it only seems reasonable that we can do better, we can live better for ourselves and we can be better stewards. We can live with greater well-being, greater fulfillment and greater abundance, while concurrently existing in regenerative harmony with the earth, as that which gives us all life, and is fundamentally the lifeground of all of our beings while we are here.

Right now, most people on the planet are living in a way proposed and imposed by others, mostly long dead. Conversely, we are not here to impose a particular way of living on anyone. No one can be coerced or imposed into community. Community will either be participated in by those who understand it for what it is, or it won’t exist.

One could say that the ultimate goal of this direction is to increase the standard of living for 100% of the population, not just the 99% or the 1%. This means that whatever solution we have to offer has to be an improvement for the 1% AND the 99%.

2. You are trying to destroy my way of life.

Yes, and no. It is true that this project represents an attempt to change the way the majority of us live. However, the system we propose is entirely voluntary; it represents a suggestion to change, and there is no force applied to change. The question to ask is this, “Is our current way of life actually worth keeping?” Does the current way of life bring suffering, war, poverty, hunger, social stratification, violence, addiction, and stress to essentially the entire world? It is essential to recognize that the structure of modern society is not capable of providing a high standard of living to everyone, nor can it ensure the well-being of the environment. Even someone who is succeeding in the current system will often have to spend much of their time performing pointless tasks that they would rather not do, while contributing to environmental destruction and slave labor. Therein, sustainability, economic efficiency, and resource preservation are the enemy of the current, dominating economic system. It is up to the individual to decide which way of living is more desirable: pointless toil, environmental destruction, and suffering versus an emergent design that continuously reassess to ensure environmental balance and human prosperity.

We are not trying to impose this system on you, or on anyone. More precisely, we are not imposing anything on you. We are presenting an alternative.

We recognize that only a voluntary system can actually meet our needs. When people are forced into a relationship, the relationship is unlikely to be of great quality. If, for example, you are forced to pay for meals at a restaurant, then the restaurant is highly unlikely to be customer sensitive.

We are not trying to convince anyone of anything. All we are trying to do is logically derive and design a new system, and then ask, does this not make you curious for what life could be like. The more we ignore and push evidence underground, the more dangerous we make life for everyone. Fear inhibits our exploration. Curiosity causes us to invent a torch as a tool for which we may explore the darkness and the unknown. To value curiosity doesn’t mean we can or should give up our sense of skepticism or cautiousness, which is different than fear; it is still a forward movement, but doing so while being careful and aware.

3. You are proposing a centralized system and I will dismiss it as such.

By calling this a “centralized system” and dismissing it as such, you are essentially trying to put us in a straw-man box that you have likely been given instructions on arguing against.

It actually takes quite a bit of time to explain the classification of the economic decision system. We classify the model as systems-based, access-based, resource-based, and participative-based. If you are interested in how we classify this system and its relationship to centralization, decentralization, and distributed networks, then we recommend that you read the subsection of the Decision System specification called “Classification of the Economic Decision Model”. Be aware that it is a long section, and it includes appendices.

To simply label the model as a “centralized system” shows a lack of diligence in applied effort to understand that which we are putting forward. It also reveals, to some degree, the assumptions being made about the system. Every system has some degree of centralization, otherwise it wouldn’t be a ‘system’. The decision system itself is simply an emergently designed model, commonly developed and informed by a distributed, open community of sharing and cooperating users.

In the real world there is complexity. And, a system which is efficient is simple. What we are proposing is simple, and yet also fairly complex; it is simplex.

Is bitcoin a distributed or centralized system? Bitcoin follows the bitcoin protocol and bittorrent does similarly with its own central protocol; however, the use of the system is distributed and power therein is decentralized.

Also, notice how in order to communicate with one another we need commonality. A community is the notion that there exists commonality at all scales, and when we recognize this, then we can intentionally plan our designs to construct more fulfilling and sustainable creations for all of us. Herein, we as humans are the designers, the users, and the operators of the community systems that provide for our fulfillment. In community, we do not construct institutions or encode abstract transaction mediums, which represent a barrier to feedback, and ultimately, our fulfillment. It is true that some of the systems in the Community are automated, but those systems are designed, used, and operated by us (not by some external profit/power seeking entity).

Furthermore, community is not a centralized political system with a centralized justice system based on retribution. It is not composed of a special group of decision-makers with a special right to threaten others, as is the case with systems of political and judicial centralization. Instead, community involves an explicit, transparent, and objective decision process common to all and informed by all. Herein, we apply restorative justice practices in place of retributive justice as a neuroscientific way forward. Fundamentally, if there is a central authority [committee, department, institution, figure, or whatever], then there is not community. One could say that in community, decisions occur central to users, and not central to industry, business and capital, bureaucracy, or some other “rightful” power player or authority.

In community, users reflect how much care and interest there is in fulfilling a particular need or want without the layers of abstraction, hidden motivations, and violence of competing forces, which are ever present in government and in the market. Human and ecological signals are what we care about in community, not “market signals” or “political signals” (as threats from authorities).

A centralized social control system often institutes a system of education controlled by its own authority. The Lifestyle System Standard describes why the Community is not that sort of environment and it describes the harm to fulfillment that such an environment creates. Among community, the individual has control over their own education.

4. You want to put a supercomputer in charge of my life.

We do not want a computer in charge of our lives, and we have not designed a system that would lead to such a circumstance. More than likely, you are probably misunderstanding (or have not read into) the Community’s decisioning system. The decisioning system is detailed in the Decision System Specification, and it is designed specifically to facilitate human fulfillment in a sustainable manner. We are in charge of our own lives and we have designed the decision system to facilitate the synergy of our efforts and the coordination of resources to generate a dynamic of greater access and opportunity for all of us. Further, engineers do not controls anyone, they just work in their particular discipline(s).

Therein, our automation systems do not exist to control our lives. They are designed by us, and for us, to facilitate our fulfillment. The same cannot necessarily be said about automation systems programmed and run by businesses and governments. One can easily imagine an authoritarian dystopian future where automated driverless cars are accessible to police such that they could use the networked system to force someone to pull over whenever and wherever they want. In community, we realize that the more you give an authority control over your life, the more likely the authority is to abuse it.

The specifications of the computing systems we use in community are composed based upon a set of fulfillment- and sustainability-oriented design parameters. These systems are not designed to make up threats, to issue threats, or to follow through with any threat.

Do you know the show “Star Trek: The Next Generation”? In that show there exists a main computer program for the Enterprise space ship. This computer is entirely under human control by design. It can lock doors, put out fires, establish security parameters, handle navigation, monitor life support systems, sometimes self-repair, and so on. But it will never exceed its boundaries defined by the humans that have designed and programed that computer. The technology in the community will serve whatever purposes human users, whom are also the designers and operators, intend it to.

Here, it may be of interest to note that in the show “Star Trek”, the economic system of Earth as well as the Starship Enterprise is essentially similar to that which we are proposing. In other words, it is based on access, resources, and participation to facilitate everyone in their development toward their own highest potentials.

5. You are promoting a scientific dictatorship.

What exactly is a scientific dictatorship? Whatever that is, we do not advocate that, and that is certainly not what we have designed. Firstly, we have not designed a dictatorship. Community isn’t a system where a special group of people use their special powers in a planned way to shape the world to their whims — there is no management of other humans occurring in community. In fact, we have designed a participatory system where dictatorship would have a near impossible time forming. The Lifestyle System discusses the topic of management and describes why the Community does not encode that concept. Instead, the Community is composed of users who are also participating in the design, development, and operation of those technical systems that sustain the structural operation of the community. Secondly, science is a method of falsifiable discovery and body of emergent knowledge, and so, it seems that the term “scientific dictatorship” is a misnomer for something else. Further, scientists do not controls anyone, they just provide more information about the nature of reality.

It is true that science is a component of our three formed approach, but to call the system we have designed a “scientific dictatorship” is to remove the application of science from all relevant context.

We use science to inform, not to dictate. Community is not a system where science and technology rule over people. You may notice from the Social System specification that we put the systems methodology first and we sub-classify science as a systems method. We do agree that problems arise when science is placed ahead of systems thinking. Hence, we are very clear in our design that science is a complementary approach to a holistic orientation to life.

6. What you are proposing is a techno-fantasy / techno-fix.

Firstly, technology is only one element in the complex design of the whole system. Secondly, at one time a simple handheld radio was a techno-fantasy.

We can design any society we want. The question is, “What sort of society are we choosing?” Those in modern society are paradoxically choosing a fairly tragic and unfortunate design; through a system based upon self-maximized extraction from the earth and other human beings they are essentially stealing fulfillment from themselves.

What is possible is heaven on earth for every single human being. We stand at a point in history where we could create a highly fulfilling environment for every human, using automation and robotics technology to complete the undesirable tasks that are currently performed in the economy, and hence, allow every human to explore that which is interesting and to develop toward his/her highest potential. “Heaven on earth” means a high standard of living for everyone and the opportunity for self-development.

In other words, we are designing a society where everything required to live a high-quality and high-opportunity life is available to everyone. And, it must be done in a way that is sustainable for the planet. This vision is completely doable right now. And, you are mistaken if you think we cannot create this new society in the very near future.

7. I don’t want you coming in and taking my property.

Hold on a moment. Where did you get the idea from that we, as participants in this proposed community, would ever come in and take your property? You definitely didn’t get that from the specifications because they go on ad nauseam about how this is a voluntary, contribution- and participation-based system void of force and coercion. Our work is in the interest of all human beings, and it is not in anyone’s interest to force you to relinquish that which you do not want to relinquish. Imposition creates counter control and resistance.

No one that advocates or develops this system is going to take your property. Once the system is running it isn’t designed to encode force and coercion, and so, still no one will come and take your property. Either people decide that community is right for them, or they don’t. There is no advocating here of taking anyone’s property. We do, however, think that over time, and as people see and experience what we understand to be a more fulfilling system, that there will be a natural gravitation toward access and common heritage, and away from the continual re-encoding of the idea of property.

In reality, it isn’t the market-based and abstracted concept of “property” that you are looking for, it is actual, tangible access and the opportunities for a high-quality standard of living and self-development that access provides. In other words, when someone says, “I don’t want you taking away my property,” that sounds doubly strange to us. Firstly, this is a voluntary, participatory and contributory system, and force and coercion are not a part of the model. And secondly, because, it is not your “property” that you don’t want taken away, it is your ‘access’ to something real that you don’t want taken away. Property, as is well described in the Decision System specification, is not the substantial equivalent of access. The Decision System specification logically explains why property is a concept with multiple contradictions and why that which exists in reality is simply access.

After all, the idea of private property is not a human universal, but a construct of our society. In some societies, no objects are owned and everything is free to take and use as long as somebody else isn’t using it.

An open and critical minded person must admit that it is incredibly wasteful to have a car in every driveway and a vacuum cleaner in every apartment when they spend the great majority of their time not being used.

Community is not an imposed system; it is understood, and then, participated in. Violence begets violence. Community, as a system, does not encode force. Let us now reference an often repeated quote by Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality; to change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

For those who participate in community, within and beyond community, no one is going to take your stuff because [in part] everyone has access to similar abundance. And, even if scarcity were to arise suddenly due to an unforeseen event, our approach is toward problem solving and our orientation is toward cooperation and sharing. In other words, if we “fall on hard times”, even then, we don’t start competing and subverting. We recognize our “togetherness” and we move gracefully through the challenge.

Fundamentally, anyone who wants to improve the situation of humankind should be subject to critical examination because if you (or we, or anyone) suggest a moral improvement to humankind and get it wrong, the lives of many people hang in the balance. So, we should be tremendously critical towards the statements of anyone (including ourselves) who claims to improve the moral standing of humankind. This is, in part, why we have encoded critical thinking directly into our socially organized approach.

Society doesn’t need redistribution or resource hoarding if we don’t distribute unequally (without equity) in the first place. People resent forced redistribution, which is bound to create conflict. Capitalism is inherently incapable of distributing equally.

8. Will I be forced to do work I don’t want to do in the community?

You really haven’t read the design specifications, which go on and on and on about how this is not a system based in any way on force or coercion. To repeat ourselves, this is not a system based on social or economic force or coercion of any kind. There is nothing you have to do in community. With that said, it will help if you find a different way to see how you are arriving at your perspectives and decisions concerning your contribution(s) to society.

Oddly enough, this is a weird question from someone who is continuously coerced to participate in the market system. If you reside in the market and are not independently wealthy, you are likely being forced right now to do work that you don’t want to, and yet, you may not see this work as forced, though it is. In modern society, we have been so well trained to use power over others that it actually becomes invisible, the ways in which we use power.

In community, money is not a middleman between “your” and “our” total need-fulfillment. You would only do work when, and if, you felt it was worth your time and benefited someone. Community is a societal design in which all human needs are fulfilled without abstracted transactional requirements and the necessity for reciprocation (i.e., returning a benefit). If you are motivated to help others, then wonderful. If you are motivated to help yourself, excellent. But, the coercion of money, the slavery of servitude, the feeling of debt, and the extraction of profit is immoral in community.

In community, everyone knows (or can easily come to know) what needs to be done in order to maintain the systems that provide for everyone’s fulfillment. All tasks required to continue the operation of the fulfillment system are explicit and transparent. Herein, there is no such thing as competitive advantage, there is only the synergistic coordination of our common efforts through a common system toward our common fulfillment. When we know what needs to be done and we know what resources are available to do it, then we can each relax into our desire to do that which needs to be done.

Community involves a change in one’s thinking from sacrifice and exchange, to contribution. This system isn’t a renunciation of possibility; it is a system of synergy toward ever greater access opportunity.

9. Someone is going to use the technology in the system against you.

It is easy to imagine scenarios for how technology and power could be misused and abused under the current system, but in a fulfillment oriented system, what is the structural basis for such abuse, or the utilization of technology as a weapon against others?

In community, we surpass the need for money, which is the basis for most corruption in modern society. In community, all goods and services available for everyone without a price tag.

10. The community you propose won’t work because human nature dictates that a certain percentage of people will just be violent. Aren’t there just naturally psycho-sociopaths in the world as human beings who were just born to prey on other humans regardless of the environment? Or, is it that people are predisposed and the environment made it conducive for them to become that way?

Kids with generous parents become generous themselves. Kids with giving parents become giving themselves. The children of parents who facilitate in making their dreams come true end up facilitating others they love in being happy also. Keeping children without choice and economic option is a form of structural violence and paves the way for a victim-perpetrator mentality and the desire for power over others later in life.

In great part, violence is a reaction to our environment. Whether we lead a life of violence or of empathy has a lot to do with childhood experience. Neither our birth nor our genes preordain our personality or violent behavior. The relatively new science of epigenetics says that the world that surrounds a child changes the way that child’s genes are expressed. In early childhood the relationships around us redraft our genetic code by causing some of our genes to be switched on and others to be switched off. There is potential for all manner of behavior encoded in our bodies, and our environment triggers the expression of one potential behavior over another.

Consider that no human individual was ever born genetically predetermined to lead a life of violence. The switching on and off of genes in early life influences our behavior (often, for the remainder of our life). The brain of a child grows according to how that child is treated — in an empathic environment the brain of a child will grow in one way, but in an environment that is harsh, punitive, and cold the same child’s brain will grow quite differently.

Our early childhood relationships change our brain, they shape our behavior and personality, and that is how we create the kind of society we are going to have. In the critical stages of child development, the empathy centers of our brain grow like muscles grow, through nourishment and use. A child that receives empathy will grow new neural pathways in the child’s empathy centers. Alternatively, the science of early childhood development tells us that when a child is frightened and neglected the body chronically produces the natural stress hormone cortisol, which attacks and destroys brain cells in vast quantities devoted to emotional regulation and impulse control. Essentially, our brains’ empathy centers grow – or fail to grow – according to how we are nurtured. Hence, children that have been abused and neglected have large areas of the cortex and prefrontal lobes atrophied or missing. What is recognized today is that impulsivity and violence are a response to this kind of emotional brain damage from childhood onward. The violence of history is symptomatic of large scale child abuse and neglect. To a great extent, this is why when we read history we are likely to get a significantly skewed first impression about “human nature”.

James Prescott looked at all the societies in the anthropological databank in which there was sufficient info to do a meta-analysis. What he wanted to see if there was a correlation between the violence within a society and the level of body contact between mother and infant. His hypothesis was that the lack of touch in a society is correlated inversely with the level of violence. What he found is that it was true from 26 of the 27 societies he looked into. Almost without exception, societies in which mothers and infants had the lowest level of contact (i.e., mothers were not carrying kids around all day) had the highest level of violence. Body contact creates a sense of security for a child. What Prescott found was that the societies in which the mother infant contact was lowest, and in which teen/adolescent sexual experimentation was forbidden, were the societies in which violence was highest, and not only within the society, but between societies (as in, they were societies most likely to be at war with the societies around them).

Human nature is not that which limits us, it is our designs and our decisions that limit our own and others highest expressions. Violence is a preventable brain disorder. The love of a parent and affection of a social environment is literally growing a child’s empathy centers through [at least] the compound oxytocin, which generates new neural pathways in those areas.

When children are treated with force and coercion and dictatorship, then how would you expect them to behave when they grow up, and what would you expect them to accept as “normal”?

Someone who intrinsically, for one reason or another, lacks the ability to empathize is not necessarily, nor will they necessarily become, a psycho-sociopath. Pyscho-sociopaths are the product of trauma, an incentive system that rewards greed and other socially corrosive behaviors (e.g., the monetary market), and a socio-economic system that provides a platform for certain types of people to take advantage of other people (e.g., the State). The following is an analogy to clarify what is being said: If you have someone who is 400 pounds, and you really want to help them lose weight; what you shouldn’t do is surround them with massive buffets of obesogenic, disease-promoting foods; they are just going to gorge themselves. Obviously they have a problem controlling their eating, and so, surrounding them with rich and fattening and addictively unhealthy foods is not going to help them. If we have people in society who have a tendency towards aggression and control of others, and they also lack empathy, the last thing we should do is create a platform for them to take advantage of others (as in, the free-market and the State) — these are institutions that they can worm their way into and use to dominate and control others. These systems (and their incentive structures) are like a big buffet to someone who has a sugar or sweet addiction. We have to design the non-existence of that buffet.

Authority isn’t necessary to deal with social ills, though it is believed by many in modern society to be so. In fact, the reverse is the case: it is the encoding of “authority” into our minds and our various socio-economic institutions that creates and otherwise allows for the situation that “authority” is supposed to exist to resolve. Most people become sociopathic after this encoding process has taken place – they advocate and desire force over others as the resolution to symptomatic issues (i.e., they advocate for government).

The science is fairly clear that individuals who have social behavioral pathologies (i.e., violent “criminality”) are largely bred through child abuse. So, if we want to focus on having a more peaceful, cooperative, and socially fulfilled society, then we need to focus on raising our children without aggression and trauma; and, we need to facilitate the processes of healing and restoration to those who have experienced trauma.

Online Resources:

• Peace code in the human brain | Robin Grille | TEDxPittwater, YouTube
• Rich People Lack Empathy, Study Finds by Alexander Eichler, huffingtonpost.com
• Sexual Violence: Early Life Experiences and Failed Affectional Bonding by James Prescott, ttfuture.org
• The Bomb in the Brain – Stefan Molyneux on Domestic Violence and Child Abuse, YouTube
• The Bomb in the Brain Part 1 – The True Roots of Human Violence by Stephan Molyneux, YouTube
• The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff
• Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn

11. What about my personal space? I am not willing to give up my personal space to live in your commune?

What you mean by commune is more than likely not what we mean by community. Now, what do you mean by “personal space”? If by “personal space” you mean a home, then yes, personal space is accounted for in the community. If by “personal space”, you mean privacy, then our response is also yes, that too is accounted for. Herein, personal space is respected through the value orientation of individuals in the community, and it is an encoded element of the decision system itself (i.e., personal space is accounted for by decisioning protocol). However, a violation of personal space is not punished, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t social consequences for such behavior. Instead, we design and engineer personal spaces with the option of privacy in mind.

12. Most communes die. Why won’t yours?

We are not sure quite how to take that question. At the societal level, a community is everyone’s, not just anyones.

Firstly, we do not consider the specifications a proposal for the formation of a “commune”. A commune can be loosely defined as a group of people living together who sharing possessions and responsibilities, which is a slightly misleading and highly insufficient definition for what we are proposing. There are many different types of communes with many different social and economic formats. Hence, it is an imprecise representation of the complex societal system that we are proposing, which may be broken down at a high level into four interconnected structures: social; decision; lifestyle; and material.

If, however, your question at all refers to the collapse of most communes which were once in existence, then it could be said that most communes collapse [in part] because of at least one of the following reasons, probably all of them in most cases:

1. The commune was low-tech in its design, and hence labor intensive for its members, which eventually re-generated a labor-for-credit economic structure similar to the market system.
2. Eventually, the people with the knowledge, skills, and resources in the commune found that they could live a “better life” by making money and consuming in the capitalist market.
3. The commune didn’t have people with the knowledge and skills to keep the infrastructure of the commune from falling into decay.
4. The commune formed without an explicit direction and orientation, and hence, a diversity of directions, orientations, and approaches generated systemic conflict that could not be resolved.
5. The commune formed based on an escapist or survival incentive, which means it formed through reactivity, and hence, brought with it many of the reactive social problems from the world-at-large. The reactive mindset of its members prevented higher-level thinking.
6. The commune formed without screening for values, or even knowing what values to screen for.
7. The commune didn’t account for human fulfillment.
8. The commune didn’t account for ecological carrying capacity.
9. The commune required resources from outside of itself, and didn’t have a unified and effective strategy with which to interact with a different socio-economic system to acquire those resources.

If you read through our design standards and the Auravana website, you will notice that we account for each of these risks.

13. I disagree with your proposal.

Firstly, in market lingo: to us, a well thought-out critique of what we are doing is as valuable as gold. We who pursue this project seek well-developed critiques. We have spent a lot of time exploring critiques of this type of socio-economic system (including critiques of a resource-based economy) in order to fill in gaps in our design and remove contradictions. We expose ourselves to as many perspectives on an issue as possible so that we so that we may understand holistically. In fact, we regularly take the approach that we are wrong, and we use our intelligence to guide us toward our goal of being less wrong.

With the above said, it is important to read the material before embarking on an ambiguous critique of the project. If your critique shows an understanding of the design, we will be much more likely to address it, and use it to improve the design. We desire to evolve the system, which your critique, if well informed and evidenced may help to do. Furthermore, criticism with the offer of an alternative is even better.

If you really want to know what our proposal is, then you have to read the proposal. Once it is read, then we can have an informed and productive discussion.

14. I don’t like what you are proposing.

Maybe this isn’t the right model for you. If it doesn’t work for you, then go do something else. Don’t work with something that doesn’t work for you. If the descriptions of this system do not resonate for you, then clearly this is not a good model for you, and it is ok for you to go find a model that fits where you are right now. And maybe you will outgrow that model, and maybe this model will become better for you later on, or maybe, never. In truth, it doesn’t matter. You should go grow and be all that you can be. If another model leads you to a better place, then great; and, if it leads you to a worse place, then there is a learning there too.

Even if it isn’t what we want to hear, hearing is good and useful because it stretches the realm of the possible for us.

15. What you propose is impossible.

What exactly do you think we are proposing? Maybe we could reverse analyze how and why you got to the point that you see human fulfillment and ecological sustainability on this planet as hopeless. Please, walk us through why community has become an impossibility. What is going on inside of you that is limiting you? We have the power and resources relative to what is needed to ensure everyone on earth live a life of enrichment and fulfillment. What we propose is possible. Furthermore, if we work together, it is highly probable.

In modern society, many individuals have wrapped their identity, and hence, the filter of their perception, in the limitations of their current situation. There are containers of thought that some of us are in right now and there are limitations to viewing the world from that container. A lot of what we propose looks impossible, even to someone who is very optimistic and excited. Yet, when we start to live in a state of fluidity with the emergence of community, then our mental constructs that create the appearance of a vast separation between important things in our lives, become seen for what they are, and start to dissolve.

16. I mostly agree with your design, but this one little thing that I disagree with will cause me to throw out the entirety of the proposed system.

If you are truly aligned with this direction, then it may be useful to ask yourself, “How important is your disagreement in the grand scheme of issues we encounter as challenges to this direction?” Or, maybe you could help those participating on the project understand where we have made a mistake.

17. I see that you are critiquing modern society. I know of another group that is also critiquing modern society; they are fairly horrible people and advocate a whole lot very bad things.

All critics of the modern socio-economic system are not the same. It would be inappropriate to put us in the same box as others who critique the system while maintaining a whole lot of other aberrant viewpoints. Further, our fundamental intention is not to critique the system; it is to design a new system that makes the existing one obsolete. In order to design this new system, we must understand the issues and failures of the current system, which may appear as a critique, but it is actually reasoning for the considered design we have selected. Among community we don’t live in our own sub-cultural bubble and define ourselves by hatred.

18. What is your position on . . . this very controversial topic?

We don’t have to take a position; we wait for the evidence in critical context and direct our decision resolution space toward regenerative fulfillment. Taking a position could become a missed opportunity to look more closely.

Certainly, we do not have engineered public relations positions on anything.

19. You are a hypocrite for promoting a moneyless society while selling things. What do you say to those who object to your business/income work, given your claim to be against money?

You are mistaken. At the present time we are not selling anything. But, so what if we were selling things beyond cost, for profit. Let’s assume we had a moral objection to eating food. We simply found the act of eating any kind of life offensive, for whatever reason. Yet, given we must eat to stay alive, are we a hypocrite for eating, even though we have no choice? Some people tend to see things in a very black and white manner and the fact is, just because a person does not morally or rationally agree with a particular action or system, does not necessarily mean they have the freedom to circumvent that action or system.

Money is the medium by which society has chosen, generations ago, to organize itself and we had nothing to do with its installation. We were born into it, just like we were born into a biological form that needs to eat to survive. However, unlike the human form’s present empirical need to consume food to survive, the market system is not permanent or empirical. It is an outdated contrivance, which is why we advocate its change.

Human society today, no matter what corner of the earth, derives health and well-being through a property-based, income extracting process of trade on some level. The entire world is owned by people or institutions via the “private” or “public” sector, which is “rightfully” protected by police and military force. Therefore, as a human being living during this social paradigm, we have no choice but to submit in some way. Either we work to sell our labor in some form, whether freelance or creating products that generate profit, or we live in pure destitution and perhaps even die.

Of course, some thoughtless person will inevitably say to us “you should go live in the woods then!” Yes, we suppose we could live in a park somewhere, hiding from park authorities, eating grubs. But guess what? We don’t care to live in such deprivation without health care or basic needs, as well as the digital technologies we are using to facilitate the redesign of society. It just doesn’t sound like a fulfilling way of living. Likewise, we also have family that needs financial assistance, along with friends and relationships. No one is an island.

Our favorite response to this condemnation, is “Ok. We will stop trading or using money for the rest of our life. However, we will need 25 million dollars each to get set up in order to do so, assuming each of us live until about 80 yrs old. We would like a protected, automated estate, a farm system, 3d printing systems, and please make sure it is supplied by a renewable source of energy. Once set up, we will never use money again. We will build a system that will work for the rest of our life and repair things ourselves, learning as need be. We will grow everything and use advanced printing technology to live simply and sustainably. So if you can provide us with about 25 million dollars each, we will happily stop interacting with the system with full integrity, releasing everything we create for free. Please let us know when you can write us a check!”

Now, to conclude, we will add one qualification. It is one thing to live, acquire money and try to do good with it (e.g., to be in the business of waking people up), and another to blindly self-maximize and extract just because you can.

20. If you don’t like the current society, then just leave.

We think there might be a bit of a misunderstanding here. We are trying to create a new society, and so, we will be leaving this society, or facilitating its transformation, as soon as we have the next one sufficiently designed and under construction.

The second misunderstanding is that everywhere you go on the planet, except for a few remote and extreme weather locales, you are still under the power umbrella of one government or another, and you will still be required to participate in the market. Hence, the statement, “if you don’t like it, then leave,” is like saying to a zoo animal in a cage, you can move cages, but it is going to cost you your family and friends, a lot of your money, and you shall still remain caged. Saying to an animal in a cage in a zoo that it can go to another cage in another zoo is obviously ridiculous. An animal that doesn’t want to be in a zoo does want to be in the wild. To say to that animal that it must like its cage, because it doesn’t want to go to another cage, is not comparing being in cage to being free. It is comparing being in a cage to being in another cage. To those who advocate the persistence of territorial monopolizing authorities, this word “freedom”, we do not think it means what you think it means. Moving to another cell is not the same as being set free from prison. The “love it or leave it” argument is basically saying, if you don’t like the forceful associations here, then you are free to choose another location of forceful association. The point of community, however, is to bring a free society to wherever we live.

When it comes to “citizenship”, you are not technically allowed to not be a citizen of any country. If you want to leave one country, you are expected to immediately take up citizenship in another country. The UN specifically bans, to the degree it is enable to enforce, this rule; it bans people from being “stateless”. You must always have a codified relationship with a monopolizing authority.

Furthermore, most governments have laws regulating their “citizens” ability to leave their jurisdiction. Some countries, like the United States of America, will tax a citizen on his/her global income regardless of whether the citizen is using US-based services. This sort of taxing behavior is actually quite uncommon among governments (though it is becoming more common), and it is a sign of a State desiring an empire. If you are a US citizen and you leave the country, but do not renounce your citizenship, then you will be taxed regardless of where you live on the planet (note that US military abroad are of a different [tax] class than other citizens).

When a “citizen” decides to leave a jurisdiction permanently, the renunciation of citizenship often carries with it two penalties: firstly, the renouncer generally has to pay some percentage of his/her income back to that society’s government; and secondly, the renouncer is often barred from ever again re-entering said government’s jurisdiction. It is also not uncommon for governments to deny exit and entry based on criminal history.

In modern society, we really need to examine how much freedom we actually have. Sometimes we do have the “freedom” to go to another farming system (i.e., another State). But, what sort of freedom is that? What most people call “freedom” is nothing but a set of privileges granted as part of a system of social coercion. People who feel “free” in a jurisdiction only feel that way because the range of privileges granted to them by their government is relatively broader than that of other governments. Many people in many jurisdictions actually have a false sense of their privileges versus the privileges of others, because most governments market themselves as providing the most privileges to their citizens.

Society should exist for the benefit of humans, but it seems that in fact many humans are existing for the benefit of society. And generally, the poorer one is, the greater the exploitation. The very idea that we are already highly civilized prevents us from being motivated to mature and find a system by which humanity can be fulfilled.

It is important to remember that we are all connected in a variety of ways on this spaceship we call Earth. Merely moving to another location on the planet will not absolve those connections interwoven throughout the Earth’s biosphere.

21. You are trying to make everyone equal.

That is not an accurate statement. A reading of the Social System Specification would clarify what we mean. Briefly, the challenge is not to make everyone equal (whatever that means), but to foundation everyone with at least a basic assurance of survival and material dignity, so that each may have the opportunity to develop themselves, to contribute, and to create a life of their choice from there. And, to those who do not take the opportunities presented to them, why should we not give them another chance, and another, and another? In community, their inaction will have no impact on others around them, and we guarantee (or at least think it likely) that eventually they’ll get tired of being left out of and of not doing anything to better with their lives. Among community, we collaboratively create an environment that facilitates equal access to life enriching opportunities and the ability to contribute to the evolution of human flourishing.

22. Give me one example of this type of society working in the real world?

The question about “can you give me an example of this society in the real world” seems to miss a lot. Does the person understand from the reading what type of configuration of society we presently have and the basis of a community-type society. There is no closeness; they are two different configurations of social, decision, material, and lifestyle. There are aspects of community that are active in today’s society, but today’s society is not and does not represent a community-type one. There is no one “close”; it will take decades to transition. In engineering, you specify out the design and then figure out how to transition the users from the current way they are doing things to the new way. This system does not start with food or shelter, it starts with systems science and understanding, and proceeds therefrom. Everything, before it was constructed in the real world, was theoretical. To call the system theoretical is correct, but also wrong, because it includes practices that are operative, working, and in some cases, the norm today, like project management, restorative justice, architecture (and other habitat/city services). There is no current operative community-type society on the planet, and it won’t be seen as a whole operating system for decades.

THE FULFILLMENT OF OUR POTENTIAL IS THE REASON WE ARE ALIVE, IT IS THE LIGHT INSIDE OF OUR EYES.