What Would Your Ideal Community Look Like?

Photo by Kirt Edblom on Flickr

When I was in school, I learned about the gatekeeper. As an aspiring author, I was told the publishing industry basically consisted of five major companies, and if you weren't published by one of those, you might as well forget making more than a penny from your writing, and most manuscripts don't even make it past the "slush pile" unless you're already a famous writer or a celebrity.

Prospects for aspiring filmmakers were just as dire. Unless you had connections with the "big boys," forget it. They're only making remakes and comic book movies these days.

For years, I believed this. Then I heard an interview with a fantasy writer who was making a 6-figure income through self-publishing. This interview changed my life. Not only could I see new possibilities for myself as a writer, but it opened me up to an entirely new philosophy and way of being.

We no longer need to go through the gatekeepers if we want to bring our creations into this world. Similarly, I've seen creatives making a living through blogging, YouTube, and crowd-funding their projects.

What if this applied to everything?

We're told our fate rests in the hands of "they/them" (we could debate endlessly about who "they/them" is—personally I think it's not composed solely of living humans but is more like an entity with teams of minions stacked in increasing layers of complexity like Russian Dolls).

The way the narrative is presented, "they" can shut down the supply line whenever they feel like it and deny us jobs and medical care and access to money and even entry to the grocery store—especially shutting us out of society—if we don't play by the rules.

But what if we eliminated the need for gatekeepers altogether?

What if we said, "Hey, we don't want your stupid society anyway. We're creating our own."

Imagine being able to build a society completely from scratch. Instead of hacking away at the layers of mold and bird crap and rotting wood, you were given a new plot of land and fresh materials. What would you create?

As a creative person, art is naturally where my mind goes first. I'm seeing dance parties under the stars as well as day-time dance parties -- why not? -- surrounded by trees and birds. Campfire writing nights.

And because I've mentioned bypassing the gatekeepers, and because really the sky's the limit, I feel that with the talents and resources of everyone in this village/community/whatever you want to call it, we can combine forces to create literary anthologies, albums, even films (let's do away with the belief that you need a multi-million dollar budget to make a good movie).

Ok, so what about the "practical" stuff like food and houses? The same concept applies! Combining our collective skills and resources, it is entirely possible to grow our own food and build our own houses.

I'm seeing a future where eventually if, say, your computer malfunctions, you won't need to order a new one from Amazon or haul it off to the Apple Store and deal with their BS.

From either the local or neighboring community, you'll be able to find the parts and tech help you need. Can you imagine, never having to deal with Verizon/Citibank/Spectrum/any of these behemoth corporations who seem to exist solely to make our lives miserable (yeah, yeah, I know these companies are only out to make a buck and don't care about actually helping people, but I'd go so far to say these companies go out of their way to make our experience as terrible as possible)?

When millions of farmers, engineers, architects, construction workers, doctors, teachers, cops—in other words, people with skills in just about every area you can think of—finally quit because they're sick of making compromises (and I'm not just talking about getting the shot, I'm referring to compromises on ALL levels—needless paperwork, bureaucracy, protocols, regulations, busy work, etc.) and the old methods like protesting no longer work because these are still system-generated methods, they'll need somewhere to go, right? Somewhere else to utilize their skills in exchange for the ability to provide for themselves and their families.

And so in this way, we'll be able to form entirely sovereign, self-sustaining communities.

Of course, this won't happen overnight. And it'll be messy at first (though once things are up and running, I think things will run more efficiently as a whole because they'll no longer be hampered by cumbersome bureaucratic systems).

Also, I get that the current system has the factories and massive workforces to mass-deliver goods and services quickly and efficiently. But another part of the equation is minimizing our dependence on such systems in the first place. Yes, I like being able to order things from anywhere in the world, but there was life before Amazon.

Plus, how much money have you wasted ordering shit you don't actually need? How much time have you wasted scrolling through millions of reviews which might or might not be accurate and fighting with customer service bots (I'm sure most of them are bots at this point, and the remainder might as well be)?

Imagine freeing up all that energy. And the thing is, we don't know precisely what this new society will look like because we are still constrained by our beliefs of what we think is possible and see everything through the filter of past paradigms and media narratives.

There's no reason we have to revert to some medieval standard of living with sewage in the streets and 99% of the population living as impoverished, illiterate serfs, or that we'll be forced into some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario with thousands of people fighting to the death over a Saltine cracker.

Again, this is the paradigm that has been given to us—this either/or scenario where you must choose between the technocratic urban slave system or filth and misery, when in fact there's room for infinite variation. We won't know precisely what some of these variations are or what they'll look like until we actually experience them for ourselves, as we have no models to base them on.

Now, having lived in a very remote location for over a year now, I can tell you that an occasional change of scenery is nice. So while ideally these communities would be sovereign and provide its inhabitants with a sense of stability, we'd have the freedom to travel to other communities and experience vastly different geographical conditions and cultures if we chose.

If enough disgruntled commercial airline pilots, engineers, and air traffic controllers quit or were forced out of work (I can't imagine that system sustaining itself much longer, but then again, if anything were real, the airline industry should have completely collapsed after 2020), a completely new airline industry could be formed, minus the TSA bullshit.

But in this area, too, there's room for variation. Community-owned ultralight aircrafts could potentially allow for greater freedom of movement while also minimizing the use of resources. Also, lightweight vehicles could more easily escape detection in the interim while totalitarian restrictions are still in place.

In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Alexandra—the oldest child in a family of Swedish immigrants—takes it upon herself to tame the rugged Nebraska wilderness and build a farm, even when everyone thinks she's nuts.

This is the belief that keeps her going, leading her to eventual success: “A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.”

As pioneers, we must be able to clearly imagine what we want, even when we have no past models or paradigms to guide us. We then must have the courage to put these ideas into action and to keep moving forward, even when the end goal seems impossible.