Restorative Justice: a Model of Cooperation

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Restorative Justice, what is it? What is it hyped to be, & what is it really? First let’s identify what it isn’t. Restorative Justice isn’t the school-to-prison pipeline. It isn’t continuing to use violence & force to reduce violence & force. It isn’t putting a bandage on the wages of violence & hoping for the best. It isn’t making the consequence an apology that won’t be taken seriously. It isn’t trying to keep violent kids in the classroom rather than letting the ‘justice system’ have their way with them. 

Greatly maligned by the media as another liberal bleeding-heart non-solution, restorative justice is a process in discovery, a concept being tested & evaluated. This is the essence of cooperation, that we don’t have a predetermined method for solving the problem, but that we seek alternative ways to reach the desired solution. It is about keeping kids out of the corrections system as much as possible. It is about finding alternative ways to help students learn to fit into society, finding other ways to deal with conflict & drama. It is about developing alternative consequences that build community, respect, & a sustainable relationship with others. The core values of restorative justice are consensus, cooperation, & compromise.

We don’t have a complete grasp of what restorative justice involves. We have developed ideas & working models, but the process of restorative justice is still in the developing stages. Most importantly, restorative justice seeks to provide a viable & useful alternative to what Michelle Alexander calls the "New Jim Crow", an unjust justice system that incarcerates far too many people for far too petty crimes. Crimes that might have been prevented by a successful restorative justice process.

 The basic process of restorative justice is the circle discussion, where every stakeholder in the situation has voice. Both perpetrator & victim have opportunities to speak to their concerns. Community members also share their needs & concerns. This is the starting place. Restorative justice needs to continue through concerns to acknowledging damage caused by the perpetrator & pain felt by the victim. The circle uses consensus to build consequences that reflect the values of the community to balance the imbalance caused by the violence. The consequences should be based in healing the rifts & damage to the community as well as the individuals. The consequences must have 'bite'. They must deplete & eliminate the desire to use violence to resolve conflict. The consequences must provide methods for dealing with conflict that don't involve violence. Christ's doctrine of patience & non-violence evoked in the phrase "turn the other cheek" shouldn't be the only offered method. Consequences must provide tangible methods & steps to lead to non-violent responses where the perpetrator has not been able to find those responses & implement them. The perpetrator must volunteer for the restorative justice as an alternative consequence to the traditional suspension or harsher. This choice must be seen by the perpetrator as their acceptance of the phases of restorative justice, not simply the circle activity where they might feign remorse.

Restorative justice falls down when the follow-through to make consequences real & holistic doesn’t occur. When practitioners don’t insure that the process’ steps have all been completed, then the desired goal of the process won't be achieved. Restorative justice practitioners tend to do well discussing the problems & hearing the voices of those involved & affected, but we don’t often incorporate systems to establish that the consequences & healing process progress to the desired end. We get busy with our lives, with the work of our pedagogy, with the multitude of other problems that we face. WE have to do better. We have to use cooperative process to do better. Find ways to spread the responsibility for making consequences real, community-building & holistic without being inconsequential enough that the perpetrator simply sees restorative justice as the easy way out.

With restorative justice, the desired solution must be a reduction of violence & community-based consequences for violent behavior that bring the offender back into the fold of a healthy (or convalescing) community. Ultimately, self-reliant individuals cooperate to build healthy, vibrant communities where they can produce & grow. This means that when we as a community of self-reliant individuals come together to find solutions to problems that we face, we do so with open minds to alternative & radical processes. We can’t do that if we simply rely on the methods of the past: suspension, corporal punishment, incarceration, & the ultimate consequence, capital punishment. While schools in struggling communities pursue a restorative justice to try to change student behavior, we as a society can’t only focus on the failures that occur in experimentation. When we see the damage done to students, we have to remember that incarceration & suspension provide ample evidence of damage to students as well. The current justice system of mass incarceration has an abysmal  track record. We need to find ways that students can be helped to fit into society. This is the complete opposite of the hive mentality that drives the corporate world to use spyware & big data to determine every action we take. Where the corporate model profits from a continual failure to really address violence & crime, we need to find solutions that benefit the whole society, not just the 'wise investors' of the corporate model.

Restorative justice is holistic, not quantifiable measurements. Cooperation doesn’t rely on quantification either. Self-reliant individuals rely on quality of life to evaluate their happiness & success, choosing to remove ourselves from any cooperative that no longer provides benefits to our quality of life. That choice is independent & not compelled by anything but our self-reflection.

Cooperation & Anarchy are NOT Ideology

 

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For me, anarchy isn’t a system, it’s a negation of the need for hierarchical systems. I may share concepts with either side of the right/left dialectic, but I don’t hold myself responsible to either side. I consider it a false dialectic that continues to divide humanity, prevents cooperation & perpetuates violent hierarchies in the name of progress. I’m accosted online by those who condemn my ideas as ‘socialistic’ or ‘libertarian’ or ‘fantasy’ from both sides of the dialectic. This is because we don’t share a consensus on certain ideas. The ideas of equality, justice & coercion often become the dividing points between myself & my detractors when I espouse one of them as part of an explanation of cooperation. For example when I said that socialism requires force, a self-proclaimed progressive suggested that force was “(a)nother stupid libertarian term with no meaning”. He went further to say that force was “(m)isused, misapplied and silly.” Ask the victims of Stalin’s 5 Year Plans if force was ‘misapplied and silly.” On the other side of the coin, I’ve had individuals call me a communist because I suggest that descendants of the founders of hierarchical corporations don’t deserve to amass a disproportionate share of the wealth generated by their employees. They won’t listen to the idea that in a cooperative organization, competition doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Any attempt at self-reliant individuals sharing the efforts & benefits of their cooperation is anathema to their ideology of capitalism. Again ask the people whose pensions have been eviscerated by the casino mentality of hedge funds managing those pension funds if capitalism trickles down. 

We often conflate grass-roots movements with top-down ideas. I overheard a teacher explaining communism as basically sharing with each other. This is grossly oversimplified. For one thing, communism as expounded by the major thinkers, Marx, Engels, Lenin, & Trotsky, is a top down process of installing a communist society on the current society by compulsion. That isn’t sharing. This is redistribution by force. Communism as portrayed by these ideologues demands submission to a state, to the over-rulers who will determine how & why the means & products of production will be distributed & expended. This is just another hierarchy usurping normal human activities for the benefit of those at the top of the hierarchy. Those who place themselves over others always do so in the name of humanity, equality & liberty, but the very nature of hierarchy prevents this from happening. If they want to be in charge, & they want to implement their policies onto a population, then they will use force to compel those who disagree with their policies. Otherwise they will lose power, & someone will usurp their position. No one listens when someone asks for voluntary efforts without being in consensus with the effort. The essence of a police force is to enforce the laws that some members of the public refuse to follow.

Capitalism is also an ideology with a strict dogma to follow. The dogma attempts to justify the abuses & inequities of the hierarchy by implying that those at the top deserve their distribution of the wealth because of their hard work & superior skills or that the meritocracy within capitalism provides opportunity for those willing to accept the challenge of the competition. Again, coercion is used to maintain the upper echelon's position through such non free market policies as copyright, patent & taxation. Just as in the communist ideology, there is a group of individuals who will define the free market, acceptable subsidies, & tax brackets. Those who hold monopoly on the monetary system will control how production & distribution occur. Microsoft build a monopoly by either subsuming creative new ideas or destroying the individuals who competed with Microsoft's products. Both methods used coercion to accomplish the mission. 

Those who oppose anarchistic methods immediately point out that if we don’t have enforcement of laws then everyone will start murdering everyone else. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. First of all in any cooperative community, there would be a broad consensus that murder is wrong & must be prevented & the perpetrators brought to justice. Those who didn’t agree with this consensus would not be members of the community. More to the point, the need for a higher authority to exact justice for murder isn’t a necessary conclusion to the question of how to prevent murder (or any other crime with broad consensus) & bring justice. Those who share the consensus can develop a process for establishing justice that rotates the responsibility, think of the jury of peers that the 6th & 7th Amendments provide. How this justice system would be established would be based on the cooperative communities consensus on their judicial & crime prevention/protection needs. Instead of a group of individuals getting together & writing laws or a incorporating document like a constitution & then implementing it onto the rest of the community, the community would build a consensus on what should be done & how to do it using cooperative methods & processes. No institution would be necessary to establish when self-reliant individuals actively engage in the process. This is why cooperative methods require self-reliant individuals. Hierarchies require uninformed or apathetic individuals who want to leave this hard work to others.

Here is the essential dilemma of an anarchist mentality trying to promote cooperation & minimal governance: idealists demand that they explain what the cooperative community would be & how it would provide various communal needs (security, justice, sustenance). Any response to that query given by the anarchist would simply be doing what other ideologies have done: create a system based on their ideas & then attempt to force it onto the community & ‘prove’ that it will work. That would make anarchy & cooperation simply another ideology. That is the opposite of the purpose of the self-reliant individual voluntarily cooperating with others to achieve goals that can’t be achieved alone. The self-reliant individual doesn’t need a hierarchy to develop cooperative communities. She develops these communities by cooperating with other self-reliant individuals voluntarily, equitably & consensually. There is no need for coercion in consensus. Ideologies & the hierarchies they build to enforce their ideas require coercion. If they had consensus, they wouldn’t need coercion. Anarchists don’t create imaginary utopias & then attempt to make those utopias a reality by force. They don’t think in terms of the end result, they pragmatically attempt to build consensus as broadly as possible & work within that consensus to achieve the goals of the consensus by shared effort & creativity. 

So an individual doesn’t build a cooperative by starting it himself & then convincing others to join his efforts. This will create a hierarchy that has the founder at the top or the founder’s original ideas instilled as a dogma to be perpetuated & enforced by an insider group. Instead the self-reliant individual identifies a need that he cannot accomplish alone. He seeks out others who share this need & builds a consensus about how to accomplish the goal of meeting this need & then how to implement this goal in a shared, egalitarian & voluntary manner.

Think of a road. Let’s say a community needs a road between their various domiciles & work locations. Individuals would get together as a group & determine how to build the road, what materials would be needed & how the community would acquire or produce these materials; how the community would distribute the labor & effort required to build & maintain the road & establish the rules around how the road can be used by consensus. Even if some individuals in the community don’t give consent to the process or refuse to participate, those who have consensus could still complete the project as long as they didn’t impact those outside the consensus (using land of those not in consensus). They might decide to charge those who don’t collaborate in the process, or they might decide that the benefit to those within the consensus outweighs the fact that those who didn’t participate still benefit from the process. Each of these decisions would be decided by consensus before any action was taken. The point of this little thought problem exercise is not to create a model cooperative community, but to show that through cooperative processes that include consensual & voluntary actions, a shared need can be addressed without requiring a hierarchy.

Ultimately cooperation & anarchy are processes. These processes are fluid, organic & dynamic. There is no utopia at the end of the process, just continued process as a community grows & evolves.

Time Allocation to Increase Self-Reliance

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Self-reliant individuals must divide their time effectively to become efficient producers. This is especially true of those of us, myself included, who have jobs that tax a great deal of our time. This necessary but futile (feudal) taxing of my time makes it more necessary that I organize my time outside employment efficiently. If I am going to get out of the need for employment to another, then I will have produce the alternative income source during my free time.

So another way of looking at productivity is how we portion our time. All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy. The same is true when we spend too much time on “research” or "learning". We may spend too much time in the company of others. The fact is we need all three. We need to produce, but we have to have down-time & learning time as well as time for collaboration. I for one spend too much time reading books & studying on the Internet. I believe that I could be happy being a monk in the Middle Ages reading & studying throughout the day, except that I’d probably get tired of the available reading material. When we have to divide our time between employment that isn’t production for ourselves & our free time that we work to enjoy, we have to plan our free time to maximize our needs. This taxing of our time to have income is why we remain dependent. Knowing how hard we work at our jobs to maintain them (don’t let me get started on the bureaucratic nightmare that nearly every job, public or private, demands), we can’t be blamed for spending our free time on pleasures. That is exactly why we should re-evaluate our ‘pleasures’. What is a pleasure? Is it really watching media on our television or on our computer? Is it really drinking & watching the seasonal sporting events? Is pleasure going out to restaurants, bars or clubs? It might be. I’m certainly not going to be the judge or jury on what we should value as pleasure. However I think we have to re-evaluate how we perceive the value of pleasure. The modern society has made life very easy for most people living in the so-called First World. Even the majority of the poor in the United States have access to food & shelter most of the time. What I don’t think we have is the necessary attitude to appreciate what we have. What do I mean by that? Well I think that we find pleasure in being numb on various levels. Pleasure for many of us means sitting and being entertained in one form or another. We don’t find pleasure in activities that might require effort. Oh we do sometimes. We take on projects around the house or keep our clothes, rooms, & kitchen clean. It’s always better to come home to a clean home than a cluttered mess. I know that there are various activities that people do to get out and enjoy their neighborhoods & cities, & some of these activities are valuable to the individuals as social & collaborate activities. Personally, because I won’t speak for anyone else, I don’t spend enough time producing when I’m not producing for my job. I’m trying to change that, & in my last post, I spoke about what production should mean outside employment. Here I want to speak about time apportionment. Namely that we need to divide our free time in ways that allow us to be more productive but still find the pleasure & downtime necessary to feel rested enough to go back to the grind the next day or next week. This division of time should produce some of the areas that I discussed last week. I see the division of time as being divided into three areas: research/learning; creation/production; & collaboration/celebration.

Learning & research are a necessary part of life. The teaching profession attempts more than anything else to develop our students into lifetime learners. We should all aspire to that goal. Autodidacts have it much easier with the Internet. We have so much information & knowledge available to us. This is why I call this sight The 21st Commons. The 21st Century Commons provides a place where we can learn & grow together through shared information & ideas. The Internet is making it more & more clear that sharing ideas, rather than copyrighting & occulting, them will not only benefit us more as fully self-reliant individuals but the hoarding of information for profit will continue to be more & more difficult to perpetrate. We need to spend time daily imbibing deeply in this river of knowledge & human possibility, this marketplace of ideas. We will benefit from joining in the commons of mankind & by contributing to it; we will return the benefit for others. Before I’m described as a ‘socialist, communistic freeloader", I want to point out that I mentioned benefiting & producing. I’m not saying that we should just give away everything we make & live on the benevolence of the Internet. First of all, good luck with that. Second, I’m promoting the ideas of self-reliance & cooperation, not some collectivist utopia. Self-reliance & cooperation aren’t an ideology that can be forced onto the masses. They are voluntary behaviors of free, independent individuals. Mostly though, we should enjoy the time we spend learning & researching. The quaffs of information & wisdom that we gulp down should give us some of the pleasure that will sustain us during the employment periods until we can become self-reliant.

The next third of our time should be spent producing. I’ve already discussed ways to be productive, but we have to recognize that our time away from the employment must be productive for a portion of the time. Why do I separate production from research & learning? Isn’t that a productive activity? No. It may lead to productivity, & it is a valuable use of our time, but it doesn’t produce tangible goods. I’m talking about tangible production here. This production should be focused around making ourselves more self-reliant. The ultimate goal of this production is to produce something that can sustain our lives without continuing to go to the daily grind. So while it may be some of the more basic production of clothing, food, & shelter, it should eventually be about producing our passions. This is the production that I’m doing here. I don’t know right now where or how my writing will lead to producing an income stream that will allow me to be more independent but this productivity aims for that target. I’m also producing a better domicile & hopefully a functioning, if limited garden. I have plans as big as Alaska for my tiny backyard, but I’m made realistic by my spouse about what I can accomplish with the free time that I have (mostly by the Honey Dew List & an 1/8th of an acre lot). Again as we produce what will make us more self-reliant, we have to take pleasure in these gains. I know that I get great pleasure from watching my garden & home bloom into my big as Alaska dreams.The ultimate goal of our productive time must be to become completely self-reliant & capable of walking away from the feudal employment that continues to swallow more & more of our life. Once we can be truly self-reliant, this division of time becomes even easier to accomplish & more fruitful for ourselves & our loved ones.

The final third of our time should be in collaboration & celebration with others. Collaborate by discussing what we’ve learned today during our learning time with our spouse & friends. Hear what they’ve accomplished, & if they can’t provide any ideas outside of their work, challenge them to do so. Most importantly, celebrate the time with those you care about. This is the third that I probably don’t practice as fully as the other two. In fact if I tallied my time, I‘d probably find that I spend way too much time researching & reading. Yet a large part of learning & retaining that learning requires that we communicate that information to others. If I spend a bit of time trying to explain what I’ve just learned to my friends or loved ones, I'm more likely to retain that information permanently. The shared information & wisdom that we gain in this collaboration/celebration time grows exponentially through our community of friends & loved ones. Celebrate with friends by having gatherings that seek to find ways to be more independent & cooperative together. Do our friends share our dreams & desires for more self-reliant independence? We must nurture that relationship through cooperation. We should collaborate & cooperate with people that we trust & love. That makes cooperation less risky & more enjoyable. Find ways to celebrate our productivity together, to share our abundance. As we become more prolific, we must share our abundance & take pleasure in the enjoyment of our abundance with others. Sharing comes from strength & self-reliance. We can celebrate our independence & self-reliance as we grow with our cooperative community that we build.

There is no reason that some of these time allotments can't be combined in meaningful ways. For instance our collaboration time might be spent learning together or producing something together. The thrill of working with friends on a shared project provides joy & becomes the impetus to cooperate again. The cooperative spirit flows naturally from self-reliance. People who feel self-reliant seek the opportunity to cooperate on projects that they can't do alone. We need to dispel our fears that cooperation will lead to one side or the other taking advantage. A self-reliant individual doesn't fear cooperation, because they know that they have voluntarily entered into the process & can leave that process at any time that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits & a resolution of that imbalance can't be found with the cooperating group or individual. Every cooperative activity has risk, just as life has risk. We shouldn't be afraid to cooperate, because when we cooperate with those whom we love & treasure, we build lasting & vital relationships that make us stronger, wiser & better humans. Rather than thinking that cooperation is something new, we need to recognize that cooperation is an innate part of the human spirit. Community is the result of cooperation with our friends & family. Cooperative communities aren't new, they've simply been usurped by hierarchies that have taken them into places that devalued or denied the natural human trait of cooperation.

Self-Reliant Production

“Master of None” by Beach House

Becoming self-reliant means becoming a producer. We must produce on this earth again, in order to remain self-reliant. Most of us, myself included, don't produce as self-reliant individuals & certainly don't produce enough. One of the vital ways that we contribute to our self-reliance is by producing. 

Most of us produce at our jobs in some manner, but a job is not self-reliant production. It is production for the benefit of the employer. As a teacher, I produce lesson plans, worksheets, lectures, mini-lessons, assessments for the benefit of my employer. My students receive these productions, & they produce work in response (homework, essays, texts). However, the employer benefits the most from this. Most importantly, other than the wage that I receive, my production does nothing for my self-reliance. Once my employer no longer pays for my production, I have few resources to remain self-reliant.

So how do we produce in ways that provide self-reliance? First the majority of our production should be primarily for our personal benefit. We should think of our production in terms of what we need to remain self-reliant. How do we do this?

The first area where we should focus production would be our selves. Mentally & physically. We need to produce human beings prepared to meet all challenges. Productive lives need bodies that can accomplish necessary physical tasks & minds that can create beyond ourselves. This means exercising our minds & bodies daily.

Providing security for ourselves, our family & our property is next. A self-reliant individual will produce the necessary security by becoming proficient in self-defense & constantly upgrading the security defenses of our home (windows, doors, safe-rooms, emergency supplies, surveillance, weapons, etc.). The best security is one that is tested constantly. Try to break into your home. How challenging is it? If you can find ways to enter, so can a perpetrator. Security should defend against blood-sucking zombie attacks. We should produce plans for a variety of emergencies & contingencies based on various situations. Make sure that all members of our family know the plan. Prepare emergency packs that can be loaded into the car or carried on the back in truly dire situations. Keep emergency supplies in our safe room. Develop alternative energy sources beginning with a generator & storage batteries.

Produce food to supply our family's nutritional needs. If we have garden space, we must maximize what we can grow. Use inside planters as well to produce herbs & greens. Grow fruits & vegetables that can be canned or pickled. Learn to pickle, ferment, dry, & smoke foods for long term storage. Build increased storage space. Make relationships with local farms & animal husbandry to get the foodstuffs that we can't grow ourselves.

Repair clothing rather than just throw it out. Learn to knit & crochet, sew & stitch to make our own clothes. Again find local producers that provide the raw materials for clothing & house fabric needs. Refurbish our own furniture.

Learn to be a plumber & an electrician. Learn basic carpentry skills. When our house needs repairs learn to do it ourselves with our own labor. Every task that we take on ourselves rather than hiring 'professionals' improves our self-reliance & builds self-confidence in our ability to accomplish every challenge presented. Learn how to repair electronics ourselves rather than just throwing away the old electronics & buying new ones. Learn to write programs on computers.

Find a way to produce our passions into tangible goods as additional income initially & expand it to establish truly self-reliant income. The more self-reliant we have become in the areas listed above before we attain self-reliant income, the less income we'll actually have to produce. For many of us, we have never considered our passions as realistic means toward self-reliance, but that is because we have been sold the idea that self-reliance comes from a steady income stream first, rather than being self-reliant to produce a steady income stream. As long as we place the income first, the effort to attain self-reliance will be dependent on that stream of income.

As long as we are expending our energy to produce for the benefit of others in order to gain a steady income stream, we will be dependent & will only have superficial self-reliance. In order to imagine a more just & egalitarian society, we must promote self-reliance rather than dependence on corporate or government jobs. We must begin to produce for ourselves rather than for others.

I've spent a career working for the government & corporations. I've come to the realization that I can't continue this career & be self-reliant. So I intend to implement & explore each of these areas to produce increased self-reliance. The long-term goal is to be self-reliant & have a steady self-generated income stream rather than continue to depend on others for that income. It isn't an overnight process, & I don't expect to be self-reliant by next week or even next year. I do expect to accomplish it. Before I can be a cooperative individual, I have to be a self-reliant individual. I hope you'll join me in this journey toward self-reliance. We can cooperate & share ideas on how to be more self-reliant & establish a more cooperative way to co-exist than the competitive zero-sum game that society promotes.

Self-Reliance & the Trivium

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One of the first ways that we can become more self-reliant is honing our critical thinking skills & ability to decipher others ideas while communicating our own clearly. Self-reliant individuals are autodidacts who never give up the love of learning. Learning remains our best skill, and we must constantly strive to learn better & faster. The Internet provides so many paths to learning. I’ve used YouTube.com to learn how to do many of the repairs that I’ve done myself on my home. It’s amazing, & I’ve been able to save money by doing it myself, besides the sense of confidence that I’ve gained once I know how to make repairs that would cost a fortune if I hired a contractor to complete them. As an educator, I’ve spent my career trying to teach students to develop the skills necessary to be life-time learners with varying degrees of success. I’ve developed several skill sets that they need to learn & apply in order to become autodidactic. Self-reliance demands that we practice learning throughout our lives, & I want to share some of the skills & methods that I’ve assembled from a variety of sources to help people learn adeptly. 

  

"Blooms rose" by K. Aainsqatsi - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

First, let’s understand the path of learning through what’s known in education as Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. This taxonomy portrays a hierarchy of learning from the most basic to the most complex. The path begins with basic ‘knowledge’ followed by ‘comprehension’, ‘application’, ‘analysis’, ‘synthesis’, & ‘evaluation’. This stair-step progression helps to develop a process of learning that should be applied to any learning endeavor. Going from terminology & information to utilizing the information, analyzing the information then creating an interpretation of that information & finally evaluating the information & your interpretation. Educators strive to apply each of these levels of cognition to their lessons & longer plans. It is a process that self-reliant individuals should constantly apply to their learning. If we aren’t learning & evaluating our learning, we aren’t progressing. Self-reliant individuals don’t become complacent with their position, they constantly seek progress (Does that make us progressives?). This is how I interpret Nietzsche’s call for overcoming. We must overcome what we are in order to become what we can be. Humanity must overcome its limitations by a constant effort to progress & not retard that progress. I digress.

While Bloom’s taxonomy has a Wikipedia page that explains it more fully, I want to direct your attention to another method of learning that has been developed quite fully by Gene Odening & Jan Irvin on a website called gnosticmedia. This method is called the Trivium, & it places Bloom’s taxonomy into three categories that autodidacts can use to hone & apply their learning skills. The Trivium applies three levels of thinking: Grammar, Logic, & Rhetoric. Tying these levels to Bloom’s taxonomy means that Grammar represents the knowledge & comprehension levels, Logic is the application & analysis levels, & rhetoric is the synthesis & evaluation levels.
 

Grammar isn’t your English teacher correcting your syntax & usage. Grammar in the concept of the Trivium refers to the first four words of the age-old comprehension questions that teachers use: the "5w’s & h". Grammar focuses on the who, the what, the when, & the where. In the Trivium, we cannot progress until we know & comprehend these. Grammar is the terminology, the facts, the details & the quotes that we are studying. This is the first two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

 Logic refers to the next two levels of the taxonomy: application & analysis. Here the learner takes the Grammar & applies that next "w" question, Why? by applying the knowledge to experience & analyzing its value. Why do we need this knowledge? Why does the source put this knowledge out there? 

Rhetoric applies the next two levels through the how question. How doe this compare to my experience? How can I use this knowledge? How does the source use this knowledge? How well or accurately am I portraying the knowledge? How accurately does the source apply this knowledge? This is the highest levels of learning, & where we actually build our learning into wisdom. I created a chart for my students to help them analyze literature, although I use different terms for Grammar, Logic & Rhetoric:

Proficiency Chart by J K Van Nort is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Another way of seeing the Trivium is to think of the Grammar as absorbing information verbatim, then Logic as analyzing that information for accuracy, fallacious thoughts, & utility, then Rhetoric as evaluating & communicating that information to others. As we say in the education profession: the best way to learn something is to have to teach it to others. A self-reliant individual isn’t afraid to communicate their learning to others. This is why ultimately self-reliant individuals cooperate readily & successfully. How can I make such a bold assumption. Well let’s put the Trivium to work on this rhetoric:

A self-reliant individual isn’t afraid to communicate their learning to others. This is why ultimately self-reliant individuals cooperate readily & successfully. 

I’d begin by ensuring that I understand completely all the terms in the statement. Words that need agreement on the definition should be comprehended first. The autodidact would probably identify ‘self-reliant’, ‘individual’, & ‘cooperate’ as words that might be defined differently by different people. So self-reliance - The capacity to rely on one's own capabilities, and to manage one's own affairs; independence not to be dependent; cooperate - Association for mutual benefit, such as for purposes of production or purchase; & individual - A person considered alone, rather than as belonging to a group of people

The basic argument that I comprehend is that independent people (who?) don’t fear sharing their learning (what?) with others which implies that independent people associate for mutual benefit better (when? & where?). So I’ve done my Grammar, I’ve ensured that I have completely comprehended the ‘knowledge’ & ‘information’ in the statement.

Next I’m going to apply logic to the argument. Why does the statement make the claim that self-reliant individuals cooperate better? The author attempts to demonstrate that independence & autonomy lead to cooperation. His agenda is to convince others that self-reliance produces opportunities for cooperation. Why does he think this? First he sees someone with self-reliance as independent & capable, who won’t be harmed by cooperation significantly. Why is he making this argument? He’s making the argument to convince others that cooperation is possible between independent people, & in fact he’s arguing that self-reliant individuals make the best individuals in associations for mutual benefit. Why can he make that claim? He claims that self-reliance makes one less susceptible to being violated, & he also claims that independent people tend to cooperate more frequently & successfully. Why would I disagree with this statement? Well, I know that independent people can still be fooled or harmed by others. I also know that just because one is independent, it doesn’t mean that they will be willing to cooperate. They may very well seek to remain alone & without involving themselves in any associations with others. This doesn’t negate the statement; the statement remains possible & even probable when we consider that self-reliant individuals would likely have the confidence to associate with other self-reliant individuals to accomplish what they cannot accomplish alone.

The third step of the Trivium is rhetoric, where we ask the question how? How does this relate to the world around me? I know that cooperation is not an easy process, & that if I were personally going to create associations for mutual benefit, I would want to pick the people with whom I associated rather than just associate with anyone. How would this work? Well, let’s say that I wanted to develop a business to repair & re-purpose items that I’ve found. I might start the business by myself, then slowly adding individuals who want to do the same thing, build a cooperative that works together for mutual benefit. The association could determine how one becomes a member of the cooperative, & how the mutually shared tools & supplies are maintained & replaced or expanded. How would the cooperative remove members who didn’t fulfill or didn’t participate according to cooperative guidelines? The cooperative would have to establish rules for membership that must be fulfilled or the membership could be revoked. If a member didn’t participate according to the rules but made it difficult to remove him, then the whole association could be disbanded & the shared items distributed according to who provided them or in an equitable manner. Then a new cooperative could be established that didn’t include the non-cooperative member. How valuable is associating with other self-reliant individuals for mutual benefit? I’d value it highly because it offers ways to accomplish more than I could by myself. How should I go about engaging in cooperative associations? Carefully & with the full knowledge that I have to be actively engaged in the process at all levels to ensure that my concerns & interests are protected. That active engagement is what makes me a self-reliant individual, & if I associate with other self-reliant individuals, I am less likely to be abused by cooperating.

As you can see, this process is simply to gain mastery of the information that has been studied. The purpose of the Trivium isn’t to provide a fool-proof method for learning as much as a process for learning that increases the ability of the individual to determine the value & utility of information. The Trivium method can be applied to any learning effort. If I want to learn how to program computers, I’d follow the same procedure. This means that when I’m learning something new, I need to always follow the same procedure. The consistency of applying the Trivium process will make the process more natural for the individual & increase the ability of the individual to learn assuredly & efficiently. The Trivium should be applied to anything we decide to add to our understanding of the world. If we are shopping for siding for our house, we should apply the Trivium process to establish the best siding, the best contractor to install the siding, whether siding is our best option, whether we could install the siding ourselves, how much value would siding provide to our house, how much will it insulate our home? If we are going to answer these questions, we must use every level of the Trivium to learn about siding & make an informed & educated decision. This is the value & utility of the Trivium: to provide the self-reliant individual with the means to educate themselves on whatever area they deem necessary to function as a self-reliant individual. Self-reliance demands that we continuously educate ourselves on the world around us, & the Trivium is an excellent tool to accomplish that demand.

Non-aggression & Cooperation (Anethema to the Collectivist)

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A system of cooperation needs to follow the ways that people already cooperate, Saul Alinsky’s meeting people where they are. Any system of cooperation must find ways to incorporate cooperation into everyday life without making it into a doctrine. There is no doctrine in cooperation, there is only process. The process is not fixed as doctrine is fixed. Process is organic & malleable. 

When I study systems by their organization, I find that organic systems come closest to portraying human cooperation. Bear with my analogy here: A plant sends out feelers & branches in multiple directions. When those feelers find sunlight or space or whatever the plant seeks, the feeler prospers & grows. When it finds an impediment or an obstacle, it either stops movement or changes direction. Either result is based on the needs of the plant. Now before this starts to look like collectivism, the organic structure is a model of cooperation based on a consensus, so the root & main trunk of the plant in the organic structure represent the consensus. The feelers are individuals or small groups who push the consensus to where it needs to go. If the consensus is that we need to have better security, then each feeler is seeking the places that need to be protected. If the consensus is to build a barter system that provides needs to individuals, then the feelers are attempts to create needed commodities for the consensus to barter & exchange. The idea or the consensus must be continuously part of all the members of the organic cooperative, their actions are determined by the consensus. Anything they do outside the consensus is based on the self-reliant individual’s volition. It doesn’t reflect on the consensus unless it violates or goes against the consensus. 

So for instance in the case of the bartering cooperative, individual volunteers can barter within the cooperative but also sell or trade outside the cooperative as well. They cannot be coerced into bartering only with the cooperative. They can volunteer to do so, but they can not be compelled. If coercion is used, cooperation has vanished. 

This is the gist: cooperation only exists voluntarily between self-reliant individuals. Cooperation cannot be coerced. That would be turning cooperation into collectivism. That is not the nature of cooperation. Cooperation is a natural human function that negates the need for coercion & force. When people speak of eliminating the state, they shouldn’t envision a new hierarchy. Instead, anarchists envision cooperation. The building of cooperation comes through consensus. A consensus is only as large as its constituency. If consensus is only between two people, that is the extent of its constituency. No coercion can force another person to join the consensus in good faith. Anytime someone attempts to claim the authority to coerce another, they have committed a crime against humanity (I don't use that term lightly. The claim of authority has always been at the center of the worst crimes against humanity, & those crimes would not have been committed without the claim to authority). As equals, we cannot claim authority over another. Because the moment that we claim that authority, we have to use coercion & force to hold that authority. This violates the basic premise that we all have equal rights to life & liberty. 

What seems like a given - this basic premise of equal right to life & liberty - is not a consensus. Those who promote collectivism do not concede this basic premise. They are always willing to use force to compel others to their beliefs. This isn’t cooperation. Cooperation isn’t an ideology, it is a process. Cooperation is a human action that requires empathy, imagination, communication & shared values. Consensus develops the shared values. Only the values that have consensus can be part of any cooperative effort. The empathy required for cooperation is the ability to see one’s self in others. By doing so, an individual can imagine opportunities to share work, play, creation, anything, once they can empathize with another individual. Without empathy, cooperation is a non-starter & collectivism finds the ground to purchase. Let me phrase that another way: without empathy, it is easy to seek collectivist means to achieve one’s ends. When we don’t feel empathy for others, we can do some really horrendous acts in the name of doing good. This is why Jesus’ command to love your enemy as yourself is a cooperative statement & not a collectivist statement. With empathy, we can find ways to work together in cooperation rather than coercion.

We need imagination in cooperation because imagination leads to the new ideas that can become the advances that benefit all. Imagination comes in many guises & generally creates both innovative & mundane ideas. Some make life better, some simply provide entertainment. Some imagination leads to collectivism, which inherently leads to violence, once the individual has determined that their imagined idea should be put into place by force.

Individuals have violent imaginations. What needs to occur for those within proximity of that individual is to not build consensus with this violence except the consensus that violent imagination must remain in the abstract & never become actionable. With empathy & imagination, cooperative individuals may find ways to build consensus with even someone who has violent tendencies & channel those tendencies into other arenas. Violence has a source. At the heart of violence is the nature of the world we inhabit. Violence is perpetrated by larger creatures onto smaller creatures to fulfill dietary needs. There is no end to violence. There is only purposing of violence. How do we purpose violence into positive needs? Hunting for food is one. Sports is another. Video games could be an outlet for violence, but an outlet isn’t necessarily a positive outcome. Violence is not self-defense, but violence can be channeled toward self-defense through martial arts that practice the martial art in non-aggressive methods. So there are ways to channel violence into self-defense & non-aggression. Do I need to explain here that non-aggression is not pacifism. Non-aggression incorporates self-defense. Self-defense is not violence. Collectivists always blur the lines between violence & self-defense to perpetrate war. The real issue is preventing violence from being a means to accomplish agendas that demand coercion & compulsory acceptance. Cooperatives have agendas (by consensus only), but these agendas focus on the needs of the volunteers of the cooperative & never seek to force these agendas on anyone, especially people who don’t share the consensus of the cooperative volunteers. In the collective mentality, the agenda is always to promote those at the top & enforce their ideas on the rest. In opposition to the collectivist, cooperation requires a non-aggression stance.

The United States has fought multiple wars claiming to fight for democracy & freedom. As these wars clearly demonstrate, violence & force will never bring democracy or freedom to others. War will continue to provide the excuses for limiting our freedoms. War will continue to degrade the limited democracy we now have. Aggression will never lead to democratic societies & will never extend freedom. Only through non-aggression can society become democratic & free.

The War on Imagination

This work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less.

“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it” Diane di Prima.

The relationship between cooperation & imagination runs deep. Imagination creates possibility allowing humans to hope & dream. Imagination introduces empathy, allowing humans to recognize themselves in others. Imagination produces innovation which gives humans the ability to work their way out of their problems. Imagination enlivens communication that builds connections between individual dreams & hopes. Imagination visualizes communities in positive, productive networks that share responsibilities & cooperative actions. Imagination allows self-reliance in the individual without compromising their membership in the family of man. Without imagination, man is an island, alone in a sea of indifference.

So when Ms. di Prima says that the war on imagination is the most important war, I have to agree. I have this quote posted front & center of my classroom because I fight this war daily. The imagination is under attack by the system-in-place that controls the majority. The system-in-place sees imagination as uniquely under its control & doesn’t want imagination cropping up in places that where it might question or deny the systems authority to control. This system must weed out the imagination where it sprouts in the orderly garden. If the system can’t eliminate alternative imagination, the system must co-opt it, corrupting it before it can flower into revolution.

Who comprises this system-in-place? Everyone & no one. This system continues because the imagination to see an alternative system or process being possible doesn't have mass exposure. When imagination envisions alternate ways of interacting as humans, the herd criminalizes those ideas. Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that “He who seeks may easily become lost himself. It is a crime to go apart & be alone. Thus speaks the herd.” That quote has always meant for me that the herd denounces anything that doesn’t compute in the herd mind. The herd will always seek to denounce those who find ways to travel outside the herd. Fear & complacency, two potent weapons against the imagination, reign in the herd, acting as sheep dogs to keep the flock together. Yet, even for those who do attempt to think outside the box, Nietzsche also points out that the herd’s voice still rings in their ears, & they must be constantly on guard themselves of these weapons in the war on imagination: what if I’m not accepted? what if people denounce me? what if I’m wrong? what if I’m exiled from humanity by my thoughts?

Plato’s analogy of the cave offers an image of that individual who ‘seeks to go apart’ when the individual who has been in the cave watching the images on the wall finds his way out of the cave & into the sunlight. In the sunlight, he finds a whole new world, one which isn’t simply flickering shadows across a darkened wall. He must ask himself: do I stay here & enjoy this new found place? or do I go back & bring others with me? Plato’s character returns & like the herd, those whom he seeks to enlighten, rebuke & eventually kill him. This is not a positive way to think about imagination being shared with others.

However, Socrates, who is often equated as the lonely seeker of the sunlight & was executed by the Athenians for misguiding the youth, created beyond himself & inseminated the Greek philosophy that is a benchmark of western civilization. We are all part of the herd, living in the world of humanity. We must be willing to risk imagining alternative ways of living together in peace & cooperation. We must accept the “slings & arrows of outrageous fortune” by empathizing with our fellow humans & seeking to communicate alternatives that don’t attempt to coerce others to accept. We must strive to be self-reliant without being misanthropes. We must imagine that others seek this self-reliance & peaceful cooperation as much as we do. We need to nurture collaboration between other self-reliant individuals. We need to recognize failure to communicate as merely a lesson in how to improve that communication so that we can build an alternative to the competitive, materialistic & nihilistic system that currently controls the way humans interact. Instead of pointing fingers at those whom we believe control the system, we need to point to those who find alternative ways to be productive & self-reliant without harming those around them. We need to model self-reliance by constantly seeking to be more self-reliant, & we need to model cooperation by not being afraid to cooperate with others to produce what we cannot produce alone. The fear of being cheated or disadvantaged by our cooperation must be overcome by attempts to develop ways to minimize those risks rather than denying that self-reliant voluntary cooperation can be benevolent & equitable. Possibly devolving into sloganeering, I reference the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine” where he simply asks people to imagine something other than what is. If enough imagine a better way to live together in peace, we stand a chance of getting out from under the system-in-place.

The war on imagination seeks to maintain the status quo. We must be the forces of change that imagine the possible & work to make it the probable until it can be the reality.