The fact that everyone knows what TSHTF means is a clue there is a real risk of systemic collapse. And while we see the fall of Rome often, nobody remembers the continuation of Constantinople for another thousand years. The Byzantines survived by shedding unprofitable provinces to barbarism and anarchy and redirecting critical resources to the remaining great power centers.

But unless you were among the remaining elites, life was pretty awful, altho somewhat better for those in obscurity, working the land as they always had, often living in abandoned villas like a set of tiny apartments still seen in shabby urban mansions. Many areas, even those ostensibly still part of the empire, didnt have what we now call good security services finding it safer to sleep and live communally in villas and manor halls.

Archeologists have found nuclear family homesteads, but what they dont find is any that lasted more than a few generations before bandits, soldiers, or whatever, looted and burnt them down. Where the houses do survive most often is in obscure villages where there was no gold.

DNA reveals that Native Europeans evolved in villages of 150-300; Africans in tribes of 75-150, other gene pools in the range. This has had some obvious psychological effects, such as the instinct for genetic diversity expressed in wantonness & philandery. Women felt more secure in a village where there were no stranger rapists. Kids dont innately fear strangers cause there were none with candy in a village. And having 50 or more men there offered some security. Ali Babba and the 40 Theives is a clue to the psychology of gangs that were hard to keep organized in the woods if there were more than 50. Who wanted richer targets with far less defenders than well regulated village militias.

Besides the notorious wantonness of village girls, wanting to be on good terms with all their defenders, there are innumerable examples of the inbreeding effect on clans, as well as some sociological studies of the complex mating rules which some tribes've evolved to maximize diversity in small gene pools.

But without the tribal rules which went on for so many millennia that they've become instinctive, its obvious to anyone who thinks about it, how women would prefer different sperm donors for every baby to reduce inbreeding. The innumerable examples we have of harems shows what males like if they had the power. This stands in stark contrast to media & literature, which'd give you the idea monogamy always was a universal hominid standard. Not that it didnt happen.

However, lacking the diversions of cities, monogamy was just too boring for some in village life, and in these isolated gene pools, STDs were far less common. As were other contagions. But The Forest People, an anthro classic on the Congo's Mbuti, who apparently were still living as they had for last 100,000 years, shows us a tribe that while it has monogamy, only 1/3 of them practice it. Another 3rd use serial monogamy, while the other 3rd are promiscuous. Whatever floats your boat.

Another challenge to the idea of universal monogamy was reported by JP Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, in which he notes the original Proto-Indo-European, from which English, and all other Aryan languages descend, has no word for marriage. This can be demonstrated by putting the vocabularies of all Aryan languages in a computer and extracting all the common root words. Its not that pair bonds did not exist, for there are figures of couples that've been found in the Aryan digs in the Chalcolithic era 7000 years ago. But most of the figures arent shown clearly as male & female, but either both clearly female, or lacking rendered sexual attributes. Pair bonds werent instutionalized. Like the matriarchic Musuo of SW China, who you slept with was not their problem. Nobody got on your case about it.

The institution of marriage begins with the need to clarify which sons of alpha male leaders will inherit wealth & power, and having that model, lower classes aspired to it. It was not, and in fact, still is not, such a big deal to the lowest class. We see this in Life in a Midieval Village,taken from the court records of an out of the way English midlands village that were never destroyed by all the armies that have swept across the land since the 13th century. It had been donated to an Abby. What we have, are records of the Lord's Court, the annual proceedings when the Abbot came to collect taxes, settle disputes, & perform marriages. The people're too poor to afford a church & priest.

They didnt pay to get married very often. What they usually did- is the well known pagan custom of jumping the broom with year & a day contracts. At the end of a year, the couple may split the profits, or sign on for another year. The Abbot himself signed off on this for his cut. When the miller died, his wife inherited the business, also using the facilities to render sexual services for stud muffins she mite need to manhandle the stock. The Abbot turned a blind eye to this. All he wanted was taxes; his share increased under her management.

Then, before this, archaeologists have revealed where a village of nuclear family huts was replaced with a Viking Longhouse, where we know the occupants lived polyamorously. The one house only needed one fire to keep everyone warm. The one big hearth was fed by several men carrying in yule logs to butt against each other that burned down like cigars, rather than needing the wood to be cut up into small chunks for single couple's hut. The long winters of the Norse regions and pheromones in a longhouse no doubt promoted polyamory like living in a coed dorm, and thus today, we still see Nordic women as more wanton, a tradition they inherited from the stone age.

The timberframe construction of the Viking Longhouse can be seen in the position of charred post stubs dug up by archaeology which date back in SE Europe 8000 years to beginnings of agriculture. The original Aryans, the Proto-Indo-Europeans Mallory writes of, lived in these communal manor halls from 8000BCE to 4000BCE before dispersing West across all Europe and East across the Steppes. The result has been a lot of diversity as Aryans mixed with various indigeneous cultures. However, the more mysogenistic the mix, the slower the rate of development.

Marriage was not always admired; Tacitus reports the rebuttal of a Celt to the charge of wontenness:Well, we Celts consort with the best of men in public, while you Roman wives do so in secret with the most vile. Plotinus goes on derisively about how infat- uation distorts perceptions, and how angry people get when they realize they have been deceived, even tho it was self deception. Marriage was always practiced with a double standard, and still struggles with the cognitive dissonance that dissolves when the honeymoon is over. People just arent that well equipped choosing partners. Whereas before they turned a blind eye to philandery, now with DNA paternity is provable. Further, STDs are far more dangerous so that the double standard is intolerable.

All over the world, in relatively recent Aryan, African or other cultures that go back scores of millennia, matchmakers & others had input into mate selection. The divorce rate where this still goes on is not any worse than people living with their own choices. Hominids did not evolve that way, but in small groups where everyone had a pretty good idea of who everyone else was, often in other tribes that had other mating possibilities. When til death do you partwas rarely very long, it just didnt make sense to invest that much in another individual. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Leblanc in Constant Battles,and Diamond in Collapse all note that 25% of the men in primitive hunting tribes die from violent assault. There is similar data from the graveyards of the Maya, Aztec, & Inca, where men lived on average only to 25. Women depended on the tribe for support.

And when we look close at these primitive cultures, even tho there is marriage, the close pair bonds many women feel is with another woman, which explains why so many ancient figure pairs are female. Men died, early, often, and suddenly. What took women out was teen pregnancy & childbirth. But if a woman made it past that, then she could create a lasting bond with another older woman. The cemetary at Varna Bulgaria, 3500 BCE, breaks dramtically with that model by having women average into their early 40s. The reason is because the ecosystem of Europe provided many herbal contraceptives.

Back when they had lunar calendars, it was realized that every 19 years, the new moon was seen in the same house with the sun at the very same time of year. This period, the metonia, became the age at which women were deemed mature enough for childbirth. This made the teen girls available as baby sitters, made for resources to be saved up for the dowry & childbearing years, and with better supervision, the childhood death rate fell. The cultures practicing the metonic cycle developed far faster, while those which treated women as livestock, or even worse, did not. Men who wouldnt think of breeding a filly or a doe before she was fully mature, failed to give women the same consideration.

In the village or tribe, matchmakers had some input, often able to delay marriage until the girl was more mature and the man had more resources to support a family organized. We should also bear in mind that the witches, shamen, & elders raised the kids of parents who were incompetent for the sake of genetic diversity. The kids mite have immunity to disease risks. The parents may also have a different skill the tribe values. It didnt matter if the parents broke up, the village was the social safety net. Both parents stayed in the village after a breakup where kids still had access. If a parent died, the village was there to manage the grief and take care of the kids while the other parent dealt with the tragedy. It indeed, ttook a village or tribe to raise kids.

Adults all have genes that evolved in these small communities that have equipped us to manage relationships. We dont have genes which evolved to handle traffic; hominids are not herd animals. Some of us have descended from Witches & Shamen with an instinct to want to help people. Some evolved as the result of case management, and depend on it to stay in the gene pool. The elders were always rite there to interfere with anger by warriors, who the tribe needed to defend the village & do the hunting. Warriors have depended on the elders managing their anger so that they could focus on what they do best. Kill. Today, we have experts doing this too, but they are each focused on some particular aspect of life- the job, school, & family, with none of them getting insight into the entire millieu the instinctive warrior has to cope with. Mostly they arent there to nip emotionally charged anger in the blood; our prisons are full of the result.

Mostly, hominids in urban environments spend the majority of their time with their own cohort, be it children, adults, or seniors; it separates the generations tending to make them compete rather than cooperate with one another. Further, the competition that goes on within any given generation lacks the insightful input from other generations. This lack of relation- ship, which in tribal life made individuals more dependent on friends, or even a single mate. Most relationship problems people have is because hominids didnt evolve to provide that much emotional support, but relied on the tribe or village to take up a lotta slack. The ability to transfer that way of life into our modern time varies some with instinctive cultural values.

Hunters & nomads evolved with the attitude that anything outside the tribe they came across was fair game; be it animal or human. Farmers, being more limited to their immediate resource base, had a different attitude, aware that anything which didnt belong to them in the area belonged to other farmers. It was the farmstead that provided the nuclear family model which is now promoted by media at the behest of business, government, & religion, each of which would prefer that individuals be reduced in relationships to the absolute minimum for the population growth needed to build these various constituencies. So, now, while they all give lip service to marriage, their decisions have reduced the importance of the husband & father after his sperm donating is done, which reduces the nuclear family even further to the single parent- who is the most of all, dependent on these larger organizations.

Some women're figuring this out, and we see lesbian relationships increase, not only from the traditional pair, but on up to triads and larger sets, which goes on hidden because of fears of social sanction. However, it is the most socially adaptable, smartest, & rational, who after examining the above trends who do this. They, however, often have only 1 child between the pair, or even none, and thus are being outbred by the less gifted women whose progeny are adding to our educational, unemployment, substance abuse, & crime problems, at the same time that the percentage of gifted kids who will contribute to the innovation the culture needs to compete in the global market declines.

Also, hominids inherit complex behavior patterns the same as all other primates. However when hominids from different lines mate, as with yeoman farmers with hunters, some inherited patterns have different agendas that result in cognitive dissonance. The cowboy model fits the nomadic lifestyle that Aryans evolved on the Asian Steppes; but there is pitiably small demand for that service. Men all over yearn to be what they are not. Those that're smarter are more adaptable, able to find market niches that fit, and able to get the education needed to fit in them.

Primate research reveals that the instinct to want to dominate is handed down on the Y chromosome. Unfortunately, brute force is no longer sufficient, and the intelligence to actually succeed at it is handed down on the mtDNA. Now that Smith & Wesson guarantee equal rights for women, the brave heart with strong right arm, sword in hand... no longer cuts it. The result is, as Nietzsche put it, the rancor of the powerless. Professional sports helps, but there is pitiably small demand for that service too. And even at that, intelligence is needed far more than the audiences know to keep up with the evolution of training & tactics.

The ancient sages of both East & West universally recommend life as a gardener as best. But both they, and their readers, had not that many generations before, even if living in cities, been back on the farm, and had evolved there for many millennia. Its only been in the last century that the population of cities exceeded that of the farmers. Excepting a few like Hamilton, most of the founding fathers were actually founding farmers, trying to set up a government suited to their landed interests.

Disproportionate power still resides in the relatively rural states even tho those who live there are no longer back on the farm. The Latin word for rural, is pagan. Those pagan values, which America inherited from both the Founding Farmers & our Native European yeoman ancestors, has been pushing square pegs into round holes. Gibbon said Roman pagans universally believed religion was true, philosphers thot it was false, and magistrates knew it was useful. (Conventional religion was never designed to respond to the analysis seen in the postings on the Internet.)

The urban pagan masses're rarely more than a few generations from the farm at the height of Rome's power. Today, urbanites usually can track back to the farm in a few generations as well, with the outcome of that cognitive dissonance contributing to the general sense of the loss of roots. That yearning can be seen in popular TV nature shows & the ads of SUVs consistently shown in boondock settings despite the fact that few of them ever get off freeways. Our seniors, who formerly were raised on farms, chose to move to the Sunbelt. But our more recent retirees, who never lived on the farm, are increasingly investing in rural real estate and trying to recover instinctive rural roots with hobby farms. Presidents & politicians, whose entire careers were in our capitols, commonly retire to ranches where they can play cowboy with real cows even tho they actually know nothing of the cattle business.

Poor minorities, who have hunter, not yeoman farmer ancestry, now live in urban jungles which their own aggressive instincts have created. There is no other place for them to go, and they are not happy about it. Well, the one other place is the dreamland found in recreational drugs. However, the recent development of virtual reality hunting grounds on computer screens may suffice. Whatever else cyberspace is, it is vast; but it does not provide physical exercise, which we now know is essential for maximal mental development. Most recently, there's work that identifies physical activity in proximity to the projected image that may help.

But all this does little, if anything, for the women no matter what their ancestral traditions. Whether nomad, hunter, or yeoman farm ancestry, women lived & worked in close proximity to other women, sharing childcare duties. Whether nomad, hunter, or yeoman farmer, women gathered and/or nurtured plants. Which dont do much on a computer screen, so the video games havent satisfied women. They have, to some extent, tried to use the communcations ability of this screen to create the kind of connectedness their ancestry expected them to experience, but that too is a shadow of reality, and not very satisfactory. Even the audio & video image of others women care about does not have the tactile sense of being hugged or the feel of a child in the lap.

The result has been a rapid increase in lesbianism, which may not be sexual, only social or fraternal. But for many women it hasnt been satisfactory. Even if they dont need sex, one thing which is missing from the Lesbian home, are the pheremones which men provided, the presence of which subconsciously meant more security from the threats of nature. Ever since the primates, the male pheremones meant they were there, on watch, so the females slept without worry about predators in the dark. Without it, they are on edge, trying to sense any risk in the nuance of behavior anyone else mite exhibit. Its a wonder Lesbian households work as well as they do. They work better for the yeoman women, who lived in cottages with secure walls & lands around them where predators had long been hunted out for the sake of the livestock.

But even more secure, was the Longhouse women lived polyamorously with other men, women, and kids in. Some of us descend from long lines of firewatchers, who kept a fire going with minimal amounts of firewood. In the communal manorhouses, the threatening forests were a mile or more away, which however meant it was a long haul for firewood. Fires needed to be carefully managed all nite, then brought up in the morning to warm the place up, cook, or heat tea for everyone. Now that the Net runs 24/7, and so many work online alone, this firewatcher instinct is coming out. If someone surfs while you sleep, you know no intruders are going to break in. The 27 hour circadian rhythm so many of us have is a clue to the fact that this niteowl task rotated among others. Thus, also a clue to our communal, polyamorous ancestry.

Firewatching isnt very demanding, so the other thing hominids do because they innately multi-task, is think. All over the world we know there are people now who look blankly at this screen, where some amorphous form catches the eye, reminding them of some other aspect of their existance. Out of which a myriad of myth was born to be reported in the morning, then handed down for generations. Out of which the ideas presented above are presented for your own contemplation. In the Longhouse, voices in the dark, from dreams, present ideas often like those we see on this screen that we try to make sense of- even tho we know very little about where those ideas really come from.

Until the 20th century, literature mentions the sexual duty women had, which can also be tickled out of oral traditions going all the way back to the communal houses. It doesnt take much sex to keep a female line in the gene pool, a ritual duty on new & full moons would suffice, never mind all the women that were forced. A lot of pre-Christian documentation shows male homosexuality is an ancient, even pre-historic practice; but either way, whether men were gay or women frigid, however much there was, it didnt take a lot of duty, driven by the need to maximize sexual diversity in a small gene pool, to keep both sexual characteristics in the gene pools. But whatever kind of men there are in the house, there was a constant exposure to male pheremones, which the sexually active & inactive women were exposed to alike.

Prior to the imposition of Christian homophobia & mysogeny, sex was regarded as sacred, not profane. Its one way firewatchers had of entertaining; then as now, it tends to improve communication. Lovers hear truths others do not. However, in polyamorous tribal life, there's no need to lie about sexual activity. Whatever kind of sex you got off on, or none at all, it was not a big deal. No other single person depended on the sexual performance of beloved partners. Yes, they had the pair bond, but exclusive sexuality was not the token of attachment. Philanders could not present one face at home, and another at work. The same people were at both places. Some, whose egos wanted a larger audience, felt stifiled; when cities emerged, they left to be early adopters. But others, wiser, took the advice of the ancient sages, valuing modesty more than fame. This is an attitude eloquently rendered by Garrison Keillor's Prairy Home Companion radio shows & books. Ironic that he has a mass audience, but indicative of the sense in urbanites of something that is missing in their lives. Villagers preferred better relationships, not more of them, a few good friends rather than a myriad of mediocre ones.

In the last few centuries in particular, village and tribal life has been increasingly abandoned for the perceived advantages and opportunity of the urban. Which for the vast majority has proven to be a bitter disappointment. But you cant go home again. Lotsa times, its not even there anymore. Like Mulenburg county, large corporations have bought up the houses, stores, & churches, torn them all down, hauled it away, and replaced it with agribusiness or pulp paper plantations. All that's left are the graveyards.

But if you cant go home again, perhaps you can design a home that lacks the problems which drove earlier generations away from it in the 1st place. I was born on a farm in 1939, saw a transition from the Rockwellian family farm with workhorses to agribusiness with diesel tractors, and saw it wasnt idyllic as Norman Rockwell or Garrison Keillor have drawn it. I've been snowed in for over 5 weeks at a crack, and know how lotsa psyches'd crack during it. I remember lotsa angry shouting when the agendas of house & barn collided. But I also recall how it mellowed out if lotsa kin were there, and mediators could intervene. The problem with a nuclear family, is that its one on one, and no majority ruling.

The advantage of the sexually diverse longhouse was that there're more than just 2 sexes, with some like Tireseus, who saw it both ways. There were also the elders, and thus more eyeballs looking for common ground. The advantage of the city was a vast pool of expertise exchanging input and finding new solutions with methods of manufacture vastly more efficient than cottage industry. There is now, however, a way to have it both ways. This message comes to you via a satellite dish next to my home in the boonies. There are increasing numbers who work online, medical transcription or whatever, who are moving out of the urban areas to where the cost of living is lower so that they can get by on the same income as a technician in Bangalore or Beijing. Outsourcing wont be nearly the risk when you dont need the income to live in American metro areas. Longhouse manufacturing may not be as efficient as that we see done by transnationals, but its way ahead of cottage industry at the same time that it has a far lower cost of management.

The SBA says that the most efficient form of business has less than 50 employees. Which is what was on hand in rural villages we see going all the way back to the stone age. Most people can only remember about 300 faces; after that, they have to rely on status symbols. The cost of status symbols has gotten way out of hand. A lot of expensive vehicles get bought to impress women. In village life, the girls all know who the jackasses are, and even if they drive a new SUV, women know they are still jackasses. Village men figure this out, and spend their money more wisely. This means the men can spend more time with the women rather than out trying to make the money to impress women they dont know. Women like it.

Lotsa men do to. But- where is a village you'd want to move to? Damnifino. Every village, commune, or other community, metro area on down to hamlet, suffers from group think. Wherever people come together, they bring the ideas from the socialization they were exposed to, without ever considering whether those values fit the new community. The clash of different customs from other areas is a common cause for heated debate, without shedding lite on better solutions. There is, by now, a large body of work on our DNA that affects our brain chemistry that in turn affects our behavior and the values that get applied to it. In addition, there are several studies on the effects of nutrition, or lack thereof and chemical contamination, or the lack thereof, that are manifest in the way that kids develop, or fail to. Which effect puberty & adulthood, or even the onset of problems like alzheimer's or dementia.

That's a lot to deal with; AFAIK, its never been tried attempting to setup a new community, or replace utopia- with more realistic expectations. I've been a member of, or visited communes, rural & urban. But I've not seen any that, at the outset,worked out some business plan for long term economic support. Many failed to find that, and dissolved. All the talk of environment and economic development, in both the near, and long term that we hear or read about, hasnt been worked out for particular locations, with clear ideas of the local resource bases. Moreover, whatever plans I've seen, whether for global, national, state, or local communities, havent integrated the effect of the challenges & opportunites of the Internet. Urban areas, where high speed bandwith is easy to setup, lack agricultural land to grow food people need to ensure wholesomeness and optimal development for their children. Rural locations may have the soil, but lack the communications access to be effective in the global and/or local economic markets.

There are, however, some rural locations near major fiber optic trunks, where long distance wireless, or satellite communications can be installed. But I dont see any way to move land needed for healthy food production to be brought into an urban area. One way to handle this is like the Athenian Deme, where urbanites had an investment in farmland, and went out from time to time to get the crops planted, managed, and harvested. Community gardens are a step in this direction, but they have a long way to go. There has not been much investment in the production of grains, dairy, and meat, nor the greenhouses to extend the season. People still have to buy the bulk of their food from commercial enterprises that do not have their best interests at heart.

If you look at the entire millieu of The Midieval Village, you'll see an example of vertical integration, where almost everything the people of the village needed was produced in the village. The village owned the oxen that plowed all the land, with each family given a certain number of rows to grow whatever they wanted. The mill ground all the flour. The smith made all the tools. Pasture raised all their livestock for meat, milk, & wool. Women spun the wool on their own spinning wheels, weaving some of it, but there was also a new technology emerging in looms which were brought to the village by a professional weaver, who would then move on to the next village. Naturally, they built their homes, thatched the roofs, cut their own firewood from the common woodlots, cooked in their own fireplaces and entertained each other with their own stories. They didnt have TV... or a cable bill. They didnt have a lotta money, but they didnt need it.

I'm not suggesting that modern urbanites return to such primitive conditions; I've seen hippies try it. They didnt last long. There is, however, a middle ground; all of the intentional communities I've seen or read about that are still with us have electricity. Some run more conventional businesses and are on the grid. Others get by on solar, wind, or whatever. But even with the former, the per capita power consumption is way down. Rather than a rec room in every house, there's one for the whole village where the TV or PC screens are on almost all the time. Niteowls have company. The cafeteria also runs 24/7; but since they are not both in the same building, people dont mindlessly munch while they look at screens, so they dont mindlessly gain weight.

Audio's cheap cause you dont need a lotta watts for music. Its so quiet in the country you can hear a car radio 1/4 mile away; you cant hear that in the city even a block away- the ambiend noise level is so high. You dont need a car to visit friends; walk. You can run down the list of these expenses needed for a decent life, add up the costs of cable, gasoline, heating fuel, electricity, & taxes on all of them, and get by on 10% of the cash.

Now, lets apply this to an entrepeneurial operation; if it is set up as a partnership, there's no need to meet minimum hourly wages and the taxes that go with them. In fact, if it is a church, land and other taxes are dramtically reduced. You wont be paying FICA either, so when you want to retire, your benefits from US Social Security will be minimal. Which is only a problem if you think it will still be supporting entitlements by then. But if you doubt- federal entitlements'll be there for you at retirement- then this kind of local community support mite be more useful. It is high time to think about saving up. If the reduction of entitlements to some sustainable level cannot be worked out politically, then it will be done the old fashioned way, with revolution. They will be simply abandoned as was done in Argentina. But which ever way, there will be enormous economic stresses that a community with a plan will be far more able to cope with than any family, limited to whatever resources it has. The community which works out new social values based on hominid evolution will do much better.

Lastly, modern urbanites can set up Demes without having to abandon their current lifestyle. Rather than paying money in a fitness gym, get the feedback from work that actually has some tangible benefit at the same time the money paid represents a share of stock in the enterprise. If the economy keeps muddling thru, the partnership rewards with healthy food. But if TSHTF, then you have hands on experience knowing how to grow it so you and your family wont starve.

For the growing number of single moms, the village is a very appealing lifestyle. Gies shows us how medieval villages were a small business: foundry, pottery, grist mill, tannery, or fabric... whatever would sell when trade was good. But if war, revolution, or pandemic cut off trade, they still had their own timber, pasture, field crops, orchards, gardens, and livestock to get by on until trade picked up again.

Women saw the resources would be there to raise the kids they bore. The village also had its own school, childcare, witches for healthcare and midwifery, and male mentors there even if the sperm donor was not. Today, a village could afford its own broadband to both help educate the kids in specialties as well as support a modern business model.

Take a look at Farm Math book , an 1885 one room country school 8th grade math book. Few with high school diplomas could deal with it today. You can see how the math relates to the math problems people on farms had at the time, so the kids were motivated to get it. The urban school program is just too abstract.

Kids were smarter then because they were raised on healthy home grown veggies with trace minerals that empower neurotransmitters when laying down new neural pathways during learning. They werent raised on sugar cereals, junk food, and soda, and werent exposed to psychoactive chemicals. Nor were they exposed to the pathogens that constantly circulate in large schools cause there are enuf students for new mutuants to constantly evolve.

My own neck of Ozark woods has lotsa abandoned homesteads left by those who could not pick up on the skills needed for the kind of self sufficiency they hoped for. But in a village, the economy of scale is vastly better than cottage industry, and its reasonable to have specialists to take care of alternative energy, stock breeding, timber framing, organic gardening, or whatever.

This is also highly educational to the kids who actualy get to see adults in productive activity and thereby come to understand the value of a dollar and the work it represents. And while there may well be some enterprise involving office work or whatever that is not so obviously instructive, nobody need do it 40 hours/week, but also engage in these other more physical activities that have their own psychological rewards from seeing hands create something real.

A village could be a deme partnership as well for urbanites and their kids to get many of the same benefits. Village output reduces the per capita carbon footprint for villagers and urbanites, making life with lower or stagnant income levels more comfortable. And of course, if the proverbial shit does hit the fan, its a resource base from which to rebuild a more comfortable and sane life.

Moreover, any business enterprise would benefit from a village staff that has a lower exposure rate to contagions. Since the kids and the parents and the staff all live and work together, they are not constantly introducing new bugs. And since the kids are healthier, the parents are not so stressed out, and productivity improves.

Then too, as Gies shows us in Life in a Medieval Village, if there is a need for many more people to handle a crop or a rush order, they are all there in the village to pitch in as needed. Nor, OTOH, is there a need for the busy work in an enterprise when there is so many other productive activities villagers could be doing. And if they are all partners in the enterprise, then their kids can chip in as well, as they've always done on family farms and family firms, and thereby learn something of what work is like with self esteem built on something real.

The people are more real as well; you cant be one thing at work and another at home. Everyone knows everyone else, and quickly pick up on drama queens and bullshit artists. Social predators prefer strangers as prey, and have thus always moved to cities. But nobody expects saints either. Knowing people face to face builds tolerance for flaws.

Village life has always been more egalitarian. Nobody gets rich, nor are there the destitute. When everyone knows everyone else, nobody needs status symbols to indicate how to relate, and in fact status symbols dont work, so the cost of living drops.

Villagers have always been known as poor, honest, and ignorant. But now with broadband, the latter problem is solved. This website could be read anywhere on the planet, and these words can be parsed out line by line to see if they make sense. Nobody in a village has the authority to control what anyone else thinks.

Group think will still evolve, but anyone can look up the work of Janis to see how it works and thereby expose the delusion as it evolves. And when problems emerge, they can be posted just like this for people to think about without having to have everyone stop what they are doing, or spend time listening to someone vent. There's been a lot of progress in the social sciences, so its time to try to apply it in a more rational setting than what passes for civilization.

dayhbrown can be reached at gmale.