benjamin (l) on sovereignty and solidarity ness
benjamin life on sovereignty and solidarity ness
aka: the 2 missing pieces
via michel bauwens tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/2059117090402148367?s=20]:
Benjamin Life is a consistent and genuine integral thinker:
* Sovereignty and solidarity are not opposites at all. They are mutually co-arising
https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/sovereignty-is-solidarity
“There is an unspoken argument that runs beneath the surface of nearly all of our political disagreements. On one side stands the self-interested individual, the figure we tend to associate with libertarians, the one primarily concerned with liberty, choice, and freedom. On the other side stands the relational self, primarily concerned with care work and mutual aid, animated by the sense that we are responsible for one another. We have learned to treat these as opposites, as the two poles of a spectrum we are forever being asked to choose between. You are either for the sovereign self or for the solidarity of the collective. You cannot, it seems, be for both.
I want to suggest that this is not only false but backward. Sovereignty and solidarity are not opposites at all. They are mutually co-arising: two faces of a single phenomenon, each calling the other into being. We cannot have either one in any durable form without the other. The kind of sovereignty worth wanting is a sovereignty that requires solidarity to be real, and the kind of solidarity worth wanting is a solidarity that requires sovereign, healthy individuals and communities to make it possible. The tension between them is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is the structure that holds everything up.”
brown belonging law et al
have to have both missing pieces for the dance to dance
notes/quotes from linked substack:
Sovereignty Is Solidarit – Delineating the Boundaries of Belonging
[1st 2 paras of piece were the ones michel quoted above]
What follows is, in one sense, an argument about politics and economics, about commons and care, about who enforces which boundary and how. But underneath the argument runs something quieter and more fundamental: *an invitation to feel a shift in how you experience being a self at all. The two poles **only look like opposites from inside a worldview that imagines the self as separate to begin with. Loosen that single assumption and the whole contradiction dissolves, not by splitting the difference, but by seeing it was never really there.
*need global detox leap for that.. because none of us are legit us.. all like whales in sea world since forever
**black science of people/whales law et al.. myth of normal et al
So let’s begin there, beneath the politics and the economics, with the question everything else rests on: what is a self, that it could be sovereign at all?
to me.. this is cancerous distraction.. ie: identity ness; the it is me yet i’m never just me; beyond the monastic self; graeber unpredictability/surprise law;..
asking what is a self.. is assuming you can define something that is (or begs to be) legit alive.. so undefinable/nameable/understandable.. et al
inserting another tweet here while i’m in middle of adding benjamin life. et al. michel tweets another [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/2059126890401824866?s=20]:
I am not exaggerating, but Benjamin Life has explicited all the necessary premises for a * A Cosmo-Local Theory of Commonfare to replace or augment the bureaucratized welfare state model ? Please read it with care and fully at https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/sovereignty-is-solidarity Benjamin Life on Fractal, Bioregional, Care and Solidarity Infrastructures “place-based, ecological solidarity at the bioregional scale is as close to a universal form of solidarity as we can reach while still staying grounded and relational” “*The honest difficulty is this: most people simply do not want to pay to support people they do not know. This is not a moral failing to be scolded away. It is a deep feature of human social wiring, a tribal dynamic that makes it genuinely hard for us to care about people we cannot see. You can wish it were otherwise. That will not help. But this doesn’t mean we should have no infrastructure for care. It means the infrastructure must be fractal, scaling horizontally by rooting interconnected networks in the context of particular relationships and particular ecologies, so that at every scale we are **accountable to actual people rather than to the abstract idea of helping people. The care does not disappear. It changes shape. It stops being a promise made to humanity and becomes a practice carried out between humans. With this understanding, it becomes almost obvious that place-based, ecological solidarity at the bioregional scale is as close to a universal form of solidarity as we can reach while still staying grounded and relational. The bioregion is the largest scale at which we still have a genuinely material solidarity relationship: a stake we share not because we agreed to it in principle but because we are literally embedded in the same living system, breathing the same air, drinking from the same watershed, fed by the same soil. This is the throne and the web at the scale of a landscape, the same pattern of bounded openness we met in the single self, now drawn large enough to hold a whole community of beings, human and otherwise. ***Beyond the bioregion, solidarity thins into abstraction. Within the bioregion, it remains rooted in the flesh, living bodies sharing nutrients, water, and exchange. Instead of reaching for the universal and closing our hands on empty ideas, we root ourselves at the widest point where our feet still touch the ground.” https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/sovereignty-is-solidarity
*rather.. red flag we’re perpetuating same song if still talking pay to support.. moral failing.. and rather.. a deep feature of whale wiring
**huge huge huge red flag..
***legit bioregion is all of us..
no one to date has gotten (and we still won’t get) to the root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
back to benjamin’s substack:
This is the ontological ground beneath everything that follows, the same shift I and others have written about elsewhere as the movement from separation to interbeing. To be is always to inter-be. Nothing stands alone; everything arises in relationship, dependent and entangled. The boundary we draw around the self is real, but it is real the way the wall of a living cell is real: not a barrier sealing off an interior, but a membrane through which a continuous exchange with the world is always taking place. The self is less a fortress than an eddy in a river, a pattern that holds its shape precisely by letting the current move through it.
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman (@BobThurman)
the rest of this essay is simply an attempt to build the political and economic forms that take that view seriously, to let what is ontologically true become socially real.
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
otherwise we get: maté trump law and then khan filling the gaps law
What Sovereignty Actually Means
The sovereignty I mean is functional sovereignty, which is, by definition, community sovereignty: the capacity of a community to delineate and enforce its own boundaries, not through force, but through the alignment of incentives and agreements. **This is a different relationship to power and authority altogether. It is not the power to dominate but the power to cohere. It is the kind of power wielded by the relational self: ***the ability of a pattern to hold its own shape while the current keeps moving through it.
*to me.. this is a cancerous distraction to the dance
and so.. to me.. **not diff.. but rather.. same song.. as long as any form of m\a\p ie: boundaries, alignment, incentives, agreements, et al..
***won’t happen if any form of m\a\p.. via on the ground ness et al
Here we run into one of the most persistent misunderstandings about the commons and anarchy. *People imagine commons or anarchist governance as something totally open-ended, a free-for-all in which anyone can take whatever they want, Mad Max violence or the proverbial tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. But this gets it exactly wrong. Anarchist or commons governance is all about boundaries. It’s about creating boundaries that are enforced through peer agreements rather than through the monopoly of violence. The whole project is to build positive-sum relationships through shared agreements, where **the cost of not upholding those agreements is precisely what keeps the system coherent. Enforcement does not come from above. It emerges from the relationships themselves.
*and to me.. this is still exactly wrong .. just to a diff degree.. still **violence
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. perpetuating survival triage.. for (blank)’s sake..
A functionally sovereign community enforces its boundaries by *governing access to shared pools of resources. Increasingly, that access can be programmatically insured, through blockchain smart contracts, for instance, where if the community revokes your privileges, you simply lose access to the resource. In the digital realm this is nearly frictionless. ..**It is boundaries enforced by relationship instead of by the gun.
*huge red flags that there is no legit trust.. again.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
**but not legit/free/trusting relationship
arane doing its living work; the other is the membrane dissolving.
This is why functional sovereignty for a self-governing commons requires healthy individuals to participate in it. It requires people who have enough excess capacity, enough surplus of time and energy, enough internal coherence, self-knowledge and wholeness, to actually tend and steward the commons, because tending a commons takes time and energy and contribution. If everyone arrives empty-handed, with nothing to spare, no unique offering derived from their personal individualized experience, there is no one to do the stewarding, nothing to share, and the commons cannot stay healthy. The kind of sovereignty I am interested in is therefore a collective sovereignty: one in which we recognize our individual responsibilities and contributions even as we work to tend the commons, not the commons in some abstract, planetary sense, but the commons that lives in the actual space between specific people.
more red flags ness
*Even the most committed collectivist societies in human history understood this. **There were always boundaries around who was and was not part of the collective. Not out of cruelty, but out of a fact as basic as physics: it is simply impossible to care for everyone at the same time. Care work is irreducibly relational. It requires intimacy, trust, and **reciprocity, and those things **do not scale to infinity, because they are made of attention, and attention is finite. They live in particular bonds between particular people
*nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem.. this is why we keep perpetuating myth of tragedy and lord et al
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
**red flags we’re doing it/life wrong
If care is relational and cannot scale to infinity, then real solidarity requires membranes. It requires relational thresholds, boundaries that define who is inside a given circle of care and who, for now, is not. This sounds harsh until you realize that the alternative is to care for no one in particular, which is the same as caring for no one at all. We are not trying to care for everyone simultaneously. We are trying to care for specific people with whom we have actual bonds of reciprocity, trust, and intimacy.
we need to let go of help\ing/caring ness.. they sound so good but are keeping us from the dance
A boundary of belonging is not a wall built to keep people out. It is the specific, relational act by which someone actually chooses to be in solidarity with someone else. This is the difference that makes everything work. *Forced solidarity is not solidarity at all; it is conscription, and it breeds the resentment we feel toward jury duty rather than the devotion we feel toward our own people. Real solidarity has to be entered, consciously, by a self that knows itself well enough to mean it. The membrane is what makes the choice legible, what lets us say, with our whole selves, I am choosing to be inside this circle with you, to bear the real costs of intimacy because of what is ultimately gained from mutual care.
*any form of m\a\p is forced ness to some degree
**again.. we need need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove/pick/decide.. we need to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
The boundary is what makes the belonging consensual, and the consent is what keeps the boundary humane.
oh my.. siddiqi border law et al..
public consensus/consent always oppresses someone(s)
mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
ms, enforced through relationships rather than through top-down authority. Without that capacity, solidarity is just a sentiment, and sentiments are inevitably strip-mined.
This is the heart of what Elinor Ostrom spent her career demonstrating. Studying real commons that had endured for centuries, from fisheries to irrigation systems to alpine pastures and forests, she found that they *did not survive by being open and unbounded. They survived because the communities governing them had clear boundaries, locally crafted rules, graduated sanctions for those who broke them, and accessible ways to resolve conflict. They survived, in other words, because they were functionally sovereign. The lesson is not that we must choose between freedom and rules. It is that real freedom, the freedom to share a commons without watching it collapse, is **constituted by the right rules, made and enforced by the people who live with their consequences.
*again.. nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem (so to me.. nothing to date has been legit common\ing ness – including ostrom 8 ness et al)
note: on survival ness: survival is a means to survive things as they are.. so to me.. not a legit alt.. it’s triage.. perpetuating survival triage.. so a temp band aide per se.. that will /can help now.. but only for short term.. because it still doesn’t get to the root of the problem.. so it won’t offer/lead-to legit change/life/freedom.. et al.. so.. to me.. it’s still a cancerous distraction to the dance
**any form of m\a\p is still structural violence and spiritual violence.. still just about
findings from on the ground ness:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to facil the seeming chaos of 8b legit free people
So the solidarity I am arguing for is rooted in reciprocity, relationships, and accountability, not in some abstract, frictionless solidarity that asks nothing and therefore protects nothing.
cancerous distractions.. ie: reciprocity; accountable ness; safety addiction; et al
There is a deep temptation, especially for those of us formed by the humanistic Enlightenment, to want our solidarity to be universal, to extend to every human being equally, as a matter of abstract right. This is a beautiful aspiration. It is also, I have come to think, *a trap, because it tends to launder our responsibility upward into an abstract bureaucratic state that is supposed to hold these universal obligations on our behalf, obligations it has, in fact, been systematically evacuating for the last fifty or sixty years. We pledged allegiance to humanity in general and stopped feeding our neighbor in particular.
*to me.. the ‘trap’ is that we think in terms of responsibility ness .. which is same song as earn a living ness..
The honest difficulty is this: most people simply do not want to pay to support people they do not know. This is not a moral failing to be scolded away. It is a deep feature of human social wiring, a tribal dynamic that makes it genuinely hard for us to care about people we cannot see. You can wish it were otherwise. That will not help.
again.. rather.. a deep feature of whale wiring
What does this actually look like? It looks like communities organizing their own care infrastructure: *insurance pools, rotating savings groups, rotational labor, mutual aid. **These are all civic solutions, ways of meeting real needs that do not route through financial transactions. These mechanisms work because they run on real relationships.
*these are all same song as ‘fin transactions’.. any form of m\a\p brings us to ie: 10-day-care-center\ness and not us ness
**rather.. all sea world solutions of meeting ‘survival‘ needs .. we need a means to facil life over survival ness
ie: need 1st/most – means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening – so we can hear what’s already on each heart as global detox in order to org around legit needs
The answer is to start small. To build material solidarity with the people you already know, not humanity in the abstract, but the specific, named, reachable people already in your life, and then to expand that circle gradually, on the basis of real relationships. This is how we rebuild the social fabric.
the ginorm small we need: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
Sovereignty is solidarity, not as a paradox to be admired from a safe distance, but as a plain description of how a self actually exists within embedded relationships. The boundary and the bond are one gesture drawn from two directions. To know where you end is to know to whom you are bound. To be truly sovereign, free and capable and whole, is to belong, on purpose, to a particular people and a particular place, and to build with them the kind of strength that no one was ever going to find alone. This is the shift, and it is available now, in the next relationship you choose to actually enter, the quiet turning by which separation gives way to interbeing, and we stop trying to save ourselves from each other and finally, at long last, begin to walk each other home.
beautiful words.. if only we could let go of thinking we have to control/understand/define things.. as long as we do that.. as nice as we make it sound.. we are still perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. perpetuating survival triage.. for (blank)’s sake..
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be you. 