Community Governance

“Our greatest duty to our children is to love them first.
Secondly, it is to teach them. Not to frighten, force, or intimidate our children into submission, but to effectively teach them so that they have the knowledge and tools to govern themselves.”

Human civilization began around 10,000 years ago, after the Neolithic revolution. With the domestication of plants and animals, hunter-gatherer groups could move onto a more sedentary social structure: the city-state.

The city provided a new order, compared to the chaos of pre-neolithic times: an order based on violence. In fact, most of the myths that recall the founding of a city are accompanied by the murder of the nomadic brother (Abel, Remo) by the hand of the citizen-farmer (Cain, Romolo).

The city is born by walling off the surrounding environment and then proceeds to strengthen its position by organizing an armed force to deal with the neighbors (military) and one to maintain internal cohesion (police).

Jericho, the oldest city our archaeologists have uncovered, was fortified by immense walls and surrounded by a moat 8.25m wide and 2.75m deep.

Cities provided safe shelter to their citizens, and promised times of peace and prosperity. Their power lied in the ability to accumulate capital (food, technology, people), hence to plan in advance and to deal with emergencies.

Human existence, organized hierarchically inside the city walls, became more productive, efficient and predictable. Capital could grow and the city could flourish, until the system hit its limits and had to expand. This necessity of periodically expanding the size of the city resulted — especially within a densely populated environment such as the Middle East — in a sharp acceleration of the technological progress due to intense competition for space and resources between rival cities.

Since then, war has been a constant recurrence in human history. Peace was seen only as a temporary break between wars. Surrounded by hostile neighbors, if your city didn’t have a standing army able to defend your borders at all times, you would be immediately invaded and enslaved. As famously stated by Vegetius in the 4th Century CE: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Looking at how nation states behave in 2018, this still stands true today.

And yet, we would be lying against the historical evidence if we forgot to mention that humanity, even when moved by aggressiveness, was always simultaneously guided by the other polarity of life’s impulse, love, whose aspiration was never domination, but communion, inspired by a mutual recognition of every personal and cultural difference.

What we inherit from this civilization is not completely biased by violence: the same technology we can blame for so many man-made disasters, is also what allowed us to develop the new connective tissue of the species, the infrastructural conditions to realize a dream that without technology was doomed stay confined inside the fascinating but sterile realm of our imagination.

When today we say that the world is our home and humanity is our family, we are stating a self-evident fact, not a rational deduction.

And even when we admit that our society is going through an epochal crisis, we believe that another society is possible, only not ordered by the violent hand of human civilization.

The old, collapsing civilization — Babylon — was patriarchal and power-obsessed.

Unity was imposed from the top, by sacrificing the freedom of individual subjects in front of the supreme will of the Great Architect.

The new planetary community is instead dynamic and life-conscious. Individuals and groups will be free to move within an open network of autonomous, eco-sustainable communities and express their creative potential.

Inspired by a consensual set of ethical standards, and connected by a global network that enables world wide communication, synergy and synchronicity while positively incentivizing local resilience, the human community of the future is founded on the recognition of the Other as a guest and a friend.

In the new world, communities will be the unit of society.

A community can be formed by one ore more traditional family nuclei with husband, wife and children, but also by any other group of at least two adult people who want to live together.

Every member of the Life Tribe can either join an existing community or constitute a new one along with other members.

All communities will be self-sustaining and self-governing, while respecting the community standards outlined in a planetary ethical charter, constitution and confederate treaty.

Community standards include:

• Min. 2, max. 300 members
• Self-Sufficiency
• Positive Ecological Footprint
• Demographic stability
• Monthly self-reports on internal operations
• Openness and transparency to external visitors
• Set up and maintenance of local transport infrastructure

Communities that meet those parameters (flexibly adapted to the local context) will be supported by the WAM’s Universal Welfare program.

Legitimation of the community’s self-reports will be granted by global standardized procedures, openness to visits by non-members and transparency to any third-party inquiry.

Each community will be governing itself by direct democracy through an internal Community Council. Communities can draft their own set of community rules and guidelines, and compile them in a Community Charter. The charter must be available online for all WAM members to read. All community charters must be in line with the World Ethos and compatible with the Earth Constitution.

Each Community Council may elect one resident member to represent the community in the Local Council, the democratic body supervising the local territory.

Local communities will also contribute in the development of a distributed transportation grid that allows every member to travel between communities free of cost. We need to come up with a radically new model of transport infrastructure that can serve a world of more than 7 billion human beings and provide freedom of movement across the planet for each and every one of us. That’s no easy feat! We need something that is at the same time ecologically sustainable, highly efficient and extremely flexible, and we can achieve something like this only with a sapient mix of cutting edge technologies, systems design and lots of human inventive and determination.

Once we have a functioning model that can scale, we must ditch the old one as soon as possible (stop using cars, asphalt roads, gas stations, and eventually even airplanes, cargo ships and so on), as we lay down our new grassroots infrastructure and start using it instead.

For land-based long distance travel, electric trains seem like the best way to go. Each area may establish local railway nodes that are built and maintained by the nearby communities. Around these nodes can develop the open cities of the future — Local Spaces — which will be more like gathering grounds providing shelter to travelers and facilitating the exchange of goods, ideas and services. Local spaces will be different from cities since they won’t be places where most people actually live or work, but rather leisure spaces where people go to meet, study and play together.

Here’s a sample map, with ecological communities (small circles) distributed around local spaces (big circles) connected by the transportation grid.

Feel free to leave any comment or question below, and join the discussion on the dedicated forum.

Also in Life Tribe:

• Holistic Living — Healthy lifestyle practices
• Self Improvement — Way of Life guidelines
• Sustainable Development — Permaculture design principles

Other WAM! publications:

Coop Network

A new economy

Conscious Forum

A new consciousness

Eden Planet

A new world