Our Next Way of Life: A Thought Experiment
People never leave a sinking ship until they until they see the lights of another ship approaching.
Buckminster Fuller
You have to see it to be it.
Billie Jean King
Before getting into the meat of this new post, let’s just do a quick recap lap, to level-set our starting assumptions.
Evidence is mounting that we’re in the midst of a massive, not-so-slow-motion system collapse, what many are now calling a poly-crisis. Global heating, biodiversity collapse, dying coral reefs, dwindling fresh water, eroded topsoil, steady buildup up of toxic microplastics and forever chemicals, good old-fashioned air pollution, accelerating migration of climate refugees and the resulting political chaos, and resurgent hot and cold wars around the globe. As mentioned in an earlier post, this has unleashed a huge wave of cognitive dissonance in the popular psyche, as the reality of collapse clashes head on with the techno-optimism of consumer capitalism and the general need for people to be hopeful for their personal futures. This dissonance is intensified by the lack of viable alternative futures on offer from our political and cultural leaders.
Our task now, as we swim in the quickening currents of the poly-crisis, is to create a new way of life, something that can both mitigate some of the worst aspects of collapse, while also preparing a new framework that will allow us to actually live in a collapsing civilization, a new format that could let us preserve some of the good things that we have now. This is actually the meaning behind the title of this blog: “Entropolitan” is a mashup of “entropy” and “cosmopolitan,” a search for a civilized way to deal with the breakup of industrial civilization.
What is needed is a fast, wholesale change in our format of day-to-day life, something that can reduce our overall ecological impact, attacking all the facets of the poly-crisis at once, while providing a viable off-ramp that people can actually see themselves taking, to escape the mounting stress, anxiety, and precariousness of our collapsing industrial civilization. In pursuit of this goal, I have proposed a mix of Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory, deployed in a very specific timeline: model communities in the US trigger overwhelming popular support for UBI and BHBs; a third political party runs on a focused platform espousing UBI-BHB-MMT; the resulting new political leadership implements the 3-part plan quickly; US citizens rapidly reconfigure into larger households; the US economy contracts in a controlled manner, as people are more economically secure while slashing personal consumption; other countries have to adjust to contracting American demand, triggering wholesale changes in those societies; the new policy model spreads, with countries able to come to the table with common goals for international cooperation; nations become more independent and yet more able to give assistance where major adjustments need to be made for new climate realities; the world is saved. For more detail on these various stages, check out earlier posts in this blog for background.
What I want to do in the remainder of this post is to consider what life could be like for Americans living in Bigger Home Bases. Let’s assume that we are somehow able to get through the early hurdles of the plan laid out above, and thus, at some date in the near future, we have instituted Universal Basic Income (say, $1200 a month for everyone), the federal government is deploying massive logistical aid for people looking to build and/or join BHBs, and cooperation between the feds and state/local governments is paving the way for all the zoning and infrastructure changes needed for a transition to our next way of life. What does life look like inside this new arrangement? Because, to flip the Billie Jean King quote around a little, ‘You can’t be it if you don’t see it.’
As I think about what living in this new arrangement would be like, three questions initially come to mind: What does day-to-day life look like in a BHB? What kind of attitudes and behaviors would emerge to support this way of life? What kind of infrastructure is necessary to undergird the whole thing?
Life Layout in a BHB
As mentioned in an earlier post, the average household size in the US is now 2.5, with almost 30% of households consisting of a single individual. A BHB, by contrast, would be 100–150 people, which is the magic number for human flourishing appearing across a broad range of sociological, psychological, and organizational studies. Ideally, a BHB would contain multiple generations, along with a healthy mix of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds. I have suggested that model BHBs should be configured as a new kind of legal entity, a kind of household corporation, established on basic charters that commit its members to non-exploitation and fair treatment of all.
Physically, BHBs would take many forms, depending on the local characteristics and resources. Urban BHBs could reclaim disused and underused commercial spaces, with assistance from local officials on necessary zoning changes and infrastructure upgrades. UBI and logistical support would also allow massive out-migration from cities, as people would have the financial stability to repopulate rural areas that have been hemorrhaging population for decades. Global heating will necessitate a move away from coastal cities anyway, so there would be major opportunities to build new BHBs in sparse areas, retrofitting existing buildings or creating new BHB structures. The economic breathing space provided by UBI would also allow people to build or retrofit their BHBs along passive green principles, which would dovetail with the overall goal of increasing community self-sufficiency and reducing dependence on outside resources of all kinds. The square footage needed per person could be sharply reduced, as people become more used to living in close proximity to others, with shared spaces increasing efficiency.
The economics inside a BHB would completely different from the current state of affairs. UBI would allow the purposeful withdrawing of people from the outside workforce, bringing as many functions in-house as possible: food prep, child care, elder care, basic health and wellness care. Depending on the climate, fields or greenhouses could be integrated into the community, as both a source for internal meals and a potential revenue source for outside sales. Similarly, the economic space opened up with UBI could also allow the flourishing of cottage industries of all kinds, again for both internal provisioning and external markets.
Attitudes and Behavior Inside a BHB
OK, so we’ve got our BHBs up and running. UBI and logistical support allow millions of people to get into these larger households, retrofitting or building structures for our next American chapter. What does my life look like every day? How do I act, and how does the BHB shape my behavior?
The biggest challenge will likely be just getting used to being around a much larger number of intimate others. Currently, we’re just used to being completely alone, or with immediate family only. All of our other relationships are contingent, changing, and intermittent. Workplaces and schools might feel like intimate settings, but they are fundamentally closed-ended and time-bound, and cannot substitute for the innate human need for perpetual and stable closeness to a larger group of people. This is why the long psychological tail of the pandemic has been so damaging. The lockdowns highlighted how over-dependent we had become on fragile, quasi-intimate institutions, as we were thrown back on our micro-sized households, which could not carry the weight. BHBs would almost immediately solve the epidemic of loneliness, basically by definition. And while It is certainly possible to feel alone in a city of millions, living in close proximity to 100–150 other household members inside a BHB would be a totally different story. BHB members committed to working, cooking, playing, and planning together are not likely to feel alone.
Similarly, BHB life would force people to learn or re-learn social skills, the art of just being together as human beings. Between the pandemic and political polarization, social skills have taken a beating, especially in dealing with people who aren’t in our normal small group or ideological tribe. But if BHBs make a commitment to welcoming diversity of all kinds, and they pledge to work together in non-abusive and non-exploitative ways, then natural social graces can emerge in pursuit of common goals, leaving behind the current trend of demonizing everyone who disagrees with us. Political and cultural polarization thrive in artificial spaces, which is only possible because our actual household spaces are so small and isolated. If people actually become accustomed to living in larger real groups, groups committed to tolerance and cooperation as a matter of day-today living, then the fuel for polarization dries up, as real attachment takes the place of cynical detachment.
Other behavioral trends that could or should emerge with BHB life include: the sharp reduction of personal consumption, as people learn to just enjoy each other’s company instead of buying things to make them feel better (therapeutic consumption); the downgrading of paid employment as the primary definer of identity, as people work less at ‘jobs’ and do more internal work to directly support their community co-members (labors of love); upgrading of practical skills around physical and household maintenance, as people rotate through BHB responsibilities like cleaning, cooking, child care, cottage industry production, and basic carpentry, plumbing and other trade skills; a general improvement in gender, racial and ethnic relations, as people are less segregated by physical place and are living cheek-to-jowel, working together at a common purpose.
Infrastructure for BHB Support
If the overall UBI-BHB-MMT project gets off the ground and truly builds momentum, then the major understandings that should emerge will be the necessity to not only stop doing damage to the natural world, but to help heal the damage that is already done. Those twin goals should form the backbone of our new American infrastructure, and the application point of that infrastructure will be the BHBs themselves.
As such, that means that we should be creating as much logistical and monetary support as possible for: reduced consumption, reduced transit, land reclamation and rehabilitation, reforestation, topsoil regeneration, passive green retrofitting and building, and creative re-zoning. The government should also begin a massive coastal relocation program, to get people away from areas that will be overwhelmed by sea-level rise (which is unavoidable at this point). Similarly, natural deserts should be depopulated, especially areas that are hyper-overconsumers of water under current arrangements. Overall, a lot more land should just be left alone, to rehabilitate itself and recover.
None of things are possible without the realistic option of BHBs as the offramp/escape route. As the Buckminster Fuller quote at the top of this piece notes, people need to see the lights of the approaching ship before they will leave the sinking one.
Coda
I know that the above account is not particularly exhaustive or perhaps even very convincing. I’m not that skilled at laying out in writing what seems so obvious and inspiring in my head. But I’ll just close with another brief reiteration of what I see as the basic facts of where we’re at, because it helps me close the loop on my thoughts for this piece.
The natural world, which is our home, is buckling under our hefty presence. We are already in the midst of the collapse of the entire system, something that will get rapidly worse over the next couple decades, if not sooner. As such, we need to rapidly and massively reduce our negative impact on the planet. The only way to do that is to change the fundamental building block of consumer-industrial civilization: the household. The household must become much larger, in order to facilitate the economic and physical contraction necessary to begin the project of ecological healing and restoration. The only way to make larger households a realistic possibility is to create working models right now, supported by UBI. Once people see it, they can be it, demanding action from government to provide the tools necessary for the transition to our next way of life.
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on December 1, 2023.
