Miscellaneous raves and diatribes that I couldn't shoehorn into the site on any other pretext.

I think our whole world-wide society worships losers. Consider how many winners there can be in any contest - just one. But everyone can get to be a loser! From the parable of the Prodigal Son to the modern werlfare state, the quiet achiever has been overshadowed by the flashy failure. If you are willing to display your abjectness to the public gaze you are rewarded with sympathy, fame, handouts, preferential treatment and advice.

And look at our heroes. The Charge of the Light Brigade - a tragedy wherein a bunch of hapless draftees were deliberately led to disaster by a fool who considered his honour to be more important than the lives of his men. The Spartan boy who stole the fox - a thief, a liar, and a suicide. "The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled - twit!" (to quote Spike Milligan.) Bonnie and Clyde, Custer's Last Stand, the French Foreign Legion, all the martyrs. How many Old West gunfighters can you name? How many lawmen?

People, naturally, admire a refusal to give up in spite of the odds. My point is that people generally don't admire those who, carefully, sensibly, wait until the odds are in their favour, then walk home without a struggle. Perhaps people don't exactly admire failure, but they don't admire success per se either. What they want to see is sensation. And sensation, by its nature, is more associated with failure than success.

Even our recreations are deliberately designed to maximise loss, not gain. Human beings are evolutionarily optimised for a certain level of effort and challenge, rather more than is provided by our society. So we seek out challenge, go for the burn, do things the hard way. My concern is that, one day (perhaps even now?), we as a culture will encounter a real challenge, one that tests our every resource to the utmost, and, true to our cultural mindset, do it the hard way - and fail.

Tai Chi

Tai Chi is a way of relaxing after a stressful day, a stretching, toning and invigorating form of exercise, and a deceptively gentle martial art. It is sometimes called "moving meditation" - an accomplished practitioner experiences the relaxation and detachment of Yogic meditation while still continuing to move and react to his surroundings. Over the years the movements have been modified from their original martial form to reflect the Chinese view of health as a harmony among the parts of the body. The martial arts applications still remain, as one of what is known as the "internal arts", in contrast to the more openly forceful "external arts" such as Karate.

I have a theory of historical cycles, which I won't clutter up this page with, but one of its corollaries is that we are right now heading into a Dark Age which will last for 400 years or so. I don't know that it's possible to avoid this, and I don't know that it's wise to try. I do know that, Dark Age or World Empire, our happiness and safety depend on the actions of individual people, and I hope to stir some of you into action with these words.

Nowadays the government, and the laws that it promulgates, are among the least stable parts of society. Once upon a time, people could feel that, while they grew old and a new generation arose to take their place, the King would continue to rule, the priests to preach, and the country go on in its age-old course. No longer. If you have the good fortune to live in a country where you don't expect a revolt, a coup, or an invasion in any given year, you can still be quite certain that the laws, regulations and "community values" that you grew up with will have changed significantly by the time you are raising your own family, and changed again by the time you retire. In the modern world, nothing is constant but change.

And it's going to get worse.

I think you have to distinguish between Village scale and village technology. In ancient times, sure, village dwellers had hideous levels of mortality and morbidity. However, city dwellers in the same times had it worse! Until the last hundred years or so, cities have been net population sinks. They had all the problems that their country cousins had, plus a greatly increased danger from fires and infectious diseases.

In modern times, the Hutterites live in tiny communities, never more than 150 members. They eschew most of the trappings of modern urban life, but they could not be considered "primitive" by the standards of even many modern third-world nations.

I would not advocate that everyone become Hutterites, or even live in their rural communities. I do think that living organisations of a similar scale are more natural to human beings than nuclear families or giant cities. I don't know for certain how they could be implemented in a modern society - which must perforce be mainly urban, since there just isn't enough land to go around, otherwise.

Co-housing or co-operative housing are probably the best bets (see Alternative Housing for definitions - it's quite short). The co-housing group would then function as a "village" within the matrix of a democratic/capitalist municipality. There is an essay at http://www.wholeliving.com/Articles/cohousing.html which talks of the benefits of co-housing. Among other things, it says "The average size of CoHousing neighborhoods is 15 to 35 households of mixed ages and family structures. This size has been found to be small enough to encourage interaction between neighbors but large enough to spread out the work of maintaining the community." Sounds good to me.

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