Every four generations we need to learn it all again from scratch. And each time the stakes grow.
The objective of this testament: to be the one thing to be remembered, for the next time. This is a whisper across time, we tell our descendents: we see you in your struggle, we love you so very dearly, you are not alone, and you will persevere. This was the essence of our struggle, may it be a guide for yours… may you receive the echo of our love, across the ages, forever.
Confusion.
The rootiest root of the struggle. Spiraling collapse is blackhole where even light rushes inwards, and observation and sensemaking become impossible. The outcome is confusion across all dimensions, and confusion begets paralysis. Unable to make collective sense, there is no direction to move in, and the status quo continues on its trajectory towards the precipice.
In these times individuals know the precipice draws near, but the mass and momentum of the system cannot change course, the collective cannot coalesce around consensus. It all continues to its own peril and to its doom. And we felt utterly powerless to stop it.
This, this is the root of the struggle. And the bravest, hardest, heaviest step also appeared to be the smallest and most innocent. But it was the first for us, and it was this: _Faith in the Small Step.
A step must be taken. No action is still an action, one where doom is certain. And it must be taken on faith. Like a baby born into a cacophony of tales and tongues, it must come to its own embodied knowing, to cut through the noise and discover its own unique understanding of reality, and trust its ability to know, its birthright to know. There is no justification for this belief. It is a necessary belief, not a true one. It is a leap of faith, a necessary faith that living requires, but especially living in the shadow of collapse.
Faith is one part of it. The other part is the Small Step. The Small Step is a feedback loop, a unity of theory and practice, all in service of living. Each step is a dialogue with reality, I take a step, I feel it in body, I make sense of it in my mind, I reassess, and take another step. I move towards a Good Life, a life of pleasure and fulfillment and meaning. The knowledge of this Good Life is already known, my body already knows how to live, to love, to die. All this knowledge is contained within me. It is a matter of listening to it, and each step is an opportunity to listen.
One foot is steady in a foundation of memory and the past, the other foot bravely ventures into the darkness, the uncertainty, the future. Each step holds excitement and fear, the practice builds the capacity to lovingly behold awe and terror in equal measure. Each step becomes asymptotically small, tiny, microscopic, until it vanishes into apparent nothingness. The smaller the step, the tighter the loop becomes, and the more inevitable its success.
Failure is a function of cost, and the cost of any individual step vanishes. In the absence of cost, any “failure” justifies itself tenfold, hundredfold, in the treasure of its teachings. And with this, there is no failure. Success begets success, the small multiplies beyond measure. The Small Step is the path of power.
Once discovered, the hard part was behind us. But the inevitable next step was to learn how to share this path of power, to be in solidarity across our individual islands of budding coherence.
In past iterations of the struggle, it was the community and the scriptures (the Torah, Bible, Quran, etc). This pattern echoes through the past. There is no telling it will continue into the future, but perhaps it will rhyme again. It rhymed for us.
The site for sharing the Small Step was the community-home and the home server.
In our world, the dominant social classes split into asset holder and renter. The whole apparatus of the system emerged to alienate. The asset holders were alienated from their true needs, leaving greed and accumulation to vainly fill the hole of their own spiritual hunger. The renters were alienated through stories of their own internal wrongness, their fears which kept them distracted and confused in blaming and abusing each other on lines of skin pigment, fictions of self and sexuality, phantom groupings, the different tongues they spoke or totems they worshipped, and other grotesque and arbitrary discriminants.
This apparatus of alienation was highly effective, it stamped out sites of solidarity with a ruthless efficiency. The system was never broken. It simply operated in a way that ensured its own institutional self-preservation, and it did so very gracefully. What a thing of beauty and brutality.
The next trick was discovering a site of solidarity that the very system ensured and enshrined. Systems and dynamics cannot be fought directly, they can only be subverted so their energies naturally flow and transform into their successor. This is part of the teaching of the Small Step, the path of power. There is no resistance, there is no fighting, there is no struggle, these are all crude fictions. There is only continuous flow, and the flow can always be subverted towards the true nature: connection, love.
The very nature of the system meant that renters became more and more densely housed. They were forced into proto-communion, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. And this was the perfect path to subversion and solidarity. This was a well of potential energy and power…
The only difference between the alienation of the co-renter and the solidarity of the co-liver is their relationship to reality. The former relates to the world through disconnection, isolation, clenched fear, resistance towards what is. The latter relates to the world through connection, embeddedness, solidarity, easeful surrender, celebration of what is. Co-renting was the power keg. Faith in the Small Step was the match, offering the promise for catalyzing alienation and transforming its potential energy into communion.
There was only one missing piece now: what was the viral mechanism for spark to transform into flame?
It was very simple: a combination of guerrilla play and common knowledge.
Perhaps people in your era will be different, but ours were not particularly creative. We lived by “monkey see monkey do”, if there was nothing to see, there was also nothing to do. But the converse was also true.
The path of viral expansion was simple: reclaim our pleasure and joy through guerrilla play. Rediscover play through tactics of subversion, chaos, randomness, the very elements that systems of control fear the most, because they are powerless to control. Broadcast our joy and play, making it common knowledge: we all know that we all know that we can have fun at the margin and the system can do nothing to stop us… Even the most callous soul will eventually thaw through exposure to joy; the rich man starved of love will discover the nameless longing they were missing all along, and surrender to their tears and relief.
Community-at-home was the embryonic core of guerrilla play. And the home server was the means of distribution, inevitably ensuring that our joy could be received by the world, and virally inspire more guerrilla play.
From the dead serious perspective of a world on fire this sounds so very self-indulgent, but play is the tip of the spear of solidarity and connection. Once in connection, we naturally wish to build our strength; once a child learns how to walk they strive to run because it is a joy to live with breath in their lungs and air through their hair. The Small Step also teaches us this, that pleasure and joy lead.
Play is the first step. But from there, the world on fire becomes a world in need of so much love, and we had so much love to give, and we now had the vehicle to do it. We joyously poured ourselves into this task befit for the happy warriors we had become. The task before us was joy itself, it allowed us to remember forgotten dreams held within our genes, dreams of tender connection with the world, loving embrace of each other, of all beings, of the cosmos.
Yes, there were a thousand different facets and instantiations of decay and collapse, but each community became the happy warrior of one, we were everywhere all at once, and together and in parallel we moved to regenerate and right the world.
A hundred thousand holonic homes naturally re-assembles into something approaching a federated democracy. It did so in Athens, and Rome, and Florence, and Colonial America, and following land reform in East Asia, and it did for us too, but now in new terms.
Democracy is a mechanism for coalescing and resolving complex pressures emerging out diverse interest groups. A healthy foundation of community-homes beget a layer of associations and communal projects, which in turn require a vehicle for their jostling to transform into coherence and alignment. Democracy is a byproduct, not the origin. It emerges out of communal and economic democracy, and certainly not the other way around — in our own time we had to re-learn the proper order of causality.
The home server became the substrate by which legibility was defined and collated, it became the site by which social law was enacted, codified, shared, adapted, remixed. It became the point of distribution for culture to grow and spread. It became the place why which we could dream new worlds, test them preconfiguratively at home, and weave them with others without appeal or permission from “authorities”. Quickly our system of law reconstituted around these new norms which originated at home, into a federated structure of programatic law, truly democratic now that the priestly caste of lawyers and economists were no longer need, and the politicians could be circumvented.
This whole process was easy. It often appeared violent, crude, frictionful, but beneath superficial conflict was the beating heart of easeful aliveness and joy. The war had already been won, and each battle had a kind of inevitability to it. Once started, it could not be stopped. Our children now carry this mantle, they inherit our foundation and expand upon it.
But all good things come to end. The first generation is the builder. The next is the improver. The third is the gamer. The fourth is the grifter, coinciding with the next crisis, perhaps yours, O reader.
In enshrining the Small Step, delicate and ineffable whispers of beauty become rigid values, rules, metrics, incentives. These are all methods for scaling the embodied truth we were so very lucky to live. I fear we do our children a disservice, I fear that in serving scale our arrogance portends your present crisis. In the past, each generation moves farther and farther from embodied wisdom. Even in our children I feel their motive differ, from presence and joy to designing new fictions of status and value, ultimately to justify and cement systems of scale and power.
I can see it all now, where their children will be subjected to this game, and learn to live through a narrative prosthetic, a story, rather than direct experience. In turn their children will learn to twist the system, metric will drift and lose relation to the wisdom that informed its construction, and accelerate into imbalance once again. Disembodied enshrinement is the seed of our decay, and the bitter fruit of your present crisis.
Perhaps with sober and humble awareness we can break this pattern, a pattern that has played out ceaselessly across human history. Embodied insight cannot be scaled. It must be re-learned and re-embodied each and every generation. Perhaps we can alter the pattern that has already begun, to right the wrong we have already committed. Perhaps we can extend this cycle beyond its normal periodicity; but preventative humility embraces the likelihood that we will likely make the same mistakes as our forbearers. And within our fatal mistakes is your present predicament.
We love you reader, and apologize for our responsibility in your current situation. Learn from us, not as sage elders or founding builders, but as flawed and arrogant mortals. Do it better than us. Exceed us. Stand on our shoulders, so that your children may be free of the illnesses of arrogance and ceaseless striving. Let them have joy, let them revel in the teaching of whatever embodied wisdom you arrive at, so they may fulfill the innate knowing within themselves.
Go forth and be joyful, go forth and be free.