Smoke Trails #8 Issue - Children I should probably devote a separate Smoke Trails to the issues of copulation and conception, having sex and having babies. The norms around baby making and baby raising in the secular American intentional communities are so different from the rest of Western society, and even from the mainstream Israeli kibbutz movement, it's closest relative, that it deserves a study of its own. Most of my observations will take the form of comparisons between these community-cousins. The first and most obvious strangeness about the American kids in community is... they're almost not there! In Samar, the ratio between adults and youth is about one to one. In Twin Oaks, it's five to one. And not about five to one, but exactly five to one, because this ratio is reenforced by a rule. If the community is already hovering at five to one, and a family with kids, or even with kid, singular, requests membership, even visitorship, they will be flatly denied, until such time as the ratio changes in their favour. If I understand this policy correctly, the reason for the ratio is that raising children requires an inordinate amount of resources. I've heard figures of a million or more US dollars required to raise babies to adulthood, at least in the so-called first world. So frugality demands that this expensive undertaking be considered carefully, one mustn't enter into it lightly, and certainly not frequently. When someone wants to get pregnant, they bring it to committee: with income-sharing, everyone's going to have to pay for their upbringing, so everyone gets to decide them into existence. In Samar and probably every other classical kibbutz, several families have four or more kids! Of course, members never consult with anyone else before getting knocked up, and they never feel any social pressure to refrain from procreation. Since community resources are allocated based on size of your family and not on the ranked relative importance of the work that you do, there's no financial incentive to keep the family unit small, because your own standard of living will not suffer in any way no matter how children you bring into the world. That's not entirely true: if everyone has lots of kids, then immense amounts of money will leave the kibbutz coffers, and then everyone's standard of living will suffer. But if you cut back on your kids, while everyone around you is spreading their seed, increasing their genes in the next generation, then you're going to feel like a fryer (sucker). It's a procreation prisoner's dilemma. And besides, this net negative financial effect is only measurable over a long period of time, while the urge to fuck and pop out replicas of yourselves can occur a lot earlier, unless you intentionally act against it. And what's more, if you live in Israel and you're Jewish, breeding on a big scale is not only government-supported, it's considered a national security directive. The "Fear of a Black Planet", of being a ethnic minority again is so traumatically entrenched, the double-speak "defeating the demographic threat" means that making babies is a military strategy. In the cultural consciousness, producing progeny is like amassing WMDs in an arms race overshoot endgame in which we all lose within twenty years. For myself, I believe in a world of abundance, but I also know that there are far too many human beings on the planet, and that we need to reduce our numbers drastically. But I refuse to reduce the fruits of my loins to absolute zero -- if all the conscious ecologists castrate themselves and the capitalists crap out brats like bunnies, then the converging collapse's few survivors will all be fucking jerks. Why should only the assholes get to repopulate the planet? I say have one kid between any two adults -- reduce our footprint, but reward the righteous. But at the same time, it's bizarre to imagine that I would let any other human being have a say in whether or not I inseminate my mate. I've never had to make that call, but I'm also indebted to community because I do believe that it takes at least a village, of not two or three, to raise a child. So I guess that means I'd like to aim for a factor of two to one, two adults for every child. Does that sound too much like an eco-anarchist eugenics program? Just some thoughts around third-millenium morals as we breach seven billion souls on earth.