Individualism Equals Planetary Destruction

I appreciate the relating opportunities Zaadz provides, and the real friendships that can be formed here. But we all need more than friends: we need deep intimacy, and real community. People talk a blue streak about community, but talk is cheap, and unfulfilling.

These days, in their daily lives, precious few people have a spiritual support system worthy of the name. We’re lucky if we have even one or two people in our lives with whom we have significant spiritual affinity. We have our pen pals, our “virtual community,” but this virtual world is woefully insufficient to fill the hearts of real men and real women.

Social isolation is a modern epidemic. We whine about that sorry state of affairs endlessly: The alienated state of human society. The awful climate of distrust that breeds isolation and rugged individualism. The disconnection caused by everyone looking out for number one. The lack of sharing that fuels runaway consumerism with the need to buy my own everything: my own house, my own car, my own T.V., etc. 

But what’s amazing is, virtually everyone who sees the problem with alienated lifestyles lives that way anyhow. Apparently, for example, most Zaadzsters love all their friends, at least superficially, but deeply trust none of them. Not enough, that is, to commit their lives to them, and move in together. There may be exceptions — but those exceptions are rare enough to prove the rule.

In fact, if you examine their actual lifestyle, you’ll find that most of the people are who are “committed to changing the world” are, in reality, committed to keeping the very worst parts of the world exactly the same. The personal paranoia, the concern for self-protection, the chronic distrust, the alienation that characterizes common society is embodied by almost every one who whines about these problems. Precious few people actually put their trust, faith, and lives into anything substantially different than the alienated lifestyle they complain about. So, even as they try to save the world, would-be world saviors continue to cultivate and harvest the bitter fruit of distrust, cowardice, self-protection, hyper-sovereignty. That bitter fruit is social isolation. Little intimacy. No living community.

The alternative to isolation

We’re going to have to get up a lot earlier in the morning, and have a whole lot more actual courage, if we’re ever to escape social isolation, and fulfill our deep and indelible need for human intimacy of sufficient breadth and depth.

Honestly now, what’s holding people back from having real flesh and blood closeness? The obstacles are:

1. Insufficient love, which kills relationships

2. Excessive distrust, which can get so severe as to keep committed relationships from getting started.

3. Cowardice, which prevents substantial changes of lifestyle.

If you doubt the insufficient love part, just look at the carnage, the trail of failed relationships most people leave behind them. So many broken relationships; so little fulfillment and satisfaction in intimacy. Do you really think that’s just bad luck? Not hardly. It’s insufficient love.

Then, having torched so many relationships, people say they don’t trust in love anymore. Or, they say they can’t find the “right person” or “right people.” Well, they are not likely to be the right person, either — certainly not as long as they haven’t overcome those three obstacles in themselves.

When will people muster enough love to get along well with others, enough trust to allow others to grow strong, enough courage to stick it out for the time it takes? How long will we continue to drive ourselves and the rest of humanity right over the cliff with our alienated, inefficient, distrusting lifestyles? Won’t anyone do anything different?

My friends and I have taken the plunge into living community, and for us, it works. My spiritual family, in our cooperative way of living, represents a level of fulfillment that people want, an advance that civilization needs, and must someday manifest. So, for anyone with the courage to do so, I would recommend that people look at our community as a model of what is really possible.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, the option of living community is not welcome yet. In this world, ego rules; and it rules with distrust. That’s why, to acknowledge our success may be too threatening to many people. It takes courage even to accept that this example truly exists — and that it is, in fact, everything that it seems to be, and purports to be, and more.

Save the planet, join a live-in community

Don’t get me wrong. In writing this blog entry, I’m not trying to recruit members to our community, or any community. God forbid! Who wants to be trusted by distrusting people? People had better get up on a much brighter side of bed before they darken anyone else’s doorway. Till then, I prefer that they distrust from a distance.

I’m making these points because I care about human fulfillment. And I want this planet, the only human habitat I know of, to survive. As I see it, the lack of cooperative, living communities, characterized by emotional support and financial cooperation, is not only a human problem, it’s a planetary problem.

The truth is:  

Rugged individualism is the biggest driving force behind the consumerism that causes planetary rape and the destruction of the planetary ecology in general.

Major consumerism results from the idea that each person has to own, personally, each and every thing he or she uses. Communal living would reduce consumer spending by at least half. No other remedy can achieve anything close to that — not and still be what most Americans would call comfortable. (For most people, that rules out living in the woods, eating edible fruits and berries.) Cooperative community achieves exceptional efficiency by virtue of a little magic trick called sharing.

What difference would sharing make to the world? A huge difference. All the bicycle riding and carpooling can’t make a difference anywhere close to just living in cooperative community.

The joke is, distrusting people who have to own their own of everything, sitting there sorting those little plastic bottles in their trash, thinking this will save the world. Look: it’s great to recycle, but that’s a drop in the bucket. The major problem is distrust, which creates the most massive inefficiency of living alone, and drives the massive consumer spending that’s sucking up our limited resources and polluting our environment.

These would-be world saviors cannot, or will not, share. They cannot, or will not, cooperate. Essentially, they don’t trust one another enough to throw their lot in cooperatively with one another. And, they really are not close to each other enough to share. That’s exactly why everybody has to have their own everything: their own house, own car, own refrigerator, own T.V., own everything — that's consumerism.

Here, in this community, we have twelve people, and one kitchen. Now, if you know anything about kitchens, you know a kitchen is the most expensive part of any dwelling.

Here, we live in one big dwelling. Think about that: What if we had twelve individual dwellings, each on a little bit of property, instead of sharing one dwelling?

Here, though we live in a huge, luxurious home on forty acres of beautiful land, living this way costs us, per capita, less than a quarter of what it costs a single individual to live in the most minimal urban, suburban, or rural conditions. That’s a significant difference. Did you know that a lot of people nowadays work half of their time to pay their mortgage payments? And most renters pay a quarter of their earnings for housing? That represents a phenomenal investment of time and energy — three months of work per year — just to stay out of the rain by yourself!

In a communal situation, the time required to pay for your housing would be only about one month per year. What does that mean? It means that in a cooperative community, two to five months’ time and income out of each person’s year is suddenly available for other things — like, for example, saving the world.

And what about the other expenses of living? People talk about food shortages, wasted food, and the high price of food. Food purchasing for single individuals is extremely inefficient. Most people in this country spend twice as much per person for food as we do.

So, most of us Americans are paying dearly for our rugged individualistic ways with most of our lives. And the rest of the world is being exploited or destroyed to keep up with our inefficiency — certainly not saved. 

How long will people be able to afford to live alone?

Distrust, unlove, and the resulting inability to join with others in cooperative living are the economic, social, and spiritual downfall of humanity at the present time. Those emotional and spiritual problems, which result from bondage to ego, are already taking a very significant toll on survival itself. Rugged individualism will bring individuals to ruin (while at the same time perpetuating unsustainable consumerism and the associated planetary destruction).

To have a distrusting view of others is to try to live alone till the eagles grin. But economically, fewer and fewer people will be able to afford that dubious luxury. As time goes on, housing becomes more and more expensive, rent more expensive, the cost of living higher, earning power less. Already you can see in the United States, and certainly around the world, more and more people are unable to afford shelter. Eventually, many such people become homeless.

And then what? Then you find that the homeless have a very short life expectancy. The problem of disease among the homeless is enormous. They have little or no medical care. They face exposure, and horrible diet. All of this because of hyper-sovereignty, creating the inability to cooperate with people, and the lack of friends who would really rally around them when they finally lose their house.

So when people, in the spirit of distrust and hyper-enthusiasm for personal survival, follow that logic to the bitter end, the end is indeed bitter. And it is not survival conducive. That’s the irony of living for self-survival.



Unlove and distrust is killing people by the thousands already. The casualties will soon grow to the millions, unless trust is restored, and sharing and cooperation are lived. All because of insufficient love and trust, primarily. These are the causes of the social alienation.

If people were going to be practical about the thing, they would look at the trends very, very carefully and see whether or not they could start building relationships of sufficient trust and love to create a more viable living situation for themselves in the future.

Will people make the effort required to not live alone?

When it comes to the almost universally popular idea, “I’ll create my own community,” there’s a hitch: Community is a most difficult wheel to invent. It takes a tremendous amount of drive, persistence, and love to create a community from scratch. And ten or twenty years of effort, too. 

Moreover, the social skills and self-transcendence required for harmonious living-together community are non-existent or inadequate in most people today. So they have good reason to fear failure, or at least significant problems and challenges, in the process of forming communities.

Clearly, the obstacles to creating community from scratch are significant. But so, also, are the incentives. There is a real time pressure on humanity to adapt to better ways of living. That slants the playing field a little bit towards the need for an accelerated effort.

Not only are living conditions on earth becoming more difficult, but it is also true that the longer one waits to correct a personal problem, the worse the problem becomes. People who are ill-adapted to trusting relationships cannot be hurt as much by trying against the odds now, as they can by waiting to try it.

You can maximize your chances of success by getting the guidance of someone who has succeeded in community — if you can find and enter into relationship with one of that rare breed. [In that regard, people who are interested can get a copy of our free e-book on community by clicking here.] Most people will have to try to create community without such help, but hopefully, at least, will make the attempt with people who are high minded and rightly oriented.

Undoubtedly, the single most important factor for success is to try in a good spirit. Community is not something that you do without sincerely trying to do it right. Be mindful of the pitfalls and of one’s own inadequacies, and remain humbly willing to course-correct whenever one stumbles over either. 

What does your future hold?

There can be no doubt in any sane mind that for almost every person in this world, future survival will depend on cooperative communities.  So many self-proclaimed visionaries envision such communities. The vision may be there already, but it’s all vaporware. How many of those visionaries will commit to such communities, much less create such communities? And when will people have the courage and flexibility and good will to join or to establish the living-together communities upon which human survival will soon depend?

Hopefully, you might say, when things get extremely bad, people might give in and decide to live differently. As the human race harvests the bitter fruit of our own distrust, our own cowardice, our own self-protective instincts — which perpetuate loneliness, hyper-sovereignty, alienation, and so forth — individuals will change. Perhaps that’s the most hopeful news about global warming.

But must we be forced into it, oh bright and shining ones? Must we wait until the eleventh hour and then cooperate out of fear and self-interest? That is not the best foundation for trust and cooperation. That may not even be a viable foundation for trust and cooperation. So, let us see the handwriting on the wall, and turn to each other in love and cooperation because we see the rightness of it.

Good luck to y’all. Hope you learn to trust while you still can.