We don't want to reinvent the wheel; however, we haven't found any organization that aims to achieve the same goals with a strategy that seems feasible. This project is unique in the way it combines pre-existing ideas. We hope to have learned from the failures of hundreds, even thousands, of years of people creating organizations and movements to make a positive impact. The following table summarizes the key areas in which we have adopted and avoided what we consider the best and worst patterns for effective and efficient social innovation.
Mission & vision
Unique taxonomy
| Characteristic | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| Holistic and systemic rather than single-issue feel-good interventions | We don't focus on saving a single cute animal species from extinction or stopping an isolated war or genocide. Those of us who care about this mission and vision are clearly a minority with limited resources. Most single-issue causes fail due to insufficient resources. To make a significant difference, we must address the root of the problem rather than its symptoms. Therefore, we focus on the underlying mechanisms that generate violence and on how to design and transition to alternative systems. We aim to apply the proverbial cure rather than just a band-aid. |
| Abstract disciplined long-term thinking rather than frantically reacting to current events | The problems we face today aren't the result of recent events. They stem from social structures and memes (self-replicating ideas) that have evolved over millennia. Finding a quick solution doesn't seem feasible. Thinking in terms of decades, generations, and centuries seems more appropriate. It is critical that we prioritize and plan - making conscious decisions about which issues to address and which to set aside. To have any chance of success, we must carefully select our battles. Therefore, we prioritize initiatives that support systemic change. |
| Tangible direct mission instead of abstract indirect one | The use of abstract thinking to derive goals and strategies must not be confused with having an abstract mission. On the contrary, instead of working towards some indirect goal like maximizing economic growth or market freedom, we are focusing on more direct outcomes: maximizing human flourishing, happiness and realization, and regenerating ecosystems. |
| Science-based epistemology rather than magical thinking ideologies | Popular solution proposals tend to rely on some sort of magic self-regulating market on the liberal and conservative camp. Or, on the socialist camp, on the magical ability to set prices while disregarding that imbalances of supply and demand tend to increase scarcity and foster mafias and corruption. None of these camps give much thought to how markets tend to evolve towards concentration of power and government capture. Liberal and conservative proposals are usually based on the mythical homo economicus, which operates contrary to actual human behavior. Instead, we propose a system compatible with actual human psychology, based on communal gift economies that don't rely on profits from wage slavery and private property. In a communal gift economy, the property belongs to the community not to individuals, and community members participate in productive activities voluntarily. The excess production is traded with other communities based on mutual support principles rather than on selfish interests. This aligns well with the scientific understanding that building secure relationships and practicing generosity, gratitude, autonomy and mastery are fundamental for human mental and physical health. It also happens to align with anarcho-communist ideology, but we aim not to be attached to any ideology, but rather to always question ideologies as required by the scientific method. If science were to change and point decisively towards selfishness, contempt, hierarchy and superficiality as drivers for human happiness and fulfillment, we would change our ideological orientation. |
| Democratic management rather than violent coercive hierarchy | There is a widespread belief that if our societies were democratically managed at the community level, if each town and city neigborhood were able to decide how to manage their own affairs, it would be so inconvenient that nothing would get done. If a community was able to decide on their own land usage, and be able to stop projects like power plants and factories to protect their natural environment, or to close down businesses that are not aligned with their values, the whole economy would collapse. We think that this argument is a very crude fallacy that justifies keeping people ignorant and uneducated. There is ample empirical historical evidence that shows that peoples are able to coordinate for the common good across wide geographical areas without coercion. |
| Social Constructionist rather than essentialist | We observe that the objects that have most power over people's lives are social constructs. Gender, sexual normativity, race, money, property, nations, borders, religion, etc. are all social constructs. They are not natural phenomena. They are artifacts of human culture. They are not immutable. They have mostly evolved to facilitate the exploitation of the majority by a small minority. We can replace those constructs with others more conducive to life. |
| Global bottom-up org rather than global top-down org or decentralized network | The challenges we are facing are global. We live in a global monoculture of market-nation-states. The most effective way to effect global change is through a global organization that plans, executes, and manages resources globally. A distributed global network would have a much harder time achieving these goals. Power must be exercised from the bottom up; otherwise, it would be very challenging to build a horizontal world with a hierarchical organization. |
| Exponentially incremental revolution aka paradigm shifting rather than revolutionary revolts or reformism | After decades, or even centuries, of attempted reforms to make market-nation-states more amenable to sustaining human life and protecting nature via social justice, human rights, environmentalism, etc., it would be very difficult to conclude anything other than reforming the current system is not viable. The alternative is a complete paradigm shift, commonly known as a revolution. The popular imagery is that of a violent revolt, but those are rarely successful and those that are often end up with even more authoritarian regimes than the ones they toppled. Instead, we suggest thinking of a revolution like the recent cell phone revolution: an incremental process of adoption of a new technology that is so superior to the previous one that now we can't imagine how to live without it. The cell phone was not a moonshot technology. The first models were heavy, clunky, and pretty much useless, much like most activist communities today are. But with purposeful iteration it became ubiquitous, unlike activist communities that largely seem focused on reinventing the wheel. If instead we focus our resources on a global transition strategy that is based on accumulating power and reinvesting most of it to increase our power, we can achieve a similar fast revolution. |
| Self-funded rather than relying on donations or grants from government or philanthropy | While donations and grants are nice to have, they can be ephemeral and might come with strings attached which compromise the project's autonomy. We must be able to accept any funding that benefits the project and at the same time be able to reject any funding that compromises the project. In order to achieve that we propose to create a conglomerate of for-profit corporations that donate their profits to a non-profit foundation, and budget the project in a way that all structural costs are comfortably covered with self-funding, and grants and donations are used for expansion only. |
| Long-term consequentialist ethics rather than immediate non-consequentialist ethics | We consider all human lives to have the same value, including those many billions of future lives who might not be born at all or born into a hellish authoritarianism if we don't get our act together very soon. Many activist organizations struggle with acquiring and effectively managing power. They are often frozen with the idea that it is very cheap to save a human life today by, say, giving away some malaria nets or some deparasitizing pills. They also tend to be paralyzed by deontological ethics, with their commandments of "you must always do X, you must never do Y": they are completely unable to conceive that by sacrificing a few million lives today, by omission, by not doing X, by redirecting our limited activist resources to building a better world for tomorrow rather than barely making a difference mitigating today's pain, we could have a return on investment of billions of happy and fulfilled future human lives. On top of our concern for paralysis we are also concerned that non-consequentialist ethics, like deontological and virtue ethics, can easily lead to authoritarianism, simply by creating narratives that align the musts and the virtues with the ruler's interests. |
| Abundance and ostentation rather than scarcity and precarity | Most activist communities are either elitist and therefore not scalable, or they try to be as inclusive as possible by spreading their resources so thin that they create very precarious living conditions, and from that precarity there is little or no power left to effect change. We postulate that by cooperating together and leveraging all the technology that we have at our disposal for production and management, we can create communities that display ostentatious abundance, both material and of leisure time. We can use this abundance to seduce people into joining the alternative system we are building. |
Values
We value the scientific method as the only mechanism we have found so far to gain increased confidence in our knowledge.
We value Homo Sapiens in our current genetic configuration and we reject the notion that we are broken by design: the notion that cognitive biases, emotion-driven behavior, and similar "defects" should somehow be eradicated, using DNA manipulation, authoritarianism, etc.
We contend instead that humans are quite fine already as they are when we operate as part of healthy collectives, and that the apparent dysfunctions that we observe are instead symptoms of a sick society, and of many people having been uprooted and orphaned from any meaningful community. Given that we were designed by millions of years of evolution in collective configurations, it is no surprise that our thoughts and emotions are collective phenomena. We see this fact as a strength to build on for social design and innovation rather than a problem to eradicate or mitigate.
We recognize that this preference is based on an axiomatic choice. We don't claim it to be derived either from scientific inquiry nor by a divinely revealed truth. Alternative preferences, like the desire for individualistic, utility-maximizing, cold optimizers, are equally valid preferences. We just don't share them. And we have some doubts that they can be defended ethically and that utility can be meaningfully defined outside of a social context.
Goal
Our goal is to b ld a new global order, based on voluntary sovereign communities that own, manage and steward communal property.
A trivial corollary to the stated goal is that we aim to replace the current undemocratic market-nation-state system based on violent coercion as the hegemonic belief-institutional system. The current system assumes that people won't voluntarily contribute to society and need to be coerced into wage slavery with the threat of losing access to shelter, food and health care, or being violently thrown into prison. The current system is also undemocratic, even in the so-called Western democracies, because it uses violent coercion against democratically expressed community decisions. If a community wants to, let's say, close down a factory that is polluting their water supply, a nuclear power plant, a McDonald's restaurant or a Tesla car dealer, the state will deploy violence against the community. Given that we are promoting voluntary social participation rather than coerced participation, we don't aim to prevent anybody from being part of violent coercive market-nation-states, as long as all participants are consenting adults. Our goal is to achieve hegemonic status for the alternative values and institutions, and for the current hegemonic ones to be relegated to a harmless fringe minority.Strategy
The proposed strategy consists of building as much power as possible as fast as possible using all the legal, non-violent mechanisms available. Since the social plane with the most freedom in the current system is the market, we can exploit this weakness by building a vertically-integrated conglomerate of global for-profit corporations, owned by a non-profit foundation, which invests the profits in acquiring land for building communities. Initial seed capital will be provided by a Western European community of skilled founding members who must be able, capable, and willing to donate some of their wealth, time and skills to bootstrap the commercial ventures that will fund the global expansion of the project. As more people and resources are transferred from the market economy to the new system, the easier and more desirable it will be for more people to join. When most people and resources are in the new system, we can deprecate the current one.
Corollary: the initial funders must be quite privileged in order to be able to contribute meaningfully. This doesn't mean that we will accept only privileged people in the global network of communities. On the contrary, the economic and political power that these communities will achieve will be used to help the less privileged to reach the same level of privileges and join the communities as equals, starting immediately as soon as the commercial ventures are profitable. Initially targeting the lower-hanging fruit, those who need less help for themselves to contribute significantly to helping others. This is very much contrary to the Marxist strategy which aims at obtaining absolute state power and waiting for a mythical future time of abundance to dismantle the state. That future of abundance is mythical because states tend to move the goalpost and to direct surplus to military expansion rather than to abundance for the citizenry. We don't seek power over non-consenting individuals and we believe that we already have more than enough resources and technology available for everybody to live in abundance if we share it instead of hoarding it.
Tactics
Tactically, it is not necessary to wait until we reach the critical mass necessary to dismantle the market-nation-state system. It is more desirable to start participating in existing state institutions as soon as it is feasible. Not with the goal of winning elections - that would require messaging attractive to the median voter, which would go against the project's objective of making an ideology that is now a minority become hegemonic. Instead, we should act as soon as we have a constituency big enough to get just a few people elected who can influence the government in two aspects symbiotic with the project: First, to improve the lives of citizens, so that we all have more access to freedom of speech, freedom of press, better education, better health, and more abundance of leisure time. The expected outcome is that freeing people, even partially, from wage slavery will ignite active participation in a mass rejection of the current hegemonic violent coercive socioeconomic system. Secondly, institutional participation will enable altering the law to make it gradually more amenable to non-state sovereign communities.
Short-term objectives
We should be able to solve the biggest global trivial, first-order problems in three or four decades. Global hunger, preventable civilian deaths caused by wage slavery injuries, lack of access to healthcare, poverty, etc. can be solved by tactically investing resources: acquiring land for housing those in need, offering residents training in high-value skills, and organizing support for children, the elderly, and the infirm, as well as building health facilities with the same up-skilled residents as staff.
Similarly, migrations are typically forced by poverty. They are exacerbated by the climate catastrophe but are ultimately a consequence of economic inequality. Wealthy people aren't displaced by extreme weather because they have access to sturdy housing with reliable power and climate control. Therefore, solving poverty will automatically reduce migration pressures.
Military slaughters and genocides are more complex. They represent a second-order problem because people trapped in military conflicts often cannot move away even with resources due to state borders. Wars are usually driven by expanding economies needing more territory or seeking to plunder resource-rich areas. Helping affected populations escape would require influence on nearby nation-states to cede land to communities under attack, as well as convincing those under attack that resettling is preferable to heroic but futile resistance against occupation. Still, this isn't an insurmountable problem and should be solvable within a few more decades.
Longer-term objectives
To completely eradicate war, allow everyone to live freely without being violently coerced into wage slavery just to secure basic rights like shelter and food, and to stop and reverse climate change will require a longer time frame.
These three problems are intrinsic to the dynamics of the hegemonic market-nation-state system. As long as economies are structured around for-profit competitive markets rather than collaborative gift economies, and people derive their identities from imaginary communities like nations, we will only be able to deploy tactics to mitigate and delay these problems, but not to eradicate or completely reverse their impacts.