This article is not a retraction; it is not an apology or an excuse.  Let’s say it is clarification?

You wil have seen the guys who go for gated communities; or others who go off to live in the woods to form small villages there where everything provided locally from nature.  Their angles include ‘to keep out the riffraff’ with walls and monitored gates, or instead to ‘go green’ and save the earth from denudation. There is good evidence that the mass of society they are excluding and thereby rejecting does hold quite a few undesirable elements, including riffraff and reckless devourers of the resources of earth.

Our posted articles to date have held a large amount of criticism of society, particularly concerning social living as it is played out in the Western world.  And there are two things in the first place we want to clear up for our readers.

Firstly, we accept it is the easiest thing in the world to knock down and destroy what another has erected. To erect something, an edifice or done service, takes an amount of creativity and dedication. To knock them down takes just bloody-mindedness and a sledge hammer.

Secondly we accept also that we are part of the problem; that these discussions and dissections we have made in the past months do not emanate from a source that is immaculate and pristine. We too are all too human and fallible and very liable to error; we are vain and offensive in our behaviour sometimes.  And that is how it is; and how it happens to be.

To clarify a bit more: we don’t advocate running away from serious problems like riffraff and gluttonous resource consumption, or any other faults and follies we people as a whole get up to. We don’t want to disassociate ourselves utterly from the people who are, for the gated people and for the backwoodsmen, beyond the pale.

On the other hand we are not soppy-happy would-be sorters of world problems ladling out a universal panacea, one drop of which is able to cure anything from arthritis to the zeitgeist.  We do hope to claim to have a solution, although not one we own or are sole advocators of, since we stumble also, but one which is small and maybe fir only for localised and modest-sized communities, but for modest-sized local communities set within the larger space of society en mass.

Admittedly we don’t want to take them into our homes and look after them in the way that the very best of humanity dedicate their lives to in looking after riffraff etc; we are not strong enough characters for that eventuality, nor are we in suitable situations equipped to cope with such generosity.  Ours is a different kind of – mission – if you like; movement – if you don’t.  And every article we publish has a threefold task.

• To open up debates on topics which are hardly aired in mainstream media and which we understand to be crucial to the solutions our society needs and ought to be seeking out.
• To provoke and inform, so as to raise the game of your conversation with your friends and families, and so in some sense we are educative
• Lastly we hope you do raise the issues with your acquaintance and hammer things out in your living rooms.  We don’t ask that you ‘like’ us or ask you to make referrals to our site and its articles to all your company; we do ask you talk to your acquaintance and spread our (and also your own) understandings that there are urgent concerns to be tackled, and to insist that there is good hope and optimism available to tackle them. As for destructive criticism, the wrecking ball in the living room, we say this: if we go in like the US Alliance did in Iraq in 2001 and take out an infrastructure whilst having no follow-on reconstruction plan in place to implement, then we are vandals and barbarians and nothing more.

On the other hand, we hope we act with discrimination; in a way analogous to having ailing buildings and past their best unsafe appliances demolished; either for fit buildings to be erected in the space of the former; or so as to canabalise for parts for repairs, or maybe melt down to raw metal for use in recycling.

‘Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and…
……
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice’

(from: Ash Wednesday by T S Eliot)

So we are not outsiders nor are we dissociated or disaffected from mainstream events and ways of living.  There is no rejection of others, only rejection of the ways of certain others. And this is done not merely for our own sakes, nor only for those of you who are onside and with us; but – this sounds a little patronising – like one of our greatest mentors, the noble Socrates, we believe that the very people heading up this corned beef hash we are served up as the contemporary world are not really keen on fry-ups either.  It is a truth that once a person tastes something better, and finds it wholesome, inexpensive, plentiful and nourishing, then that person would be going against reason and inclination to go back upon adopting a new diet.

We say there is no point to division, exclusion and separation.  We say people work best together and when no-one is out to head up the team and take over the glory.  It’s not a particularly political position so much as an apolitical one; it begins and ends with each of us inthe first  place working to govern themself, and then proceeds to allowing others adequate social, mental and spiritual space to do the same.  We remain individuals, in fact become more truly individuals than many of us are allowed to be in society as it is right now.

If one of your feet gets sore and hurts in your shoe you don’t cut off or maybe throw away one of your shoes.  You find the piece of grit you kicked into it when walking, remove it, and sort the problem out.  To set up a gated community or to build a secluded village in the woods is in fact throwing away the rest of your body and keeping only a foot that still hurts, and coving it with a band-aid.

There is no solution while there is one man or woman or child still disenfranchised from a what may be a modest although fulfilled life. And there is, at the level of the nitty-gritty, no one size fits all solution.  But as one plus one makes two and two plus two makes four – persons who have begun on a rocky uphill long distance climb onward and who are striving not just for a purblind narrow self-improvement, but yet for a self-improvement which they measure by the benefits they move forward to be allowed to others, as well as by the committment they put in, in working to  help supply routes towards adequate, fullfilled lives to deprived others.

On the other hand two minus one makes one alone, and one minus one makes nothing at all – no common society, only internecine faction, breeding antagonisms.

So in one sense, to breakaway and start a Roanoke, a Darien, or Pantisocrasy, is a defeat at the very moment it is resolved upon. It is an unspoken rebuke to and rejection of others, an inauspicious start for a new venture, since it is a bad precedent which bodes for the future.

‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’

 

You can also find this article at our steemit blog.