Universal Ways of Knowing

Essential Contexts

Universal Needs

Recurring Problems

What Makes a Healthy Society?

How Do Healthy Societies Succeed?

To be updated!

(Deduced from 4_02 and 4_05)

Summary of universal "strengths" from 3_02 forward

Community & Generational Round:

• Community Over Individual: individual humility, obedience and submission to community will and benefits; individual submits to community for benefit of stable well-being from generation to generation
• Social Knowability and Accountability: community small enough for daily face-to-face interaction and consensus decisions
• Consensus: community decisions achieved by consensus, without coercion
• Internal Non-Coercion, Non-Aggression and Conflict Avoidance: no use of force allowed by one member against another
• Non-Hierarchical: no individual allowed to have power over another
• Material Equality & Non-Hierarchy: equal distribution of goods and resources maintained, individual acquisitiveness suppressed
• Population Control: make procreation dependent on marriage, and marriage dependent on food resources
• Genetic Diversity: ensure that marriage adds to social network
• Childcare: cultivate role of elders as caregivers, to relieve adult providers for subsistence work
• Education: adults give children adult responsibilities in both society and ecosystem at an early age; children learn directly from adult providers to sustain subsistence livelihood across generations
• Social Reciprocity: give to receive, maintaining social bonds
• Restorative Justice: restitution rather than punishment
• Celebrate Cycles: strengthen social bonds and commitment to ecological paradigms via community celebrations of repeating events in natural and social cycles (harvests, marriages, etc.)
• Community Health Maintenance: singing to ease communal work and relieve communal stress; games to mitigate conflict; etc.
• Cognitive Fitness: maintain memory through oral culture and generational transmission of knowledge and wisdom
• Separation: limited interaction with other, potentially unhealthy, societies, limited interaction with outside cultures
• External Non-Aggression and Conflict Avoidance: avoid taking habitat or resources from other communities and societies; avoid conflict with outsiders

Habitat, Cycle of Fertility & Seasonal Round:

• Subsistence: most active adults are food providers, engaged with habitat in food production
• Ecological Reciprocity and Restorative Ecology: give to receive, maintaining fertility of habitat
• Ecology Humility and Non-Aggression: everything in habitat is sacred and has its own role, wisdom and knowledge; learn from ecosystem partners, but limit ecological interactions to the minimum needed to sustain community; limit intervention and encroachment on wild (unmanaged) margins, because our food and other resources depend on wild (unmanaged) partners and their knowledge and wisdom which is unavailable to us; avoid attempting to master the roles or wisdom of ecosystem partners
• Ecological Knowability and Accountability: all universal needs are supplied from local habitat
• Stability Over Innovation: strive for stability of well-being from generation to generation; allow no innovation that violates or impairs best practices of community
• Celebrate Cycles: strengthen social bonds and commitment to ecological paradigms via community celebrations of repeating events in natural and social cycles (harvests, marriages, etc.)
• Sensory Fitness: maintain sensory fitness through direct observation and engagement with natural ecosystems
  

Cycles of Creation:

• Seek, value, preserve and learn from wild habitat, because wild habitat is our safety net in crises, a reservoir of resources when domestic habitat fails
• Elders cultivate, preserve, and pass down long-term memory of infrequent crises, including non-agricultural skills
• Community adapts via wisdom preserved by elders, including non-agricultural skills, or by migration to avoid conflict or regain productive habitat