Saturday, January 31, 2015



Polytopia Versus Utopia/Dystopia:


What is a better future and how to get it? This is an issue of praxis, of how to apply such manifold knowledge toward how to craft more representative and sustainable jurisdictions. The implications of such knowledge is that what is to be done is to build jurisdictions that maintain themselves with more jurisdictional parity, and thus with less inequality and less human-environmental externalities instead of sponsoring their inverse. So equally such manifold knowledge is toward how to craft jurisdictions and our social life to maintain environmental conditions and maintain it over time as more immune to such comparatively regular historical systemic drifts of jurisdictional change.

In comparative retrospect, so far, most of human history's contingent choices look like a feudalization process that only chooses to keep and to expand ever greater human tyranny and ecological tyranny. This occurs at least until an equally contingent (though comparatively expected) massive, hydra-headed, multi-regional, ecological revolutionary opposition of people, in different regions yet all concerned about the same issues of rising human health externalities, economic externalities and ecological externalities combined, rise against it (as described in Ecological Revolution).

A different future than this regularly chosen and repetitive past (and present so far) requires checks and balances against such systemic drifts mostly built from such ongoing jurisdictional parities preserved whether state, culture, economics or finance. This additionally means recreating a sense of more (regional) public virtues of citizenship instead of merely modern abstract larger 'private' senses of mere citizenship.

To be fair to this issue of praxis, through the openness of history, we can use this knowledge in two very different ways. If we are virtuous and good, this knowledge can be applied for how to craft better precursor contexts in history that encourage us to avoid such a feudalization processes, toward how aggregately to develop a future of durable jurisdictions and civilizations, with higher human quality of life, and with better environmental conditions equally instead of ongoingly choosing to destroy all three. However, if we are evil of course, the same information holds the key to a praxis for how to destroy attempts at durable jurisdictions and how to destroy representative and sustainable trends (by repressing such precursor contexts and by encouraging ever more politically sponsored jurisdictional inequalities and privatization, militarization, and feudalization drives with their ever growing lack of jurisdictional parity seen in politically sponsored crony consolidations and ever growing externalities.

However to dedicate one’s life to defending or to enhancing that privatization, militarization, and feudalization would be to dedicate one’s life toward something innately self-destructive in that threefold way as to be in service of something, that in comparative retrospect, is pointless to defend since it has never lasted and instead only has destroyed itself and others as its only accomplishment for those attempting to defend it, over and over.

So one future route is toward a durable civilization aligned well with jurisdictional parity, representation, better material quality of life, and ecological sustainability. The other future route is towards nothing more than a tragic repetition of past human and environmental suffering so far, at ever larger scales.

To choose that evil route is to choose a repetitious tragic future, seen in history mostly when a self-destructive unrepresentative leadership, interested only in increasing supply-side biased decisions toward consolidation and wider externalitiesagainst consumers and citizens alike, takes their civilization hostage and takes it down with them in ever more guided choices. This can barrel onward only by choice, only because people choose to continue toward these jurisdictional changes that enhance human tyranny, ecological tyranny, expanded inequality, expanded consolidation and expanded externalities. This can barrel onward only by choice to keep subsidizing and defending environmental degradation against the many attempting to challenge it bubbling up from below with their wider choices, more representative choices and more sustainable choices. To choose the evil route has always had the same ending so far. By politically subsidizing an ongoing human immiseration and ecological destruction, the leaders (and much else) is gone sooner or later, and people are living in the human and ecological ruins that are hardly going to be better for higher material quality of life or hardly better even for subjective quality of life. Typically, such choices towards civilizational and ecological collapse are militarized enslaved wastelands instead of dreamy ecological paradises. So the question is how to we craft and graft a better representative and sustainable trend onto such ongoing degradative and unrepresentative ones? The answer is polytopia--explained below.

However, both the virtuous route or the evil route are choices seen in the past and in the present. Each regular choice has regular implications, respectively, of greater human and environmental improvement or of greater human and ecological self-destruction. In conclusion to this introduction, both regularly chosen patterns are entirely open futures. Moreover, both have developed in the past. The past shows the unrepresentative, inequality-enhancing, and degradative jurisdictional expansion trend and simultaneously a representative, equality-enhancing, and more sustainable jurisdictional trend. This is the ‘green theory of history.’ Contrary to modern social and environmental historiography, systemic environmental degradation and oppositional sustainability movements both are hardly only ‘modern’ phenomena though a template of how human and environmental historical dynamics have played out throughout history, past and present. 
Instead of this being a prediction however, our future is always unknown and unpredictable since our future always depends on ongoing planned interactive choices, strategies and tactics as well as more unplanned interactions (of such rebarbative and ever changing plans with and against each other). However, in comparative retrospect, more unrepresentative and degradative patterns have been chosen more so far and have been contingenly ‘successful’ more so far , despite that ‘success’ being just an ongoing failure by ignorance or hubris of how it is creating just the same boring repeating tragedy of self-destruction and ecological destruction at ever larger scales.

Moreover, in comparative retrospect, the many different more representative and sustainable choices, so far in history, have been [1] undermined only contingently by the former, [2] or undermined by their own bad strategies of opposition, or [3] undermined by their lost facilitating precursor contexts that had encouraged more representative and sustainable arrangements in the first place, that when lost, then encouraged their leaderships mostly to become as unrepresentative and degradative as the trends they had once opposed. These three ways that most representative and sustainable trends fail contingently, so far, are highly interrelated points (particularly as that third point about lost precursor contexts can thus become the first point once more as well.)

Your Choice: Repeating Tragedy of Feudalization or More Linear Modern Triumph in Polytopia?

So in comparative retrospect, these different regular choices have their different regular implications. On the one hand, we can choose to keep creating those unrepresentative and degradative futures that are truly futureless in that they are hardly different than the past. The terms 'doomed and damned' truly come to mind for those that choose such trends. These are pointless banal situations in comparative retrospect. Regardless of how this path is chosen, either by hubris or ignorance of some, or merely because it is allowed to continue by the ambivalence of others carried along with it, these unrepresentative and degradative situations are truly tragic situations. This is because we can understand the bad implications of such unrepresentative and degradative consolidation choices beforehand by comparing ourselves with others in the past and their similar regular jurisdictional choices and the regular implications of tragedy if such ongoing unrepresentative and degradative arrangements of consolidation are chosen, kept and defended. This choice is 'a future without a future,' only a willing repetition of the tragic past. We can understand now that it is a regular choice of ever more self-destructive, unrepresentative, and degradative jurisdictional relations. It is the willing repetition of the feudalizing past under counterfeited ‘modern linear' guise.

Choosing Polytopia as the Future: Four Parts
On the other hand, we always have a choice. We can use the same knowledge in attempts to craft virtuous situations of jurisdictional parity. We can use this knowledge with the awareness that we require both [1] a more sound approach to durable regional specificity of solutions as well as [2] require cross regional, multi-regional conflict management in both environmental issues and in civil rights issues to have any open future for ourselves as a species.

These interactive solutions have been coined under the name of a (Plural) Bioregional State achievable by an Ecological Contract involved in a wider ecological checks and balances, wider green constitutional engineering, and a wider Ecological Bill of Rights. For one term, this is a polytopian view of jurisdictions.

To expand on this polytopian view of jurisdictions and social life as a better ideal for the future, it has four characteristics for how to craft that different and better future.

1. Common Regionalized and Better Material Objective Quality of Life

[1] The first characteristic is a common regionalized and similar better objective quality of life allowing for the existence of various different real places materially and ecologically, along with any locally managed and locally desired trade between such variegated regions. This secures both a multi-regional material jurisdictional autonomy as well as assures that ongoing larger cities (in regions themselves though very dependent upon ongoing cross-regional trades) can remain in existence, though only in existence now under more sustainable choices of material relations where regional venues can organize for their own better interests materially and ecologically—instead of being feudalized investment vehicles, ecologically degraded regions, and human tyrannies repressively propped up and caused by distant others who extend very unrepresentative supply-side biases upon consumers and citizens alike across many different regions worldwide. So a polytopian view of the future is contrary to the promotion of an artificially singular ‘utopian’ place that (literally) exists ‘no where.’ Of course for some, a more singular utopia does exist though always only in the dangerous potential monoculture of their minds, and as such, typically becomes a repressive dystopia in the repressive attempt to force a reduction of regional variation in others minds and lives to the same exact ideas and 'solutions' upon all unrepresentatively.

That utopian mental picture would be a dystopian future in social life if there is a lack of variegated bioregional input from multiple regions’ on their own future decisions to make decisions at all, or to even the ability to change their strategies and tactics over time if they deliberate and desire to do so.

So a polytopia is meant as opposite to a utopia.

A utopia exists literally ‘no where’ and so destroys multiple variegated real particular places and real human variations as a consequence. A utopia attempts to create a closed present and a closed future. To the contrary, a polytopia is an attempt to keep the human present open and the human future open with an ongoing group of multiple real places with each seeking out their own ongoing choices of better future material objective quality of life, better ecological optimality with that, and better cultural appropriateness per bioregion built into both. A polytopia thus maintains a (plural) open present and an open future, across multiple regions, and is thus without any artificially singular utopian vision of content imposed across and against the open and ongoing environmental and human variegation allowances. In a polytopia in other words, people as individuals and groups can even change their mind on ideals (as people typically do change across their life course), and so they can move between different bioregions attempting different versions of social life that finds their transcendences in different tactics, or they can always attempt novel and inventive cultures for themselves, though open and in competitive appeals with others who attempt the same with the same aggregate populations across all bioregions, or they can just stay in the same place as well if they want, culturally and bioregionally. All individually and culturally variable paths are available.

This first point of the polytopia means similar environmental and regional material priorization of jurisdiction, and it means cross-regional conflict management for that common regionalized plurality (involved in the pragmatic realities of cross-regional pollution flows, legal conflicts, economic regulation, contracts, roads, trade, 'heritage' infrastructures from before polytopia, etc.)

In short, this first point means a similar better material objective quality of life of sustainable and regionally attuned wider choices. Such material improvement occurs with regionally made choices of how to trade between regions if desired (instead of it forced on them), and how that is to fit into the many different desired regional cultures and ways of social life. This means the regional jurisdictional right to ban particular material imports as much as the regional jurisdictional right to allow them inside. So this first point of polytopia means the regional jurisdictional priority to make decisions for the wider regional commons of all commodity interactions in a particular region to suit their own desired better material objective quality of life. As said in the short definition of the bioregional state:
From that comes in tow how such decisions innately would be more toward greater ecological security for their regions simultaneously, if commodity choices were allowed over time by ongoing deliberation to be harmonized with a regional future in mind and a future in which trade occurs only if the deliberative region desires it. Typically in a more unrepresentative and degradative context, trade occurs under political regimes where forced external commodity dumping, repressed attempted to stop it, and the resulting economic shakeout benefits only the politically crony consolidation. Such an ongoing political repression destroys any durable wider choices materially toward durable regionality that is neverthless typically always attempting to formulate itself. So a polytopia is  entirely against global neoliberalism, which is just the name for a rather commonly seen feudalization in modern guise though at a much larger scale than before, yet imposed by the same age old repressive politics: pushed by politically crony unrepresentative consolidations, by biased economic subsidies toward them and against actual open markets, and by open invasion, murder and violence to get that crony consolidation. So global neoliberalism is without a future because it is that same feudalization process of the past. Neoliberalism is entirely against any actual variegated open wider choices and thus it is against wider 'free markets' and only for more consolidated delimited choices being politically imposed across everyone. Such neoliberalism is destructive of our wider choices and our more variegated solutions that require a better more regionalized deliberative input on how to achieve better market choices, better regional sustainability via those regional commodity choices, and how to fit these into more regional cultural goals.

However, instead of regionalism always being rosy in all factors of human and environmental life, the second characteristic of a polytopia is somewhat a check and balance on the potential human (and environmental) corruptions of the first.

2. Common cross-regional universal human civil rights, including universal human rights of travel: rights of exit from anywhere and rights of entrance and immigration to anywhere

This is [2] common cross-regional universal human civil rights, as a base to build upon instead of as a glass ceiling imposed. In other words, this is a cross-regional protection against any potential aforementioned regional ascriptive discrimination upon minorities of any kind and any definition, instead of using these universal human civil rights as a pretext for the imposition of a singular cultural standard. In addition to universal human civil rights, this is a universal right of travel. It gives all regionalized humanity the right of universal travel between bioregions.

Meanwhile, oppositely from the first point of the polytopia above, commodities are denied the same universal cross-bioregional travel rights, and commodities' travel rights remain decided upon per region which lends to more representative market solutions. This means better balanced trade for regional consumers and regional citizens against those increasingly psychopathic supply-side biased corruptions and cronyisms.

This means rights for all peoples to exit regions. It means rights for all to enter other regions. It means rights to attempt culturally to aggregate other forms of subjective quality of life for themselves, with different others elsewhere, instead of allowing some regional populations to keep minorities unrepresentatively against their will in their own region. So it equally means rights to move into and to live in any other different region.

These kinds of universal civil individual rights, universal rights of individual movement, and universal cultural rights to formulate other individual futures for themselves as part of novel aggregates elsewhere are all so people can avoid the synergistic environmental injustices that regional corruptions can create by being unrepresentative on minorities. This can build into environmentally degradative trends in different regions, and these trends in turn can even damage the earlier (first) goal of better ecologically aligned material objective quality of life in the region as a consequence.

So an unrepresentative human experience and a degradative environmental trend tend to be co-visited upon minorities if their universal individual civil rights, their universal individual rights of movement, and their universal cultural rights of development and expression are left unaddressed.

This means it is a bad idea to leave various regions entirely to define their own civil rights as that can be captured and defined in a biased way by any hegemonic regional cultural expression—effectively creating their own different ideals of civil rights, travel, exit, entrance, residence, living and transport. That path can only encourage forms of systemic minority undercastes, which can only encourage civil injusticies, and which can only encourage environmental injustices and then environmental degradation in a region which can in time undermine that regions own goal of better ecologically aligned material objective quality of life as well.

3. Allowances for More Regionally Variegated Senses of Subjective Cultural Quality of Life as Having Cultural Hegemony and Jurisdictional Authority
However, next, as a check and balance against the former as well, the third aspect of such a polytopia would be [3] allowances for a more regionally variegated sense of subjective cultural quality of life as having cultural hegemony and jurisdictional authority instead of using the second point about universal civil rights to enforce a singular cultural view or singular correct social stratification upon all similarly across all regions.

One might be properly concerned that this allowance for more regionally variegated sense of subjective cultural quality of life having cultural hegemony and jurisdictional authority encourages such unrepresentative repressions upon minorities. (Actually what does cause such unrepresentative repressions upon (cultural) minorities are such claims of an empire's 'universal civil rights' imposed as the same standards on all in the hypocritical attempt to destroy its regionalism more than 'to protect' its individuals. "The West" for instance would have a hard time invading and destroying places around the world if it lacked such a false claim that it was protecting 'universal human rights' as it strafed people to death as a sick cover for imposing its crony consolidated political economy on them and a sick cover for denying them any actual universal human rights at all in the process.

Therefore, in the second point about more universal human rights as just baselines that various individuals and groups of people can appeal to use, instead of states getting to use such claims to 'justify' their depravities and invasions on others. So there can be certain baselines of rights of exit, of entrance, of residence and of cultural expression established across all bioregions. By such uses of these rights or by mere brinksmanship threats of such exit and entrance rights by minorities in this way anywhere various more unrepresentative tendencies that are possible in this third point may be tempered against creating an unrepresentative/degradative situation upon minorities.

For instance, sometimes the threat of laboring undercastes of a region exiting (and thus raising the costs or difficulty of labor, profit, or even survival of other leaderships, for instance) is enough of a push to encourage any unrepresentative jurisdictional arrangement they dislike to buckle to be more representative and thus to keep them and their useful labor under better conditions. Equally, in the inverse, sometimes the threat of mass entrance and mass immigration of other cultures and subaltern groups to elsewhere (i.e., immigration of minority cultural, religious or ethnic labor for instance, to other places), encourages those others already living in those other places to help those other groups'  home regions to find other solutions for them besides immigration, in order to temper that exodus from happening by meliorating their own regional positions potentially by their aids to other regions to help them live there, in order to keep them there.

So the right of exodus and immigration across the whole bioregional state polytopia, without the ability of anyone legally to stop it, can build interesting alliances of greater representative relations and material betterment in any cultural bioregion. Even external regions may aid other peoples' regions so that they remain settled and in better material objective quality of life there that would keep them from becoming immigration or refugee populations that the other region would be having to take anyway. So such wider universal rights of exodus and immigration anyway can help us achieve more representative and more environmentally bettered situations as many would choose to help others to avoid such immigration.

4. A Bioregional Hellenism: Shared Regionalized Institutions Assuring a Parallel More Neutral Open Public Civic Life of Transparency and Public Deliberation in Any Region, in Any Jurisdictional Issue, Whether Governmental and non-Governmental

The fourth characteristic of a future better course is [4] a Bioregional Hellenism that involves several parts.

One of these parts of Bioregional Hellenism is in the Bioregional State itself—in [4a] its regional and yet cross-regionally common and shared sense of green constitutional engineering principles with many added ecological checks and balances of maintaining regional durability as an ongoing general check and balance shared in all regions against any more unrepresentative wider jurisdictional aggregations from developing. The Bioregional State includes as well [4b] many other formal checks and balances against ongoing unrepresentative (and equally thus degradative) developmental power.

[4c] Additionally this Bioregional Hellenism involves establishing, in all watersheds, an Ecological Reformation.

This Ecological Reformation is an assortment of various more bioregionally attuned civil and material institutional forms to assure open regional civil public deliberation:

[4c1] for truly regional public cultural hero recognition, in the Civic Democratic Institution

[4c2] for deliberation about material sustainability issues in all commodity choices, in the region in an ongoing way, in the Commodity Ecology Institution (CEI), and

[4c3] for many other purposes to establish an ongoing open transparency in all four major jurisdictions of public civic life. These are more mixed rationales that fall between or within both those cultural and material issues of civic transparency and ongoing deliberation.

For instance, these other regional public institutions without any particular order, are:

[1] the institutions involved in public science encouragement and environmental monitoring,

[2] several regional seed banks for heirloom crops,

[3] a watershed based public meeting hall/venue and fairgrounds--designed and built entirely on regionally attuned materials and ideas, and as a useful infrastructure available for regular fairs assembled for buying or selling of only various sustainable regional commodities.

[4] various different examples of agroecology, on public land, as experimental test plots by and for the watershed public in order to allow private business people in the region to have a freer hand to experiment riskily how to achieve best sharable practices in improved agroecological projects attuned to their region. These would be multiple examples of silvopasture, alleycropping, permaculture, food forests, acquculture, acquaponics, etc., instead of placing a double burden on private groups (the double burden would be the placing publicly useful experimentation for all on the back of only private groups, given the potential risks of their livelihood in the event of failure financially on an sustainable production experiment technique that would be useful to know about for all in the bioregion.)

[5] bioregionaleducational degree tracks that would institutionalize in the local universities parallel degrees about how to maintain, to carry on, to share, to improve such bioregional experimental knowledge and cultural history,

[6] more regionalized specific capstone professional accreditation requirements,

[7] financial mediums of complementary currencies, to keep flows of capital within particular regions and as regional store of value currencies; administered by the Commodity Ecology Institution members

[8] regional material licensing and business licensing based on how well it is attuned into sustainable practices, and

[9] consumer and producer useful ‘regional green’ labeling of what the region (through the Commodity Ecology Institution members) considers sustainable and integrated commodities recommended for buying to maintain a bioregional economy soundly and financially in an ongoing shiftable perpetuity.

Through these nine examples at least, a different civic sustainable culture can develop for the future. This Ecological Reformation's wider shared civil culture builds open public institutions of civil deliberation, builds open material commodity choice deliberation, builds public scientific institutions of research and monitoring about the region, and builds professional accreditation knowledge of the region to practice a profession in the region. It builds as well [10] a more balanced kind of ownership regime, with greater jurisdictional parity on land ownership across all watersheds and bioregions (i.e., some private, some held by the regional commons, and some in cooperatives instead of the dystopia of only having any version of ownership dominating the landscape).

Each of these Bioregionally Hellenized civil institutions (or the tenth point, more a point about ongoing land ownership parity) build more more transparent democratic deliberation in areas of cultural recognization and admiration, civil life, market life, financial life, and scientific life, and ownership.
An Ecological Reformation of such jurisdictional parities in politics, culture, materials, and finance can provide a future toward an ongoing living regional check and balance against any regional centralizations. Typically unrepresentativeness and degradation come from such consolidation biases that are equally environmental, material, and cultural consolidation biases.


This polytopian view of the future that is truly a modern linear future is equally an allowance for a common better material objective quality of life, with a sustainable material regionalism for all. A polytopian future is potentially different in every region depending on their own ongoing political, cultural, and material deliberations. A polytopian future as well is a pragmatic ongoing allowance and support for a variety of different desired subjective qualities of life culturally--whether traditionally maintained or freshly formed by novel inventions and ideals--that are all ongoingly competing with each other to attract people and adherents and all being steadily pushed to buckle and be more moderate and representative toward heir internal minorities that disagree with them. This is because people who dislike a particularly unrepresentative version in any region can more readily be helped to exit such bad unrepresentative versions of such cultural hegemonies, or can be helped to immigrate into a different better one for themselves, or can be protected in the attempt to formulate a novel cultural expression and settlement for themselves elsewhere as all part of their universal human rights. These kinds of dynamics of ongoing human mobility and travel are a kind of check and balance against particular regions creating cultural and environmental undercastes. So a polytopian future is a check and balance on any toxic and unrepresentative attempts at a singular utopia, whether internal to a region or across multiple ones, because such attempts tend to become dystopias particularly for minority populations that disagree and are unable to escape or to reformulate themselves culturally to other ideals. So such polytopian dynamics can make all regionally supported cultural hegemony versions, pressured by such jurisdictional parity, to be more representative versions of their own cultural arrangements over time. 

So how to summarize these four points of the polytopian future?

In practice in a polytopian future, the many different subjective cultural and religious values are alongside each other in different regions, each attempting to share the same better objective quality of life in material sustainable relations, each having the same Bioregional Hellenized public institutions (as well in addition to any of their own), and each participating in the ongoing wider cross-regional green constitutional engineering arrangements as well, and each being pressured to be as representative as possible to any minority groups that disagree. Something unsaid so far is that there are equally regional rights of ongoing secession and/or 'prepped' entrance (building one's own Bioregional Hellenism first) that are protected in the bioregional state.

This polytopian future is of course only a potentially linear modern future, because at least in comparative retrospect, such more representative and sustainable trends have both been developed as well as have lapsed in the past. So such lapses of course can happen in the future as well. Though if that lapse occurs by choice, in comparative retrospect, we have regular implications of what happens in such an event: just a tragic repetition of the same tragic unrepresentative and degradative past by choice.

While many such issues of a polytopian arrangement have existed in piecemeal in the past, these polytopian ideas above are a distillation of what should be done in the future to have any kind of linear modern future at all. Any actually linear modern future would avoid our tragically regular human tyrannies and ecological tyrannies of the past, instead of just attempting to repeat them in modern guise. Any actual linear modern future would be this cross-Bioregional Hellenism, of both the more formal Bioregional State and the more non-governmental cultural Ecological Reformation of existing institutions. This would avoid the weakness and divisions (cross-regionally and internally to regions) that contribute(d) to the failure of past representative and sustainable trends more often than otherwise in comparative retrospect. 

In conclusion of all these four sections of a polytopia, a polytopia is perhaps the only modern linear future that avoids the ignorant and hubristic repetitions of the past. This kind of comparative historical knowledge helps us to recognize our ongoing repeating tragedies, which may be a negative spur to such positive action for something more representative and sustainable for us all. The application of comparative historical knowledge as applied praxis to get better human quality of life and better ecologically sound development is very different than the mystifications of other theories rejected. For instance, the failed modern developmental ideas derived from Smith or Marx, that have been suggested for solving issues ranging from human freedom to ecological sustainability, are truly showing themselves both as only modern unrepresentative mystifications for an ongoing feudalization in modern guise.

[back for some editing will stand for now.]