Considering Deliberate Bonds
The overriding reason to put several families together is that the combined human resource creates the here and now opportunities to practice free assembly with peers, free speech, and free expression. We can release involuntary servitude by combining chores.
A secondary value of putting several families together is that the recovery can be contagious: a child from one family sees another child solving a problem in theirs. What was hopeless is proven to be no longer hopeless. The second child's recovery is boosted, as well.
Of course there are risks in putting people together this way. But these risks can be removed with some forethought and engineering.
In particular, I believe it will be useful to declare private household spaces off limits to non-household members. The common-ground gathering spaces in the middle of the community are always for assembly. The private household spaces are always for privacy... privacy of the individual, and privacy of the marital and family units.
Maintaining a firm rule about continual privacy of the household spaces is like using the clock during sessions: the blatant objectivity of the rule overturns chronic patterned thinking about dominance, "virtue," and subservience. One's "feelings" about when it is "right" to claim privacy do not always lead to the truth.
One reason we do not all live closely now is the discomfort we feel when we are presented with re-stimulating situations in other people's families. We get away from each other because we don't want to feel all those feelings again.
But the larger problem with putting families together in direct community is that inhuman patterns are contagious. It isn't just the re-stimulations that drive us apart. It is also the real risk of new infection, or re-infection by pattern confirmation. When we come together, it is worse than "love me, love my dog." It becomes "if you want me close, you must let my patterns dominate you (and your children) as much as they dominate me."
We can use our comprehension of the structure of patterns and the mechanics of contagion to devise systems that do block contagion.
I intend to show that there is a difference between re-stimulation and re-infection, and that we can structure close arrangements that do not infect or re-infect. When all can see that healing is in progress, the re-stimulations that remain will simply form effective pathways to discharge.
Patterns are passed along bond lines between people. Once people form personal bonds, the patterns start to travel down those bonds. (For instance, after you get married, the beatings start.) This is a elaboration of the general sharing function. Just as all the material resources are shared within a family, the "resources" of patterned thinking are also shared. There will be a drive towards general equilibrium, where everybody is as sick as each other.
The intensity and severity of the pattern installation in any person is directly proportional to the degree of power differential, or the degree of dependence, there was or is between that person as "victim" and the other family member as "assailant".
Any pattern presented to a child by a pivotal adult (especially a parent) can result in a deep installation of chronic dysfunction. The same pattern presented by a stranger or a peer will be less damaging, less likely to become firmly installed and dropped into the unconscious, because the dependence is not there, or the negotiating balance between the two is fairly equal. The would-be "victim" can acknowledge that the event occurred, because the person is not dependent upon the bond for survival.
When young people succumb to pattern presentation by a peer, it is because the pattern has already been installed by somebody else, and is only being confirmed, not newly introduced.
Every family has its own little brew of characterizing patterns. This is a fact we must accept and we might as well have a sense of humor about it. But to make community workable and fun, we don't want to spread these from family to family.
The safest way to bond a community of families together is to deliberately add especially peer-to-peer bonds. This way, when we present our patterns to each other (as we certainly shall) we are stacking the deck against new installations and instead promoting the event as a great opportunity to dislodge and discharge the pattern being presented.
Information about whatever is being presented in the privacy of the children's spaces will filter up to the adults by way of the strongest child-parent bonds. We adults will learn a lot about governing human nature in truly healing ways by designing interventive strategies that do not violate the basic rights of the young ones.
Here is a map of the bonding patterns that can allow tremendous closeness as community, yet prevent the spread of patterns from family to family.
A secondary value of putting several families together is that the recovery can be contagious: a child from one family sees another child solving a problem in theirs. What was hopeless is proven to be no longer hopeless. The second child's recovery is boosted, as well.
Of course there are risks in putting people together this way. But these risks can be removed with some forethought and engineering.
In particular, I believe it will be useful to declare private household spaces off limits to non-household members. The common-ground gathering spaces in the middle of the community are always for assembly. The private household spaces are always for privacy... privacy of the individual, and privacy of the marital and family units.
Maintaining a firm rule about continual privacy of the household spaces is like using the clock during sessions: the blatant objectivity of the rule overturns chronic patterned thinking about dominance, "virtue," and subservience. One's "feelings" about when it is "right" to claim privacy do not always lead to the truth.
One reason we do not all live closely now is the discomfort we feel when we are presented with re-stimulating situations in other people's families. We get away from each other because we don't want to feel all those feelings again.
But the larger problem with putting families together in direct community is that inhuman patterns are contagious. It isn't just the re-stimulations that drive us apart. It is also the real risk of new infection, or re-infection by pattern confirmation. When we come together, it is worse than "love me, love my dog." It becomes "if you want me close, you must let my patterns dominate you (and your children) as much as they dominate me."
We can use our comprehension of the structure of patterns and the mechanics of contagion to devise systems that do block contagion.
I intend to show that there is a difference between re-stimulation and re-infection, and that we can structure close arrangements that do not infect or re-infect. When all can see that healing is in progress, the re-stimulations that remain will simply form effective pathways to discharge.
Patterns are passed along bond lines between people. Once people form personal bonds, the patterns start to travel down those bonds. (For instance, after you get married, the beatings start.) This is a elaboration of the general sharing function. Just as all the material resources are shared within a family, the "resources" of patterned thinking are also shared. There will be a drive towards general equilibrium, where everybody is as sick as each other.
The intensity and severity of the pattern installation in any person is directly proportional to the degree of power differential, or the degree of dependence, there was or is between that person as "victim" and the other family member as "assailant".
Any pattern presented to a child by a pivotal adult (especially a parent) can result in a deep installation of chronic dysfunction. The same pattern presented by a stranger or a peer will be less damaging, less likely to become firmly installed and dropped into the unconscious, because the dependence is not there, or the negotiating balance between the two is fairly equal. The would-be "victim" can acknowledge that the event occurred, because the person is not dependent upon the bond for survival.
When young people succumb to pattern presentation by a peer, it is because the pattern has already been installed by somebody else, and is only being confirmed, not newly introduced.
Every family has its own little brew of characterizing patterns. This is a fact we must accept and we might as well have a sense of humor about it. But to make community workable and fun, we don't want to spread these from family to family.
The safest way to bond a community of families together is to deliberately add especially peer-to-peer bonds. This way, when we present our patterns to each other (as we certainly shall) we are stacking the deck against new installations and instead promoting the event as a great opportunity to dislodge and discharge the pattern being presented.
Information about whatever is being presented in the privacy of the children's spaces will filter up to the adults by way of the strongest child-parent bonds. We adults will learn a lot about governing human nature in truly healing ways by designing interventive strategies that do not violate the basic rights of the young ones.
Here is a map of the bonding patterns that can allow tremendous closeness as community, yet prevent the spread of patterns from family to family.
The bonds between children are not represented in this image, as well as some parent-child bonds, just to not muddy up the diagram, but certainly the bonds will be there.
Although this "idealized" map shows only two parent/ heterosexual families, the same bonding principles can apply to any person who comes into the group. A childless or unmarried person can plug in to the appropriate peer circle and become a member of the community that way.
How do we deliberately build bonds? Bonds between people are built by transactions. Any passing of goods or information establishes a link between persons.
When strong bonds are present, sharing becomes automatic. Sharing becomes something that enhances each person's feeling of wealth and self-interest because one's sense of "self" has expanded, and one enjoys seeing one's loved ones enjoying what has been given. The human rights community naturally leads to a developing system of closed loop sharing as a human method of material distribution. We can expect many benefits from this.
Different people operate different types of bonding systems to experience love with one another and assemble their circle of friends. The concentric bonding system (with fixed sexual bonds) shown here is one method. There are other logical possibilities for intentional bonding to form and maintain a community.
Another possibility is an "omni-bonding" system wherein each person is at least potentially equally bonded to everyone or anyone else in the group, and sexual bonds may be in constant flux. An omni-bonded community is one wherein free assembly is practiced not only between peers, but between all members. I have heard many futurists hope for this, and might call it polyamory.
I personally have noticed a lot of difficulties coming along with the omni-bonding routine, and I feel the special need to mention this because so many utopians have proposed this idea to me. I personally do not wish to experiment with omni-bonding because I want to structure community to strengthen families not atomize them. Concentric bonding can be a safeguard against infidelity and divorce, whereas omni-bonding virtually promotes infidelity and divorce, and perhaps polyamorists call these things freedom. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it - I just don't want to do it. And, you don't use basketball rules on a football field; different games, different rules. Just be up front about your intentions.
The entire meaning for me of this experiment is to set up a formulaic system of community formation that can be duplicated safely in many places, with any people who express an interest. We cannot assume that everyone who approaches will be free of dangerous patterns.
So if we are designing the human rights community as a game, we are going to use very precise rules. The general playing of the game creates set-ups for discharge directly in the context of the family and daily life. We are a like a volley ball team, humans against patterns. In short, the idea is to just get out there and do what you do, which will result in various things including, eventually, somebody becoming upset. (Haven't you noticed? That is what happens when we try to do things together.) That is the set-up.
Then the next phase of the peer support group or special counseling functions are engaged. We get to witness the movement in the person and how this fans out into movement within the family relationships. I think it shall be exciting and fun.
In the long term the human rights community is not about co-counseling relationships per se... it is about living free of oppression. We won't need that much out-of-context counseling anymore, and we could have that through on-line or phone sessions with people who live elsewhere.
My aim is to contextualize the discharge healing process, such that maintenance discharge needs are handled within the context of family and friends. My hope is that the only counseling skills we will need in that context, from one another, shall be that no one interferes with the other's discharge. We can own that sentence on the back page of Present Time: "Any ... person would recover spontaneously..."
This can also be stated as the decision and aim to take the responsibility of the healing impetus off the "counselor" role and rightfully place it back in the domain of the "client." I suggest that we can toggle that switch in that direction, and still see healthy discharge and re-evaluation, because the essential contradiction is no longer being supplied by the special character and skill of the "counselor." Inside a human-standard community, the reality that the person is immersed in, becomes the overriding contradiction.
Within the overall environmental contradiction of the whole community structure, offering new and continual opportunities for assembly, free speech, and privacy, and the pattern interruptions provided by the human standard commitments, we shall not need to rely upon the character of the counselor to provide contradiction by way of concentrated sessions. We shall all hold the keys to our own recovery and strength, not need to run to another for the way.
Though I have tried these things personally, these hypotheses have yet to be tested by any group in a formal and concerted way. I want to try it. I invite co-counseling students as participants not because of special counseling skills, but because of your practiced client-ing skills. I am inviting you to experiment with immersing yourself in defined community, and then toggle that switch for where you suppose the responsibility for healing can be most healing: in claiming full agency.
One of my biggest concern is that the system will work “too well”. We all know that when chronic patterns are effectively confronted, one side effect is the momentary feeling that we are "gonna die."
Without experience in recognizing this feeling as a very good sign, someone might interpret the process as "life-threatening" and drop out without making any change. And life-threatening it will be: for patterns, that is. But for humans and real human nature I expect it to be remarkably life-enhancing.
Summer camp is my proposal. But really, this is just practice for a long term arrangement. I want to be up front with my belief that tribal living in eco-village is our necessary path to get rid of consumer addictions like gasoline, the utility costs of McMansions, and chemical farming that harms everyone. We need to live differently to refuse fossil fuels and other bad industrial methods, and we might as well go for it, all the way.
Although this "idealized" map shows only two parent/ heterosexual families, the same bonding principles can apply to any person who comes into the group. A childless or unmarried person can plug in to the appropriate peer circle and become a member of the community that way.
How do we deliberately build bonds? Bonds between people are built by transactions. Any passing of goods or information establishes a link between persons.
When strong bonds are present, sharing becomes automatic. Sharing becomes something that enhances each person's feeling of wealth and self-interest because one's sense of "self" has expanded, and one enjoys seeing one's loved ones enjoying what has been given. The human rights community naturally leads to a developing system of closed loop sharing as a human method of material distribution. We can expect many benefits from this.
Different people operate different types of bonding systems to experience love with one another and assemble their circle of friends. The concentric bonding system (with fixed sexual bonds) shown here is one method. There are other logical possibilities for intentional bonding to form and maintain a community.
Another possibility is an "omni-bonding" system wherein each person is at least potentially equally bonded to everyone or anyone else in the group, and sexual bonds may be in constant flux. An omni-bonded community is one wherein free assembly is practiced not only between peers, but between all members. I have heard many futurists hope for this, and might call it polyamory.
I personally have noticed a lot of difficulties coming along with the omni-bonding routine, and I feel the special need to mention this because so many utopians have proposed this idea to me. I personally do not wish to experiment with omni-bonding because I want to structure community to strengthen families not atomize them. Concentric bonding can be a safeguard against infidelity and divorce, whereas omni-bonding virtually promotes infidelity and divorce, and perhaps polyamorists call these things freedom. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it - I just don't want to do it. And, you don't use basketball rules on a football field; different games, different rules. Just be up front about your intentions.
The entire meaning for me of this experiment is to set up a formulaic system of community formation that can be duplicated safely in many places, with any people who express an interest. We cannot assume that everyone who approaches will be free of dangerous patterns.
So if we are designing the human rights community as a game, we are going to use very precise rules. The general playing of the game creates set-ups for discharge directly in the context of the family and daily life. We are a like a volley ball team, humans against patterns. In short, the idea is to just get out there and do what you do, which will result in various things including, eventually, somebody becoming upset. (Haven't you noticed? That is what happens when we try to do things together.) That is the set-up.
Then the next phase of the peer support group or special counseling functions are engaged. We get to witness the movement in the person and how this fans out into movement within the family relationships. I think it shall be exciting and fun.
In the long term the human rights community is not about co-counseling relationships per se... it is about living free of oppression. We won't need that much out-of-context counseling anymore, and we could have that through on-line or phone sessions with people who live elsewhere.
My aim is to contextualize the discharge healing process, such that maintenance discharge needs are handled within the context of family and friends. My hope is that the only counseling skills we will need in that context, from one another, shall be that no one interferes with the other's discharge. We can own that sentence on the back page of Present Time: "Any ... person would recover spontaneously..."
This can also be stated as the decision and aim to take the responsibility of the healing impetus off the "counselor" role and rightfully place it back in the domain of the "client." I suggest that we can toggle that switch in that direction, and still see healthy discharge and re-evaluation, because the essential contradiction is no longer being supplied by the special character and skill of the "counselor." Inside a human-standard community, the reality that the person is immersed in, becomes the overriding contradiction.
Within the overall environmental contradiction of the whole community structure, offering new and continual opportunities for assembly, free speech, and privacy, and the pattern interruptions provided by the human standard commitments, we shall not need to rely upon the character of the counselor to provide contradiction by way of concentrated sessions. We shall all hold the keys to our own recovery and strength, not need to run to another for the way.
Though I have tried these things personally, these hypotheses have yet to be tested by any group in a formal and concerted way. I want to try it. I invite co-counseling students as participants not because of special counseling skills, but because of your practiced client-ing skills. I am inviting you to experiment with immersing yourself in defined community, and then toggle that switch for where you suppose the responsibility for healing can be most healing: in claiming full agency.
One of my biggest concern is that the system will work “too well”. We all know that when chronic patterns are effectively confronted, one side effect is the momentary feeling that we are "gonna die."
Without experience in recognizing this feeling as a very good sign, someone might interpret the process as "life-threatening" and drop out without making any change. And life-threatening it will be: for patterns, that is. But for humans and real human nature I expect it to be remarkably life-enhancing.
Summer camp is my proposal. But really, this is just practice for a long term arrangement. I want to be up front with my belief that tribal living in eco-village is our necessary path to get rid of consumer addictions like gasoline, the utility costs of McMansions, and chemical farming that harms everyone. We need to live differently to refuse fossil fuels and other bad industrial methods, and we might as well go for it, all the way.
