Unthinkable Dream

America is dead culture in which we mostly vacillate between unpleasant work experiences and boring leisure hours. You work to get money, but there is not much worthwhile to do with it, unless you have a lot of money, then you can escape from America, but that is getting harder to do as America expands around the planet. If you don“t already know this, and if you are not interested in doing something toward changing it, then I am not speaking to you, so you may not want to read any further. If, on the other hand, you know/feel that life could be and should be significantly “more”, but you don“t know what to do about it, then here is my suggestion.

Refuse the nuclear family model of love and happiness because it destroys community and community is an essential joy, perhaps the greatest joy, in human life. The American dream of private property, private house, private spouse, private children, and all the other possessions that comprise the little family household is a fragmented/broken community of eventual loneliness, boredom, and longing. Why? Because if you meet someone of the opposite sex who is also searching for a better world, then you are not permitted, according to the strict monogamous marriage contract, to go/travel/evolve with that person, which shuts down the possibility of deep association and communication with approximately one-half of the human population. There can be no meaningful talk, experience, or dream of genuine community with such a sweeping prohibition on human interaction and development.

If you bring the sexes together, and allow them to spend quality time together, especially alone time, then this leads, sometimes, to sexual love. Here is the decisive choice: either you don‘t allow the sexes to meet heart-to-heart with one another and share their histories, sorrows, dreams, challenges and worldviews, in compliance with nuclear family morality, or you accept the spontaneous and natural result of relationship-building, or community-building, between the sexes, which is occasionally sexual love. I say, especially to young people and future generations, accept the free flow of communal life in which people gather, mix, and get to know one another in varying degrees of closeness or depth, or stop saying that you want community. You can‘t have it both ways: be a person who holds all members of the opposite sex, except the spouse, at a distance, or on the surface, and also be a person who belongs to a community that includes men and women. A community of nuclear families is an oxymoron because it does not allow individual members, if they happen to be the opposite sex, to seek out, find, explore, and develop one another.

The nuclear family, as we know it and suffer it, is not absolute, eternal, or unchangeable. Until around 10,000 years ago, the tribe was the basic social unit, and we still function best in small groups between 15 and 25 people who, taken collectively, comprise a village around 500 people (and beyond that to a federation of villages or tribes) where important and vital goods, including sexual love, are shared. The pairing process, or coupling process, between man and woman in one form or another - loose monogamy, for example - was for eons and may always be a basic structure of community, but certainly not strict monogamy, the modern nuclear family, in which lovers live alone, isolated from intimate conversation and companionship with other members of the opposite sex, save one, and where it is strictly forbidden, even a moral outrage, for the lifetime of this partnership, to touch, kiss, or be intimate with anyone else.

In primitive societies there are festivities and celebrations throughout the year when the bonds of monogamy are loosened for an evening or for a few days, and in aboriginal everyday life there is toleration, flexibility, for sexual adventures/liaisons because that is what it takes for community to sustain/work. Couples are held together by personal inclination, and the strength of sexual desire and love, and each partner has the right to leave the other if s/he no longer wishes to remain in the association. The wife simply goes home (to the mother‘s or relative‘s house), and the husband may or may not attempt to get her back, and she may or may not accept him. If not, then she divides things, and he chooses one half or the other.

A community in which lovers pair up without breaking down into isolated nuclear families is the natural order of things because the human community is a microcosm of the earth, the galaxy, and the universe in which each part has a relationship with all the other parts in a self-adjusting, self-regulating whole. Everything is interconnected, with no solid walls or absolutes, and each member finds its place, identity, comfort zone, according to the cosmic laws of attraction and repulsion, intimacy and distance, love and hate, integration and disintegration. The strict monogamous lifestyle is designed for separation and indifference between the sexes, in defiance of gravity (so to speak), and it takes us out of balance with the rest of Nature, causing human tension, boredom, and discontentment.

What can you do on the personal level to improve America and the world? Don‘t promise love, or make a love-contract, that cuts you off from quality experiences, including time alone, with other members of the opposite sex. The fear that these personal explorations may end in sexual love, even though the vast majority of them will burn out long before reaching this destination, is blocking the emergence of community. It has led to the present American situation where a glance, smile, conversation, and any attempt by the sexes to know and be known by one another, outside of marriage or marriage-seeking, is suspect, guilt-ridden, dangerous, and wrong. Instead, Go with the flow!

You can‘t have community if you lock your spouse and yourself in a permanent monogamous box, anymore than you can have community if you horde wealth in a safety-security box, or restrict your children to your own sandbox. Community, in contrast to society, is the natural and spontaneous flow of life, love, and the other great goods of human association, so don‘t attempt to find it or create it, if you embrace a kind of love, possessive love, that prohibits it and ultimately makes it impossible. If you want community, then have the honesty and courage to accept it for what it is; namely, a meeting of hearts and minds that influence and move one another, according to their inherent natures, powers, desires, in a self-balancing, dynamic social constellation. This is how heavenly bodies behave, so open yourself to the harmony, beauty, goodness, and intelligence of the Cosmos, or return to your house and bolt the doors, but please don‘t think that you are doing good for your children because the truth is that you are role-modeling a lifestyle that will leave them lonely, bored and unfulfilled.