Working Assumptions
Overview
This is a partial list of assumptions that we are making as we go about the development work of this wiki. These assumptions help one to understand our motivations and approach.
Working Assumptions
- Civilization are shaped by their resource base. The resource base is what gives people power. By controlling others through an economic or social hierarchy, we can control resources, and thus gain power. Resource conflicts occur because people have not yet learned to manage resources without stealing. Society has not transcended the brute struggle for survival. We remain on the bottom steps of Maslow's pyramid. Transcending resource conflicts by creating abundance, first for hundreds, then for thousands of people, is now possible if knowledge flows openly and advanced technology is applied to produce goods.
- Said propaganda and conditioning has successfully removed the notion of self-sufficiency as a viable means of livelihood. Most people are afraid of self-sufficiency and consider it a return to the stone age. Most people cannot envision that advanced civilization can be created in small (100-1000 person), self-sufficient, highly skilled communities. Furthermore, most people do not realize that it is possible to educate, skill, and evolve human beings such that an integrated, self-sufficient lifestyle option that promotes advanced civilization on a small scale of human organization is created. It it possible to achieve this level of excellence if people are taught real knowledge and wisdom, as opposed to undergoing global workforce training.
- Education curricula have typically deleted practical applications deliberately, to produce subjects of the global workforce. If education is reinstated then self-sufficiency will emerge as a natural option.
- Self-sufficiency is not an antisocial behavior, but a means to full individual and community accountability for resource conflicts, foul politics, and other corruptions of large-scale endeavors. (review works of Gandhi, Schumacher, Fuller) Self-sufficiency is a means to highest quality life by definition, one is in control of one's destiny when one is self-sufficient. The assumption of self-sufficiency is that its practitioners must be highly skilled, and not products of centralist education.
- By self-sufficient, we mean in full control of providing one's needs. Note that self-sufficiency refers to needs - those things that allow one to survive in absolute health - and not wants. Self-sufficiency does not imply a solo, isolationist endeavor. Self-sufficiency may be accomplished with the help of as many people as it is possible to maintain full accountability, transparency, and sound ethics within that group. This group may be dispersed globally. Historically, sociology of human settlements has shown that this scale of self-sufficiency is a few hundred people. (see E.F. Schumacher; other references)
- The State promotes well-paid incompetence, largely through specialization, such that subjects produce sufficient surplus to pay for their own oppression.
- Education, media, and social engineering programs have subjugated human integrity to passive consumerism, with its related problems (resource conflicts, loss of freedom such as wage slavery). The only way out of this is creating a framework within which humans can prosper: provision of true education, learning of practical skills, stewardship of land, advanced technology for the people, and open access to economically significant know-how.
- Import substitution is reducing dependence on external feedstocks and replacing them with local ones. People in control of their resources control their own destiny. Thus, to localize the essential parts of an economy completely is the prime formula for social stability. Localization should not be considered a struggle, but merely a possibility. It is a possibility that is not recognized because most people, as specialists, lack integrated technical literacy and skills that make a local economy feasible.
