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On this episode of The Vonu Podcast, join Brian as we explore two selections from VonuLife #5, discussing the topics of parallel economy, secure communications, and some ponderings by Rayo on ecology and coercion. Please enjoy.
- Selection 1: (Overviews) Parallel Economy (pg. 134)
- Selection 2: Comments on Overviews , VonuLife 5 by Rayo and Dr. G
OVERVIEWS: Parallel Economy
Dear Editors:
Recent issues mention “Communications”, “Parallel Economy”, Rayo has mentioned the idea of a truck making weekly trips up and down the west Coast and of course there is the ongoing dialogue about vans, trucks, various types of automotive nomadism…all kinds of transportation schemes.
I think I detect a common vein running through all this. Perhaps it can give us a tip to Vonuans and other contemplating alternative styles of living.
To me, Trailer, Van, Truck-living is an extension of the 50-year American hang-up with the automobile. It still means dependency on a technology beyond the control of the user and upon the very system he seeks to escape. It hardly seems a move toward invulnerability to put your body and your house on the highway. That’s the same small space occupied largely by those guys with the red lights on their cars and often by the migratory bureaucrats they protect and then there’s the fact this is the best population reducing machine (overlooking pills and small devices) we have developed yet. Communication in a post-Armageddon world rules out public mails, Ma Bell, and is not so efficient or economical right now. Some take Parallel Economy to mean some underground production and distribution of the industrial junk we now have, but by a complex outside the existing system. This is like saying, “We will change everything and when we get it all changed, it will be just the same as before”. We need to confront the fact that Vonuans and other irregulars are not now self-sufficient, can never be in all things, and will continue to need many things not the product of their natural environments, nor within the scope of their own talents and resources to provide. Further, that many of these things, especially those needed to enrich our lives, are not in fact the products of the existing production-consumption-industrial system. Or, at least do not have to be such. It would appear there is both a need and an opportunity for a special kind of commerce among those of us outside the system…much of it in goods not really the product of the system.
Autonomous Libertarians and Vonuans need more and better communication or we sink into alienation, isolation, and ignorance. Carrier pigeons and smoke signals don’t seem like a good answer. How about a higher order of technology using very low power, non-licensed 2-way radios. FM side bands could be used for a networking and linking together a Co-Op Communications system. This presumes cooperators spaced out along a route not too far apart and the use of equipment not much beyond that employed to open garage doors or in radio controlled model airplanes. Living close to the route of the old Army heliograph system (a line of mirrors flashing dots and dashes of reflected sun light) I was sparked to do a little research on that. Messages were relayed in the mid-1800’s from remote Cavalry patrols to Headquarters in Santa Fe, N.M and San Diego in about the time it presently takes to send a Western Union message.
In transportation, considerations we are not only hung up on the auto…but get caught up in its systems, routes, and the flows of commerce it has created. Often these are totally unrelated to the world of non-system commerce Vonuans might need and use. For us, distance, time, and cost factors are on a different scale. Example: If it is vital for you to personally travel a long distance quickly, get the jet and go, but seasonal migrations, leisure movement may not need to be hurried. If a flow of supplies you need and want are moving to you and arriving on time, you are not at all concerned about when they departed, nor how long they spent on the way.
The cheapest, simplest, most primitive way of moving things is to put them in a vessel and float them on water. A glance at the map will show you that enormous areas of this country are on water or very close to it. The East and Gulf coasts and mid-West with their coastal and river water systems are an obvious water commerce situation. Even the West coast picture is good if you consider the “Pacific Canal” and the vast areas accessible to streams classed legally as “navigable waters”…over 1500 miles of shoreline in the San Francisco Bay-Sacramento-San Joaquin River complex. Puget Sound is a whole water world. You can boat inland to a surprising number of places and of course, Lewiston, Idaho is accessible. Draw lines paralleling all these waterways and 50 or 60 miles inland from their shorelines and you will find you have encompassed not only vast areas, centers of population, but most of the Vonuan hide-out sanctuaries in this country! The intervening few miles between you and boating water is probably less than a day’s walk, bike ride, horseback trip. All other factors being favorable, it might warrant finding squat spots on or nearer these waters.
Conclusion: Maybe we need a Communications-Transportation Co-op…a sort of forum and agency for establishing non-system, invulnerable contacts and commerce between ourselves designed to more efficiently and certainly more economically supply our special needs in these areas.
Example: Via the communications network we exchange ideas and information and let one another know what we have and what we need. You might pick herbs and berries in Oregon and make jam. I might trade you a ton of dried apricots scrounged here. We pass things along an Underground Railroad facilitated by the Co-op. When quantities are involved we might bring in a third parties in the form of boat-based Vonuans who can move things along for us.
If all this strikes a chord with you or your readers, I’ll send along specifics on how to operate a non-Government regulated shipping enterprise, how to build boats for living and hauling, pack-horse transportation schemes and routes, etc.
Suggestion: It would be most helpful in assessing the needs of a parallel economy and alternative communication-transportation systems if a survey could be made of what actually are the needs of Vonuans and how they supply them now.
[SECOND ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW]
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COMMENTS ON OVERVIEWS, VONU LIFE 5 – by Rayo & Dr. Gatherer
To DAVE: There are degrees of vonu – invulnerability to coercion. I prefer a 90% probability to a 10% probability of remaining alive and well the next 20 years.
If a majority of people ever become vonu, it will be by developing many DIFFERENT vonu ways, not by adopting any single lifestyle. Vonuans will not bump shoulders very much because they will be “invisible” to other kinds of vonuans as well as to bludg.
The earth’s big problem right now is not too many people, but too many people trying to live the same way. That’s bad ecology. The earth supports a tremendous quantity of life, without serious problems (except for mankind), because that life is extremely diverse – grows in different habitats, eats different foods, behaves in different ways. At one time there may have been only a single lifeform – the first lifeform on earth. But life inevitably diversifies because there are survival advantages to diversity. (A lone Madrone growing among Douglas fir, is immune to insects and diseases which prey on Madrone. And it utilizes somewhat different soil nutrients than Douglas fir, etc.) Humans will diversify for similar reasons – culturally at least, perhaps biologically as well. (Some humans may be able to digest cellulose, as can cattle and one kind of monkey. Others may be able to live underwater.) To the degree that humans diversify, the earth will support more of them with fewer problems.
That’s looking long range. In the shorter range, a recent survey concluded that only half of all children born in the United States are wanted by their parents; worldwide, the proportion is probably lower. If this is true, the birth rate will be cut in half as cheaper and easier-to-use contraceptives are developed. Population will soon be declining, not increasing.
The only thing I know about Zero Population Growth is their ad, offering to sell an abortion to any woman who wants one, which is commendable. Unfortunately, many of the “concerned people” are eco-fascists – seeking coercive political solutions to population and ecology problems. That’s like taking whiskey to cure a hangover. Government has been and continues to be a big cause of population problems: laws against contraceptives, laws against abortion, laws against “sodomy”, taxes on childless people, military conscription, FDA interference with development of birth control drugs, etc.
A “unified, mass movement” is unlikely to develop but would be harmful if it did. A mass movement cannot individualize benefits and responsibilities, and so is fueled by irrationality and irresponsibility of its followers. Every mass movement of history I know of has had laudable, often libertarian goals. But every mass movement has brought only coercion and destruction. The political problems of today – the cold war, anti-sex and drug laws, communism, inflation, unemployment, compulsory schooling and child labor laws, are products of the “noble crusades” of yesteryear.
More about diversity: Just as a mechanized, one-crop farmer requires uniformity of plants, so a totalitarian government needs uniformity of people – it can control only to the extent that people act and react in similar ways. Coercive government, like single crop farming, is inherently bad ecology. Bludg go to almost any length to achieve uniformity – witness the bussing of slave school children – favored by practically no one except bludg. But the advantages of diversity become greater and greater. Soon, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men…
Vonuism, and the whole alternate lifestyles quest, is only the beginning. –RAYO
To DAVE: By the way, you might be interested to know that I have professionally diagnosed you as suffering from feelings of ineffectualness, helplessness, and depression. Such feelings are the inevitable outcome of trying to change other people in order to solve the world’s problems. –DR. GATHERER
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