When we want to live differently, what do we imagine?
We could go live on a hippie commune or a squat house, start a farm, join a cult—but we're afraid that these are all naïve, escapist, silly, maybe even dysfunctional.
Surely our imaginations are not so easily exhausted! Surely, we can think beyond these worn out clichés.
The bad ideas of the past (not only the silly ones, but the nightmares too: Nazism was a nostalgic reaction against modernity; so was the Khmer Rouge; Stalin and Mao rose to power on utopian dreams) have left us paralyzed, unable to consider any substantive turn away from industrialism and the particular system of capital and power that it seems bound up with.
When we try to think about these things, we get lost in generalities or in enormities or in clichés. We need to begin somewhere specific and concrete, and, while keeping in mind all the ways that past efforts have gone awry, not for that reason assume that future efforts are doomed.
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