Play up, play up and play the game…

Dave Pollard over at “how to save the world” has just done a very good blog post giving a scorecard on our dependency on mega-systems and whether its getting worse (mostly), better (not at all) or staying the same. While you might quibble with the slightly Rousseau/Noble Savage in a state of nature assumptions (I’m more of a Hobbes man, myself, if it comes to it), Pollard’s suggestions about what to DO about the depth of the shit we are in are I think well-thought through and not starry-eyed about the likelihood of “success”. And he has the good taste to like the cartoons of the astounding Marc Roberts too…

I don’t think there’s anything that can be done to ’save’ these systems, or most of the people who just aren’t aware or capable enough to wean themselves off them. But those of us who want to be models of more independent, self-sufficient ways of living, I think the best approach is the same one nature uses to wean young wild creatures off their parents: play. Here’s some things we could play at:

* unschooling ourselves and our children
* natural entrepreneurship: learning how to make a living for ourselves, doing what we’re meant to do
* walking and cycling, instead of using energy-inefficient vehicles
* taking charge of our own health: prevention, exercise, self-diagnosing, self-treatment
* living in community e.g. creating our own self-organized and self-managed community centres and other community-shared resources; looking after our own security and conveying important and actionable news and information among and between communities
* singing, playing instruments, acting, drawing, and participative non-competitive sports
* gardening and permaculture, eating a vegan diet (and learning to cook delicious meals for ourselves), learning to make our own clothes, learning to construct zero-net-energy, zero-waste buildings, learning to repair instead of replace, learning to buy less (and shop more carefully), and sharing instead of buying equipment
* practicing emergency preparedness in our communities, through simulations and table-top scenario planning exercises

Why “play”? Because play is all about learning by experiment, joyfully, and being fully open to outcome. In the greater scheme of things, our skunkwork efforts at reinventing a working, community-based culture are not going to change much. They are not scalable (trying to do things at a scale larger than what can be managed through local personal responsibility is part of what got us into this mess). Most of them will probably fail. But a few of them will succeed, spectacularly, and perhaps give the survivors of our crumbling civilization culture some ideas on how to do things better next time.