Societies of Resistance, Societies of Correspondence. Then, Now and Forever.
Reverberations across time and space.
These are the days of serial transformation. If we thought things might be going back to “normal” by covid, Putin erased that thought. The world as we knew it last week is shattered by a man off his rails.
In Ukraine, some people just continued on in their daily lives as rumors of encroaching invasion grew louder, but each day it gets worse and the reality sinks in. Darkness in many forms descends upon the world, brought about by one man already causing thousands of deaths. The man has to be taken out, one way or another, but carefully. Pray it happens before nightfall.
Refugees, unprecedented in numbers since World War II, stream into surrounding countries. The Syrian refugees with darker skins have a worse situation. In Maine and across the USA the homeless situation has been growing worse. People find themselves sleeping outdoors, refugees in their own land.
The world has responded to the autocrat by freezing and then seizing the assets of his oligarchs. It is said the oligarchs stole their wealth from the Russian people and so the question is if the wealth is seized, will it be returned to the people from whom it was taken, and what will that process look like?
The Boothbay Peninsula where I reside is dominated by an oligarchy by which I mean rule by the few and has been that way for quite some time. It is how this Peninsula feels before the midnight hour when awakening begins anew.
Recently I attended a Zoom meeting about the Maine housing situation but I didn’t fit the attendee profile. I only spoke twice but was interrupted by the host each time, stopping my thought from going further and I was not speaking for an inordinate length. There were a couple of speakers with whom a bridge was possible at another time and place but the hosts have their rules and expectations. After the second interruption, I left the meeting. There is no place in the existing paradigm of either housing or economic development for businesses in a home. I cannot fragment a wholistic reality into separate bits and pieces and process thoughts according to template instructions. No need for me to be there.
We who have a business in a home lifestyle are the hidden minority. Therein lies a problem with the system that does not want to include us. I am alone but not alone in being alone, and less so than I was before the changes now underway became apparent like the tips of leaves coming out of the ground in the spring.
But today it is a dark and thundering spring. Take that autocrat out! Don’t take the hero! It’s up to those around Putin to deliver that solution. Word has it that even those around Putin do not want what Putin has brought about.
The home business prevailed before the Industrial Revolution when large industries took over everything and people came to talk about business and work as if it necessarily means being employed in a large corporation, erasing the former culture in which work-life and home-life were integrated and people were more independent.
Now the corporations are acquiring the ownership of individual homes, not just corporate headquarters. What kind of a society is that?
One can’t enter the conversation if the category is not given a place on the map. Today new convergencies are forming. Remote working is introduced as a model of a corporate employee rather than as an independent business, but the concept will necessarily evolve. If a corporation wants exclusive rights to an independent contractor’s time and loyalty, then the terms of the agreement have to reflect that. “Know your worth” is the motto of the day.
A New Day Begins Today and Every Day
Years ago I saw a Maine media map in which many voices were missing. When I attend meetings such as the one the other day, I cannot speak. The people are pleasant and well-intended but the conversation is structured according to preconceptions. I remained within the initial values that are overdispersed relative to each target distribution, which must be normally distributed“. I didn’t fit the mold and I did not want to be normally distributed. I come from a family that makes molds but before we make the mold we create the form. Formation comes first.
The mold reflects the form. The form does not reflect the mold. We create new forms by embracing the initial data and letting it speak. Pursuant to the meeting my initial data is that I was raised in a business in a home but that data did not converge into the anticipated norm reflected by the structure of the conversation, which I bumped up against whenever I opened my mouth. My thought process is a product of my background environment. It’s a way of being. I left. My voice didn’t fit.
Social media is evolving and creating spaces where individual thoughts can be said amidst the background of the free marketplace.
Facebook is in decline. Facebook is meme territory where people take sides written in stone and battle it out with each other. One can say anything in a meme and it doesn’t have to be true. Facebook is a land where propaganda thrives. It’s a battlefield, not diplomacy, seldom a dialogue. If Facebook is in decline, is society moving past the era of great divisiveness?
The content markets are spaces where thought can thrive. The person whose thoughts are overdispersed does not need to normalize them, Instead, the overdispersed thoughts can unfold and become a realized idea. One may not realize the idea exists until one starts writing it down, like remembering a dream, as you write down the dream it opens up.
Try it. Commit to it. Believe that even as you go through darkness and confusion, it will come together as a piece.
Today something is different. You have to go the home page of The Individual vs the Empire to see it. Now in the menu, there is a link that says The Society of Correspondence. If you click on the link, today, there is nothing there, except a name inspired by the Society of Correspondence the article wrote titled Luddites, Guilds, and Societies of Correspondence. The Society of Correspondence is an eighteenth-century precursor to Substack. It was a movement of the English working class. Like Substack, It had paid mail subscriber list.
For now, there is just a link on a web page- a work in progress, not officially launched. Currently, the Society has no additional writers. Its purpose is to allow the quality of thought, shared values, and objectives worthy of a name that reverberates throughout centuries, the working-class entrepreneurs that once made up a middle class. The new independents. It might be active or grow slowly. It is a place to contribute something that you think fits the conversation in a space where no one interrupts.
The great heroism of the Ukrainian people resonates across the centuries with the time when the Society of Correspondence was formed in London by the working people and small entrepreneurs. Some were tried but not convicted of treason, which would have been a horrible death, but they were spared that fate.
Let us hope and pray that the Ukrainians are spared. Let us pray for intervention.