Willem IV- It will be necessary in our increasingly unstable and insecure future, made so by our culture’s deliberate moral and spiritual corruption, to reconsider our basic living arrangements and to consider new forms that are actually based on old forms. Namely, we must consider the necessity of building physical safe havens which can, in an emergency, provide shelter and sustenance to many people.
Call to mind the violent riots staged by such malefactors as Antifa and other radicals using “Black Lives Matter”* as their theme. Now, imagine these roving angry mobs, flung at the world through the worse lies and propaganda and/or through actual outrages, becoming so much more the norm that your community’s likelihood of encountering them becomes high.
(*Black Lives Matter as a concept should be disconnected from some violent authoritarian radical groups using that as their brand.)
The era of insecurity that follows the era of hubris and decadence must necessarily accompany the latter stages of a dying culture within a dying civilization. And the culture of this country as well as the entire Western Civilization are dying. We have collectively sowed to the wind and we will all collectively reap the whirlwind UNLESS we manage to physically remove ourselves from the path of this looming catastrophic storm.
The past is future. When we consider the way the people in earlier days tackled their era of insecurity, we find the monasteries of the 5th and 6th centuries and of the 10th and 11th centuries providing a model which can inspire us right now.
This doesn’t mean we need to build all male religious orders based on vows of poverty and then cloister together behind walls for safety from the barbaric environment beyond. The more important idea of the monastery is that it is a relatively compact, secure, materially self-sustaining facility that could and did provide shelter for far more people than the number who lived there permanently. The monastery preserved the elements of culture which it bore and propagated and which became the seeds of what would eventually become a new civilization.
Like it or not, the future will make the bizarre events of 2020-2021, which are still ongoing, seem like a slow drumming introducing a violent and overwhelming drama that is far louder and more constant in its cacophony than anything most of our living memories can recall.
The physical spaces we will need to shelter and thrive if or when the next plaque of angry rioters, the next pandemic, or the next economic downturn will in many ways be best compared to these monasteries as safe-havens managed by a small permanent community who can host many more people than themselves.
The deliberate creation of safe-haven hubs owned by some form of organically cohesive body of people, not necessarily a religious order but of the same quality, may be essential to the future survival of advanced culture.*
(*Advanced culture is predicated on the goal that all children be raised in a loving home by their own biological or adopted parents who are a married mother and father and all of whom are clustered within a larger nurturing extended family and community of trust.)
We will call a monastery-like hub an “embassy”, for our purpose it represents a sort of outpost and diplomatic mission representing the new civilization in the midst of a dying old civilization and its chaotic environment. These embassies are basically self-contained, materially self-sustaining, and more or less autonomous safe havens operated by some order connected to a larger global network.
An embassy would likely consist of a core community of people who share the same basic beliefs, values, and convictions and the same mission, both to preserve the elements of advanced culture in a barbaric environment and to provide shelter and aid to internal refugees or other refugees in a time of acute crisis. For instance, an embassy of 120 families and attached single adults might be big enough to shelter as many as 1200 families and attached single adults in a major crisis but may at any given time have twice as many refugees on site as residents.
As with many instances where we write about modern adaptations of ancient institutions and structures, the core element remains this thing we refer to as “organic cohesiveness.” The people who run and dwell in such embassies will need a strong religious and cultural homogeneity: they will need to identify with, in conviction and feeling, the same religious and cultural values and common standards as well as the same mission.
The larger communities which emerge around them, whether as in a physical town or just individuals who may subscribe to their emergency/crisis management and assurance services, may indeed embody pluralism. In fact, this is ideal. A closed community that is too homogeneous is bound to become insular and become a ‘Dead Sea” community.
Even our concept of an advanced culture is not a basis of extending aid pluralistic mutual respect. While it is indeed our conviction that this is the proper basis of culture, we are also convinced it must be strictly voluntary. We choose this culture, we do not impose it. We preserve it through our own freewill participation alone, our only demand from society being to let us worship and serve our God in peace.
But as to these embassies, unlike other forms of clustered housing we propose, their residents/managers must have a high degree of organic cohesiveness in order to fulfill their role and maintain unity without recourse to top-down control and rigid hierarchies. People working together in these embassies will become unified in action through a selection process aimed at identifying people who have the same core beliefs and values rather than through a hierarchical system of top-down control and coercion.
But the physical facilities must be capable of enclosing a larger population of refugees within a private area that can be secured in the event a mob or something like that makes an unruly appearance.
The proliferation of these embassies, by whatever name you want to call them, will ensure the greatest number of people safety in times of local catastrophic crisis. As noted, the circle of care is not limited to those who embrace the same religious and cultural beliefs and values. The circle of care is extended on the basis of a free and pluralistic sociocultural community of equals as our vision for the larger diverse society in which we live.
In legal terms, the only ways to create these embassies are through the mutual benefit corporation or a cooperative religious order. Eventually, one can hope, law catches up with that which is necessary and technically possible in our era. A legal structure to allow such embassies, again, by whatever name you prefer, is lacking, but legal structures used in combination are not.
If a group of Jewish, Christian, or other religious and/or sociocultural groups with inherent organic cohesiveness were to form a combine and build such an embassy they could serve themselves and their neighbors. We do not endorse race-based combines as the basis of these embassies because adopted beliefs and freewill participation transcend merely who your ancestors were or your skin color
Race-based combines of people may exacerbate tensions and lead to hostility. Also, organic cohesiveness is about the heart embracing similar things out of free will, it should be open to anyone on the basis of shared beliefs, values, and convictions, and only that.
Our basic proposition is that the modern adaptation of the monastery, what we call an embassy, will become a necessity in the coming decades. While the builders and managers, as well as permanent residents, of such embassies must have a strong organic cohesiveness, their circle of care is extended on the basis of a free and pluralistic society of equals.
