Last Chance Moonshot — Part 2: Bigger Home Bases

You are captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity. This is what prevents them: they are unable to find the bars of the cage.

Daniel Quinn

The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

African Proverb

It should be obvious by now that the hybrid entity Elonald Mump is engaged in full-spectrum social engineering. What he was unable to accomplish in his first stint in the Oval Office, largely because victory took him by surprise, and because of the pandemic, Trump is now rolling out with furious purpose: erasure of black and brown people from any high-profile positions in government, smashing of the diabolical Deep State via ketamine and keyboard, the liberation of locker rooms from Marxist trans demons, shredding of any international relations that don’t earn a buck for the good ole USA, and the application of as many Project 2025 initiatives as the market will bear, even though Trump has never really even heard of that stuff (really, honest, he swears!).

For now, Trump is getting the benefit of the doubt from the self-described pragmatists who voted for him, those significant millions who are not full-bore MAGA folk. After all, the nefarious Deep State is so entrenched that it will take some time to uncover and unravel its awfulness. And also, ya gotta break some eggs, right? (even if you can’t find any to buy). So, people are giving him time to right the ship and to get his policies really humming along (of course, this belies all the things that Trump said he would do on Day 1, but that’s a different discussion for another time).

But eventually, Trumpism 2.0 will fail, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions and delusional fantasies. Eliminating federal workers, squelching liberal culture, and withdrawing from internationalism will not magically create a Golden Age Galt’s Gulch in America, where everyone is a wealthy proprietor/entrepreneur, free from government interference and the leeching of lower-class parasites. It is a lot faster and easier to tear shit down than it is to create and build, and as Trump’s stormtroopers will find out, neither the spectral hand of the market nor the powerful fist of the Old Testament God will intervene to save the day. And even more fundamentally, as outlined in an earlier post, Trumpism is now composed of three broad camps, each with radically different visions of the future. Some want an overt Christian theocracy, some want a Wild West crypto free-for-all, and others just want cheaper groceries and gas.

However, when Trump-topia fails to deliver on any of these visions and inevitably implodes, Dems and libs will not be able to just put new wine into old wineskins, trotting out the same old saws. Trump’s re-election made clear that people have had enough of the system as a whole, and are ready for something completely transformative and groundbreaking. Liberals need to be ready to seize that opportunity from the Project 2025 wreckage, jettison the old plutocrat-establishment playbook, and pivot to a radical new vision for the future, something as audacious as what Trump is trying now, but, you know… right. Social engineering is in the air. We just need to provide a better blueprint.

Last time, we looked at the first plank in a new swing-for-the-fences project: Universal Basic Income. And while UBI is absolutely necessary, due to the irreversibly-transformed nature of work, money, and morality, without a different point of social application, UBI could just lead to faster decimation of the planet, via accelerated consumption and the ensuing ecological destruction. So rather than just turning UBI loose into the current social and household landscape, Bigger Home Bases (BHBs) will also be necessary, as a new underlying socioeconomic format where UBI can be implemented while still achieving the overall goal of downscaling production, consumption, labor, and environmental impact.

BHBs

I am convinced that, one way or another, we will be living in completely different conditions sometime soon, likely in the next fifteen to twenty years, if not sooner. The only question is, will this change be completely on nature’s terms, or could we do something to ease the transition into this new world, something that could allow us to thrive while downscaling, and perhaps even start the rehabilitation process for the planet? Our current society will need to undergo a kind of metamorphosis, a change as radical as the shift from feudalism to modernity, only we’ll have to do it much faster.

In this context, I am proposing the creation of 15–20 model communities across the US, funded by a multi- or non-partisan group of wealthy donors/patrons. Each of these communities, what I call Bigger Home Bases, will be comprised of 125–150 people, and they would all sign on for a 5-year stint. Each community member would receive a basic income, somewhere around $1200 a month, and members would commit to honoring a basic charter of core values: collective living, non-exploitation of fellow members, reduced consumption, increased self-sufficiency, limited participation in the outside job market, etc. Aside from that, the only other assistance for the communities would be logistical: connecting communities to the right resources, like zoning boards, construction/retrofit companies, local banks, etc.

I have covered these BHBs in more detail in various posts on this blog (see here for a good overview), so I won’t belabor the specifics here. The general idea is to create tangible, visible, physical examples of a different way of living, a possible future that is actually much more practical than the fantastical options on offer from either Trumpism or the current incarnation of liberalism. As Billie Jean King said, “you have to see it to be it.” So when people start seeing that a Universal Basic Income, applied in a Bigger Home Base setting, can basically attack all our problems at once, in a realistic way that actually creates a better life experience, then the groundswell for these policies will be swift and mighty. A cultural shift would ignite overwhelming political will, and millions would demand that government get on board and facilitate these changes on a national scale.

In the short term, BHBs and UBI could accomplish some amazing things pretty quickly: increased self-sufficiency for people, as they start doing things in-house; improved physical and mental health, as loneliness, anxiety and depression give way to human connection and cooperation; reduction of consumption, travel, and outside labor, which lessens impact on the planet; de-population of overcrowded cities, as people set up BHBs in rural and exurban areas, re-populating areas that have been on the decline for decades; increased financial health, as BHBers pool their resources, take advantage of economies of scale, and leverage the UBI to reduce personal debt; defusing of political polarization, as people pursue a common national goal, while actually focusing on positive, constructive change.

In the longer term, the powerful UBI/BHB combo could be revolutionary: a completely new purpose for government, providing direct financial resources for people instead of funneling everything through markets, banks, and businesses (which is what fosters economic inequality and popular powerlessness); a simplified, streamlined federal government, as UBI replaces the wasteful patchwork of programs that forces everything through labor and wages; a limited (in scope) but expansive (in breadth) political policy agenda, perhaps even crystallized in a new political party, with just three main economic pillars: UBI, BHBs, and MMT (Modern Money Theory, which we’ll look at in the next post).

Beyond the US, this transformation would give us a better platform for approaching international endeavors, treaties, and projects. As BHBs take hold, American ecological impact would come down quickly, along with consumption. Countries that rely on exports to the US would need to make radical adjustments of their own, so there is big potential for other nations to craft their own versions of economic downscaling. This would be fruitful terrain for cooperation with the US on a range of mutually-beneficial efforts to start the planetary healing process.

What we’re looking at, if UBI, BHBs, and MMT really catch fire and take hold, is a great reversal, a massive social shift where the welfare of people and the planet are put ahead of the interests of capital, religion, and ideology. This would be an arena of huge conflict with the status quo and the powers-that-be, except that regular people would have the advantage of doing the fighting through their very way-of-life itself. It would be a new kind of activism, fought through our everyday actions, instead of in the streets or on social media.

This has been a quick overview of BHBs, and thus necessarily an incomplete one. I would encourage people to check out other posts on this blog for more details.

Next Time: Modern Money Theory — a new philosophical foundation for government

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on March 7, 2025.