The Need for New Communities in the West
Many of our communities form around unuseful values reinforced by unhealthy rituals; there is a better way.
Every week, I write about technological and cultural norms; the goal is to figure out how we improve our well-being in the modern world.
The longer you live in a society, the more invisible its culture becomes; eventually, you stop questioning its norms. Let’s take my hometown of New York as an example. When recent graduates move to the city, they’re shocked: Why is everyone working 80-hour weeks? How does everyone drink this much? Yet after a couple of months at Goldman Sachs, they’re no longer conscious of the city’s pull on their behavior; now they’re just alcoholics that love to work. New York’s culture is like a rip current: nearly impossible to swim against.
Herein lies the beauty of travel: it allows you to swim next to the current, observe it, dive in for a moment, and then return to where you came from. You get to see things that the city’s inhabitants stopped noticing years ago. And once you return home, for a little while, you can see your city’s idiosyncrasies. Then, Thursday rolls around and your city’s norms hide, once again, in your fourth, froth-laced, happy hour beer. You’re back in the rip current, and you start to forget what you saw.
I haven’t, yet, re-entered the Western rip current after a recent trip to Ecuador: the experiences from my Ayahuasca retreat are still clear. And while there’s a lot to say about taking Ayahuasca itself, there’s more to say about the community surrounding this practice.
In the West, deepening divisions, rising suicide rates, and widespread addiction to prescription “medication” have made it clear that our existing communities are failing us. Fraternities and sororities promote alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and an obsession with social status. Corporations expect a dedication to work over everything else. Political cults, which are proliferating at warp speed, demand an unwavering dedication to ideologies that threaten civilization.
This is the world you get without wholesome values and rituals: friendships with precarious, hedonistic foundations; disillusioned employees; and nations with no connective tissue. We cannot continue like this. To ensure a positive future, we must re-organize around non-sectarian, healthy values. To this end, while Ecuadorian communities are not utopias, they have a lot to teach us.
The Jungle
In Ecuador, indigenous communities have been using plant medicines regularly for thousands of years. They start each ceremony with a unified understanding; they set specific intentions; they share wisdom; and they celebrate each other.
There is no dogma involved, but if you want to participate in a ceremony, there are certain requirements: You must desire introspection. You must want to grow your capacity for love and compassion. You must unite with everyone else in the ceremony (read: put aside your political and personal differences). You must try honestly to have compassion for everyone.
When you start with these shared values, magic happens. Suddenly, you’re aligned with someone that you couldn’t ordinarily stand in the workplace. Why? Because you know the pain he’s gone through; you know that his harmful actions are a result of his pain; you know that he’s working to come out of these patterns; and you know that another person’s suffering is all of our suffering—if you help someone heal, he will be less likely to create destruction in the world. That doesn’t mean that you tolerate dysfunction, but it does mean that you don’t hate the people responsible for it.
With this communal understanding, ceremonies can take place. Each individual sets his intentions for the ceremony and the Shamans set theirs for the collective. While each person is silently focused on their inner world during the ceremony, the Shamans share knowledge that they’ve accumulated through generations. They give discourses on love, compassion, and other principles that are the bedrock of a healthy civilization. They play beautiful music that reinforces these ideas.
How different would your friendships be if they were formed around these core values? How different would your emotional state be if you had an ever-present community actively aiding your spiritual growth? How would your familial relationships change if you shared in gratitude once a month? How would your country change if these ceremonies were adopted at scale?
The West
These tribal concepts should not sound foreign: all modern, secular societies have their own values and rituals to reinforce them. New Yorkers value hard work, wealth, fashion, music, and food. We meet in the office, head to happy hour, frequent jazz clubs, and congregate for Michelin star meals.
We should be grateful for many of these principles and activities: the world would be a much emptier place without New York, Paris, and London. However, many modern societies don’t actively emphasize love, compassion, and introspection. We don’t regularly listen to spiritual discourses; we don’t gather to take psychedelics; we don’t meet to meditate; we don’t know each other’s struggles: your boss is just an asshole.
New Communities
While there is a lot of valuable information contained in ancient religious texts, there are also passages and principles that many Westerners will never subscribe to. Therefore, we need new organizations that appeal to modern men and women.
These communities should be non-sectarian and committed to humanity’s unity. They should not tolerate organizations promoting harmful ideals, but they should remember, as they seek change, that tribes tend toward division. (Obviously, this is a very challenging balance to strike.)
These communities should promote love, compassion, and introspection. Our society has drifted away from all of these values, so new communities should create rituals (volunteering, psychedelic ceremonies, group meditations, etc) to reinforce them.
These communities should appeal to reason. There should be no dogma, and there should be a limited requirement for blind faith. It will be very difficult to onboard secular minds, otherwise.
These communities should be accessible for modern civilization: most Westerners do not want to become monks. That is not to say that these communities should uphold all of our Western norms around pleasure, just that few desire complete abstinence. Condemnation and repression will fail; conversations and introspection will succeed.
Ecuadorian communities are showing us the way, and we need many others to flourish. Then—one day—the idea of friends and families uniting regularly to share in love, compassion, and introspection will become commonplace, again, in the West.
The Need for New Communities in the West
Muy buena redacción hermanito bravo!
I like the format including the visuals.