Voluntary Simplicity: Not just a Credo but a way of Life
Arcosanti in central Arizona is designed to be a live/work environment what that basically means is that you do not need a car to live there because work and other basic services are all accessible within a short distance. At Arcosanti where I have lived off and on for several years, there are several small businesses operated by the Cosanti foundation including a bakery a café and a gallery. Most of the revenues however come from the sale of soleri bells. We are also members of a local health foods cooperative.
What lured me to Arcosanti, was the fact that it positioned itself as an antithesis to suburban sprawl and the automobile. Arcosanti has the some of the basic concepts of what its founder and leader calls a Arcology, primarily in a formidable infrastructure of buildings.
Voluntary Simplicity
Ted trainer believes we have to abandon affluence in order to become a sustainable society. The rates of consumption must be lower than they are now in developed countries, and developing countries must not follow on the present path that is associated with further economic expansion of the developed world. To prevent waste, we would live in a world where a minimum of unnecessary products were produced. Communities would be much more self sufficient with increased dependence on the land for survival. Lastly, Trainer says the few machines needed would be made to last and easily repairable for many years (Trainer, Ted. 1991. The Green Reader. Dobson, Andrew, ed. San Francisco: Mercury House P84-90).
Living in Community
Arcosanti is one example In the US of 8000 plus people that are living in intentional communities, housing cooperatives and co-housing units in America, practicing voluntary simplicity as part of a ethical or spiritual practice. Such a practice is based on the evolution of the environmental and social justice movements where we begin to question existing conventional modes of thought and the behaviors that result.
Do more with less. Frugality or voluntary simplicity is not just a credo it is a way of life.
Lower cost of living means less work is necessary to sustain oneself.
More time to experience life. Less need to consume conspicuously means more quality time interfacing with nature and people you care about.
By consuming less and living in cooperative communities we can allocate more resources towards those things we feel are important to our environmentally and socially conscious ethos such as the money that we do not spend conforming to the mainstream economic mindset we can spend on composting toilets, natural buildings and solar panels, and socially conscious investing.
Post Conventional Thought
Greater mainstream discussion of the deeper meaning of commercialism and its impacts on our lives, hopefully signals that elements of conventional society are at least exploring post-conventional ideas. Evidence forwarded by Paul Ray, a demographer, suggests that an emerging group of people already have a significant impact on American society. There has been a reluctance to give the cultural creatives the attention that they strive and deserve (they constitute 25 percent of the population and represent the fastest growing demographic the others being modernists and traditionalists), since it is that the essence of they as integrationalists (holistic thinkers) represent nothing less than a shock to modern system that was built on the arrogance of reductionistic and mechanicistic thinking.
These controls are now driving us in the modern world. One example of this is cited by Paul Krugman in a recent New York Times Magazine article where he shows that increasing incentives to help the rich make more money have improved the common welfare of the nation but have instead eroded it. Economic growth has been not been linked to real social improvement among a broad spectrum of the world's population in general.
Collective action in complex systems snuff out individual consciousness and impact. We are just a face in the crowd of the faceless mass culture, affected by the commercial culture in ways that we do not want to accept. Indeed it is the fact that we as Americans need the illusion that we are autonomous. In many ways we do have the power to express our individuality as never before, but this is only in theory. The reality is that we are affected by the collective mind in unseen and unconscious ways. This has probably been the case for humanity long before the modern mind developed a conscious understanding of CAS, but the problem lies within the prevailing contemporary human aspect of this influence, which is commercial culture.
The above mentioned developments are offering increased opportunities for those who want to become effective and practical agents of change agents as professionals and investors as well as political social and environmental activists. Dee Hawk is a former Visa Card founder and CEO who has come up with a plan--outlined in a book called The Birth of the Chaordic Age to develop a integrated network to facilitate the blossoming of practical, new, less constraining as well as non-exploitative economic and social models (www.chaord.org), so as to make the vision of the alternative sustainable economy a real world reality. Part of this making this vision real is the development of integrated sustainable communities.
Many who are here, seek to develop more of a logical consistency in terms of better linking ideals with practices so that Arcosanti is consistent with the principles of the sustainable society vision. While Soleri emphasizing the importance of the lean (sustainable) economy within this cityscape, that is designed in the image of humans, the actual Arcosanti lags in terms of real, sustainable substance. People come here and they are disappointed since we progressives seek to create systems that are consistent with our beliefs.
This is the reason that we need--as social innovators--a multi-pronged strategy for a massive social transformation that starts at places like Arcosanti that are located all over the world. Ecovillages and intentional communities that are striving to get off the grid, minimize ecological impacts, create a viable social atmosphere and also a prosperous and thriving economic atmosphere (this is necessary for the growth of the ecovillage movement and for it to eventually blossom into the sustainable society).