Published on May 13, 2025 8:35 AM GMT
On Profitable Partial Exit from Perverse Regimes Through the Exercise of One's Formal Rights as a Citizen
Enough criticism and analysis for the moment; here's a constructive program!
Whole systems become richer through exchange and division of labor, which affords people more leisure to explore and investigate the environment, and add to the total knowledge and capacities of the community. Local subsystems that are part of a larger economic community that is fundamentally extractive may decide to temporarily become less wealthy in nominal terms in order to become more self-governing through import replacement. For a more detailed well fleshed out theory with many examples on the level of the municipal or state economy, see the published work of Jane Jacobs, especially Systems of Survival, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Economy of Cities, The Nature of Economies, and The Question of Separatism.
At each stage of the process, the import substitution has to pay off fast enough for the community to be able to reproduce itself, which limits the extent of possible import substitution; we do not want to become North Korea. The Amish represent a more appealing prospect along the efficient frontier; they abstain from television, which we permit, but retain the capacity to build enough new housing in desirable locations to meet new needs, which our civilization has lost.
I would like to increase the scope of trade for a community of people whose minds are increasingly integrated, fully endorsed parts of their survival and reproductive strategies, and who constitute a language community that can describe itself and whose members can increasingly honestly describe themselves. For now, comfortable survival as an individual in our society requires adapting to mores that are perverse, anti-intellectual, and promote self-hatred, which makes it much more expensive to retain a nonperverse and prointellectual internal attitude. (See On commitments to anti-normativity, Guilt, Shame, and Depravity, The Order of the Soul, Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency, and Can crimes be discussed literally?.)
Here are some ways I can imagine forming various small republics within the current American system. I am less familiar with foreign regimes but I imagine some elements of this generalize well.
Contents [hide]
- 1 Republic of the Self2 Republic of the Household3 Republic of the Pod4 Dunbar Republic5 Festival Republic6 Political Economy Republic
Republic of the Self
One person trying to improve the extent to which they are in integrity with themselves can profit from pursuing more bodily autonomy and integration, the resolution of self-inflicted pain, and improved nutrition.
The works of Moshe Feldenkrais are the best formal guide I've seen to body integration. Tai chi also helps. OpenATM or a credentialed Feldenkrais practitioner might be helpful for those who aren't exceptionally literate. Possibly some forms of yoga can help; Iyengar seems like the stupidest (and therefore most reliably reproducible) possible intervention that helps with this.
Generally, spending time playing around with the movement of one's own body, gently, investigating the edges of one's capacity rather than pushing past them, prioritizing balance, precision, and efficiency over cruder metrics like growing more meat or even maximizing strength in one stereotyped movement pattern. One can profit from adding mechanical challenge when one has become too strong for the current level of challenge to provide clearly interpretable feedback. Some movement patterns to learn, improve, and retain include walking barefoot on variable terrain, squatting, crawling, hanging, and climbing.
If there’s part of your body or a context where you feel pain or some other salient problem, or dissociate & don’t feel anything at all, that’s a natural target of investigation. If it feels good to move some way, that’s an even better target.
For mental integration, the canonical book is Spinoza's Ethics. It's old, a demanding read, and missing some important information about conflict, and I'm working on a patch, but for now, it's the best thing in its class by far.
Eating enough food, especially lightly processed and unadulterated animal products, and reducing or eliminating foods that lead to gastric distress or challenge, is the main way to improve nutrition. One might start by transitioning (gradually, to avoid transition shocks) to an elimination diet of fatty ruminant meat only, then trying to add back in things that Paleo-style heuristics would endorse and paying close attention to how they affect you. Salt, eggs, refined dairy, unrefined dairy, organ meats, bone broth. Then fruits and raw honey. Then root vegetables. Then other vegetables, grains, nuts, and other seeds. Then once you know what you can profitably eat and what it feels like to eat broadly enough and also nothing that makes you feel bad afterwards, experimenting with relative composition and timing.
Chris Masterjohn's work can improve the scope or precision of this work, as can state-published micronutrient guidelines.
Meditation - the simpler kinds like practicing attending to the breath, body scans, and nonjudgmental awareness of whatever else comes up in the process - can help cultivate the sensitivity to apply the above interventions intelligently. If you're too anxious to sit quietly for a while without a lot of outside stimulation, you might have mental knots that need meditation to unravel.
Republic of the Household
One can insource early childhood education - see the published work of Maria Montessori (inventor of the Montessori method) and Siegfried Engelmann (inventor of Direct Instruction), especially Give your child a superior mind. Taking Children Seriously is important as well.
Food preparation can be made much more efficient through division of labor (these profits can be realized as either spending less time or money on food, or consuming higher-quality food), and intelligent friendly touch can also be insourced profitably at this scale. You may need to live somewhere less fashionable and consume less conspicuously.
Republic of the Pod
Child care / education and meal preparation can be rendered much cheaper if several households collocate within easy walking distance, especially if they are adjacent. If they coordinate well about housing, they will be less reliant on living in central fashionable areas, which should reduce housing costs and allow more members of the household to focus full-time on internal and other local production rather than working outside the home to earn money from a larger extractive system. This is the smallest sustainable size at which I can imagine adults who are not exceptionally privileged sustainably (from an intergenerational perspective) enjoying serious leisure, since exchange - watching and befriending each other's children - can allow this size of group to attain a high educational standard without heroic, individual investments of time and attention that would be financially unsustainable for most people. This is also the smallest group size that can profitably and economically purchase land in order to improve it for the future.
Another critical specialization would be that only some members of the pod would have to be expert at navigating the bureaucracies that gatekeep critical services from the broader society such as hospitals.
Dunbar Republic
A group of 80-150 people is large enough to begin to assert itself politically to create space for distinctive norms that permit more efficient resource allocations than the broader society. For instance, a nonparanoid attitude towards freedom of movement for children.
If located within a broader municipality, a relatively unambitious version of this would be a whole city block of people collectively petitioning the city to close that block to automobile traffic for a couple of hours a week to allow their children freedom to roam within those boundaries (Play Streets). They could also stick up for each other and lobby the government if harassed by outsiders, in ways that would make it feel more politically expensive for municipal or state decisionmakers to tolerate, enable, or participate in such harassment. For instance, the Orthodox Jewish community of Pittsburgh successfully lobbied the state to change mortuary regulations to permit simple inexpensive burials. I would have a noticeably easier and more relaxed time caring for my children if I lived in a neighborhood that robustly supported Scandinavian-style mores around babies napping outside, instead of having to perform constant conspicuous vigilance lest the police arrest me for child endangerment.
Republics frequently practice something like universal conscription (the Swiss and Israelis notably still do this) as a formalization of their collective commitment to mutual defense. While small towns are not permitted military autonomy, they are sometimes permitted their own police force, which customarily receives broad deference from the state around use of force. A group this size could potentially incorporate a small town in an unincorporated area, and constitute their own police force comprising the entire adult citizenry (or whatever other arrangement is compatible with their local mores), though this would be easier with a somewhat larger well-coordinated group. Universal adult membership in the police is an important form of lawful autonomy under systems where policing of some kind is mandatory; it at least prevents the sorts of systemic inequality of violence that emerge where policing is a specialized role. The Rajneeshi cult documented in Wild Wild Country did this, and while their experiment eventually failed for other reasons (for instance, they were a crazy guru sex cult that attracted a lot of adverse attention, and then poisoned some random salad bars when they felt threatened by outsiders), constituting their own police force seems to have been an entirely sensible measure that worked well as long as the project lasted and did not itself lead to any major problems for the Rajneeshis.
Festival Republic
Several Dunbar groups with compatible household and pod norms could constitute a minimal viable mating pool, so that members wouldn't have to adapt to external mores in order to get enough attention to find a mate.
Political Economy Republic
At some point there are enough people with enough volume of exchange to require explicit procedures by which a confederation of distinct communities negotiate mutual trust. This is a large enough group to profitably develop a formal internal currency, and a formal defensive alliance. This is also a large enough group to constitute a sustainable language community (even if it's effectively a strongly differentiated dialect of the outside culture), since where conflict extends to competing uses of language (as it frequently does in our current political context), the meaning of language is ultimately decided by the process for resolving disputes about commitments. (See Civil Law and Political Drama)
I have not prioritized novel institution-design for this last topic because I don’t see enough coordination on the lower levels to make it worthwhile.
Discuss
