Functionally Sovereign Community
Description
Benjamin Life on Functionally Sovereign Communities:
"If the self is an eddy rather than a fortress, then sovereignty cannot mean what we usually take it to mean. When most people hear it, they imagine the rugged individual: a self walled off from the world, defended against intrusion, owing nothing to anyone. Or they imagine the state, with its monopoly on violence, drawing borders and enforcing them with armies. Neither is the kind of sovereignty I am interested in, because neither reflects the reality of interbeing.
The sovereignty I mean is functional sovereignty, which is, by definition, community sovereignty: the capacity of a community to delineate and enforce its own boundaries, not through force, but through the alignment of incentives and agreements. This is a different relationship to power and authority altogether. It is not the power to dominate but the power to cohere. It is the kind of power wielded by the relational self: the ability of a pattern to hold its own shape while the current keeps moving through it.
Here we run into one of the most persistent misunderstandings about the commons and anarchy. People imagine commons or anarchist governance as something totally open-ended, a free-for-all in which anyone can take whatever they want, Mad Max violence or the proverbial tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. But this gets it exactly wrong. Anarchist or commons governance is all about boundaries. It’s about creating boundaries that are enforced through peer agreements rather than through the monopoly of violence. The whole project is to build positive-sum relationships through shared agreements, where the cost of not upholding those agreements is precisely what keeps the system coherent. Enforcement does not come from above. It emerges from the relationships themselves.
A Functionally Sovereign Community enforces its boundaries by governing access to shared pools of resources. Increasingly, that access can be programmatically insured, through blockchain smart contracts, for instance, where if the community revokes your privileges, you simply lose access to the resource. In the digital realm this is nearly frictionless. In the physical realm you still need other forms of enforcement, which is why community self-defense is a real part of this picture and not one we should be squeamish about. But an enormous amount can be accomplished simply by aligning incentives so that staying in good standing is more valuable than defecting. The commons is not the absence of boundaries. It is boundaries enforced by relationship instead of by the gun."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/sovereignty-is-solidarity)
Discussion
Codepedence is <not> interdependence
Benjamin Life:
"Codependence is not the same thing as interdependence.
Interdependence is the recognition that our actions and our choices have real consequences for one another, and that we are responsible for those consequences. It is the throne and the web in working order, a self that holds its shape and knows itself woven into others, drawing strength from the connection rather than dissolving into it. Codependence, by contrast, is a kind of reliance that limits the agency of the individual, a binding that keeps everyone smaller than they might otherwise be. It is what happens when the eddy loses its own internal pattern and slackens back into undifferentiated current: connection without coherence, web without throne. The two can look superficially alike, because both involve depending on others. But one expands agency and the other contracts it. One is the membrane doing its living work; the other is the membrane dissolving.
This is why functional sovereignty for a self-governing commons requires healthy individuals to participate in it. It requires people who have enough excess capacity, enough surplus of time and energy, enough internal coherence, self-knowledge and wholeness, to actually tend and steward the commons, because tending a commons takes time and energy and contribution. If everyone arrives empty-handed, with nothing to spare, no unique offering derived from their personal individualized experience, there is no one to do the stewarding, nothing to share, and the commons cannot stay healthy. The kind of sovereignty I am interested in is therefore a collective sovereignty: one in which we recognize our individual responsibilities and contributions even as we work to tend the commons, not the commons in some abstract, planetary sense, but the commons that lives in the actual space between specific people."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/sovereignty-is-solidarity)