Eutopia or Bust
I had Eutopia or Bust bumperstickers printed up in 1968, the year that I authored my first "eutopian" vision, the Communiversity concept and proposal which was the beginning of my activist career. So this year, 2018, marks the 50th Anniversary when I first reached out to others dissatisfied with mainstream life in America. I wanted to see if anyone else was interested in starting a new type of intentional cooperative community, the Communiversity, an eco-community of co-operative communes centered around an open-university environment. This outreach led to meeting new friends, like-minded communitarians, and to the formation of Lime Saddle Commune in 1972 and I and my family's adventures in communal living, something euphemistically called a "learning experience" and certainly not all that much fun at the time. I still have dozens of Eutopia or Bust bumperstickers left over from 1968. The glue failed after 30 years or so..
Unlike most all the rest of America's second wave of communitarian development that occurred in the 1960's and '70's, we were an activist commune dedicated to social change promotion and organizing. We worked long hours. building our own little cabins and managing to grow most of our food organically of course, and we founded and published Communities Magazine as a clearinghouse of communal information which miraculously is still being published today.
The communal movement died out in America in the later '70's like it did before in the first communitarian wave in the early 1800's. This communitarian wonders if there will be a third communitarian wave again appearing when social dissatisfaction reaches deep into the American public. If it does appear and it's communal, forget it in my opinion based on several years of experience. But if it's communitarian, co-operative but not coercively so, using pro-human, pro-environmental design technology for co-operative community housing for example rather than ideology and endless meetings.
I've been going through my old communitarian social change notes for updating the Creating Climax Civilization section of my social change ideas and projects, thinking that most of those old communitarian socialist ideas were out of date now, the conditions in America that spawned such dramatic social protest, the Vietnam War especially, much different from our times now. But are they really all that different? There was massive social dissatisfaction happening in the 1960's and there is massive social dissatisfaction happening now. The corporate capitalist system has only proven itself to be a monster in the hands of the Super Rich who have completely undermined America's democratic government, imposing instead a real plutocracy where a handful of Super Rich people, so very few in number compared to the world's vast population, own and control most of the globe so that massive social injustice, social and political unrest and horrible wars and crimes against civilians are the common stuff of daily news. The climate's been heating up dramatically since the industrial revolution and species are disappearing. Our earth is burning up. Too many people are mentally on fire, unstable, and killing each other. We need Eutopia now more than ever. But what is "Eutopia"?
Eutopia: The Good Place
It isn't Thomas More's "Utopia" which means literally "no place" and it isn't "Ecotopia", an environmentalist's fantasy where environmentalists become the new ruling class. "Eutopia" is simply the "Good Place", a place you have been called to where you spiritually need to be to become a better person. It's the place where you help others do the same. It's really none other than that place Jesus called for his generation the "Kingdom of God" and which we can call for our politically correct generation--the Realm of the Holy One.
Eutopia is very big and yet it's small. It's here and it's there. It's spread out all around you yet it's deep within you. It's the place in your heart and mind and in your community family where peace and harmony reign above violence. It's the place where you are at peace with yourself and where families and communities and nations are at peace with one another and with the surrounding natural world that's needed to keep our global civilization alive and healthy, bountiful and good. It's cooperative communities of men, women, children living in harmony with each other and the communities of Life.
Eutopia is the society that feels good because it is good, good to the people in it and cooperative with people not there yet. Eutopia is Freedom in Love, Freedom in Self-Expression, Freedom in Social Organization, Freedom in Joining our loved ones as family and friends be they short, tall, skinny or fat, dark or light, babies or geezers, furred, finned or feathered. Eutopia includes Everyone as Family because it's the place in your mind that knows and lovingly accepts Life with all it's natural joys and pains of existence in this utterly unique and wondrous world that is the Great School of Living and, if you are a believer, the School from which we all must graduate to enter the World to Come.
The Seeking of Eutopia was the foundation of Judaism and Jewish Christianity
As you can see something happened along the way in my social change activist life that brought in spiritual consciousness and made spiritual change just as important for me as social change. I found God and Christ in a most profound spiritual awakening that occurred at Easter in 1979. My social change activism became rooted in humanitarian Christian theology and has remained so ever since. Without humanitarian consciousness we cannot create a better world and humanitarian consciousness along with the socialist ethic began in earnest on earth with the arrival of Jesus Christ. And this is why I present my religious foundational beliefs and views before presenting my social change activist history and visions of Eutopia. The whole reason why Abrahamic faiths came about has to do with humanity's thirst for a better life, a hunger for the Good Place, Eutopia. If religion was satisfied with the way things are as are the Eastern mystics, the Jewish effort to create a religious nation that adhered to what was then a great increase in social harmony and release from tyrannical authority. But societies do evolve and what was good enough for the ancients isn't good enough for our times that are witnessing the democratization of personal freedom and expression. Human Rights in short are the direction of spiritually led social change.
If you're atheist you can skip the religious section and go directly to the Creating Climax Civilization and Communitarian Transformation pages but you will indeed be missing something important and vital to social change and humanity like I missed as well until I met God and the Spirit of Christ in 1979 and became a Christian visionary and spiritual activist and lived happily ever hereafter. But I recommend taking the scenic route - - the whole Biomystic Book sections, chapters and pages that include everything.
