I'm not sure I can envision an "ideal" society but one thing I know for sure is that it would have to a LOT smaller than it is now.

I don't think that's going to be a problem after WWIII, pole shift, Yellowstone, and AGW.

Megadoom

.


- Well, there won't be A human society. The trend towards homogenization of culture will certainly reverse.

- Since most people in the West have been conditioned from birth for Cornucopian living and will hang onto the core of that lifestyle at all costs, I expect the majority to accept some form of urban fascism. (Already most of the way there, really.) It's the only model efficient enough to keep the people in McEverything for a few more generations.

- For folks willing and able to shift away from the Cornucopian paradigm, I'd say the ideal societies would be small towns/ villages, surrounded by old-school family farms (maybe fisheries, if the waters aren't too polluted)... Towns being a central hub providing goods and services for the farms, farms producing the raw materials for the towns.

- Technology in such places would for some time be re-discovering tech our great-grandparents had. Fortunately, we'll have some crutches in the form of some sustainable modern tech and modern tech that can be re-purposed for simplified application.

- Institutionalized education has never been a real success, and we'll be better off without it. Most kids will learn to read, write, and cipher just fine. They'll pick up technical skills as needed by assisting their elders.

- Barter will no-doubt become the order of the day Outside, augmented by various sorts of commodity-currency. Especially PMs... It will be interesting to see how long people keep trying to trade in silly green paper, and how insane it gets before the habit is finally broken. (Garbage bag full of cash for a ham & cheese sandwich?)

- Resources will have to be used with considerably greater efficiency and foresight than they have been... But this will come naturally without petroleum-enabled bulldozers, trucks, etc. that have enabled the sloppy, wasteful approaches of recent decades.

- With relatively small communities, formal government becomes kind of silly. Town/county councils will devolve into simple caucuses of leading members of the community who pool resources for their common benefit... Over-equipped standing armies of enforcers will be out of the question. Perhaps a sheriff, constable, or town marshal whose real authority would be limited by his ability to call up a posse or militia to handle serious situations. (He can pretty much forget about having back-up to go bust cousin Jim for growing weed, or to throw the Smiths off their property for tax delinquency.)

- Without monolithic Government authority, effortless travel, and constant communication, communities will become more isolated and distinct from one-another. (Not TOTALLY isolated. Just more-so than they have been in the last half-century.) This means that folks who don't fit-in with their community can go find one that suits them better. You could find a neo-puritan community down the road a couple dozen miles from a veritable wild-west recreation because, without cheap gasoline, a couple dozen miles is a LONG WAY.

.

Hey, Hillwalker, that's MY house! I agree a lot with what Old Horseman has to say. I'll think about it some more.

Ideal for me would be the 1950's.
I keep thinking of the movie "A Christmas Story."
Moms stayed at home, kids could be kids, no drugs, we could all say "Merry Christmas", no tv, real community, and we were still a lender nation instead of a debt slave.

That is an oil age era. I need examples and ideas for a post oil and post collapse era.

I can't comment on the 50's as I didn't live through them. I don't think watching the "Christmas Story" would entitle me to comment on whether it was ideal or not. Did you live through the 50's?

Megadoom

By heat to the Arctic confined,
With the food chain then long undermined,
Those few wined and dined
On whoever they could find....
Oh wait. Sustainable? Never mind.

Ok, so in the spirit of “The Commandments” outline in this Forum, I will sketch a skeletal structure of my vision:

STRUCTURE
The Built Environment: (This is most in line with my professional field of expertise)
Agreeing with Old Horseman, indeed, in his thoughtful and experienced insights (read his outline).
In keeping with Old Horseman’s ideas, I see no need to invent anything, when we have a bible for common-sense building available in “A Pattern Language –Towns, Buildings, Construction”, written by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobsen, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel, (Berkeley, California), New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, ISBN 0-19-501919-9.
This is one book that, should I have to run for my final BOB to hand to my children, I will have this included in it. I believe firmly that the ideas, language and patterns so eloquently and simply discussed here, will help to resolve problems and calm differences. Architecture, from the placement of doors, balconies, window seats, places for children and the elderly, quiet spaces, places for couples, and places of interface between the private and the public realm, in a small community scenario, will be like the capillaries, arteries, and veins of our in our physical bodies. This book is part of a series, which includes Volume 1 entitled, “The Timeless Way of Building”. “A Pattern Language” provides useful patterns of how human beings might best live amongst one another, in varying community and individual needs, keeping in mind access to privacy, public life, caring for the young and the elderly, transportation and accessibility to needs, and so much more. The book is about 1175 pages, and when I ordered it in Canada in 1996 it was $113.95.
There are other books, but this one is primary, IMHO.

TECHNOLOGY & RESEARCH
That’s a tough question for me, depending on the application, of which there are many:

Farming: ditto Oldhorseman, which would also require acquiring animals and knowledge of how to work WITH them. No more spoiled pets. Horses that work and contribute to tilling soil for crops
Pigs for clearing stumps and other clutter, possible (if we haven’t roasted them feral pigs yet)
Learning to grow food will be a HUGE, and sometimes EXCEEDINGLY difficult task for so many people. Getting the timing right, learning to keep records of seeds, when to plant them, being able to document this stuff from place-to-place, and from season-to-season. The farming way of life is tough, at best, for experienced farmers. Sorry, I’m drifting, but this one is BIG. We will be needing to save seeds, share seeds, and be prepared to work hard and get dirty. We and our animals will be doing the work. We will get it right, if we have community backup, much of the time.
Communication: Letters, runners and riders. Long waits for responses. We will be too busy with seed saving, and with taking care of the animals anyway. And animals well-integrated into the family/community won’t be stabbing you in the back like some people do. So we won’t have to miss a lot of humans anyway.

EDUCATION
Oldhorseman is right again. Homeschool and homestead school. Some of the children will want to take over the reins of the farm, some will want to do other stuff like practice “medicine” or healing/caring arts, some will be better at smoothing out differences between angry parties and will therefore be parents/advisors/town-mayor-farmer, or sewer/mender/bread-baker.

Which brings us to the next point::
MONEY OR LACK THEREOF
We will not be specialized. Specialization strips us of our innate need for adaptation in order to survive what ever circumstances throw at us. We will live in a community where, in any given area walkable withing 20 minutes, NOT everyone will raise chickens. You will bake bread and trade that with me for fresh eggs. But while your bread is rising you can go to the neighbours, take the kids with you so they can help carry the milk jugs and replace the cow’s water and clean out the stall. While you’ve got the children the egg lady is washing the eggs and out at a meeting about the feral pig situation. When the kids are returned the bread has risen, the eggs are clean, the kids can help you with simple tasks to get dinner ready and you can pickle the eggs that you are trading with the old lady down the street for some access to the firewood. You get my drift.
Sounds reasonable to me (in my perfect world no money needs to be exchanged…perhaps utopian…)

RESOURCE USE
Depends on where you live, and what are your regional/local needs.
Regardless of this, in my perfect world would be a respectful and symbiotic relationship with every thing. For example, if you live in a cold, sparsely treed Northern climate you would have to clothe yourselves, feed yourselves, heat your living quarters, keep all of your food from freezing, dry things, and have some kind of social interaction (either inside your home or outside in some other home or meeting area).
How could we set this up? Fewer children? Maybe. Clustered homes? (so as not to freeze to death) with lots of wide open space reserved for wildlife and timber if possible.

GOVERNMENT
Now in this type of arrangement of the above I have outlined, and in agreement, again with Oldhorseman who is very wise, I have only one more idea to add. Having very quickly proofread my post, I think it looks to me sort of like self-government, at least as a point of departure. This is a quote from a dead poet, whose ideas I find very much alive, especially when we have the strength of heart to consider them. My ideal society will have a different strength of heart than the one in which we find ourselves asking these important, soul-searching questions today. Yet in these questions, formed by you, Megadoom, and answered and already digested by some of us here, I am aware that the following mindset is achievable and is, indeed doable. What is a mindset other that something that had, once searched for, and alas, had felt that it had found stability and sanctuary?

In summary, I believe that the strength in our new and ideal community and civilization, in a striving for fairness, justice and humanity, equality of pride in our children and our humble aspirations for sanity and a knowing of peace, can be found in the teachings of a human being who was a POET born in 1875 and died in 1926, whose life was touched deeply by the Age of Industrialization. The reason I have chosen this romantic poet is because his teachings are felt in the heart, and are humbl,e and help to give us permission to be what we need to be in order to pass through this eye-of the-needle.

The book is entitled, and excuse me, but it ALWAYS makes me break down in laughter, teaching us how to listen to our hearts and to always ask the essential questions of our hearts and to be our true wisdom:

“RILKE ON LOVE AND OTHER DIFFICULTIES”, Translations and Considerations of Rainer Maria Rilke, by John J.L. Mood, Norton & Co., 1975

Rainer’s way of communicating how a lover or someone having some other difficulty, is my ideal way of proceeding with the foundations for a healthy and realisitic community. Doesn’t mean we have to be airy, fairy, happy….OK. I’ll read one passage of his work. You decide if you want to hear more:

“I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am – where one begins….

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Resolve to be always beginning – to be a beginner!”


I would appreciate lots of feedback please, lurkers and shy ones too. I hope this isn't too weird Megadoom.