Honoring Geostrategic Diversity: Clandestine Ruralization of Culture War Battle Lines TPS-0060

In my political and economic evolution, the critique of capitalism was the gateway drug of evolving into being critical and generally left leaning on that journey.

Now I don't associate with any wing or any color or any direction that in earlier stages in my development, were essentially spoon fed to me and I very innocently, went along with.

Back then it was very tribalistic or in-group and out-group, us versus them kind of way of approaching politics. I've evolved and haven't looked back much on those fundamentals, those early building blocks when somehow everything was directly indirectly in reference to capitalism, communism or socialism.

It was more about politics being determined by the mode of production, who owns and controls the means of production.

I evolved into thinking that was polishing the brass on the Titanic, or rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic, or the Ship of Fools to be playing political games when the real substrate of all of that showmanship was some for of statism.

I didn't associate with any form of statism and it was always a matter of class war to overthrow the government and rise from the ashes in anarchy.

To establish decentralized, anti authoritarian, economic and political units that are hyper local, I would have used to call them trade unions or syndicates. Red anarchism, if you want to give it a color, the red and black star would rebuild forms of an economy and technology that would be appropriate, and it would be sustainable. But not necessarily.

I wasn't necessarily a radical ecological thinker at first. I was pro-environment but I wasn't as fully informed as I later became to where I really joined forces with the green movement and became very toxic and immature and hostile in a way that I regret.

I will formally apologize for my really immature, back biting, insular, intellectual wars between green and red, we were fighting over who was gonna have more market share in the memetic marketplace of ideas, for how life would be.

But for the most part, it was all happening while we were mostly just partying and drinking micro brew. Suckling at the waste streams of the state and capitalism, without having our own infrastructure built.

You would imagine that as a counter subculture, the syndicalists would be completely self employed in their parallel, sort of underground.

Maybe even completely alternative currency economy, where they have their own workshops and their own unions and their own fee structures and insurance, health insurance, everything, all the things that are actually possible, and that some of the more advanced back to the land communities have actually achieved.

Some of them more mature and wise, more integrated with actual communities and economies, not just urban youth, hipster, ideological subculture.

I was in those kinds of scenes and it was a lot of talk and a lot of rhetoric and a lot of wind and some action, some mobilization, a little bit of infrastructure. But not not really much, and not as much as I would later see when I traveled to Mexico.

There I saw way more mature and sophisticated implementations of infrastructure that actually exemplified the best imaginable green and red anarchism in a beautiful synthesis that I learned a lot from.

I was really honored witness a much more mature and wise and holistic and even far more indigenous and ancestral pathway of anarchism expressed through the anarcho- punk movement.

There were traditional gardens and there was traditional folk culture, solidarity and labor relations that didn't come out of a university, this came out of the Earth.

So it was humbling for me to see that. I really appreciated that, it put into context, what my thin and weak and very academic roots were. Everything coming out of books and all talk and theory, not enough action and not enough really rolling up your sleeves and actually building.

Not only fighting with the establishment, but actually being the change you wanna see. Building the alternative that makes this system obsolete.

There are certain things you will not be able to get away with. You will have to be compliant with certain zoning and building codes.

There are certainly all of those invisible structures that, unless you were extremely remote, and a lot of this stuff was happening in the city, you're gonna, be fighting toe-to-toe with the man, with the system.

If you're trying to revolutionize it from within, and you're breaking all kinds of laws in very visible and very loud ways, people are gonna complain, and maybe they wouldn't have even cared. Maybe they wouldn't have even bothered you. But you become such a nuisance public health and to noise ordinances and everything…

The youth dominated political movements aren't often sustainable in a lot of ways. So even the attempts to establish gardens or establish collective co op businesses, they often sabotage themselves because they throw punk shows to make ends meet, and then, the street punks pee in the neighbor's yard and spray paint the neighboring business tenant's fleet of vehicles and break bottles and get in fights, and there's blood everywhere. Cops show up and they, they burn the spot. So much for that garden, and so much for that co op business.

We did the states work for it. They didn't have to roll up their sleeves or bruise their knuckles or chip their batons on us. We would brutalize ourselves and undermine our own infrastructure.

Needless to say, it was a breath of fresh air, for me to eventually discover permaculture, but I didn't fully get trained until much later.

It was extremely refreshing because it offered a constructive and less windy, less ideologically reliant. It was a more science and ethics and engineering approach to solving problems. You spend a very small amount of time even mentioning or talking about the problems. Understood the problems to the point where you know what we're up against. But then from there, the majority of energy and effort and thought and discourse goes into actually solving those problems.

To invoke a sentiment of Buckminster Fuller, he said something to the effect of, if you ask people whether or not you should build a bridge to help facilitate them getting across the river, they'll fight you on it. They'll argue against it. They will not even believe it's possible or whatever. They will be very antagonistic to just the idea of it. But if you just go ahead and do it, they will just use it without a fuss.

If you think you have a better solution, if there's a new way, I'll be the first in line...it better work this time...if you know where that line's from.

There's not too much stopping almost anybody from being innovative and creative.

There are some laws you have to follow, but within reason, you can even get permit exemptions in some circumstances.

The point being, I embraced permaculture as a refugee from the ruinous, empty failed many years of my life, chasing ideological hype and pipe dreams.

So I haven't really looked back and thought back about these words I used to talk about, capitalism, communism, socialism. I don't feel there's much utility in it anymore. Now, even in geopolitics and the empires of the world, what do they say?

I would say it's the world order of globalization that we're in. It's almost archaic and irrelevant what ideology the revolution that founded your nation over a hundred years ago or even within the last century because now everything's in the name of globalization.

All the competitors of capitalism have for the most part explicitly or implicitly succumbed to it, the Western forces led by the United States economy, secured by the United States navy.

Western capitalism reigns supreme, using naval forces to police and facilitate a global international maritime trade system, a free market system.

Or gangster cronyism mafia, whatever you wanna call it, there's a hegemony of extortion across nation states.

I think it's just safe to say it's all still imperialism and empires are gonna empire and states are gonna state.

The opposition doesn't seem to take the form of old academic intellectual traditions that required a lot of reading. It's hard to imagine in the short form dominated by smartphone apps how an archaic ideology would survive. I don't know what it what it would look like.

It feels very anachronistic, to say the least, to be a self-proclaimed Marxist or socialist, I never took on any of those titles.

I remember, back in my day before the internet was really much of a thing. There were hardcore extreme religious fanatics with sandwich boards and bullhorns.

Back then, many political radicals had that sort of mentality.

You have to join a socialist party that would be there with a stack of newspapers, demanding you follow the party line.

Now, it's just the Balkanization of everything since all of the phases of Web 1.0, 2.0, even 3.0, and then social media and apps and all of that.

So many cults of personality that used to be the founders of big political movements. It's now more a disposable culture, like the pop music icons, just a flash in the pan and then you're gone as an influencer. Or the platform that you became an influencer on is deprecated because a new platform comes up.

As was said in Pump Up The Volume, society is mutating so rapidly that anybody over 30 really doesn't have a clue.

I'm over 30 and I think that's more true than ever.

So like I've said in a previous episode, it's my job to stay out of the way of the next generation.

Hopefully, with a bit of opting in to wisdom of elders, they will make wise decisions with all the energy and power that they have and they'll look at these arcane political ideologies and remix them in a way that will create emergent properties that were unforeseeable.

Back in my day, if you wanted to learn something you went to the library and you researched it by checking out books and reading them, then talking about them with your friends and maybe your professors.

I did volunteer with a cable access show. I had appearances on college radios here and there, that was before all of the internet opportunities really took hold.

In this moment of what's being called the the culture wars, a lot of identity politics. Tension between right and left and conservative and progressive.

I'm at a point personally where I'm not trying to be aligned with anybody other than myself.

Hopefully I'm at a strategically positioned distance from that crossfire.

That's where I'm speaking from now, I'm doing my thing, I feel like I'm doing it physically far enough away from anyone else's politics.

We can live and let live because we're far away from each other, and we don't want to hear each other, smell each other, and whatever flag we wave, it's just gonna be the size of a pixel from the distance of neighbors from where I'm at.

So it really doesn't matter. No one's gonna care what color flag or what's on it, cause you won't even barely be able to see it.

If I gave any advice to anybody it would be the experiment of the melting pot of the public sphere, where everybody's religion and ethnicity and orientation and lifestyle is gonna be tolerated and embraced...You have to choose whether or not that's a hill you wanna die on.

There's a point at which I would hope that everybody has a Plan B that would involve displacing from, and relocating from, and just going back to the time tested American tradition, the American Dream, the tradition of planting your flag and homesteading in a rural environment where you can live and let live.

Really almost nobody cares what you think, what you say. There's just a geographical buffering around all the things that people get offended and triggered by.

I don't wanna be utopian pipe dream about it, but I'll say I'm living it even right now.

When you're neighbors are not in your face because of the distance between properties, they could be exactly like me, or nothing like me, or mortal enemies, or best friends, I don't have to know if I don't wanna know, it's not in my face and there's a grace to that. You lose that grace when you chase this policy public paradigm that it's possible for everyone to get along in a polite manner in the public sphere. It's a worthy to try to have a constitutional framework that attempts to address all potential conflicts of interest. I think it's very well designed, it has created some of the most honorably diverse demographics within institutions, leading the world out of the dark ages of patriarchy and barbarism. Out of the ages of Empire, kings and warlords and autocrats, all of those regimes. I think it's a noble cause, I'm proud to be part of the American experiment.

I think the Constitution was well designed and well framed, and it really can potentially continue to develop and grow and facilitate a peaceful, plural, melting pot of diverse and inclusive public space.

But if I were asked to give any advice it would just be let's do some threat modeling and do the "what ifs" on some of the constitutional protections failing like some have been failing with certain Supreme Court rulings. Hard won freedoms lost that we had maybe gotten complacent with over a generation.

It's a tragedy that so many people, because of a lack of financial means and disadvantaged class, lack of privilege, are forced to then be victimized by a public policy. Public policy forces can be commandeered by religious agendas.

They can be commandeered by financial agendas, corporate agendas, collusions of powerful people who have interests and networks...I could just say old boy networks, but to be more precise and clinical in the language...

There's the landowners, the bosses. I'm gonna invoke that language from my early political consciousness development. It was the language of class. We are the class warriors, the working class. The critique of the bosses, the capitalists, the landowners, the landlords, the ruling class. Whether they are leaning to the left or leaning to the right.

Framing it in terms of the working class and the ruling class, and then all the gradations below and in between.

But for simplicity sake, I wanna dust it off, I wanna kind of exercise and develop and reclaim some of those fundamentals of critical thinking in my earlier stages of of development. I felt like they're quaint and antiquated.

For me that chapter of my life reached its peak in the anti globalization movement. Since then the rise of Internet culture has made those frameworks somewhat antiquated.

There's just more of a fluid and more of a rapid, evolving, streaming, ideological swarm of memes that aren't conducive to manifestos.

So now I want to attempt some intergenerational medicine work. A healing, almost ideological shamanism. Not to make any claims or to aggrandize myself by saying that, but just in the spirit of mending these fractures.

I would rather see a stronger fabric of our nation with more tolerance and more unity and solidarity across all different walks of life, so that we can stand tall and stand proud and stand strong against our foreign adversaries. That's my tactical permaculture kind of ethos at this point.

What can I do to be part of the solution, not exacerbate the problem of creating divisions and inflaming divisions?

I wanna be part of healing and strengthening and gardening and creating resilience within the human sector.

Within these borders, on this continent. I'd like to be a healthy, strong, robust participant in international relations and economies.

I may be personally leaning towards isolationism in terms of foreign policy and personal policy. But I don't think that's gonna voluntarily happen anytime soon.

The fact is the US military, the US economy has its tentacles in a lot of cookie jars around the world, I would like to reign that in and and bring our troops home from a lot of places and get serious about repairing our soil.

It's not about just providing jobs so that we can all be slaves in factories. I would say major agrarian reform and major land back initiatives.

Give all of the Native American Tribes orders of magnitude more land rights than they already have, and give them the best land and not the worst land to be sustainable and self sufficient horticulturalists if they want to.

Even better for those who still want to reclaim the ancestral ways of foraging, hunting and gathering, but to be able to have the best and not the worst lands to do that.

To me, that would be priority number one, to heal the fabric of the hypocrisy and the broken treaties of this nation.

Just surrender mass acreage of public land, national forest, B-L-M…

That's just strokes of pens, just retitling parcels of land. It's strokes of a pen and a few bucks at the County Registrar of Records, just retitling parcels giving land back to tribes.

I would love for the people fighting the culture wars in the cities, and for the working class that's in perpetual war with the ruling class to have some land.

I'm lucky to be freed from city life, at least for now. I'm able to be in an ecological economic flow of permaculture and better living through permaculture.

But I'm in solidarity with the working class, I'm still a class warrior even though I'm no longer working for the man, anything could happen to force me back into wage slavery.

I've already formed a trust, my successor trustees are people of Indigenous descent. It's not a big virtue signaling thing. It's just those are the people who I happen to form alliances with. So hopefully, future generations on the land will enjoy the shade of the trees that I'm planting.

They will be nurturing and sustaining their indigenous bloodlines and languages and cultures and life ways on liberated territory that I fought in the cities as a class warrior to be able to establish and to own on paper.

Hopefully we can be regenerative and financially productive with market gardening, so that we can continue to live the dream on the promised land and just pay property taxes.

That would be just one example of acreage of liberation from the grinding poverty of the city and the victimization in the culture wars.

However we care to express our diversity and our orientations and our family planning...that would be our business.

For now I'm lone wolfing it. None of my neo-tribe that I built over so many years...no one else is here with me now.

There were times in my career as an activist, as a member of the movements, the social movements, both in the city and in the countryside, where I had a very a big tribe of loosely federated eco-punks.

Almost all of us were extremely impoverished, starving artists, revolutionary wannabes, with no tactical training, no backing, barely scraping by minimum wage jobs or gig work and sometimes sex work.

I'm one of us who was able to fight my way out of the class war and to get a piece of land. That land is already entrusted in a way that it will go back to the indigenous people, the bloodline of Indigenous people, through my network of friends.

So I'm living in the ethos of land back.

It's cinematic though, I show up at my post and there's nobody there. You just man up and you defend it, don't complain about it.

That's me living in that romance with the frontier, a patriot to the Earth, to the land that sustains your life under your feet that you stand on, that you should be a custodian of, a steward of, a warrior defender of.

You may have to take up a martial posture against those who would attempt to ravage the peoples and the ecosystems and the wild animals...

From what I know about the history of westward expansion, manifest destiny...

All throughout the wars that built the country we now take for granted, there were a lot of European soldiers who defected and joined Native American tribes and fought with and alongside them as traitors to United States.

I don't wanna invoke that word. I'm gonna say, I'm a law abiding citizen. I'm a patriot of United States of America, but I think it is the appropriate, tactful, diplomatic position to say…

I live in honor of the surviving indigenous nations and as a delegate of a settler, a colonizer, a white man with the privileges that come with that. I wanna build alliances with the Native American tribes, I have done that in many forms of activism throughout many movements throughout my life.

I would say it's all rooted in my childhood experience of the films Thunderheart and Dances with Wolves, that's going beyond capitalism and communism, socialism.

I would like to embolden and strengthen, affirm and energize, all of the people who are really struggling to find a voice. And where the politics of the culture wars, of the left and the right, conservative, liberal, whatever it is...I think there can be more unifying rhetoric, a more unifying framework. A more strategic and tactical position of grassroots coalition building.

I'm getting over the hill, I'm in decline. I'm out of my prime. And I'm gonna just keep planting trees, tending my gardens, trying to keep my fish alive and just be barely hanging.

I'll be out here, slowly being ground into dust by the elements, and hopefully composted in a grave of my own design.

So that this land can be one node in a network of settlers, white settlers, who entrusted land that they were able to purchase, and they didn't pimp the land or pimp the people on it, and they just enriched it with permaculture and then entrusted it back to the Indigenous people.

That's patriotic to all nations of this land, because it's good for the soil. It's good for the First Nations. It's good for nationhood of the United States of America.

I don't wanna get drawn into the crossfire of the culture wars. I can't keep up with it. I'm too old. I literally don't have the bandwidth. I would have to be on a million apps and follow a million people and try to ratio them on app comment threads, and I don't have time for it. I don't have interest in it, and I wouldn't be successful at it.

I forfeit the culture wars, but I stay aware of them. I acknowledge them. I have a lot of sympathy for the people who are in those fights.

My only advice would be that for every unit of energy that gets poured into the possibly futile battles with the ruling class and the conservative religious right around freedoms of expression in different domains in the public sphere...that if you're going to fight for concessions within the public sphere, in the cities and on the land of the bosses and the landowners…

Budget some energy and time, create a fund within your movements to start to look at buying land that has no amenities that you could retreat to in an emergency, like a pandemic or social unrest.

Hopefully there would be a contingency planning sub committee of your organization or your movement that would say, we're gonna be like the green berets of this force of this movement.

We're going to engage in the special operations that will be required to mobilize this movement into positions in remote areas that are already built out to function like regenerative bases of operation with communications, physical security, etc.

Factoring tactical and strategic thinking around maybe you don't wear your politics and your orientation and everything on your sleeve. Maybe there's a time and place for it not being something you parade around in public.

I don't wanna die on that hill, as much as I want to be a part of honoring diversity, when it gets to an extreme of imperiling itself, where it becomes martyrdom, when it goes to the extremes of actually indulging in seeking opportunities to agitate and to be offensive.

It's gonna create a backlash. Words to the wise, if you're gonna fight in the arena of public policy and public scrutiny, in public space...no matter what, it's still the framework of the working class versus the ruling class.

So if you wanna fight that fight, and you feel like it's a good fight, and for the most part, I feel that freedom of expression, freedom of speech, diversity, inclusion, all these things to me, I'm alignment with anybody expressing their constitutional freedoms.

If you're not hurting anyone else, then, by all means, be a consenting adult and and do your thing and but don't be naive about the fact that if you make a public spectacle out of this fight in the public sphere...then you chose your battle.

I was on those front lines for many years and I considered it to be a losing battle. I'm not the first person to say it's time to head to the hills and retreat from the urban public sphere. Class war, ruling class versus working class, front line battlefields of riot cops and judges and juries, grand juries and litigation.

All kinds of ways to get your skull cracked and to be bankrupted and to be bled out and incarcerated, even if you're fighting the good fight. So I come from the class war, and I just don't wanna fight and die in the class war in the city.

For the people who wanna fight for public space, for the right to do and say and be and dress and act and have access in public space...I'm at a point where I just feel like, they can have it. You can have it. Whoever can have it. I don't want my skull to be cracked on concrete. I wanna die peacefully and integrate into the soil that I built.

I'm speaking from a place of privilege having purchased land, and now I'm living a vintage American dream of permaculture homesteading, back to the land.

There's not a big culture war to be fought, I can pretty much think however I want to think, dress however like. As long as I'm not being obnoxious, there's really almost nothing I could do to offend anyone or even be noticed because of the dispersion of the population.

Like people say, if you put your phone down and all your problems seem to have gone away, then maybe that says something about where your problems are coming from.

Maybe that could be said about urbanization and urban life.

I'm not saying things get more free for everyone, it's all in the eye of the beholder? Because one person's freedom is another person's tyranny. But the idea of live and let live.

If the people who are fighting culture wars online and in the cities spent more time homesteading on land that they own in rural areas, and they strategically interface the public sphere without going out of their way to offend and agitate it...you can be yourself and be free with plenty of distance from the judgment of your neighbors, the community that you're embedded in...You're just a rural land owning member of a loose community spanned across mass acreage.

Maybe people who are tighter in the community will talk about you behind your back, but if you don't go and hang out at the County Fair and the local tavern, you could probably have your enclave of people who think like you and dress like you. You could have your own fairs and bars at some level.

I don't think that's a loss, I think that's a win. I don't think that's ceding territory to the alt right.

I just think that if you really wanna fight over densely populated public space and not have a fallback location like rural land that you can go and sustainably live on...it's worth considering a Plan B.

I spent as much time as I could helping my friends who were living on land, and they were actually doing regenerative permaculture, and they were anti authoritarian rebels, and they were doing it far from the city.

They had fought, they had scars and battle wounds from fighting in the city for every cause you can imagine. Some people would say that they sold out. And now their lifestyists because they went back to the land.

I always wanted to have one foot back to the land and one foot fighting in the cities.

Now I got both feet back to the land. And I would like to extend, not a hand to guide people onto my property, but at least to facilitate them, the class warriors out of the urban class war and into a far more camouflaged and nuanced peaceful alternative to fighting their game by their rules.

You may have to more tactical and strategic about blending in and laying low. But for the right price, it's worth it to buy a small parcel of land. Just do the math and think about it.

If you are the most woke person listening to this right now, or the most anti woke person listening this right now. We could probably all agree that your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins.

We can go a long way with diversity and inclusion and honoring diversity.

I think we just need to give each other more space to not just on top of each other in cities. I'm not gonna get started on a rent or about how ecologically incorrect urbanization has always been.

As a permaculturist that goes without, saying it's an inappropriate design pattern.

Bill Mollison said, cities produce pollution and shit.

Whereas if you were to be intelligent about managing waste, you would be producing fertility, and you'd be growing perennial forest gardens with no toxic pollution, and a reinvestment of all of your biological, organic waste products into the Earth Bank.

You would be capturing and utilizing more energy in a clean, sustainable manner than you consume, therefore you would be perpetually sustainable based on a real time solar budget.

That's the permaculture promise. I'm living it inch by inch, not row by row, but layer by layer, shall we say.

My heart goes out to all of the people who are gonna have to keep fighting in the street fights, the class war, the race war, the culture war.

I know from painful experiences, that concrete is hard, and those jail cells are cold.

The ruling class on the left and right, they got the money to just make a sport out of you being the political football as the working class.

Whether you're the most woke, or the most anti-woke, I think we can all agree as Americans here, let's live and let live.

Let's see less violence.

Even if you're totally racist and homophobic, I would like to speak to that place in your heart, if that's you, where you would be able to live and let live. If you don't want diversity in your backyard, if you don't want to see it, but that's who your neighbors are..then maybe you grow a tomato trellis together. If you don't wanna see each other, you don't wanna talk to each other, you can still live and let live.

If you really check in deep within your heart, why not have an edible privacy fence that you grow together with permaculture. Solutions can be found in the garden.

The solution to all problems can be found in the garden. The peaceful resolution of all the culture wars is not going to be found in courtrooms or at street intersections.

How about culture peace in the garden. That's the evolution of my being an urban class warrior, and now really feeling sad and feeling distraught about the futility of the online and urban culture wars.

So if there's anything that is useful to you, the listener, from this, no matter who you are, I'm hopefully, hopefully this medium actually.

It is a garden party for diverse people of diverse backgrounds, where I would love for the most homo phobic and racist person find healing.

I would love for their mortal enemy to make a garden date to grow that fence together so they can live and let live.