The Reintroduction of Relationality

The modern world is characterized by a complete breakdown in relationality, a dissociation of people from one another, themselves, and their environment. Every other problem can be seen and interpreted in light of this primary trauma. No one knows where the products that fill their lives come from, how they are made, or who makes them. Industrialization serves to anonymize products and processes, because the primary concern is economic efficiency. But this notion of the economy is itself pathological, albeit, it should be noted, of historical necessity. But having had been necessary or not, it is now time to move beyond its negative limitations, by introducing a new economic structure based on a radically different set of principles.
What is needed is an ecological economy; a self-limiting, stable system. An ecological economy seeks its increase through diversity rather than endless growth. Although growth is necessary, it is meant to pave the way to maturity, not be an end in itself. Any growth process which does not reach a point of satifying its basic parameters becomes a cancer. Maturity does not equal stagnation- change is constant, but must be translated into a deepening, not an expansion.
To reintroduce relationality into our products and processes is to automatically reintroduce it into our social structures, thereby undoing the harmful effects of industrialization.
When the food we buy is so heavily processed, packaged, and 'clean' that all traces of its biological origins are removed, then we have arrived at a point where our divorce from nature is complete. These actions, these metaphors of production, are not inconsequent- they produce changes both subtle and gross in our experience and in our being. An apple shrink-wrapped and displayed under constant flourescent lighting at so many cents per pound is not the same apple that is picked off of the tree. Biochemically they may be identical, but on a more abstract, intangible level they are profoundly different. These effects are felt most fully in the realm of our awareness, and the constant assault it endures adds up over years and decades, slowly eroding the potential for a full and true exppression of our humaness. We are being deliberately stunted and weakened in order to be controlled.
A populace psychically starved is unwilling and often incapable of asserting its most fundamental truth- that it is free. Freedom has always been the enemy of control, to those who would rule under the guise of efficiency and social necessity. But it has never been the case that the few have advanced the interests of the many better than they themselves could. Always we witness the pretext of unity, which becomes code for homogenity and compliance. There is no unity in the politically conservative sense, despite their best wishes and efforts- only unity through diversity, a principle of ecology. Therefore all forms of tribal thinking, from racism to nationalism, fail, because they refuse to confront what is, prefering to see things on the limited basis of how they desire them to be.
But all of this brings us back to questions of production, ie. how to create enough of what we need in the most ecological way possible. This is where the central problems of relationality lie. We must begin always with an inventory of ourselves- our needs, and our expenditures of time and energy. Everything is interlocked, and we must discern the patterns which shape our lives and have control over us. If we complain of a lack of time or money we must pursue these conditions to their heart, seeing that our time is consumed through trivial, meaningless work, and the money recieved through it spent in support of a system that generates the bondage of debt instead of the freedom to create. When we have taken account of ourselves this way, we will see how so much of what we do is not only counterproductive, but self-destructive and socially destructive.
We must reassert basic need, and live within it, rather than being betrayed by the artifice of want. Furthermore, we must all engage in the vital process of providing for the needs of each other, rather than shifting responsibility to remote and antihuman corporations. Yet we must always bear in mind that our most basic need is expansive, and cannot be confined to the false equality of a lowest common denominator. An equality of impoverished being is no achievement to be celebrated, but instead a betrayal of our noblest aspirations. Equality is always a matter of possibility and access, not of conditions and concerns. The inequality of resources in an ideally equitable society can only be addressed by shifting our view of the material processes around us. A forest then is not a resource to be argued over and exploited, but a living system to be entered into partnership with. Resource exploitation means using something up and producing unwanted waste- it is a unidirectional flow. Partnership means an equal exchange, a bidirectional flow of energy, information, and sensation. This is the heart of relationality.
There is enough for everyone because everyone's genuine needs are minimal. There are three foundational things which should and must always be free to all humans: healthful food/clean water, shelter, and energy. Everything beyond this is secondary, and must be negotiated collectively in terms of the overall benefits of fulfilling a want or desires versus the true costs and impact within the total human socioecosystem.
A simple adage is this: the minimal necessary freedom for all is the natural limit on the maximum possible freedom of any.
One can replace the term freedom with any other quality or concern, such as safety, material comfort, posessions, etc. Freedom is a good rubric in general because it contains through implication all other considerations. What this means in an expanded sense is that a society based on radical freedom is nonetheless not a society without rules or structure. It is not anarchy as conceived of in the naive popular sense. This kind of freedom contains its own limits, ones based on the realtionship between the group and the individual. Consequently, the greater the freedom of the group, the greater the freedom of the individual. The two are consonant with one another. No longer can a small elite weild such disproportionate power over the majority, nor can any irrational majority impose its will on other minorities.
A more pressing concern is in how we define the 'minimal necessity' of freedom. Freedom presupposes equality, an equality based on a lack of coercion. A society not based on coercion would be utterly unrecognizable to us, so completely inured are we to the daily manipulations of force both overt and covert. Equality implies that all actions are based on consent, a consent which is only valid if entered into with full and complete knowledge. It is for this reason that we can claim that a radically free society is a fully open society, where nothing is hidden, and all contracts and organizations are transparent. Of course, this can only flourish where profit motivations arising from competetion are removed. Likewise, in an open and free society there would be no private property, only private space. This is a critical distinction, which is not easy to grasp. It means that property is recognized as the means towards some social benefit, not merely the personal enrichment of an individual. Property must serve some function, not be an end in itself. Private space is that space which an individual constructs out of his own awareness, and which can be accessed only by invitation.
So how then do we regulate the distribution of differences? If we have ten plots of land of differing quality and value, and ten theoretically equal individuals, how do we determine who gets what in an open and free society without resorting to a centralized bureaucracy or tyranny? This point is central to the whole endeavour, and must be resolved before any real progress can be made.
The first step is in recognizing the nature of property or resources as the common inheritance of humankind. When we ask 'how do we dristribute the land' we are already presupposing that it is someone's to distribute, usually a government or a coprporation. But this is flawed reasoning. Rather we should reevaluate our incessant attempts to divide the world up into a multitude of bordered domains. In a free society there would not be ten plots of land- only land and ten individuals making claims upon it. It is here then that we hark back to our fundamental adage that 'the minimal necessary freedom for all is the natural limit on the maximum possible freedom of any'. In this way, the use of land, or any 'resource' for that matter, becomes a project to determine how best it can benefit the needs of all without regards to the limited wants of any. In practice this means that the most desirable land, ie. waterfront, agricultural, etc. cannot be controlled by any one individual, but must instead serve the needs of all. Such lands and resources would thereby be held in common trust, preserved from exploitation, but open to use by those who can generate the most benefit.