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The long-term goal of the organization called SolSeed is to become an intentional society, with a large number of people living in the same place, a number of businesses and industries, art and culture, etc. It will be a society of "starfarers," that is, the type of people who are able and willing to commit to massive long-term endeavors such as seeding the galaxy with life.
Solseed is like a religion in some respects. But unlike most religions, certain governments, and other human institutions such as the global capitalist economic system, it has no interest in converting everyone to its way of life. The goal is to find people who want to be starfarers, in the broad sense described above, and see if they like us enough to join. In short, SolSeed wants to be a non-totalizing society. This is based on our core value of respecting and welcoming difference.
Yet, paradoxically, the sum of all organizations who hold that value, what Paul Hawken calls "the movement of movements," is itself totalizing. It wants everyone to respect and welcome difference, which implies the abolition of all prejudice. The only aspects of any culture that this broader movement abhors are those which treat women, gays, minority ethnic groups, people of other social classes or castes or faiths or political beliefs, as second-class citizens.
This "intolerance of intolerance" seems to turn the ideal of respecting difference upside down, because so many of the world's cultures have deeply ingrained prejudices, such as those built into the division of gender roles that was arguably necessary up until relatively recently, when modern technologies and practices made pregnancy less of a limiting factor in women's lives. In asking such a culture to give women the right to hold paying jobs and even start businesses, as the burgeoning microcredit movement does, aren't we demanding that they give up what makes them unique and become just like us (or even less prejudiced than we are, in some especially hypcritical instances)?
Perhaps, to some degree. But the purpose of such demands is to grant an oppressed group the freedom to fully express its own uniqueness, collective and individual, and it's held as an article of faith in the movement of movements that this flowering of difference more than makes up for anything that is lost in the process of turning a culture upside down and shaking the prejudices out.
P.S. Happy hottest day in Seattle in recorded history! Let's see if we can avoid celebrating this again next year!
Solseed is like a religion in some respects. But unlike most religions, certain governments, and other human institutions such as the global capitalist economic system, it has no interest in converting everyone to its way of life. The goal is to find people who want to be starfarers, in the broad sense described above, and see if they like us enough to join. In short, SolSeed wants to be a non-totalizing society. This is based on our core value of respecting and welcoming difference.
Yet, paradoxically, the sum of all organizations who hold that value, what Paul Hawken calls "the movement of movements," is itself totalizing. It wants everyone to respect and welcome difference, which implies the abolition of all prejudice. The only aspects of any culture that this broader movement abhors are those which treat women, gays, minority ethnic groups, people of other social classes or castes or faiths or political beliefs, as second-class citizens.
This "intolerance of intolerance" seems to turn the ideal of respecting difference upside down, because so many of the world's cultures have deeply ingrained prejudices, such as those built into the division of gender roles that was arguably necessary up until relatively recently, when modern technologies and practices made pregnancy less of a limiting factor in women's lives. In asking such a culture to give women the right to hold paying jobs and even start businesses, as the burgeoning microcredit movement does, aren't we demanding that they give up what makes them unique and become just like us (or even less prejudiced than we are, in some especially hypcritical instances)?
Perhaps, to some degree. But the purpose of such demands is to grant an oppressed group the freedom to fully express its own uniqueness, collective and individual, and it's held as an article of faith in the movement of movements that this flowering of difference more than makes up for anything that is lost in the process of turning a culture upside down and shaking the prejudices out.
P.S. Happy hottest day in Seattle in recorded history! Let's see if we can avoid celebrating this again next year!
