Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Page 9
Over in Tsarist Russia, the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the onset of new industrial forms of production immediately preceded Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 What Is to Be Done?, a work that profoundly influenced later Russian Bolsheviks, including a young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (also known as Lenin). In his protagonist Vera Pavlovna’s third dream sequence, Chernyshevsky outlined a utopian vision where women are emancipated and workers would finally enjoy the fruits of their own labor. “Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful,” Chernyshevsky wrote. “Love it, strive toward it, work for it, bring it nearer, transfer into the present as much as you can from it.”3
✏️ This is just one example, but it highlights that at times of crises, turbulence, regime, etc., writers tend to react with a focus on utopia and idealized forms of society. Also, it’s cool seeing how these writings influence leaders. 📖 (Page 9)
Page 11
The German sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that utopia was a necessary antidote to what he considered the normative role of “ideology,” a term he specifically defined as the unseen but omnipresent social, cultural, and philosophical structure that upholds a particular “order of things” and protects those who wield political and economic power. “The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle realized,” Mannheim wrote in 1929. Those who benefit from the way things are have a strong motive for labeling as “utopian” any ideas that threaten the status quo. But even beyond that, those steeped in the ideology of their current existence cannot imagine an alternative to it. And most of us follow along.
✏️ Utopia vs ideology 📖 (Page 11)
Page 12
We accept the way things are because we’ve never known them to be different. Behavioral economists call this the “status quo bias”. People prefer things to stay the same so they don’t have to take sponsibility for decisions that might potentially change things for the worse. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously found that people want to avoid feeling regret, and that they are more likely to feel regret about a bad outcome resulting from a decision they made compared to a bad outcome that came from inaction. It’s just so much easier to do nothing. Accepting the status quo - even if we hate it - means the potential for fewer regrets.
✏️ Status quo bias. Thinking outside the box requires courage. 📖 (Page 12)
Page 15
According to the anthropologist Wade Davis, “the world into which you were born does not exist in an absolute sense but is just one model of realitythe consequence of one particular set of intellectual and adaptive choices that your own ancestors made, however successfully, many generations ago.” As individuals going about our daily lives, it is often hard to step out of the flow of history and consider how things might have been different if our ancestors had made an alternative set of intellectual and adaptive choices” and to imagine what those choices might look like in practice. When we lose sight of the past, we lose sight of the idea that there were other pathways forward, other roads not taken. We begin to feel our present reality as static and inflexible. We convince ourselves that things cannot change, and that if they do, they will change for the worse
✏️ Nothing is static or set in stone. What we consider sacrosanct now was merely random or particular choices made by ancestors. 📖 (Page 15)
Page 16
profit-seeking corporations and think tanks often encourage brainstorming sessions open to all ideas regardless of practical constraints: so-called blue sky thinking. Conjuring up new technologies, products, or marketing slogans to increase profits distinguishes the entrepreneurial mastermind from the mere corporate flunky. We accept that this is a good approach for solving economic issues and scientific problems. Yet at the same time, dreaming of different ways of organizing our lives is dangerous and discouraged.
✏️ Blue sky thinking is good for anything and everything, except in in political, social and economic systems that might disrupt the specific status quo that keeps a certain set of people to maintain power and wealth. Dare not consider ideas that might reorganize our individual and family lives and make them better. 📖 (Page 16)
Page 21
After centuries of Western colonialism that dispersed patriarchal family forms across the globe, fewer than thirty human societies remain matrilocal today.
✏️ Patrilineality and patrilocality, all which keeps women subservient to men. 📖 (Page 21)
Page 22
One community of Tibetan Buddhists called the Mosuo provides a fascinating example of a matrilocal society where neither side over large multigenerational families. Women own and inherit spouse is expected to relocate. Among the Mosuo, grandmothers preside over large multigenerational families. Women own and inherit property through the maternal line and live with their mother’s tended family. Men live in their maternal grandmother’s household and practice a form of “walking marriage,” whereby they visit their partner only at night. Both men and women can have as many companions as they desire, without stigma, and women often do not know who has fathered their children. The concept of “father” barely exists, and men have few paternal responsibilities. Being a good uncle is far more important, as men help raise the children of their sisters. Since there is no formal marriage, the only reason men and women form pairs is because they are attracted to each other or enjoy each other’s company. When the attraction fades, romantic ties can be dissolved without negative financial consequences or social impacts on the children. How very radical the Mosuo family structure seems to many us today highlights just how deeply ingrained our own patrilocal and patrilineal traditions remain.
✏️ Example of matrilocal society, but also reads so radical.. But that’s more a reflection of how ingrained patriarchy is within us. 📖 (Page 22)
Page 25
As our societies evolve and change, we must be ever mindful of the social and cultural beliefs which perpetuate patriarchal power and how they manifest themselves in our daily lives. The traditions that many of us think of as “natural” have been shaped by millennia of patrilocal and patrilineal practices which reinforce the power of a small group of (usually male) authority figures over the rest of society.
📖 (Page 25)
Page 38
most famous monasteries and universities were overwhelmingly male spaces. Women who chose to become nuns often found themselves locked away in convents living under the strict authority of the Mother Superior and a male hierarchy that controlled their access to resources. Many convents were much poorer than monasteries, and some orders demanded dowries or other maintenance fees from the aspiring nun’s family. Nuns enjoyed fewer freedoms than monks, particularly their ability to leave their cloisters. But beginning in 1190 CE, some women found a way to live communally with other women without taking vows. They became the first Beguines (sometimes referred to as Beguine nuns), a special lay order of women who lived together in urban areas in what is now modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. In contrast to cloistered nuns who took religious vows and lived apart from the world, lay nuns lived their faith within their communities.
✏️ The start of the beguines.. Women communities that were spiritual without taking vows 📖 (Page 38)
Page 39
Eventually, the male hierarchy felt threatened by the defiant independence of the beguinages, which attracted greater and greater numbers of single women and widows into their all-female fellowship. Partially for their lack of formal religious vows, the Catholic Church castigated the Beguines as heretics and ordered that the beguinages be disbanded at the Council of Vienne in 1311. Despite this, the Beguine way of life continued for centuries beyond the official auspices of the Catholic hierarchy because they never lacked customers for their beer, cloth, and lace, and they remained in high demand as nurses and teachers.
✏️ Beguines were independent, economically self sufficient, provided useful services, etc. But they threatened patriarchy too much and were labeled as heretics. The ol witch mandate really. 📖 (Page 39)
Page 40
Fourier’s vision of the secular phalanstery (sometimes called “phalanx”) drew direct inspiration from the abbeys of the Roman Catholic Church. The portmanteau phalanstère comes from blending the French words phalange (an ancient Greek military formation, per haps in a nod to Plato’s wish that his Guardians live as “soldiers in a camp”) and monastère (monastery) in recognition of the utopian impulses of the cenobitic tradition. The phalanstery was a massive complex designed for 1,620 men, women, and children together in a self-sustaining community where people theoretically only labored at tasks that they enjoyed based on their particular passions.
✏️ Fourier vision of communal living 📖 (Page 40)
Page 41
the phalanstery included a central residential structure flanked by two wings with covered galleries. Noisy workshops as well as the children’s living quarters and schools would take up one wing, while a traveler’s inn and various meeting rooms would be clustered in the other. The phalanstery strove for balance between agriculture and industry, as well as the private and the communal.
📖 (Page 41)
Page 42
Fourier imagined collective abundance, free love, and communally raised children, although he allowed for private property and some social stratification. Residents who had joined the community with preexisting wealth enjoyed more luxurious rooms, but they took their common meals in a dining hall with anyone in the community who had a taste for more exclusive foods and wines. Fourier believed that some level of inequality was unavoidable, and as long as all residents lived in conditions of relative abundance, differences in dispositions (or what Fourier called “passions”) would not fuel envy or discord.
✏️ In Fourier’s vision, he allowed for some social stratification as necessary evil I guess? But hoped the collective abundance would allow for everyone’s varying wants of modesty vs luxury. 📖 (Page 42)
Page 42
Jean-Baptiste André Godin built his first Familistère (Familistery or Social Palace) in 1859 in a small village in northern France called Guise. This experiment in collective living lasted for 109 years. Like Robert Owen had done in Scotland, Godin married utopian socialist visions with local industrial production to build a successful (if paternalistic) community of workers, giving proof that Fourier’s sometimes fanciful ideals could be adapted to practical purposes and promote greater concord between capital and labor.
✏️ Another vision of communal living. Built by an industrialist aiming to marry socialist living with industrial work. 📖 (Page 42)
Page 43
Although individual families resided in their own private apartments, the Social Palace resembled a large hotel with a beautiful vaulted glass ceiling where residents shared a vast array of communal spaces designed for their enjoyment, including assembly halls, dining rooms, a theater, gardens, courtyards, a laundry, a swimming pool, a bar, and an observatory. All children accessed childcare and education according to their ages: a nursery for infants; a pouponnat for toddlers who could walk, up to four years old; and a bambinat for children from four to six, after which they began their education
✏️ The profitable industry of making and selling stoves funded the space, education, leisure, etc. They had rules of conduct, honors and bonuses, as well as elected council of men and women. 📖 (Page 43)
Page 45
Friedrich Engels criticized the Familistery as an unworkable “bourgeois” solution: “No capitalist has any interest in establishing such colonies, and in fact none such exists anywhere in the world, except in Guise in France and that was built by a follower of Fourier, not as profitable speculation but as a socialist experiment.”
✏️ Still though, in 1880 Godin converted ownership into a cooperative enterprise owned by the employees. It flourished until the 1960s when market for iron stoves dried up. 📖 (Page 45)
Page 47
when the Soviet Union industrialized, the idea of self-sufficient rural communities like the phalanstery and the Familistery, as well as the work of the Swiss-French urban planner Le Corbusier, inspired architects to design new integrated city neighborhoods where workers would reside near their workplaces and enjoy easy access to services. Massive new planned cities like Magnitogorsk sprang up, filled with microdistricts, known as mikrorayoni: large housing complexes within walking distance to parks, health clinics, schools, and groceries, and connected by free or subsidized public transportation to universities, factories, and offices. Planners also designed these microdistricts to help promote women’s emancipation: if women had easy access to stores, cafeterias, playgrounds, and mass transit networks, many of their domestic burdens could be reduced
✏️ Soviet example 📖 (Page 47)
Page 49
The ground floors of almost every residential tower included cinemas, culture centers, libraries, kindergartens, pediatricians, supermarkets, hairdressers, cafés, and a wide variety of services that existed ‘primarily to lessen the burdens associated with daily life in the private sphere. Wide pedestrian-only promenades linked parks and children’s playgrounds, where kids could roam freely with their friends around the residential towers. 39 A construction worker or miner might live next door to a physicist, a neurosurgeon next to a seamstress, and, “On the top floor of many of the taller blocks,” Vučetić explained to me, “the planners had built ateliers for creative workers. Each building had a working writer, a painter, a designer, and a composer in apartments with terraces as big as the apartment they lived in.” Even when I visited in 2021, the ground floors of these microdistricts still contained various businesses to service people’s daily needs: appliance repair shops, dentists, butchers, green grocers, and stationers.
✏️ Serbian example based on the Soviets. What’s fascinating is that the penthouse is reserved as workshops for creative artists etc., serving the building. These places functioned as 15-minute cities almost. 📖 (Page 49)
Page 54
cohousing tends to be intergenerational and attempts to find an ideal balance between privacy and community. Cohousing also allows for private or collective homeownership, as opposed to the rental options primarily available through co-living, making cohousing a more permanent arrangement.
✏️ Denmark in 60s/70s thought of cohousing, balancing privacy and community. 📖 (Page 54)
Page 55
Over the next decade, cohousing communities spread across Denmark, usually in suburban or semirural areas with an architectural style known as “dense-low,” dense because people lived close together and low so that the developments would maintain a greater harmony with nature. Much like the initial plans devised by Gudmand-Høyer, the physical layout of cohousing usually included a cluster of independent homes-much smaller than single-family homes, but still with private bedrooms, bathrooms, and a kitchen-together with shared walkways, gardens, parking, laundry facilities, workshops, tools, recreational equipment, and play spaces. The collective facilities encourage sociality, and many cohousing communities include labor requirements that compel residents to work together toward common goals. The architecture of cohousing communities varies, with some building fairly similar single-family homes for traditional nuclear families, while others offer a variety of accommodations for older residents, singles, multigenerational families, or childless couples.
✏️ Overview of the Danish cohousing style 📖 (Page 55)
Page 56
Community labor includes normal things like landscape maintenance, cleaning common spaces, and cooking common meals, but it also often includes tasks like organizing and leading activities for children as well as driving elderly residents to doctor’s appointments or doing the kinds of care work that would otherwise fall disproportionately on the shoulders of women. By recognizing many traditional care activities as labor contributions to the wider community, cohousing collectives help alleviate some of the stresses involved in daily life. And to the extent that women often provide a disproportionate of emotional support within families (particularly in heterosexual relationships where male partners rely primarily on their wives or girlfriends for their emotional needs), the close proximity between cohousing residents creates a wider network of people with whom to share thoughts and feelings.
✏️ Examples of what people do for community labor in these cohousing complexes 📖 (Page 56)
Page 58
Nashira ecovillage in Colombia, which was a finalist in the 2015 World Habitat Awards, contains over eighty homes built by women and children who have been victims of domestic violence or found themselves displaced by Colombia’s decades-long civil war. The residents constructed their own houses on free land using recycled materials. Once women contribute a fixed amount of “sweat equity,” they become full co-owners in the cooperative community, sharing in its collective revenues and partaking of its many facilities, including a computer lab, a community center, and a shallow pool for children to play in. Although some men live in the community, all authority rests with the female residents who grow their own food, have their own source of clean drinking water, and operate a restaurant run on solar power and a Saturday market.
✏️ Modern example in Columbia 📖 (Page 58)
Page 77
Plato divided his society into three groups: the philosopher-kings, the auxiliaries, and the producers. When Plato first speaks of “the Guardians,” he means both the philosopher-kings and the auxiliaries, but then makes a distinction between the two: the auxiliaries are warriors who protect and ensure order in the Republic, while the philosopher-kings (and queens) are those deemed wise enough to rule it. The producers grow the food and practice the trades to support everyday life in Kallipolis. Scholars still debate whether Plato meant all children in his ideal society should be raised collectively or whether he meant this only for the offspring of the Guardians, but it is clear that any child could end up in any one of the three groups depending on their innate abilities. “I think it makes more sense for all kids to be raised communally given his goals, which include discovering true talent,” a professor emerita of philosophy, Sarah Conly, explained to me in an email in March 2022. “[But] it is more important for the Guardians because they have power and must be prevented from trying to amass more to pass onto their families.”
✏️ A tactic to prevent the thought of power inheritance and nepotism. You can’t horde power for your kids if you don’t know who your kids are. It’s extreme, and one has to wonder the negatives to such a scenario. 👓 swn 📖 (Page 77)
Page 94
Despite her best efforts, World War I, the Russian civil war, and a horrendous famine crushed the Soviet economy and undermined the viability of her social dreams. Worse still, her decision to liberalize divorce resulted in a social crisis as men forsook their pregnant lovers. The new Bolshevik state found its major cities flooded with abandoned children who formed large gangs and survived through petty crime. By 1926, the Soviet Children’s Commission estimated that there were about 250,000 children living in state-funded orphanages and another 300,000 living on the streets. Conditions in the children’s homes proved rather miserable, especially for infants and toddlers who needed the most attention. The general economic chaos also limited the resources available for the kindergartens. Quality suffered.
✏️ The timing and the confluence of crises killed the momentum of her program 📖 (Page 94)
Page 94
Given the costs of feeding, clothing, and providing shelter to more than half a million parentless kids, let alone paying the nurses and educators necessary to look after them, Soviet leaders preferred a retreat to the traditional family, where women would provide this labor without cost to the state budget. To fund women’s return to the home, Kollontai’s Bolshevik colleagues proposed to strengthen laws around alimony collection so that fathers would bear the responsibility for their offspring. Kollontai objected to the reversion to the traditional family and considered alimony both demeaning to women and impossible to enforce. Instead, she proposed a universal tax of two rubles per person so that the state could properly fund nurseries, kindergartens, and children’s homes and also support single mothers. Her male comrades considered her proposal untenable given the stark realities of the Soviet economy. Then, in 1936, fearing demographic decline, Joseph Stalin forced the passage of a new Family Code
✏️ The crises, the economics of the whole thing.. It made the leaders take the choice of going back to traditional family.. Where women do the work for free. Then Stalin undid the rest of the changes by banning abortion and making divorce harder. Back to square one. One of those “what if” scenarios that one considers where things could’ve been off it played out right. Like with electric cars, solar energy, all in the first decade of the 1900s. 📖 (Page 94)
Page 95
a massive expansion of state-run kinder gartens, crèches, and children’s homes, as well as maternity clinics, were among her first priorities. She pushed an ambitious package of social reforms that would increase the health and well-being of working-class children, while also promoting the full emancipation of women through the liberalization of divorce and the decriminalization of abortion in 1920.
✏️ A reminder about what Alexandra Kollontai was trying to achieve in soviet union 📖 (Page 95)
Page 95
Unlike their Soviet predecessors, the East German government committed the resources necessary to make the system work. In 1949, only 17 percent of East German children had access to childcare centers, but by 1989 the government claimed to guarantee a place for 100 percent of parents who wanted a space.49 On the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 80 percent of all infants and toddlers under three were in nurseries and 95 percent of children between three and six attended preschools.
✏️ A case where what they wanted but failed to get in soviet union, actually worked here in GDR. Also, professional staff, good facilities, and significant paid parental leave. 📖 (Page 95)
Page 96
Sweden is a fascinating case study of a country that made a massive public commitment to supporting both parents and children. Swedish feminists demanded that the government create a National Commission on Childcare in 1968 to deal with the increasing number of mothers entering the labor force. In 1975, the National Preschool Act forced Swedish municipalities to expand the availability of publicly funded childcare, and by 1991 all children between the ages of eighteen months and six years had a guaranteed place in a day care facility as long as both parents studied or worked
✏️ Paid for thru economic boost from women’s greater labor force participation, and increases in local tax revenues. It can and has been done, successfully. 📖 (Page 96)
Page 99
the ideal combination of policies would be a job-protected, paid parental leave for the first six months to a year of an infant’s life, followed by universally available and publicly funded high-quality care during the workday with educational requirements for preschool teachers and pay commensurate with their education. Caregivers for toddlers would ideally have professional training as nurses, child psychologists, or teachers specializing in early childhood education. Good salaries and working conditions for caregivers would reduce turnover and ensure a continuity of care for the infants and toddlers, encouraging the formation of secure attachments. At all ages, appropriate child development curricula would equip kids with the skills necessary to succeed intellectually and emotionally through their formal schooling
✏️ The ideal game plan for collective child rearing and education 📖 (Page 99)
Page 108
the challenges of educating for self-reliance, creativity, and personal contentment in a world where schools often emphasize conformity, standardization, and professional accomplishment
✏️ My issue with schools in a nutshell. Are schools a social and public good that teaches education for the sake of education and being a better human, or is it a commodity that teaches one the current values and norms of how to be a good citizen and employee? followup 📖 (Page 108)
Page 114
Makarenko believed that the education of children must extend beyond the school, and that children would only embrace learning if they felt that their lessons related to their experience of the world. Pupils wanted teachers to act as guides rather than arbitrary authority figures. And so, Makarenko created a new pedagogy that fully integrated manual and mental labor and taught youth the values of cooperation, community, and self-reliance. In 1920, the education department in Poltava, Ukraine, put Anton Makarenko in charge of creating a colony for “juvenile delinquents,” which is to say orphaned or abandoned children who had lived on the streets (called the besprizornye or bezprizorniki-the “unattended” ones). Makarenko understood that these children had survived on their own, sometimes for years, through creative forms of selfreliance born out of desperate necessity. Makarenko gave them control of what eventually became known as the Gorky Colony, collaborating with the young people to create a selfsustaining community where pupils took charge of their own working, learning, and well-being
✏️ The formation of the Gorky Colony in Ukraine.. Where children learned to be self sustaining and make their own decisions and learned manual plus mental labor and community 📖 (Page 114)
Page 115
Makarenko organized the children into autonomous and coeducational groups he called “detachments” of no less than seven and no more than fifteen members. Each detachment had an elected “commander,” chosen by the children, and these commanders had to attend spontaneous “Commander’s Councils” to discuss the business of the colony. They have the keys to all the stores, they draw up all the work places, manage the work and take part in themselves on an equal footing with the rest of the detachment. The Commanders’ Council decides questions such as the admission or rejection of voluntary newcomers, and sits in judgement on fellow-colonists guilty of slipshod work or of a breach of discipline and ‘traditions.”
✏️ Logistics of the Gorky Colony 📖 (Page 115)
Page 116
the detachments grew less hierarchical as Makarenko ensured that each memberparticularly the girlshad leadership opportunities by creating temporary detachments for specific tasks, such as organizing a special Guest Committee to host international visitors or preparing for holiday events. The “Commander’s Councils” soon transformed into “Detachment Councils” after the children decided that anyone could attend a council meeting as long as each detachment was represented. Later, the children began self-organizing into their detachments, which they treated as their families; they remained within the same group of age-mixed and gender-mixed kids throughout their stay in the colony. The children worked for four hours a day and spent the rest of their time studying for a traditional secondary education
✏️ Evolution of the colony 📖 (Page 116)
Page 118
By the late 1970s, the government grew concerned about the role education played in dividing society into manual and mental laborers, which increased the class divisions in a supposedly classless socialist state. 24 Bulgaria’s rigid track system funneled some students into academic high schools, where they prepared for university entrance exams, while others attended technical high schools, where they trained for specific careers in the planned economy.
✏️ Bulgaria noticed a problem where elite and intellectuals went towards academics vs the laborers went to technical track. The devaluation of manual labor and the division in class went against the government’s goals for egalitarianism. 📖 (Page 118)
Page 118
the Bulgarian government introduced a novel program between 1983 and 1989 that forced all academic high school students to pick a trade, earn a formal qualification in addition to their academic diploma, and work full-time in that trade before going to university. Until the very end of the communist era, no universitybound student graduated from an academic high school without working as a manual laborer, whether it be typing, plumbing, or driving.
✏️ The solution was mandating manual work before graduating. People gained valuable skills but also respect for the work done. 📖 (Page 118)
Page 121
the colonial education system taught African boys and girls to embrace Western values and attitudes, such as prioritizing competition over cooperation, urban over rural living, and mental over manual labor. The system also reinforced racial and class inequalities and disdain for traditional African cultures.
✏️ It’s hard to imagine a non competitive school space.. One that values cooperation. Think about the focus on being first, grades, individual efforts, etc. 📖 (Page 121)
Page 121
“foster the social goals of living together and working together, for common good. It has to prepare our young people to play a dynamic role and constructive part in the development of a society in which all members share fairly in the good or bad fortune of the group, and in which progress is measured in terms of human well-being
✏️ When you teach competition, that’s the society you get. If you want cooperation and community, you have to foster it from the beginning. Plato encouraged that girls were equal to boys. Makarenko was teaching about democratic consensus vs obedience to an authority. Nyere included agricultural labor to show that manual labor was just as important as mental. 📖 (Page 121)
Page 133
What if we were all less worried about the future because we lived in societies where one’s ability to have a decent life had little relationship to one’s profession? If we valued all workers who contributed to the functioning of our societiesincluding those who provide care for our children, elderly, and other vulnerable members of society-would our formal education systems be liberated from their role in sorting us into “winners” and “losers” based on the schools we attend and the jobs we end up doing? And to the extent that schools inculcate the values that perpetuate the need to sort children into people whose future labors will be worth more or less, can’t we use our schools to teach a different set of values: those of cooperation and collaboration instead of self-interest and competition? And shouldn’t we continue reinforcing these values throughout our lifetimes? As so many social dreamers in the past have realized, any utopian reimagining of the private sphere needs to challenge basic ideas about how societal resources are distributed and how our formal education system legitimates that distribution
✏️ What if questions to ask in a group setting.. To get people thinking. To get people imagining. 📖 (Page 133)
Page 139
A significant difference exists between the personal property needed to meet one’s individual needs and the private (or productive) property owned for the purpose of seeking rents or extracting labor from others. Almost all communist and anarchist thinkers following Proudhon recognize that people can maintain personal possessions, such as tools, jewelry, and loincloths, even in a society based on the common ownership of land and other productive resources. Unlike in religious traditions that eschew material possessions on moral grounds, in Proudhon’s view, people should be allowed to own their homes and the various implements necessary to provide for their own health, safety, and sustenance. The problem of private property lies with those who own such property for the sake of extracting payments or labor from those without it.
✏️ Exactly this. It can be misconstrued that, under socialism, the state wants to take all your stuff and ensure you have nothing and must share everything. It’s important to note the difference between personal and private. You can have personal, but you can’t have something private that you use to extract labor and exploit people that don’t have it. 📖 (Page 139)
Page 139
When utopians talk about “private property,” they generally mean property that people own for the sake of making money, not the property we own for our own personal use. And yet, much of our economic system today is premised on the inviolability of productive property rights. Many of our government structures and institutions exist to protect and facilitate the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of this property and the various privileges arising from it.
✏️ More about private property 📖 (Page 139)
Page 140
“In the first place, none of them [the Guardians] should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter… .“8 Plato proposed that no system of government could be just if the leaders were primarily concerned with their own personal wealth and the future wealth of their children. How can any leader successfully work for the health and prosperity of their society if they are simultaneously trying to preserve or grow the contents of their own purse? Property, by its unequal distribution in society, made people selfish. Plato believed that this selfishness weakened the state. Citizens would be divided in the face of external enemies because they would care more about the well-being of their own families than about the collective defense of the city
✏️ Some “crazy” notions on leadership by Plato. 📖 (Page 140)
Page 142
Acts 2: 44-47, we learn that: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”¹2 Evidence is provided again in Acts 4: 32-35: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had… . And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”
✏️ On one hand, many religions espoused a form of communal living and anti-private property. Hinduism, janaism, Buddhism, and the Jewish sect of the Essenes, all called for communal labor and living, personally owning only what’s necessary, and not earning a living that might harm others. Even Christianity in highlight above talks about how the apostles lived communally. 📖 (Page 142)
Page 142
a medieval Bulgarian priest declared them heretical because: “They teach their followers not to obey their masters; they scorn the rich, they hate the Tsars, they ridicule their superiors, they reproach the boyars [nobles], they believe that God looks in horror on those who labour for the Tsar, and advise every serf not to work for his master.
✏️ Bogomils, Cathars, Albigensians, rejected authority and property, and pushed for more equality between the sexes, even as religious leaders. This pissed off people, especially Catholic Church, because it questioned their own authority and control, and the ability to exploit people for taxes and labor, etc. The Church after all had vast lands and collected tithes. 📖 (Page 142)
Page 146
There is an essential difference between me owning the house in which I live and me owning a wide variety of properties that I rent out to less fortunate others who cannot afford to own their homes. Maybe I came into these properties through inIM heritance heritance, or maybe I bought these properties with money that I saved from working hard and being frugal, but Proudhon would always see these properties as the result of a historical process whereby a small minority dispossessed the majority from lands once held in common and then used the violent power of the state to legitimate their ability to charge rents for something that was once free. The enclosure of common lands, laws against vagrancy and squatting, and the lack of social housing options (which predate the Industrial Revolution in Europe) compels people to rent their dwellings at market prices, which fluctuate based on supply and demand. Landlords benefit from a system that denies access to affordable housing because it keeps rental units scarce and therefore rents high.
✏️ Owning properties to rent to people 📖 (Page 146)
Page 147
having money saved to provide for my personal needs in the future is different from having money saved for the purpose of lending money to poorer people and charging them a fee to use my money, which is basically what banks do with our money when we deposit it in a bank account. If working people had access to public housing, or jobs that paid enough for them to own their own homes, there would be fewer mortgages. Since many investors now buy mortgage-backed securities (a financial instrument that bundles multiple mortgages so that investors get a portion of the interest payments that borrowers make to banks), fewer mortgages would ultimately mean fewer mortgage-backed securities, which would mean one less investment vehicle for those with surplus savings. If you spend a moment to think about it, wealthy investors stand to benefit at least twice from the lack of affordable housing. If they own investment properties, they can charge higher rents. With the profits that they earn from rents they can buy mortgaged-backed securities. This allows them to make money off of former renters who cannot afford to buy their homes in cash, often because they have spent most of their incomes paying rent.
✏️ Having money for the purpose of lending and profiting off of poorer people 📖 (Page 147)
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Let’s say a single-family house costs 300,000 in cash, but (as discussed above) a poorer person will need to borrow money from a bank. If they borrow 233,000 in interest to the bank, not considering any tax deductions. The bank will keep a portion of this money as its fees and profits, and the rest of it will be paid out to depositors and to the wealthy people who bought mortgage-backed securities, which the banks created by lending out their depositors’ savings and then selling those mortgages on to mortgage aggregators. It’s meant to be confusing. The point is that the exact same house costs 533,000 for a poorer one, and that this whole system further exacerbates inequalities by facilitating wealth transfers from the poor to the rich.
✏️ Mortgage backed securities. Made me think about how this is a good example of how the rich took 42 trillion from the rest over the past fifty years. xref 📖 (Page 148)
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The big distinction between the anarchists and the communists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that while both imagined a final utopian world with no state, no laws (since laws need someone to enforce them), and no private productive property, the communists imagined an intermediate stage that they called “socialism,” wherein the state would own all of the productive property on behalf of the non-propertied classes. Anarchists like Kropotkin argued that this intermediary stage would inevitably lead to a form of authoritarianism that impinged on personal liberties. He therefore advocated for the most minimal government structure necessary to maintain collective ownership.
✏️ Difference between anarchists and communists 📖 (Page 151)
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Kropotkin and other anarchists would want to immediately return Wikipedia to the decentralized, volunteer-based, and freely disseminated project that it is today.
✏️ Potentially interesting example to delineate the difference between capitalism, socialism, and communism/anarchism. Encyclopedia Britannica is capitalism. A government funded and run information system is socialism. followup Wikipedia is communism. 📖 (Page 152)
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archaeological and anthropological evidence challenges Engels’s assumptions that human history can be marked out in defined stages or that humans are “naturally” one way or another. It’s increasingly believed that greed and the desire for private property did not develop in some direct teleological way as we moved from hunters and gatherers to settled agriculturalists, but that there have always been competing political and economic formations, reflecting a diversity of human civilizational projects.
✏️ Just a reminder that, although it sounds good to follow Engel saying that women lost their status in transition from hunter gatherer to agricultural communities, that’s not necessarily true. There is no “natural” way of being.. All styles have existed and do exist. This should tie to one of my major questions, relating to the nature of humanity. followup 📖 (Page 153)
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What these religious communities demonstrate is that experiments with communal living do not have to be secular or progressive, despite the negative stereotypes associated with them in the West. The sharing of property in common is also fully compatible with leading a rather traditional family life: the Hutterites and the Bruderhof formally embrace patriarchy (as well as patrilineality and patrilocality), but individual wives are not economically dependent on their husbands or isolated from other women. If anything, women living in these communities may have more economic power in their relationships than women living in traditional nuclear families. The gendered division of labor results in fewer economic inequalities between husbands and wives because they all share equally in the redistributed wealth produced by their collective labor. Also, since property is shared in common with others, all children who choose to stay in the community as adults will receive an equal share of the community’s resources. This disrupts the role that individual nuclear families play in the differential intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege.
✏️ Modem examples of communal living that’s religious include the Hutterites, the Shakers, and the Bruderhof. 📖 (Page 157)
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the Yamagishi Association is a federation of more than thirty different leaderless, income-sharing communities across the archipelago that began in the 1950s, including many that incorporate spiritual aspects of traditional Japanese Shintoism into their collective pursuits.
✏️ Long lasting utopian community in Japan that’s giving me strong rpg vibes for a faction 👓 swn 📖 (Page 162)
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You might think that the nuIclear family is natural: either the inevitable outcome of our evolution, or the obviously best way of doing things, or even divinely commanded.
✏️ Potentially another question of propaganda. There’s such string resistance to considering any alternatives.. It’s very ingrained within us. 📖 (Page 179)
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unlike other primates, human infants are essentially born premature and require intensive care and nurturance over an extended time. The archaeological and anthropological evidence indicates that our human ancestors solved this problem through cooperative breeding, meaning that human young were tended to by other providers, often kin, but not always.
✏️ Interesting shift in perspective 📖 (Page 181)
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Our contemporary mating practices are not “natural” or “unnatural,” “right” or “wrong.” Instead, the diversity, flexibility, and creativity around how we love, lust, marry, and raise our young has allowed humans to adapt and change over our evolutionary history. Family forms can respond to different demographic, environmental, or economic contexts, leading researchers on the evolution of human family forms to conclude that: “The cross-cultural empirical record supports that the family is a highly flexible social organization that is transiently, culturally and ecologically adaptable, a dynamic less transparent from traditional positions on patrilocality, patrilineality, and male parental care.
✏️ Humanity’s core trait of flexibility and adaptability shines through here. 📖 (Page 186)
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Although the Mormons claimed that plural marriage enjoyed constitutional protection as the free exercise of religion, the 1878 Reynolds v. United States Supreme Court decision found that religious beliefs could not excuse this “crime.” “Polygamy,” the all-white, all-male Court opined, “has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people.
✏️ Supreme Court, showcasing their usual brand of conservative and controlling values that they can arbitrarily decide supersedes individual or collective rights.. Because it offends them. It became a felony crime and was constantly shamed from the president down. 📖 (Page 192)
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Supreme Court found against the Mormons in the 1890 Late Corp. of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States. “The organization of a community for the spread and practice of polygamy is, in a measure, a return to barbarism,” the decision read. “It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity, and of the civilization which Christianity has produced in the western world.”
✏️ More conservative racism from the Supreme Court. 📖 (Page 193)
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As women become economically independent enough to remain unmarried, as is so welldocumented in Rebecca Traister’s 2016 book, All the Single Ladies, should we also expect a rise in violence committed by “excess” males?66 And will women be blamed for this: lesbian and bisexual couples demonized on religious grounds, single mothers criticized for raising their kids in “broken homes,” and women who freely choose to remain unattached vilified as selfish spinsters? Would these various forms of social shaming reduce opportunities for women to freely choose their own paths in life? Can we also expect growing attempts to roll back women’s rights, the passage of new laws to reverse or further constrain their reproductive freedoms (such as the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade in the United States), or new policies or cultural messages encouraging them to stay home as dependent wives? For those who fret about the socially destabilizing violence of too many unhappy bachelors, don’t single independent women with full bodily autonomy pose as much a threat as wife-hoarding polygynous men?
✏️ Need to study more, but so much here that’s used as propaganda to send specific messages around what’s allowed and what’s not followup 📖 (Page 197)
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For millennia, women and girls - who are not the source of the problem - have been cut off from their kin networks; bartered, traded, or sold; rendered dependent on their fathers and husbands by legal codes and religious injunctions depriving them of opportunities to support themselves; and prevented from exercising basic control over their own bodies, so that one class of men can hoard resources that might otherwise be shared.
✏️ All this, and the creation of nuclear monogamy, to keep low status males under control and pacified from rising up against the elite? 📖 (Page 197)
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Kollontai proposed that both men and women needed to rethink their relations with romantic partners. Rather than treating significant others as the sole source of affection, validation, emotional support, and sexual satisfaction, Kollontai hoped that young Soviets would collectively evolve beyond the need for socially imposed monogamy once they lived in a more equitable and cooperative society. Kollontai recognized the ubiquity of jealousy and possessiveness that people felt when they fell in love. Kollontai also accepted that infidelity, abandonment, and unrequited love caused people great emotional distress, and that passionate romantic love could drive people to do outrageous things. But she believed that people would be less wounded by betrayal or rejection if they received affection and support from a wider network of colleagues and friends. “The stronger the ties of all members of the collective,” Kollontai explained in 1921, “the less the need for the creation of strong marital relations.”27 In other words, unlike the Oneidans who attempted to prohibit exclusive sexual relations between couples, she merely wanted to immerse couples into a sea of robust social relations that could assuage some of the inevitable pains that come with the unpredictability of romantic love.
✏️ She started with legalizing divorce and abortion, making marriage civil not church, and targeted anything that fed into patriarchy. Then she went for liberating sexuality. She argued that you could overcome jealousy, unrequited love, infidelity, etc if you immersed people in a sea of social connections to fall back on. 📖 (Page 214)
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the expansion of safety nets and the socialization of domestic labor would also reduce the stresses of everyday life. She believed that the precarity and selfishness of capitalism made partners cling to each other in unhealthy and unnatural ways. Rather than acting as kindred souls working together toward common goals, couples often demanded exclusive rights to each other’s sexual and emotional attentions. “The ideal of the bourgeoisie was the married couple, where the partners complemented each other so completely that they had no need of contact with society. Communist morality demands, on the contrary, that the younger generation be educated in such a way that the personality of the individual is developed to the full, and the individual with his or her many interests has contact with a range of persons of both sexes. Communist morality encourages the development of many and varied bonds of love and friendship among people.” 28
✏️ Communist morality and love encourages multi varied relationships to expand into rather than placing all your needs and demands upon a singular partner, as in capitalist love. 📖 (Page 214)
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In a similar way to how we collectively believe in paper money, many of us also embrace the fiction that the way we organize our private lives is the only way available to us. Even if we understand in the abstract about the pressures parents face, the strain that child-rearing places on romantic relationships, the high divorce rate, the prevalence of child abuse and intimate partner violence, and the very real possibilities of our own or our partner’s long-term unemployment, disability, or death, we replicate the domestic form that makes us the most vulnerable to these problems because it is convenient and because that’s what everyone expects of us. Just as our entire economy rests on the fiction of what economists call a fiat currency, it also rests on a particular notion of the family, one that is often viewed as either natural or divinely mandated, but which acts to uphold a specific set of social and economic relations
✏️ Convenience and “the way things are” trump all else. We perpetuate the same systems and methods, even if they illicit so many damaging outputs. 👓 propaganda 📖 (Page 236)
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what matters most is taking the journey and considering the kinds of changes that might make our domestic lives less isolated, more flexible, and more ecologically sustainable: things like universal childcare, cooperative living, ethical education for self-reliance and critical thinking, shared property, and family expansionism
✏️ What to work on to go towards Utopia 📖 (Page 237)
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In terms of the architecture of our minds, hope is to the future what memory is to the past.
✏️ Great quote and very evocative. 👓 quote swn 📖 (Page 239)
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If utopian visions exist to inspire this more emotional sense of hope, then dystopian worlds prey on our fears and anxieties, forcing us to stay in our unhappy relationship with the present. Similarly, if utopianism stimulates our cognitive capacities to imagine living in a different and better future and helps us find the will to effect the social changes necessary to realize that future, then dystopianism constantly reminds us of the failed social experiments of the past, especially those that have gone tragically and horribly wrong. By forcing us to look back rather than forward, by privileging memory over hope, the ubiquity of dystopian thinking browbeats us into accepting the status quo.
✏️ Yup. Dystopian stories might have their value, but they’re very good in immersing is in a sense of dread, fear and anxiety. It makes us feel hopeless in the face of all these things. Sure, maybe you’ll feel motivated to stop such a terrible outcome, but hopeful stories can be much more encouraging and inviting and hope-inducing, without any of the fear or anxiety. 👓 propaganda 📖 (Page 240)
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Capitalist realism refers to a particular cultural mindset that convinces us that there are no workable alternatives to the way things are today. It finds its most powerful expression in the ubiquity of dystopian films, books, and television shows that bombard us with the message that any deviation from our current way of doing things will inevitably make us worse off. Davina Cooper has also reflected on this tension: “Utopia conventionally depends on stimulating desire and hope in order to inspire and motivate change. Dystopias, by contrast, aim to stimulate action in order to resist or halt what is feared to be emerging. Dystopic narratives assume change, that the world is not a static or stable place but moving toward, indeed in some cases already enacting, its own ruin.” But dystopian thinking can also weaponize the general zeitgeist of despair to immobilize us. It nips our nascent social dreams in the bud by convincing us that working toward a better future will destroy the imperfect but familiar present. And the most effective visions of dystopia prey on our deepest fears of being alone and unloved.
✏️ More on utopia vs dystopia. Utopia seeks to inspire change, while dystopias seek to stimulate action in order to stop the declining change happening. 📖 (Page 241)
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in all three of these influential dystopian novels, and in many more contemporary books, films, and TV series that have followed in their footsteps, authors portray the eradication of eroticism and romantic love as well as the breakdown of the traditional family as the inevitable collateral damage of attempts to build a different world, no matter how well-intentioned those attempts may be. The community in The Giver gives up love, beauty, passion, and connection so as to rid themselves of hatred, prejudice, hunger, cruelty, and war. But the promised better world always turns out to be worse than the world it replaced; brutally worse in 1984, existentially worse in Brave New World, and sentimentally worse in The Giver, but always and inevitably worse. The message of these books is loud and clear: you may be unhappy with the way things are, but forget about trying to change them. Any challenge to the “natural” order of things will end with an irretrievable loss of individualism and a slow slide into totalitarian hell.
✏️ The propaganda in mandating the teaching of The Giver, Brave New World, and 1984. We’re fed dystopian ideals that say: things might suck now, but be careful trying to change things.. Or else you’ll lose the things that meant the most to you. 📖 (Page 245)
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Jeane J. Kirkpatrick in her infamous 1979 essay, “Dictatorships & Double Standards.”31 Kirkpatrick was an influential neoconservative who served as the first American woman ambassador to the United Nations and on President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. She shaped Reagan’s rabidly anti-communist foreign policy in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In what would later become known as the “Kirkpatrick doctrine,” the Reagan administration justified its support of what she called “rightwing dictators or white oligarchies” in the Global South because they helped check the spread of communism. Throughout the 1980s, the United States supported military leaders and capricious monarchs-including those who “sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents”-precisely because they defended the status quo
✏️ The 80s US foreign policy of defending right wing dictators because they maintained traditional values and combated communism 📖 (Page 248)
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Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill.
✏️ Quote by Jeanne Kirkpatrick about maintaining the masses through tradition and misery and squashing hope 📖 (Page 248)
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1651 work, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes proposes that people will trade obedience for the protection of an absolute sovereign since the state of nature is violent and unpredictable. Without a strong, undivided state to control and direct them, human lives will be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes predicated his theory upon the republican Roman ideal of patria potestas, where the father had unquestioned power over the life and death of his children. Teaching children to accept the ultimate authority of the father in the home produced adults who would, in Hobbes’s view, subordinate themselves to strong leaders in the public sphere. As a result, the patriarchal nuclear family played an essential role in producing docile political subjects.
✏️ Philosopher that promoted patriarchy as best means of control and obedience. A strong father meant obedient children that obeyed the state authoritarian. 📖 (Page 249)
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Some of the most important utopian thinkers, thinkers whose ideas have reverberated across the centuries, hailed from the most privileged classes. Sir Thomas More was High Lord Chancellor. Peter Kropotkin was a prince. Henri de Saint-Simon was a count. Plato and Alexandra Kollontai were born into influential, aristocratic families. Friedrich Engels was the wealthy son of a successful German industrialist with a taste for fine wine and caviar. Julius Nyerere was the son of an African tribal chief. Many others benefited from solid middle-class educations and never spent a significant portion of their lives laboring in the fields or toiling in factories. And while it is true that men like Charles Fourier and Jean-Baptiste André Godin had private fortunes to build their pocket utopias, their efforts set valuable precedents and showed the world that alternative ways of living were possible. If hope is a cognitive capacity that can be learned and strengthened with use, it is not surprising that those with the most leisure time to read and think and daydream have the mental bandwidth to imagine alternative futures. And while we might prefer to live in a world shaped by the ideas of what the Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals” from the less privileged classes, we shouldn’t ignore potentially transformative social dreams because they arise in the minds of those who were born to wealthy parents. Utopian ideas that turn the world upside down have often originated from the minds of those who have the most to gain from keeping it right side up.
✏️ Many utopian thinkers were well off and privileged. She argues that shouldn’t dismiss them outright, since it’s not surprising that those with most leisure to read and stream are the ones to imagine alternate futures. They also have the most to lose. Is this valid? followup Because lots of haters of utopian thinking and alternate lifestyles deride the people doing it as just rich white people that can afford to take risks. Still, is that throwing the baby out with the bathwater? 📖 (Page 253)
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While Godin’s Familistery did manage to survive for over a hundred years, other industrialists in Europe did not rush to replicate his experiment. But other “harmless” little communities had to be forcibly eradicated. The Romans wiped out the communal, slave-abhorring Essenes; the Bulgarians exiled the vegan, anarchistic Bogomils; and the Inquisition hunted down and murdered every last protofeminist, celibate Cathar who dared question the Church’s hunger for material wealth. Thomas More and Thomas Müntzer were both executed, and the Anabaptists were forced to flee across oceans. The Beguines were declared heretics and disbanded. Prosper Enfantin and other prominent Saint-Simonians were sent to prison for their outrages against public morality. Members of the Oneida Community faced charges of adultery and threats that their children would be taken away from them. Today, ecovillages and intentional communities like Tamera are derided as “cults.” Tax lawyers admit that our economy could be destabilized if too many groups decide to live together out of community treasuries. If utopian ideas and the communities they inspire are so harmless, why are those in power always so eager to crush them? Creating viable examples of alternative ways of living threaten the status quo because they may trigger our cognitive capacities for hope.
✏️ There’s been a lot of persecution of utopian ideals and communities throughout history. Those in power are always so eager to crush these supposedly harmless lifestyles. 📖 (Page 254)
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In a world of real or imagined scarcity, we arrange our domestic lives to protect ourselves against an uncertain future, hoarding as many resources and privileges as possible. In a society with less precarity and with resources more equitably distributed, we will worry less about hustling to make sure we have a bigger slice of the pie than those around us. But it works the other way, too. If we lived in wider networks of people who shared their resources, we would become less precarious. Both processes are interdependent. It may be that we will geoengineer our way out of the climate crisis, and that one day we will all share unlimited, free solar power; enjoy universal basic incomes funded by our collective ownership of the robots and algorithms that will do most necessary labor; and live in real democratic societies where “material needs no longer exist,” but none of that is possible without fundamentally rethinking the basis upon which we organize our intimate lives to free us from selfish individualism.41
✏️ Many probably assume that once we invent the right tools and tech, we’ll invent our ways into a more utopian world. But it doesn’t work like that. Think about AI. Here we have a major shift in technology, but instead of seeing how it could free us, instead it’s all very shallow/entertainment focused at best and dystopian at worst. Goes back to Ted Chiang piece about AI and capitalism xref. If we maintain all the selfish individualism, the hoarding of resources, the fear of future scarcity, etc.. We will keep practicing all the same habits in home, family, love, education and state.. That keeps us trapped in the existing systems. New tech will just get formatted into the existing, instead of seeing it’s potential for something better. followup The same tech and science under selfish individualism will look vastly different under collective optimism. swn That’s the whole point behind those mirror episodes in star trek. 📖 (Page 257)
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Domestic transformation is therefore a key node-if not the key nodeof resistance and reinvention. On a purely practical level, living with more people means buying fewer things. In the United States, consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of the gross domestic product, which means that individual decisions about how we arrange our private lives and define who counts as family can undermine the internal logics of a growth-obsessed economy. Fewer babies means fewer future consumers. If more people share their homes and stuff, there are fewer demands for new things. If people have wider social networks within which they find love, support, and companionship, people may begin to care less about chasing the external accoutrements of material success. Status markers matter less in more equitable societies.
✏️ Saudi is chasing being a growth obsessed economy. That means intense consumer spending, status markers, traditional forms of marriage and family and housing. Doing alternatives to those traditions means resisting that kind of economy. That’s how you fight back. followup 👓 ksa 📖 (Page 257)
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As the historian Howard Zinn reminds us: To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places and there are so many where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction
✏️ The stories we tell ourselves about the past determine the possibilities for our future. 👓 quote storytelling 📖 (Page 259)