One of my intentions in life is to co-found an Intentional (Natural) Community, a collective of between 20 and 150 people, living and (through Natural Enterprises) making a living together, self-sufficiently, in harmony with nature.

The biggest challenge to achieving this, I think, is finding the people with whom to create community. In addition to having a shared purpose (the 'intention') those people have to have several qualities that are, I think, common in wild creatures but rare in 'civilized' humans:

• Love: They have to care deeply about, pay attention to, appreciate and be generous to, others. 
• Passion: They have to be committed to their purpose, enthusiastic, energetic, positive and full of joy about life.
• Trust: They have to have the courage, faith in human nature and self-confidence to trust others.
• Strength: They have to be emotionally strong, not needy.
• Self-sufficiency: They have to be able to self-manage, self-motivate, self-organize and think critically for themselves.
• Honesty: They have to be honest to a fault, but tactfully so they don't hurt others.
• Intelligence and Curiosity: They have to care about how the world works and how to make it better, and willing and able to understand.
• Sensitivity: They have to be attentive, open, perceptive, aware, responsive.
• Imagination and Creativity: They have to be able to see things other than as everyone else does, and how they might be.
• Responsibility: They have to be willing and able to be responsible for their own actions and inactions, and those the people they love.
• Expressiveness: They have to be able to communicate well, orally, in writing, and with their bodies.

In the natural world these are survival skills. Without them, you can't stay alive, can't stay healthy, or won't want to. I sense that that is why wild creatures live in Now Time, profoundly aware of every movement, loving life and every experience it brings.

My Let-Self-Change project is to try to engender in myself as many of these quality as possible, as deeply as possible, without constraint or reservation. I am trying to love everyone. I am trying to become a better person. I am trying to become a model for others, because I believe that is the only way we can make the world a better place.

But so many of us lack these qualities. In this terribly world we see an epidemic of hatred, jealousy, possessiveness, low self-esteem, neediness, dependence, incoherence, greed, selfishness, superficiality, insensitivity. In a healthy world where a few people lacked a few of these qualities, the rest could get together to help and heal those who were suffering. But what do you do in a world where seemingly the majority are suffering from these negative, soul destroying incapacities? We can't help everyone.

So if you want to find some people who share your purpose and have most or all of the eleven essential qualities above, to create an intentional community, a working model for the rest of the world, what do you do? In an earlier article I suggested that we might use Open Space, bring together by carefully-crafted invitation a large forum of people on the same quest, to interact and, through conversation, self-organize into fledgling Intentional Communities that would really work.

But even if we did that, we would then have the practical challenge of finding attractive, affordable, uncrowded natural places where these communities could be built. No easy task!

And then the other evening it struck me: We don't need Open Space to convene people on this quest, nor do we need to find land for them to found communities. The tool and the place to do all this already exists, in Second Life. There are already thousands of people in Second Life (SL) exploring, actively looking for something that is missing in their lives, looking to meet new people. Sure, a lot of them are dysfunctional, negative, damaged, and lacking in the eleven qualities bulleted above. But a significant number of SLers are extraordinary people, and, I think, potential partners in Intentional Community.

I have met some people in SL who I have come to love very quickly. A confession: Yesterday's story A Small Romance was not fiction. The entire dialogue in that story is real, taken verbatim from one of my instant messaging (IM) threads in Second Life. The lovely woman in the story is real, and the words are her words, 'spoken' in real time. We have forged a deep, trusting, loving friendship in a few hours together, using only our words and the gorgeous context-setting environments of SL, which let you simulate genuine introduction and real discovery, and find people -- deep, true friends to love and build community with, right in Second Life.

I don't know who or what this remarkable woman, or any of the other exceptional people I have met in SL, is or does in Real Life. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we have proved that you can forge relationships as true and deep as anything in Real Life, astonishingly quickly, without ever meeting face to face or even speaking voice to voice. And if that is possible, it should also be possible to create a complete, functional Intentional Community full of loving relationships among people who have all of the qualities bulleted above, inside this imaginary world.

You probably don't believe this, and if you don't I'd ask you to read A Small Romance and see if it changes your mind. It changed mine.

What's more, beautiful, limitless land exists in SL in which rich Intentional Communities could be constructed quite easily and inexpensively. They may already exist in 'private' spaces there (though I doubt it). I have seen some places there that would be perfect, lovely laboratories for experimenting until we know how to make Intentional Communities really work.

Now I come to a troubling thesis about such communities. I am convinced that (a) they must be polyamory, and (b) they must be exclusive. By polyamory I mean that every member of these communities must love each of the other members without constraint or reservation. That's why emotional strength is so important. There is no room for the jealousy, possessiveness, neediness that pervades the Real World. Even in SL a distressing number of members brag that they are 'owned' by or even 'slaves' to, others. I've speculated on why this might be true -- the brutality of the modern world, the pro-monogamy social indoctrination we receive from birth, pathological co-dependencies, and the jealousy and possessiveness and pain that our perverse meting out of love as a scarce resource leads to.

I don't believe any of this is natural. I believe we are created, like most natural creatures, to love many others without limit, without fear, without shame, jealousy, possessiveness or doubt. The term for this is polyamory, which literally means 'loving many'. It has a connotation of promiscuity, but that's because we cynically believe that love of many means only sexual love. The love I'm referring to is more expansive, deeper, combining intellectual, emotional, sensual and erotic love. In a completely generous and genuine natural community that is emotionally healthy, where everyone loves everyone else and love is abundant not scarce, love pervades everything and is demonstrated in cooperative work, in conversation, in art and science endeavours, in discovery and imagination, and in sensory and sexual exploration of others in the community. There are no exclusive pairings, because there is no need for them. Physical and sexual caresses may be frequent, but they are also fun, casual and pleasurable, and never possessive. They are just another way of saying 'I love you'.

I believe only people who have most or all of the eleven essential qualities bulleted above have what it takes to make such a polyamory community work. And while there should be no exclusive relationships within a polyamory community, I think it is essential that membership in the polyamory community itself be exclusive. By that I mean that new members of such a community would have to meet and be approved unanimously by the existing members. This would entail the founding members, as few as two or three, meeting and 'feeling out' people in the more social areas of SL, perhaps using the bullets above as a type of informal scorecard (but also going on instinct), and then, only after they had met and been approved by all existing members, would new members be invited to the private space in SL where the Intentional Community 'lived'.

Could such a process create Model Intentional Communities in SL that would teach us what we need to do to make them work in Real Life, and teach us the qualities and capacities we need to acquire to make them work, and in so doing make the world a better place?

I think it could, and I'm going to try. This process may sound elitist, and perhaps it is. Just as a doctor can't take every patient home with him or her, we can't, alas, help everyone, though we should try to love others (both inside and outside our communities) and help them as much as we can.

So that's my wild and crazy idea. I'm still thinking it through, but I think there's something important here. I'd welcome your thoughts.

Photo by Rhonda Miller in this remarkable Metroactive article about polyamory, that ends with this wonderful poem:

you have saved me from an eternity
of what if
with one moment of yes

My main blog can be found at howtosavetheworld.ca and I post there daily.

For those who want to know me better, here's my credo:

CREDO

I believe human civilization is in its last century. While we have a responsibility to do the best we can to make the world a better place while we're here, and to help our descendants cope with the mess we are leaving them, it is really too late for the world to be 'saved'.

I continue to hope that governments and corporations can be persuaded to behave in a more altruistic and enlightened manner -- e.g. working towards Sustainability in a Generation. But whether they can or not, I think the more important political, social and economic activities of the next half-century will be grassroots, bottom-up actions: The creation of sustainable intentional communities, sustainable natural enterprises, and peer-to-peer collaborative information and education networks about how to live sustainably. We will in effect be creating new, self-managed political, social and economic systems to replace the completely dysfunctional hierarchical systems that we currently live under. This is consistent with Bucky Fuller's advice: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

I believe in creating these new bottom-up political, social and economic systems despite the fact that I think it is too late to save the world from the old ones. At best, what we will accomplish is to have created some 'working models' that will be useful by post-civilization society. That's not much, but it's better than doing what we're doing now, or doing nothing at all.


ABOUT MY BLOG

My weblog is a journal of my search to find better ways to live, and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works. It has six converging, overlapping categories of essays, articles, synopses and stories:

• Preparing for civilization's end: Articles about sustainable living, how our civilization emerged and why it is no longer viable, what we can learn from nature and from history, building community, activism, alternative economies, animal sentience and how to prepare ourselves, and our children and grandchildren, for civilization's twilight and aftermath.
• Working smarter in the meantime: Articles about sustainable business and how to find meaningful work in a world where most work is not. And some useful ideas and tools from my own business experience to make you more innovative, better at business research, more effective at getting things done (and done well), more collaborative, more appreciative of complexity, and more aware of what is really going on and what is needed in the evolving economy.
• Using weblogs and technology: Why blogs and other social networking and collaborative learning tools are so important in a networked non-hierarchical society, and how to use them more effectively.
• Understanding ourselves: Our culture, what drives us to do what we do, feel what we feel and be what we are, and what we can learn from science, the arts, holistic approaches to health, great writing, and stories.
• How the world really works: What the political and economic news really means, the news you don't hear, how the political and economic systems really work and why they're so dysfunctional, and the role that the media, the education system and our frames of reference play in how we understand the world.
• Stories: My short stories, poetry, memoirs and other fiction writings that try to imagine what is possible, and try to explain things that essays cannot, in ways that essays cannot.

MY DISTINCTIVE COMPETENCIES (IN CASE YOU WANT TO HIRE ME)

My genius -- what I do uniquely well, and love doing -- is imagining possibilities. If you have a set of intractable business and/or social problems, I can draw on 30+ years of business experience, an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, an extremely creative yet pragmatic mind, exceptional research and collaborative skill, and a knack for taking an idea or solution from one discipline and seeing how it could apply in an entirely different one, and come up with ideas, solutions and approaches that will address these problems, better than anyone else can do this. And then I can provide you with processes and tools and coaching that will show you and your co-workers how to make this continuous innovation process "part of the way we do things around here".

My experience and understanding of complexity science and systems thinking have also taught me what (including most 'conventional wisdom') doesn't work, and why, so I can help you avoid the mistakes all your competitors have made and are still making. I'm up on the latest business techniques and knowledge, from customer anthropology to tapping the 'Wisdom of Crowds'.

I'm an expert on: Knowledge management (e.g. personal productivity improvement, just-in-time knowledge canvassing, knowledge harvesting, personal content management, the cost of not knowing, adding meaning to information), business innovation, all aspects of entrepreneurship (e.g. researching unmet needs, the innovation process, finding partners and allies, organic financing, viral marketing, building networks, strategic improvisation), social networking, information architecture, the virtual workplace, complexity management, cultural anthropology, business valuation, business sustainability, collaboration strategies, the future of business, the new economy, capturing employee and customer intelligence, differentiation strategies, and personal effectiveness coaching. I've written, lectured and presented at conferences on most of these subjects. You can find many of my writings on these subjects in the business category of this blog.

E-mail me for more information on my competencies, experience and credentials.


ABOUT ME: MY OBITUARY

[In the movie Serendipity , Jeremy Piven plays an obituary writer for the New York Times, who is charged with having to say something about friend John Cusack on the occasion of his wedding. Inevitably, Piven's character frames the bio as an obit, making the point that there is probably no better format to tell about one's life in a few words. So herewith, my obituary, self-constructed. No morbidness intended.]

Dave was born in 1951 in Leicester, England and grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, a shy, slow learner who suddenly developed some social graces and language skills at the age of 17, and in the process evolved from an incoherent and withdrawn C student to a scholar with an overblown ego. He was then, and remained throughout his life, defined by words that start with the letter "I": immature, insensitive, inarticulate, and idealistic.

His immaturity caused him to be socially awkward, impatient, unfocused, inattentive and sometimes too intense, but also made him irreverent, open to new ideas, and imaginative. His insensitivity made him a poor listener, left him with an unreliable memory, and caused him to misunderstand most of what others said to him, thought about him, and wanted from him, to his lifelong impoverishment. His inarticulateness prevented him, usually, from gaining the recognition and achieving the results he would otherwise have attained. His idealism made him impractical and ultimately unhappy, but also gave him vision, ambition and courage. He believed that civilization culture damaged, alienated and psychologically imprisoned everyone.

He was interested in and modestly knowledgeable about a vast array of subjects, and that breadth combined with an unusual self-taught creativity enabled him to see how ideas, information and innovations in one discipline could be applied in interesting and sometimes exciting ways in a completely different discipline, a skill that was intermittently valued in both social and business circles. He did a reasonably competent if somewhat disengaged job at providing for his family and surfacing some useful and innovative ideas in his career as Director of Entrepreneurial Services and Chief Knowledge Officer for a big professional services company. His collected stories, poetry, essays and other written works can be found in his on-line journal How to Save the World and in his eight published books:

• The Only Life We Know, a prescient novel about the "strange, diverse and surprisingly idyllic life on Earth after a future eco-collapse" (he was off by 30 years in the date of the eco-collapse, but his vision was remarkably accurate, considering it was written in 2007)
• Finding Meaningful Work and The Natural Enterprise, a two-volume work about establishing your own satisfying, socially and environmentally responsible business in collaboration with people you really care about (2007 and 2008)
• The Cost of Not Knowing, a book on the failures and promise of Knowledge Management (2009)
• The Generosity Economy, a book explaining how the faltering market economy of the day was giving way to a new, collaborative economy based on service instead of self-interest (2010)
• Working Smarter, a book on improving your personal work effectiveness (2012)
• A Legacy for Your Children, a book explaining how to create sustainable intentional communities, sustainable natural enterprises, and peer-to-peer collaborative information and education networks about how to live sustainably (written at the start of the Second Great Depression in 2016)
• Learning from History in a Time of Madness, a book written for "the generations after" with ten lessons about the greatest mistakes made by civilized humans (2024)
  

When he was 55 he listed the following as his regrets in life to date: Spending thirty years as a wage slave instead of living simpler; not making more friends and lovers; not loving himself more and looking after himself better; not spending more time in wilderness, in nature, with animals, and in play; spending too much time in information and entertainment activities that didn't matter; getting angry and upset with others, and about events over which he had no control; eating meat; not creating a natural enterprise with others; wearing clothes; and not learning to be more self-sufficient. He made up for all these regrets in the final 20 years of his life, establishing the Sustainable Living Collaborative in 2010 and helping to create many of the models of community, enterprise and economy that our post-civilization society was built on and has flourished because of.

In his latter years he lived in a lovely community on protected wetlands in Caledon, just NW of Toronto. He was survived by his wife, her two extraordinary children (who he always said he was "privileged to have grown up with"), and two equally extraordinary grand-daughters.

He credits his wife with making him everything he was.