I know, you're probably saying, "great, some more hair-brained, neo-hippie commune bullcrap -- real original."  But bear with me.  I'm not a hippie, by any stretch.  And I don't currently live in a community.  I'm not particularly well acquainted with my neighbors, and I could probably be described as substantially misanthropic.   I don't volunteer for any worthwhile causes or donate money to community groups.  In fact, I'm about as non-community-involved as someone could be.

But that's not the point.  I'm not touting the community option because I want my own heroic generosity and involvement to go mainstream (they ain't there anyway).  Group living will become an absolute necessity as the American Algorithm comes unraveled.  We will be living more collectively in the near future, whether we want to or not.  The individual and nuclear family matrix will not hold.  There is simply not enough economic substance to support our current social form for much longer, and things could get very unpleasant unless we can construct some bold new community structures.

To see why group living is really the only option for a positive future, lets quickly revisit the gross mismatch between the problems we're facing and the solutions that are tossed about in mainstream discourse.  On a broad scale:

• It is highly likely that human activity is warming the global climate, which could result in multiple catastrophes (some dissent exists on global warming, but all relevant peer-reviewed studies and major scientific bodies have concluded that human activity is almost certainly a major cause; we will deal with some of the more vociferous conservative doubters in a later post)
• Almost all other global natural systems are in decline: depletion of fresh water, accelerating species extinction, degradation of fertile topsoil, expanding desertification, etc.
• The gulf between the rich and poor is growing both within the United States and internationally
• Individual US households are in trouble: personal savings are low, wages are flat, bankruptcies are on the rise, health care costs are skyrocketing, food prices are surging, and the bogus "wealth" built up during the housing bubble continues to seep away
• Globalization and technology continue to erode the wages of US workers (even salaries for college graduates are trending flat or downward)
• The "hidden underclass" continues to expand, with staggering rates of African American incarceration, rural poverty, and the companion complex of drug sales, abuse, and violence
• Petroleum costs (really no need to say any more here)

This is just a smattering, but you get the idea.  In general, it's obvious that human activity is just too much for the planet to handle.  Our sheer numbers and our industrial processes are a lethal combination.  And this economic system that is so dysfunctional for the natural world is proving no better at producing real social value either.  The overall productivity of the system cannot be denied, but the benefits have not accrued to the majority of the people.  Regular folks have no real power, in that they cannot significantly alter the shape of their lives.  We are at the mercy of huge systems and trends that are remorseless in their indifference to human well-being.  For many, daily existence is a kind of Chinese water-torture, a relentless grinding away by impersonal factors on our very personal lives.  Many live in dread of the unknown. When is that unexpected illness going to come and trash my insurance and savings?  When is that next round of layoffs coming?  How can I continue to commute via car when gas costs double in a year's time?  What happens when that last credit card gets maxed out and no more offers are coming in the mail?  How will we support that elderly parent who has run out of pension money to pay for the nursing home? 

The gross dissonance between what we know has to be done and what we can realistically do is mind-boggling.  We know that there have to be epic changes in the way we organize work, energy, travel, construction, and consumption, in order for the planet to even begin to heal itself.  But how do we get there?  How do we get people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck to buy local, organic (i.e., more expensive) veggies or reduce their carbon footprint?  How many American workers have the luxury, time, and money to retrain themselves for the green jobs of the future?  And what tiny percentage of people are able to move their portfolios to more socially responsible spheres of investment?  This is the other half of that problem-solution mismatch.  As the American Algorithm is presently configured, what are the actual mechanisms for achieving positive social change?  These are really the only options floating around in mainstream discourse:

• Hope that energy technology bails us out.  This is a fairly common motif in the mainstream media, obviously because new technology means new products, more money, economic growth, the whole shebang.  This is the perfect pipe dream for those who can't see the structural problems with the American Algorithm.  The basic problem here is well-outlined by James Howard Kunstler in The Long Emergency.  Technology and energy are not interchangeable.  The infrastructure we have built upon the oil platform is absolutely unique to the specific characteristics of petroleum: high fungibility, portability, relative safety, compact volume to energy ratio, etc.  So while there certainly will be new energy technologies in the future, the social structures that can be supported by them will be radically different from today (spoiler alert): they will be much more decentralized and collectivized, the exact format that can be maximized by community living.
• Hope that the market bails us out.  Similar to the above hope, and really a superset of it. You can see permutations of this dream on the right and left.  Conservatives insist that we just need to get government out of the picture and give unfettered laissez-faire a real try.  Business-friendly liberals are gaga over the future green society, trumpeting the emerging grassroots economic miracle (see Paul Hawken's works in particular).  Of course, the problems with this fantasy are numerous.  First of all, markets have been doing just fine for decades, and that still hasn't accrued to the general welfare of society or the planet.  Sure, we have 500 different kinds of underarm deodorant, but a third of the country has no health insurance.  Secondly, the general economic trend of the last 40 years is centralization of control.  Labor unions, credit unions, and other collective mechanisms have all but disappeared, making the seedbed for small businesses very unwelcoming.  And while it is true that at any one time, small businesses employ a large percentage of the population, the survival rates of the businesses themselves do not extend much longer that 2-4 years, making it very difficult to build an actual small entrepreneurial culture.  And most basically of all, markets and the business culture in general have only one goal: to produce profits.  It is not surprising that ecological calamity, social inequality, and moral bankruptcy are often the products of the free market.  Corporations are not in the business of being nice, or responsible, or neighborly, or whatever.  They are there to make money, and they're very good at it.  The other stuff, like our air, water, sanity, and health, must be leveraged by other means, through other mechanisms.  The market will not save us, nor will a green economy magically grow under the present set of arrangements.
• Retreat to the narratives and blame the other side.  This is really a form of surrender, and it's fairly prevalent.  See the first two posts on this blog site for the Conservative and Liberal narratives.  These stories give each side some (bogus) moral high ground from which to spew their invective or self-righteousness, depending on the setting.  But what does feel good about these stories is that we can pretend that things would have been, and still can be, just fine -- if the idiots on the other side would just grow up, or find Jesus, or move to Canada, or whatever.  And of course, these narratives have built-in excuses and scapegoats, so that when the vaunted plans go awry, we all know where to point the finger.
• Demand that the government bail us out.  Call this the Creeping Katrina effect.  We start to see everything in terms of a natural disaster, and scream to the rooftops for our leaders to help us.  Banks go bust for floating badly-collatoralized loans?  No matter, the government steps in with a bailout.  People need a feel-good bump for the beginning of summer?  Send out some tax refund checks?  Gas prices too high?  Demand that the President fly over to Saudi Arabia and make those bastards open up the spigots!  It almost goes without saying that this is a piecemeal and highly reactive tactic.  The tacit hope is that we're just a couple temporary fixes away from a tipping point of wonderfulness.  Maybe the next refund check will magically topple the last five decades of socioeconomic rot.

If Barack Obama does end up as President, it may prove bitterly ironic, because all of these approaches to our problems are variations on hope, the Obama core value.  In each scenario above, we're refusing to look at things as they really are.  We want some nebulous force or entity to swoop down and turn the game around, without us having to give up our way of life (it's non-negotiable, after all).  To hope that things will work out, despite Everests of evidence to the contrary, is supreme folly.  As mentioned in an earlier post (I think), one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting the outcome to be different.  What these vapory hopes for the future also display is just how constricting the strait jacket of the American Algorithm can be.  None of these solutions entertains the possibility that we're going to have to radically alter our work, travel, habitation and consumption patterns.  We can't break free from the one person-one job, one family-one set-of-stuff motif, so we have no recourse but to hope for the best. 

However, a change of perspective at the root social-form level can make many of these colossal mismatches between problem and solution go away.  And that change is the subject of the next post: the community mechanism.