I have proposed the creation of ersatz, secondary, voluntary groups I propose calling Bohannons, which will act as extended families. [I don’t know where I got this name. I had thought it was in Stranger in a Strange Land, but without rereading it, I can’t find it mentioned in the summary. It does mean “victorious” in Gaelic. I like that.]
It occurred to me that this idea is potentially much bigger than I realized. It sprang from my first experience of Holotropic Breathwork, in which I was astonished how quickly groups of complete strangers achieved extremely high levels of emotional intimacy and openness. My thought was obvious: why not create standing groups? Why not grow old together? This is beautiful solution to the problem of alienation and loneliness. Groups of 20 or so are manageable.
Then I kept going. Why not develop funerary rites? I had in mind this scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. Every group could develop their own. You could have regional variations.j
Members could help each other financially, as churches do.
You could support one anothers goals. One idea I really like was from De La Salle High School football program, in which you pair up and give the other person your set of goals, and they hold you accountable.
But then I started into University of Chicago, cold stone building sorts of thinking. Next stop: Abstraction.
The family as cultural unit is attacked by Marxists–which is to say just about all Professors of anything to do with the Humanities the world over–as patriarchal, unjust, predatory. No doubt, in some cases it can be those things.
But what have I created? A HORIZONTAL group, in which “leadership” can change hands in every meeting. In my vision, the goal is not teaching or telling, but eliciting: giving people a space to tell their story in their way, and to expect to receive unconditional support. They get advice only if they ask for it. The world is not wanting for opinions. It is wanting understanding.
In the Marxist world view–and this is the plain fact, even if the predatory rhetoric remains benign on the surface–there are two social positions: the isolated individual, and the State, or collective. The goal is not to elicit from the in-dividual what is unique about them, but the exact opposite: to cause them to DENY everything that is unique about them, and to adopt a mindset and worldview that is dictated by a central elite. Psychosocially, it consists in the emotional cloning of clinical narcissists and psychopaths, and the implantation of their ideas and manias in every member of the collective. A hive mind, based on a lunatic queen.
I am offering, in conception, an intermediate, HUMAN position. Marxism clearly increases alienation, it facilitates it, even though it claims to oppose it.
Here is something that would work, something that is doable. I think I have more to say, but my brain is full. I’m going to go climb a ladder and drill some holes in a wall. It’s a great thing I do manual labor for a living.