image by oddsock and Magritte

In my meanderings around the blogosphere over the last several weeks, I came across a post wondering if post-Peak Oil culture may look like the Netherlands on steroids, where our every action is mediated by regulation and law, and questioning whether that is the kind of future we want.

When I was recently in San Francisco, I saw a tiny microcosm of the kind of thing this writer was describing. On each MUNI train I rode, there were at least 10 signs describing what we were compelled to do by law, including giving up our seats to elderly and disabled riders. I was a little put off by this, personally—how far must we have sunk as human beings if we have to be compelled by law to give up our seats to people who need them?

Around the same time, I had a conversation with a friend about the nature of liberty. Liberty, he said, is not a personal entitlement, but a communal experience. The old chestnut “Your rights end where the tip of my nose begins” is only part of it. His claim is that we cannot in fact experience liberty as individuals. Instead, we must all have it, or none of us can.

It’s not a right, but a state of being in which my actions and the pursuit of my goals fit into and serve the goals of the larger community, because we all recognize that we are connected and that hurting each other means hurting ourselves.

Looked at this way, the opposite of liberty is not slavery, but selfishness. In order to bring the experience of liberty alive for everyone, we must no longer treat life as a zero-sum game, where one person winning comes at the expense of someone else losing. Rather, we must have and act from an understanding of our fundamental connection as human beings.

Whether you see that as a spiritual oneness, or a more practical recognition that we are sharing the same air, water, and biosphere ultimately doesn’t matter. The fact is, our well-being does depend on other people and what they do and don’t do.

Thinking about the future, and listening to the conversations folks are having about how to create it, I keep wondering how we can get there. Can we create the world we want via the external scaffolding of governmental regulation? Or is a more fundamental change in our consciousness required?

In his wonderful Ishmael books, Daniel Quinn puts forth the idea that our salvation as a culture should never have to depend on human beings being better than what we are. He believes that solutions must take into account human nature—that we are, in fact, oftentimes greedy and short-sighted and hateful, and any culture that’s going to work needs to deal with that.

On one hand, I agree with Quinn’s point of view. If our solutions depend upon every human being having a spiritual awakening and becoming a “good person,” we may as well drink the Kool-Aid now and be done with it.

But on the other hand, I disagree with Quinn’s view of human nature as fixed. We can easily see that, over time, human values have shifted. A thousand years ago, no one cared about alleviating poverty on the other side of the world; but now, thousands of people organize via sites like Kiva to do just that. Even 100 years ago, the idea of human rights as intrinsic to every person on the planet was laughable. Now, there are millions of people working to protect those rights. We do change. We do develop.

What we value changes, and how we behave also changes in response to changing life conditions. As environmental consequences become more severe, it’s very likely that our values will shift once again, and our fundamental connection to the earth and to each other will become more important than ever. But in the meantime, we probably need bureaucracy to straighten out the large, systemic problems with the way we do things.

I suppose it comes back to the idea of supporting growth of individuals and cultures through both inner and outer means. If we re-think the big stuff like how we design communities, and it will no doubt have an impact on the way we think. And if we think differently about who we are, we will have different ideas on how to live in a larger sense. Each level supports the others.

Our goal on The Sunny Way is to support the growing we need to do, personally and communally, to change the way we think and the way we act, and to come together to rethink the way we live in general. My concern at this point is that time’s a-wastin. We urgently need to change both the way we think and the way we live, on every level, as quickly as we can. We need to evolve, quickly, to the stage where we can perceive and pursue liberty as my friend described it.

What are your thoughts on this? What can we do to make ourselves better vessels for liberty? How can we live this urgency?