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Is the Left still Liberal?

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various views depending on their understanding of these principles. However, they generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.
-Wikipedia

For decades in America, the political left, liberals, and Democrats were roughly synonymous, but that hasn’t always been the case. The following is taken and lightly condensed from Balaji Srivanasan’s most excellent The Network State:

Most Americans know vaguely that the Republican and Democrat parties “switched sides,” that Republicans were on the left in 1865 and on the right by 1965, but not exactly how that happened.

How did the GOP move from the “Radical Republicans” of Lincoln’s time, to the conservative Republicans of mid-century, to the proletarian truckers of the post-Trump party? And how did Democrats go from secessionist Confederates to anti-anti-communist liberals to woke capitalists?

Let’s warp back to 1865. Immediately after the Civil War, the Republicans had total moral authority — and total command of the country. During the process of Reconstruction and what followed, they turned that moral authority into economic authority, and became rich by the late 1800s. After all, you wouldn’t want to have a Confederate-sympathizing Democrat traitor as head of your railroad company, would you?

Gradually, the Democrats began repositioning from the party of the South to the party of the poor. A major moment was William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896. Another huge move was FDR’s re-election in 1936, when black voters shifted 50 points from Republican to Democrat, though they still voted Republican at the municipal level. The wrap up was in 1965 when black voters moved another 10-15 points towards Democrats, though the civil rights era was really just the culmination of a multi-decadal trend.

After 1965 the Democrats had complete moral authority. And over the next 50 years, from 1965-2015, the Democrats converted their moral authority into economic authority. You wouldn’t want a Republican bigot as CEO of your tech company, would you?

Now that cycle has reached its zenith, and a critical mass of high income and status positions in the US are held by Democrats. Some stats and graphs will show the story. Democrats have:

97% of journalists’ political donations
98% of Twitter employees’ political donations
>91% of professors in the top US universities
26 out of 27 of the richest congressional districts
>77% of political donations from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google

Meanwhile, the Republicans have by many measures become the party of the economic and cultural proletariat. There are of course exceptions like the Supreme Court and state legislatures which are majority Republican, but see this chart from the Brookings Institute, which shows that >70% of US GDP is now in Democrat counties. See also this set of graphs from 2019, and that’s before the money printing and small business destruction that occurred during COVID. The dominance is even more total when one thinks about cultural institutions.98 What’s the Republican Harvard — is it Bob Jones University? What’s the Republican Hollywood — some guys on 4chan making memes?

So, Democrats have become the party of the ruling class, of the establishment. And the Republicans are repositioning as the party of the proles, of the revolutionary class. This is why you see Democrats doing things like:

tearing up over the Capitol six months after tearing down George Washington
denouncing free speech
setting up disinformation offices
shifting from investigating the government to “investigating” the citizenry
putting Pride flags on attack helicopters
advocating for corporations to fire people at will
defending deplatforming as a private property right
embracing the national security establishment
allocating two billion dollars for the Capitol Police
approving 40 billion dollars for war

It’s like the quote from Dune: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” Now that the Democrats are strong, they are acting like rightists. And now that the Republicans are weak, you see them acting like leftists:

criticizing America’s imperial influence in the world
opposing war and military aid
not trusting the FBI or the police
expressing qualified sympathy for America’s current rivals
talking positively about unions
introducing anti-discrimination laws to protect Republicans
lobbying for free speech

This explains the weird flip-flops of American politics over the last few years. We’re in a realigning time where many institutional things are flipping from blue to red and back before finally going bright blue or red. Free speech is now coded red, while the FBI is now blue. Because Democrats are the ruling class now.

Note that this isn’t an endorsement of either side, just an observation that two ultra-long-timeframe sine and cosine waves have now shifted into the opposite relative phase. The parties that many identify with and implicitly think of as constant were not constant. The radical Republicans attained socioeconomic power and their defense of this order made them conservative; the reactionary Democrats lost socioeconomic power and gradually repositioned as revolutionary. Now they’re flipping again.

This doesn’t mean everything is flipping, of course. Democrats are still pro-choice, Republicans still pro-life. Republicans still have an institution or two, like the Supreme Court and some states. Just as Democrats after the Civil War were very weak, but not eradicated, and able to serve as spoilers.

However, the two parties have flipped on all the institutional bits, even if many Republicans maintain the Monty-Python-like pretense that the conservative America of their youth has just suffered a flesh wound, and many Democrats maintain the Soviet-like pretense that the ruling class is still a revolutionary party. Mexico has a great name for this kind of thing, the PRI or “institutional revolutionary party,” but there’s a more familiar metaphor: the startup.

A successful startup wants to think it’s still the scrappy underdog, because that’s good for recruiting and morale. But now the Democrats are no longer a startup. The party has completed a 155 year arc from the defeated faction in the Civil War to America’s ruling class.

There’s a Ship of Theseus aspect to this, though. All the parts got swapped out, and the parties switched sides, but somehow the triumphant Democrat coalition of 2021 ended up geographically and demographically similar to the Republican lineup of 1865: Northeastern-centric liberals arrayed against conservative Southerners in the name of defending minorities.

At the surface level, the symbols remain intact: Democrats and Republicans still use the same logos, just like the Chinese Communist Party has kept the hammer and sickle more than 40 years after Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist revolution. On a policy level, as noted, not everything has flipped: Democrats remain pro-choice, Republicans remain pro-life. But on an ideological level, that’s worth a bit of discussion.

Certain kinds of people are born revolutionaries. So when the Democrats flipped over from revolutionary class to ruling class, when they shifted from (say) “defunding the police” to funding the Capitol Police, the born revolutionaries got off the bus. It’s not necessarily any one issue like the police, or military, or COVID restrictions, or regulations – the trigger is different for each person – but the common theme is that the born revolutionary just has a problem with what they perceive as irrational authority.

Visualize the startup founder who just cannot adjust to a big company after an acquisition, or the writer who just refuses to hold back a story because of his editor’s political demurrals. Born revolutionaries of this stripe include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and many Substackers and tech founders. They just can’t bend to the establishment. But they also have real disagreements with each other, which is why they’re independents, and why they can’t mouth a party line. So the born revolutionary is really far more anti-establishment, and hence today anti-Democrat, than pro-Republican. Many of the most accomplished in tech and media share this characteristic – they don’t want to listen to authority because they think they know better, and in their case they often actually do. They’re fundamentally insubordinate and disobedient, rule breakers and novelty seekers, ideological rather than tribal, founders rather than followers — and thus sand in the gears of any establishment.

Other kinds of people are ideologically predisposed in the opposite direction, to what some might call “imperialism” and others could call “national greatness.” As the Republicans fully flipped over from ruling class to revolutionary class, and went from organizing the invasion of Iraq to disorganizedly invading the Capitol, the neocon types like David Frum and Liz Cheney switched sides. In our tech analogy, these are the big company executives who only join a company once it has 1000+ people and leave out the back when the writing is on the wall. They’ll take less upside in return for less downside, and are more focused on guaranteed salary and prestige. They’re cyclical, as opposed to counter-cyclical like the revolutionaries. They follow the school-of-fish strategy, going with the crowd at all times. And in this context, their animating characteristic is not so much that they’re “pro-Democrat” but that they’re anti-revolutionary. Much of the national security state and military establishment is also like this; they are fundamentally rule-followers, institutional loyalists, and top-down in their thinking.

So that means that right now, immediately after the American realignment, we see all four types: (a) revolutionary class Democrats who still think of their party as the underdog, (b) ruling class Republicans who similarly (as David Reaboi would put it) “don’t know what time it is,” (c) revolutionary anti-establishment types like Greenwald, and (d) ruling class anti-revolutionaries like Frum and Cheney.

Over time, if history is any guide, the independent thinkers will move away from the ruling class to the revolutionary class, while a much larger group of herd-minded followers will join the ruling class. Returning to our tech analogy, think about how a few of the most independent-minded people have left Google, while many more risk-averse people have joined it. At Google, there isn’t much of the early startup spirit left, but there is a paycheck and stability. That’s similar to the dynamic that characterizes the Democrats in their formal role as America’s ruling class: they largely control the establishment, but they’re losing the talent.

Two factions consistently arise because coalition-forming behavior is game-theoretically optimal. That is, when fighting over any scarce resource, if one group teams up and the other doesn’t, the first group tends to win.

This is a fundamental reason why humans tend to consolidate into two factions that fight each other over scarce resources till one wins. The winning team enjoys a brief honeymoon, after which it usually then breaks up internally into left and right factions again, and the battle begins anew. After the French Revolution, factions famously arose. After World War 2, the once-allied US and USSR went to Cold War. And after the end of the Cold War, the victorious US faction broke down into internal hyperpolarization. A strong leader might keep this from happening for a while, but the breakdown of a victorious side into left and right factions is almost a law of societal physics.

-Balaji Srivanasan

Balaji argues that rather than Left and Right, a far more useful lens to understand the two sides of the culture war are Revolutionary Tribe vs. Dominant Tribe.

The revolutionary tactic is to delegitimize the existing order, argue it is unjust, and angle for redistributing the scarce resource (power, money, status, land), while the dominant tactic is to argue that the current order is fair, that the revolutionaries are causing chaos, and that the ensuing conflict will destroy the scarce resource and not simply redistribute it.

But when the revolutionary tribe wins out over the dominant tribe they become the dominant tribe and adopt dominant tactics, forcing the losing now revolutionary tribe to adopt revolutionary tactics.

Repeating the important distinction that the tribes don’t flip on every last issue – Democrats are still pro-choice and Republicans are still pro-life – over the last ten years what was the Left has secured its position as the dominant political tribe in America and has adopted increasingly authoritarian tactics and thus looks increasingly Right-like. Likewise the Right has become increasingly more liberal.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the issue of Free Speech, which is now firmly coded Red, and I shall take up the issue of Free Speech in the Age of Social Media in another post.

I share all of this because I think accuracy of language is important. I think it is very important for Leftists who now espouse authoritarian tactics and ideology to be confronted with the fact that in doing so they are no longer liberals. I want to reclaim the label “liberal” for actual liberalism.

Furthermore, and most importantly, this is an attempt to deflate the culture war. I think most Americans agree to a large degree with classical liberalism, which is after all the ideology that the USA was founded out of. This is an opportunity for Leftists to reflect upon the increasingly authoritarian tactics used by their team. This is an opportunity for Rightists to see how it feels to have the self-same authoritarian tactics they once used turned upon them. My hope is that we collectively engage in less authoritarianism.

It is human to want our side to win. The perennial danger is that in winning we often come to be that which we initially sought to stand against.

Me? I stand for most of the classically liberal values. I stand for freedom, autonomy, consent, and equality before the law. I believe in freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and of assembly. The one I struggle most with is the idea of personal property, which on a small scale (personal belongings) I support but on a large scale (one person owning tens of thousands of acres) find problematic.

‘Don’t Look Up’ is Real

Not literally, but figuratively. Sorry for the clickbait title.

First of all, if you haven’t watched this movie yet, don’t read further until you do. It’s on Netflix and it’s excellent. The rest of this post assumes you’ve seen the movie.

What I mean is the premise of the movie is real, thematically, right now, in reality. What’s different are the details which, to be fair, are significantly different.

Our global civilization is currently, non-metaphorically, in real life, facing an existential threat – it’s just not an asteroid (at least that I know of). But we are facing something just as potentially deadly – the Metacrisis.

The Metacrisis

What is the Metacrisis?

The Metacrisis is the sum of a large number of crises that are all bearing down on us. A non-exhaustive list includes: climate change, desertification, soil loss, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, polarization of society, wealth and income inequality, collapse of the financial system, peak oil, AI, bioweapons, water scarcity, pandemics, and nuclear war. There are, of course, more.

Here’s a talk explaining the metacrisis in depth

This is obviously a very different threat than the one in ‘Don’t Look Up’. Probably the most significant difference in the natures of the two different threats is how deterministic they are. In ‘Don’t Look Up’ the threat is very deterministic, i.e. it’s eminently clear how and when the threat (asteroid) will appear. This is due to the fact that the motion of large bodies in space is very well understood and the math of physics can make extremely accurate predictions thereof. In the movie they were able to determine precisely when and where the disaster would strike with extremely high confidence (99.78% or whatever it was) more than 6 months in advance.

The Metacrisis is an entirely different animal. Most, if not all, of the crises that compose the Metacrisis arise from complex systems, each with many variables, interdependencies, and feedback mechanisms that may or may not be well understood. These complex systems in turn interact with each other, introducing yet more interdependencies and feedback mechanisms. Covid provides a perfect example to illustrate what I mean.

A virus led to the shutting down of businesses, which led to people not working, which led to stimulus checks funded by central bank money printing. All of the above impacted the supply chain causing serious disruption. Supply chain disruption combined with vast money printing has led to inflation, which is causing economic hardship on people. Attempting to control the virus led to most nation states adopting totalitarian control measures, causing many people to lose trust in institutions and polarizing society even further. While covid itself is mostly in check, its consequences are still rippling through society and will likely be doing so for the foreseeable future.

Putting aside the likelihood that covid was the result of a lab leak, there is a constant probability of a new pandemic occurring at any point in the future. But we have no idea of knowing what that probability is. What are the chances of a new pandemic arising in any given year? 1%? 2%? No one knows. We have no certainty around this question. But we do know that the probability is non-zero, and likely to increase as we reduce natural habitats and continue to engineer viruses.

What all this means in practice is that the Metacrisis is far too complex for us to have high certainty of any of the details. There’s no way to predict with any degree of determinism how the details of these issues will play out. We’re stuck with educated guesses.

This being the case, we can still use an understanding of probability, history, and trends to make a prediction that points to a strong likelihood (so strong that I personally consider it a certainty): that global civilization as we currently know it will not make it to the end of this century. This idea has come to be known simply as Collapse.

Collapse

The collapse of past civilizations has long fascinated historians. I found the eponymous book by Jared Diamond to be very well thought out and educational. Over 30 different civilizations have arisen and then fallen. Collapse is a constant.

The general trajectory of all of these civilizations is establishment, concentration of material wealth and status in an elite, over-exploitation of the environment, human population exceeding carrying capacity of the environment, and then civilizational collapse as the environment can no longer support the number of humans living there. The Fall of Rome is a literal textbook example.

What makes our civilization unique is that it’s the first global civilization. Globalization and capitalism have tied the entire world together into one civilization, what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a world-system. This has a few implications for the discussion at hand.

First, our civilization is able to draw on more resources than any previous civilization by orders of magnitude. In doing so it is quickly running through the once abundant natural capital that our beautiful planet was blessed with. Just as spending more than you make depletes your savings account, consuming more resources than nature produces causes them to run out. This is why the fisheries have disappeared, why the rainforest is getting cut down, why we’re likely in peak oil, and why we’re constantly losing farmland to cities and deserts. This is obviously not sustainable.

What ‘not sustainable’ means is that it cannot continue indefinitely. You can’t eat fish that aren’t there, nor dig for oil that doesn’t exist. As abundant as Earth is, it is not infinite. It has limits. And we have crossed them. A reckoning is unavoidable.

Second, what caused our current civilization to become global is that it is predicated upon growth. Economic growth is what allowed our civilization to subsume or outcompete rival ways of life. Our entire global economy is inexorably dependent upon constant growth. Yet it is now that same growth that threatens everything. It is an impossibility to have infinite growth in a finite system. This is why technoptimists talk about colonizing Mars. The only way to keep the current socioeconomic order in place is to expand our civilization beyond the limits of our planet. The only alternatives are to switch to a non-growth based society or collapse.

Lastly, that our civilization and its collapse is different than the collapses of all past civilizations in an extremely significant way – they were all localized civilizations while ours is global. The fall of Rome didn’t impact the Mayans, nor did the failure of the Mayans influence the Inuit. Easter Island’s collapse impacted only Easter Island.

This is not true of our global civilization. For better and for worse we are all in it together now. There will be no escaping the global collapse unless Elon Musk successfully colonizes Mars. We have been given a little preview of this with the current Pandemic. While some issues will remain local, as our world grows evermore interconnected local issues will increasingly ripple out to effect the whole world, the consequences of which will send out their own ripples in turn. The bigger they are the harder they fall, and no civilization has ever been as big as ours.

Don’t Look Up

This finally brings us to the genius of Don’t Look Up. Jared Diamond, in Collapse, proposes a roadmap of factors contributing to failures of group decision making at the societal level.

Reasons a society may fail:

1. Failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives
2. Failure to perceive a problem when it does arrive
3. Failure to even try to solve a problem once perceived
4. Fail at attempt to solve perceived problem

This rubric gives us a wonderful lens with which to compare Don’t Look Up to our real world.

Failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives

The fictional world of Don’t Look Up and our real world both successfully clear this first hurdle. The young grad student discovers the asteroid 6 months before it is due to strike. Numerous forward thinkers are sounding the alarm that our society must make radical changes or face the existential threats of the Metacrisis.

Failure to perceive a problem when it does arrive

This is where things start to get good.

Don’t Look Up

When the scientists first tell the President of the US about the asteroid they are dismissed. Then when they go on national TV they are once again not taken seriously, dismissed, and even mocked. The movie doesn’t go into why this is, leaving it to the viewer to speculate. However Diamond makes his own speculation that I find quite compelling:

The final speculative reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem is psychological denial. This is a technical term with a precisely defined meaning in individual psychology, and it has been taken over into the pop culture. If something that you perceive arouses in you a painful emotion, you may subconsciously suppress or deny your perception in order to avoid the unbearable pain, even though the practical results of ignoring your perception may prove ultimately disastrous. The emotions most often responsible are terror, anxiety, and grief. Typical examples include blocking the memory of a frightening experience, or refusing to think about the likelihood that your husband, wife, child, or best friend is dying because the thought is so painfully sad.
For example, consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is found to be highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That’s because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst. Although psychological denial is a phenomenon well established in individual psychology, it seems likely to apply to group psychology as well.
Jared Diamond, Collapse

Because the possibility of a planet destroying asteroid was so terrifying, both the President and the nation simply didn’t even consider it. It was dismissed out of hand because it was too incongruous with their worldview.

Even more ludicrous yet all too real is the campaign later on in the movie extorting people to ‘Don’t Look Up.’ The willful, even proud, ignorance really hits home in this day and age. The existence of an asteroid became a battleground of the culture war, instead of being left to astrophysics as would be rational. But we humans are not rational as much as we like to pretend we are.

The Real World

Hopefully the parallels to our world and the Metacrisis draw themselves, but just to be thorough let’s look at just one example, climate change.

Just as people in the movie denied the existence of the asteroid, many people in our world deny the existence of climate change. Corporations with large financial interests in a fossil fuel economy actively fund misinformation, seeking to establish room for reasonable doubt in the narrative.

In a different vein, how many of the crises I named earlier as components of the Metacrisis are you familiar with? Being ignorant of an issue guarantees that we can’t perceive it. And what we don’t perceive we can’t attempt to address.

Do we see the asteroid coming towards us or are we just not looking up?

Failure to even try to solve a problem once perceived

Don’t Look Up

The movie has a mixed record in this regard.

They set up the first mission to destroy the asteroid, but call it off at the last minute when it becomes known how much valuable resources it contains. So this kinda counts as an attempt, but also doesn’t.

Then a coalition of non-US countries attempt their own mission, but fail at launch. It’s unclear why, but sabotage is hinted at. If it was sabotage, then once again it kinda counts as an attempt but also doesn’t. This could also be considered a failed attempt though.

The Real World

Earlier I mentioned climate change deniers, but they’re low hanging fruit. Instead let’s look in the mirror.

How energy intensive is our lifestyle? How often do we fly on a plane? How often do we drive in our cars? How far away does the food we buy come from? How much plastic do we throw away?

We might say that we recognize climate change is a real threat, but do our lifestyles reflect our words? What are we doing personally to address the various threats of the metacrisis? Are we trusting in our competent leaders to identify and solve the problems for us?

Fail at attempt to solve the perceived problem

Don’t Look Up

In the movie the one real attempt to break up the asteroid fails due to technological failures, the robots don’t launch correctly nor do they work correctly. But this is cutting the world of the movie too much slack.

It’s worth pointing out that the aborting of the original mission could also be counted as a failure. The state was captured by an elite, who placed his potential to make more money above the well-being of the entire planet. I think it’s very fair to consider this a failure of our group decision making processes known as government and capitalism. The same argument applies if the failure of the non-US countries’ attempt was in fact sabotage.

It’d be easy to blame Isherwell as a bad actor, but that’s letting us off too easy. Rather than blame Isherwell as a scapegoat, I think it’s far more productive to examine how an Isherwell ever came to be in the first place. The fact that our society and institutions are constructed in such a way that someone like Isherwell can amass that much power and influence in the first place is a far more interesting place of inquiry for me. It’s also worth pointing out that pretty much the only way to amass that much power and influence is to be a sociopath, and that society rewards, conditions, and trains sociopaths to rise to the top of the power hierarchy.

One of the primary contentions that I espouse is that our current institutions are not just no longer serving us, but are actively harming us. I think the movie very eloquently makes the case that it is the fault of society as a whole that it was unable to stop the asteroid, a case worth considering as we reflect upon our own world.

The Real World

Luckily our asteroid is still many years away. The threats of the Metacrisis are still just that – threats – and not foregone conclusions. It’s still not too late to prevent the worst of them. The question is, will we look up?

A YEAR AND A HALF AT EAST WIND

This post is long overdue. I had originally planned to update this blog about every two months or so, but that’s obviously not happening. So I’ll update when I do.

A lot has happened since I last wrote of East Wind. Perhaps most significantly to me, I became a Full Member at the start of February. Provisional membership lasts a year at East Wind, after which Full Members vote on the Provisional Member’s membership. I passed 🙂 . This entitles me to the same rights as any other member of East Wind, including full health care (major medical, dental, vision), a full vote, 1/73rd ownership of East Wind, three weeks vacation each year, and the security of knowing it would take two thirds of all full members to force me to leave.

It has been a beautiful and mild summer here, with ample rainfall. Everything is super green even now in August. The local area here actually made national news due to the torrential rainfall and subsequent flooding that we received in late April. Many local bridges were knocked out and many people in the area lost their homes. It was devastating. Luckily East Wind came through pretty much unscathed. We lost a canoe or two, but otherwise came out great. Our creek became a roaring river during the flooding; I witnessed entire trees whizzing by going at least 20 miles an hour. Our hayfield flooded, as it is land owned by Army Corp of Engineers for just such an occasion. For about two months we had lakefront property due to the high levels of Norfork lake. The creek has finally returned to its normal level lately and it will be fun to explore how it is different.

My labor here has become relatively settled. While I enjoyed keeping an open schedule when I first got here, over time I found myself taking on more and more scheduled labor. It suits me well. An average week goes as follows:

Mondays:

I teach a dance lesson at 11am. Though not actually labor, the lady I teach gives me 1 PSC for each hour I teach her, so it works out to the same thing. I eat lunch at noon. While we are in production I have a nut butter production shift monday afternoon. These last usually between 3 and 5 hours.

Tuesdays:

Tuesday mornings I get up early and milk the cows at 6:30am. We currently milk four cows, which produce more milk than we can drink. The only other scheduled labor I have on Tuesdays is my HTA shift after dinner. HTA stand for Hard To Assign, and refers to cleaning the kitchen. I wash pots for two hours every Tuesday evening and consider it a bargain for never having to cook. The rest of my tuesday I keep open to be able to work on projects.

Wednesdays:

I milk cows again on Wednesday mornings and teach another dance lesson at 11. After lunch I make cheese. Lately I’ve been making mozzarella, which is about a ten hour process. I’m starting to get good at it, it actually tastes almost the same as you would find in a store.

Thursdays:

The only scheduled labor I have on Thursdays is my CP shift in the afternoon. CP stands for Consumer Products, and essentially entails answering the phones and every so often selling some of our products to the rare walk-in customer. Since I have access to the internet while doing this shift, I often research for my book or catch up with friends and family.

Fridays:

Friday mornings I milk again, this time at 6am. I have my third and final dance lesson of the week, again at 11. In the afternoon I do my second CP shift.

Saturdays:

Saturday morning is my bread shift, which I usually start at 8:30. There is a bread shift every morning so that we always have fresh bread. I make white bread because most other people make wheat bread. After lunch I have comptoil which entails collecting all of the full poop buckets from the composting toilets and replacing them with empty ones. It’s not near as gross as you might imagine. I then shower thoroughly, which is labor creditable. I then usually clean an elevator in the factory if we are in production.

Sundays:

Sundays I have no scheduled labor. Our community meetings are Sunday at 2 however, and are labor creditable. I attend almost all of them. Otherwise I usually take Sunday as a rest day, or catch up on things I didn’t have a chance to get to over the week.

I’ve also undertaken a few projects in my time here. The project I’m most proud of is also the most boring. Nut Butters had been losing potential customers due to not being certified by a third party food safety company. To become certified we need a Hazards Analysis and Control Points (HAACP) program and the foundation of a HAACP program are Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). SOPs are essentially written out instructions for everything that gets done in the factory. Everything. And that was my job. I took notes left over from previous managers and wrote out an SOP for just about every job in the factory. What I didn’t do my friend Warren did. It was a lot of time in front of a computer and wasn’t the most fun. It was important though, and in the end we got a 99/100 on our inspection.

A less important but much more fun project was building shelving and drawers for our new walk-in pantry. Our old pantry was too small and too old, and so this spring Becky tore it down and built a much nicer new one. I undertook to build the storage spaces for it. Our kitchen managers told me what they would like – a wall of shelving and a wall of drawers – and left the rest up to me. I drew out a design, compiled a materials list, ordered materials, and with help turned my vision into reality. These shelves and drawers should serve East Wind for years to come.

As I mentioned in my last East Wind post, I had taken our nut butter onto Amazon. Since then I have sold over $38,000 of our product there, at about a 25% profit margin. In July of this year alone I sold $8k. Not a huge deal compared to our bottom line, but I’m still proud.

One thing that has been really nice is how much time my labor here affords me to work on my book. I have a number of jobs that have a good amount of down time to them, namely my cheese makes, my breadmaking, and my CP shifts, and these allow me to serve community while at the same time making progress on my book. One of the many perks of this lifestyle.

Something that might be of interest to you is how I view the turnover in membership here. While the bulk of people that were here when I got here are still here, there has been a fair amount of turnover in the last year and a half. However, by and large I think it has been really good for East Wind. In that time we’ve gained some great new members, and the vast majority of those who have left are what I would consider people I’d rather not live with. In general, I feel that East Wind has amazing momentum in the positive direction. Nut Butters just had it’s best year in years, we’re building two new buildings this year, and there are more and more badasses on the farm.

So life is good at East Wind. Again, no promises, but I might post some updates in the relatively near future; some writing I’ve done for my book.