So, my mind is on mincom. The experiment from the 1970's that shows sometimes things just happen that are totally unexpected like giving an entire town a guaranteed annual income. It also means purpose, autonomy and stability are important to everyone's wellbeing. Beyond that what does it mean? It means something that this happened.

I really want to understand what de-compartmentalized lives look like.  Learning, and living while meeting our needs for food, shelter, clothing as well as our more complex needs for emotional and intellectual support. We live in an age where the factory system still rules our lives, though the manufacturing jobs have dried up.  The system has moved overseas--colonizing other lands.  But what did family life or village life look like in pre-industrial times?  Child labour laws exist now but tracing their emergance leads us back to a factory system.   What does this mean?  It means that prior to the building of factories for the manufacture of goods people spent a good part of their time at home with their families producing goods for local use.

How did people work in their home workshops?  Farmers produced food.  Why did the industrial revolution happen?  How did it happen?  A massive shift in thinking occurred.

I realized what I want to write about is decompartmentalized living or rather more accurately having a family life and a work life that are harmonious.  People learned, lived and provided their food shelter and clothing before modern society.  Economics has a concept of scarcity, which works on the premise that food, shelter and clothing must be earned through hard work. What is real scarcity though?  Is this true?  Can people live by producing their own food, building their own shelters?

The first question is what do we need?  On the surface of it its basic onotology--a simple question in an economics class.  I remember in a high school course getting the answers wrong when asked what would you need if you were marooned on an island.  The answers were food, shelter and clothing.

I came up with a longer list.  The fourteen year old me learned to re-think what was a need.  Now older and wiser I am back to the same question thirty years later.  What is a need?  I am a product of time and space and culture so I am certain the answers for short term survival are different than those for long term survival.  What makes me happy?  Joyful?  Ecstatic even?  

The answer is envisioning a different sort of world and trying to find my way there.  How do I get there?  What is the world?

How do we live together?  What do we want to do?   Before I find the answers I think I have to find the correct questions.  How can I find a way to integrate my family and work life?  How does learning take place within a free culture?

Adventures in participatory democracy

On a practical level what happens when everybody is equal.  How do we run a meeting as equals?