We had a food jar, where we all pitched in a dollar a day. Each day it was someones turn to go shopping for food stuff and make dinner and their was a healthy competition on making really good and satisfying meals so we always ate well.

That this was a life that you could have once upon a time in New York City, still bewilders me. I try my best to relive it with my friends today, but everyone needs to make money and doesn’t have enough time. Maybe now is the time to get off the grid.

My fiancé and I both come from modest means and have pushed our way up out of restaurants and call centers to become professionals on hard work and luck alone, without the college educations we couldn’t afford. Now, we are both making decent salaries on the upper side of the middle class scale, still under 6 figures apiece. Needless to say, it seems as though we’ve come upon a fortune and find our modest success to be a blessed relief… and a bewilderment.

So please, would you be so kind as to share more of your insight? How can we go on to own a home, save for retirement and make investments 1 – safely, and 2 – without contributing to the problem?

Yes, we’ll have to save money from each paycheck, raise our credit scores and live within our means, as we already do. But after we have saved up that “6 month cushion” what can we possibly invest our savings in? Are there any stable American investments that won’t enslave our neighbors and still be of value by the time we’re 80? It’s hard enough feeling that our new-found prosperity comes from working for the devil during the day–I make up for the karmic deficit by doing pro-bono work for non-profits on the weekends. I don’t know how I could sleep at night if I were also a sociopathic pig stockholder or venture capitalist, nor do I want to take it up the ass in a money market when all those losses tumble downhill.

Also, a million thanks for “The Persuaders”. I’ll always refer to those stolen pages from Frank Luntz’s and Clotaire Rapaille’s playbooks when tackling their masters.

Thank you again!

I live in Nevada City, California, where all things community-oriented thrive greatly. The collaboration of locals here is amazing, and it is the ticket to our future freedom as the people buy local produce, use a local business barter-dollar, and enjoy some of the best, free K-12 educations in the nation. Everything you said makes perfect sense. I know that when the “virtual” economy hits the “real” workers in the gut, a community like ours will be ready. I am so very grateful for having been destined to live in such a place. I just hope I can be of some influence to the dear ones I know who live lives more centered around the monetary treasure and not the treasure that is wisdom and knowledge and friendship. I am in love with living in the mountains, and I can’t imagine where one would begin as to reforming big cities to ACTUALLY be the kinds of communities you speak of, but I have hope that such places can and must develop into existence.

The making friends is paramount.

The trend of rolling back to a smaller homesteading community is manifesting itself on many planes. On one end, you have hardcore survivalists that are refusing to pay taxes and are moving to remote rural areas, creating a farm that will sustain them and a network of like-minded individuals.
On the other, city dwellers are starting to buy local produce, investing in green energy, buying used clothing.
This seems to be a part of a global trend of people awakening to their individual responsibility- for their destiny and freedom.

I will have to get back to you with the name, but a Russian anthropologist did very interesting research into how people there managed to survive the terrible economic crisis not so long ago.

He sad that due to the constant flux of government and economy in Russia, people had evolved a social mechanism of interaction based on barter and friendship, and may had small rural plots where they grew their own vegetables.

Most Russians would regularly have a stockpile sack of flour, potatoes, onions.
Enough to survive a winter.
Thus, you could live with no money for 6 months.

This would have sounded backwards and paranoid before the crisis, eh?

Now it looks like we have to accept that our liberty depends on independence from overseers, speculators and well-meaning big brothers.
Life is our responcibility alone.
What a shocker!

Personally, I am not really sure how prepared I am for a possible depression. I have large amounts of out-standing debt, at the same time pursuing a ‘career’ (hate that word)
in fields the tenuous fields of music and writing. So, I’ve been used to riding by the seat of my pants for most of my life, the possible economic collapse plus global climate change and peak oil has got my mind reeling a bit.

Anyway, thanks again for this piece Doug.
I’m going to spread this to all who will listen

PEACE
Prop

This is what it’s all about, right? The deep programmability of our current culture is what you stressed in your books, and I see your point man!!! There is ample opportunity to build mobile/desktop HUDs that could catalyse homeostatic, synergetic behaviour amongst a whole-brained populace. I see this as possible, and as an awesome invitation to start grooving.

What if a friendly means of interchange could be developed from the small up; meaning a peer-to-peer implementation of LETS-style interchange running on Bluetooth. As a first cool gimmick, it could be a playful way of keeping bar tab scores amongst friends In the best case, it would provide a means of optimal distribution of issuing power, thereby building a bigger-than-now scenario to which the current centralized systems can willingly be invited to as co-creators. It’s the enlightened way of Hacking Marketing Budgets, and we’re all gonna love it, I tell you!

We can hack our logical deductions from the big Freudian Marketing experience into a new man model that does not necessarily start from a dualistic, paranoid stance. The rational and ‘irrational’ (or right-brained/metaphoric) can indeed work together when an elegant social model for unified consciousness is put forward. It seems to have to do with inviting egoic consciousness into an inherently bigger game of loving, intentful compassion.

What I propose is to honour great guys like Huizinga, McKenna and Erasmus, and to build a distributed life game, implementing the wonderful network effects of the Internet, working towards a feeling of national and then transnational trust in the possibility of a balanced, compassionate economic ecosystem. Honouring all the wonders of whole-brained realisation.

It’s gonna groove, it’s gonna work, I tell you. Here’s my substantiating evidence: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1csh0li2ckI

With much Love!

Steven Kruyswijk