Valery Khiltunen, a journalist and traveler, has been studying settlements for many years, where they try to implement ways of life that are alternative to modern technogenic civilization. They are called differently: post-market, trans-globalist, eco-villages, eco-cities… Hiltunen himself calls this way of life “secondary”. Just as primitive life preceded the type of civilization known to us, so, he believes, «secondary life» will sooner or later replace it. And it’s even coming.
To understand the eco-settlers, their life, motives and meanings, Hiltunen personally traveled to many such places, rightly believing that for completeness of understanding there is nothing better than to see with your own eyes and feel with your own hands. And what? It turned out that the experience of this world beyond it remains essentially unknown. The most interesting things are said in patter in the reference books, and much of what is written in fact turns out to be simply not true. It became clear that it was time to correct the situation.
Hiltunen, who calls himself a “citizen of the earth” and “a stray dog of world civilization,” is sure that the experience of ecovillages is very important. If only because it opens the eyes of modern man to his own unknown or long-forgotten sides and possibilities. Some sociologists generally believe that the inhabitants of such settlements, with their seemingly eccentricities and oddities, overtook the rest of the planet by seven hundred years. Really? Our correspondent met with Hiltunen to get at least preliminary answers to this and other questions.
Interview
Yuri Plyusnin: — Valery Rudolfovich, so what is it really — ecovillages?
Valeriy Khiltunen: — This is a completely new type of settlements, which is now being built in the world. About 6 million people now live in pre-market communities, and according to my estimates, about half a million live in post-market communities.
The classification of such settlements is still very conditional. Serious science hardly does this. And the press writes about it badly, indistinctly. No wonder: journalists are people who, in their spirit and way of life, are the most distant from the “secondary” environment. They, I think, will be the very last who will come there.
I, plunging into post-market life, recognize in it what I already saw in the gaming models of the communal gatherings of the “Scarlet Sail” of the 60s, at bard rallies, organizational activities … We then guessed a lot — intuitively, sometimes not really understanding why we do it this way and not otherwise. The main thing was to be creative, to constantly improve the surrounding life. With a very calm attitude to the external surroundings, property, housing. The general slogan is «to be, not to have.» In addition, a constant rotation of managerial functions was mandatory so that the spirit did not smell of slavery and bureaucracy.
It turned out we played correctly. They played what is now being embodied in new and, I think, promising forms of future life.
My hypothesis is this: for the people of the future, the problems of housing and clothing will fade into the background. With all due respect to these useful things.
There is a general principle for the organization of secondary life—I define it for myself in three lines. First: there live rascals — people who try not to multiply evil and do not spoil. Second, they are self-sufficient. So far, I have not seen complete independence from external sources of energy and food anywhere, except, perhaps, the most exotic, “Robinson” options, but everywhere I noted the desire to minimize the consumption of gasoline, gas, and form a diet from local food, and not imported from outside the settlements.
And the third thing: in these settlements there is always a painful, but regular work to reveal some secret of human life, some secret. This, too, sometimes takes rather strange forms.
For example, in Väinel in Finland, for several decades, they have been recognizing the mistakes made by mankind when translating ancient books. More than a hundred volumes have already been published in Finnish, some in English, there is even one edition in Russian. These enthusiasts diligently even study the “geometry” of a prophet’s conversation with his students: who sat where during the conversation, who could understand what and how, based on location and education — the same word could reach us in completely different forms . In the texts of the Gospel, for example, these people find up to eight translation errors in a word. This work was started back in the XNUMXth century by a man of genius, apparently, Pekka Ervast.
In a huge house not far from the Finnish city of Tampere, where Ervast’s students and followers swarm among many wise books, everything is adapted for research work: each has a cell-like study, a giant library. They are there all the time with books. My friend and I arrived there by chance and without a call, went into some door, sat down, waited — and suddenly a line of completely naked women with turbans on their heads and books came along. Well, I think Amazons live here, nudists, and a turban is probably a sign of belonging to some sect. I’m sitting, drawing squares in my notebook, where I write down everything I see in such eco-settlements — and then a shy aunt comes up to me and says embarrassedly: “You know, we have a guest entrance from the other side, and you went into the bathhouse, we have Just today is Women’s Day. We are generally without complexes, but are you sure that you are here? As it turned out, they never parted with books at all. There is still a lot of work…
I think that only in such unusual places can new non-trivial ideas, new technologies (especially food, medicines) ripen. It is like a confederation of more or less securely protected incubators where the future is nurtured. Sometimes their desire not to have anything to do with the outside world comes to the ridiculous, but maybe this is just the case when it is better to be safe than sorry? I remember how we tried to help Auroville with cheap solar panels — we were exhausted with negotiations about which bank accounts to make payments through: “We conduct our money affairs outside the territory.” I walked around the Italian Damangur with a large basket of some medieval ducats — no euros or bank cards are accepted here as payments.
Yu.P.: — Are there many such secondary settlements now?
V.Kh.: — In Europe, in the Schengen zone, according to my calculations, there are approximately 3 more or less stable settlements. There are more than 000 in the world. But the figures are very approximate: the tissue is alive, every day something arises, something dies. Approximately half of the settlements are located in rural areas, but many are in metropolitan areas. The division into town and country does not work here at all. The main thing is different.
In my understanding, the commune is the highest phase in the development of the collective. Its structure is multi-layered. Much depends on the control scheme here. The right of «veto» for each person in such a settlement characterizes a highly developed commune. This is rare, but it happens. In the embodied version, this is practically unattainable — although it occurs in game situations when all the activities of the team can be blocked by one voice of a small child who feels that something is not right in the decision being made. What if this child is the Buddha?
Yu.P.: — Are the roots of this form of life religious?
V.Kh.: — If we talk about religious roots, then, indeed, many settlements arose on the wave of religious escapism: many people, having read something like that, left and began to build secluded temples, monasteries, monasteries. After all, even the ancient monasteries — at least Solovki and Valaam with their powerful and rather natural-looking monastic farms — are also a kind of eco-villages, completely self-sufficient. Northern monasteries after the church reform were forced to deal with life support, because the North was predominantly Old Believers and there was no one to hire. And yet, I would classify monasteries as a “non-market” way of life.
But religion is not everything. There is also an anti-market — this is already from the Soviet era, when they tried to jump over historical stages. It turned out something like a premature birth. The miscarriage, however, turned out to be more or less viable, and for seventy years it quite cheerfully twisted its legs. From which I draw an optimistic conclusion about the enormous viability of the present post-market.
Yu.P.: — Give, please, the most striking examples of secondary settlements.
V.Kh.: — First of all — Auroville, which has been known since the late sixties. This is something like an attempt to equip the intellectual and spiritual capital of humanity, which was undertaken by the disciples of Aurobindo Ghose. Those who have read The Seagull by the Name of Jonathan Livingston, written by one of the most faithful and consistent Ghoshevists, Richard Bach (he conceived the book as a “preface to the integral Vedanta”, addressed to all reading people, including housewives far from esotericism), that roughly represents the main ideologeme of Auroville — «a city that does not belong to anyone in particular, but immediately to all mankind.» A copy of Van Gogh’s The Sower was placed on its gates: remember, he went out before dawn and throws everything, throws seeds into stony soil — in the hope that it will sprout somewhere … Auroville was planned for about 50 thousand inhabitants — this is in the future , but even now the population can already be measured in thousands, especially if you count everyone who comes and tastes this “second existence”.
I can talk about Auroville for days — back in the late 70s, Komsomolskaya Pravda almost gave birth to my huge article about Aurovilleans, but it all ended in a screech at the editorial board, my hopeless trips along the corridors of the Central Committee of the CPSU: they simply honestly did not understand what I was talking about interpret. I’m used to. When already in this century I wrote about another secondary miracle in feathers — Damangur, built by young leftists who, after the events of 1968 in Paris, fled to the mountains and dug a whole underground city between Milan and Turin in 40 years, they began to invite me to their seminars science fiction writers: they decided that I composed a beautiful fairy tale from the day after tomorrow. And I just described what I saw. This is especially funny now, when the Damangur confederation is quite open and hospitable, they even have their own website: www.damanhur.org.
When I was last there, about 700 people lived in Damangur. On the surface there is a settlement where outsiders are not really allowed, but inside there is a giant dungeon, where they are allowed to go down for money. They do many things there, both serious and wonderful. They have more than a hundred industries, their own constitution, currency …
The nearest Steiner settlement to Russia (there are only about a hundred of them according to Schengen) is in Tapol, in Finland, about 150 kilometers from the border. There are now about fifty people living there — entirely bright, highly developed intelligentsia, working with children. Since Steiner bequeathed to work with the most problematic and vulnerable children, they work with such children: mentally retarded, crazy … But you should have seen their economy!
The oldest Steiner settlement is in Iceland. Hitler closed them almost all over Europe, but did not reach here.
From my point of view, Iceland in general gives us an example of the gradual formation of the post-market, no longer in separate centers, but within the framework of a whole society. True, external observations do not give much here: this is a country of continuous paradoxes. Super-satiety, the Internet, total motorization — and at the same time a childish faith in elves. Traditional large families — and a clear trend towards the disintegration of the nuclear family. Icelandic women mostly live alone, their sexual availability is legendary in Europe, and it is the most moral country I have ever seen in my travels around the world. Every boy knows by name all his ancestors for a thousand years. And during the famous experiment, when wallets with one hundred dollars were thrown into the toilets of the capital of all countries, only in Reykjavik all 100% were returned to the owners (in Moscow — one out of a hundred).
In Iceland, as it were, there are no weak people: “Everyone who did not stand firmly on his feet was long ago blown into the ocean by the wind,” as they say. You come and see: the people there are really strong, they are all like Greek gods. Their dwellings, from the point of view of a European or an American, are some kind of unpretentious-looking sheds. No concrete fences. There is practically no greenery — there is even a party of strange ecologists protesting against reforestation and flower beds: it is impossible, they say, to blur the foundations of the national — Spartan! — the spirit of all sorts of Sybarite things. And the children all work from the age of eight and are self-sufficient. Therefore, the gradual withering away of the nuclear monogamous family is not perceived as something tragic.
By the way, about child labor — this is a purely Marxist thesis, brilliantly tested in practice by Anton Makarenko. So page 198 of the 16th volume of Marx’s PSS is by no means the delirium of an inflamed mind, as many researchers have suggested, having come to a standstill in front of the exotic thoughts of the classic.
Marx, let me remind you, said: from the age of nine, a child should be a real master, receive money for his real work. Wildness, right? And in my opinion, he guessed that a person, having found himself early in an adult, responsible situation, quickly reaches heights, after which accumulation becomes simply uninteresting to him. Then he begins to get out of his situation and build something new, his own. If he does not start early, then he is afraid to get out of the situation that he has mastered, afraid to lose what he has acquired, no matter how small it may be. And only in old age does a person begin to understand that everything that he owned in life was, in essence, worth nothing. But it’s too late to do anything about it.
Notice that almost all of our oligarchs were very poor in childhood. This is almost a disease: an obsessive feeling that you need to «save in reserve.» Because, having accumulated the first 20 million dollars, a person no longer feels whether it is a lot or a little. He is still haunted by the miasma of childhood — the smell of poverty lingering in a small cubic capacity. Sometimes it is so terrible to remember that a person builds seventeen toilets in the house for himself, his beloved and the only one, as one American did.
I suspect that so far only the Icelanders have managed to somehow overcome this test. Stendhal’s heroes who asked: “Is that all? And for the sake of this — to live? — were, are and, I hope, will not disappear among all peoples. But to the whole people?!
Of course, it would be a bit of a stretch to say that Iceland is one big commune. But, for example, the President of Iceland is the least protected head of state on Earth. I saw a little girl tug on her skirt as she worked in her unassuming shed-like palace.
However, I saw real palaces stuffed with electronics in ecovillages. But young Swedish architects lived there — for them, housing was more like a laboratory, a testing ground for testing innovative ideas.
All this, in my opinion, proves that housing is a transitional form of life. Is it a coincidence that virtually all major religions respect the vagrancy of their saints and with some suspicion their real estate? That many of the people who left the deepest footprint on earth were homeless? I have often heard the opinion that property, by tying you to the ground, takes something significant from you. You pay her something. Is it the ability to be creative?
I like the formula — «all-home». This is not homelessness in its classical sense. This is life everywhere. A person does not become a slave to what can be lost. He has a house all over the place. Like a «flagship cabin» — in the past, large military ships always had an empty cabin in case the flagship appeared. So it is here: you can participate in the affairs of any community as an ally, and you will be welcome. This is one of the ideals that I personally aspire to. Sometimes it works out. Happiness is when you are expected. This is the first.
Second. As I understand Confucius: if you sleep in life, all your problems are not very interesting: what do you eat, where, with whom and under what roof do you sleep. And if you have already woken up, many external problems fade into the background.
Yu.P.: — And what is the optimal number of such settlements?
V.Kh.: — It is believed that all three cities that gave the largest amount of intellectual mass — Florence, Athens and Jerusalem — were small, up to 20 thousand people. The oldest existing settlement, information about the number of which I was able to find, is 147 people: 29 men and 118 women. There, with the birth of an «extra» boy, one old man goes to die in the desert. And this is strictly enforced. I myself was not there (it was already very packed from prying eyes) — I tell from the words of more nosy friends.
In the same way, the Hunzakuts managed to live in isolation, self-sufficiency for more than 2300 years. These are the descendants of the deserters of Alexander the Great, who did not go further with him and fled to the mountains. They still live in these mountains. They live long, do not get sick. They eat mostly what the surrounding nature gives. They have a peculiarity: once a year they descend from the mountains to the lowland settlements and distribute everything they have. They return to the sky again naked and barefoot and start all over again.
In some places, I was told the optimal figure of 259 people: with such a number of people, the risk seems to disappear that some overheated paranoid may come to power in the community. The famous «three sevens» also surfaced — with 777 members, the commune is still a brotherhood and does not need an official layer. Then the trouble begins: a narrow layer of managers is singled out, they have their own interests … But, I repeat, all this sociodynamics is still waiting for its researchers. I only record what I see and hear — grieving that I see little on the roads of this post-market Other Planet, both scientists and publicists.
Here, no matter where you dig — everything is insanely interesting. For example, it turned out that communities, like families, are periodically shaken by crises — as if the accumulated bad energy is being dumped. After 2 years, 8, 17 years… Why, why, what to do with it? Unknown. Isn’t this a test of strength: satiety, copper tu.e.mi? .. Remember how Makarenko, seeing that everything was too good for him, left everything and went with the guys to a new place, where he started everything from scratch?
Ecovillages, in order to live long and trouble-free, need either fresh blood or special tricks. As in Damangur. There, four archons govern the entire community, and one of them has the only elementary and terrible duty: he is allowed to blow everything to hell when development stops and the community begins to rot.
Yu.P.: — What will be the mass housing of the future, in your opinion?
V.Kh.: — It should be minimally sufficient. For a long time, when I was in Athens, I was looking for a barrel in which Diogenes was found. And in the end I found something similar on the Acropolis. An excellent vessel, pithos — it is cool and spacious there. In those climatic conditions, this is a sufficient dwelling. We decided to spend the night there and it turned out to be good.
Somewhere here Socrates was wandering around the market, surprised at himself: I can do without that, and without it … I once invented for myself the science of “Reducing needs” — not asceticism, but calm alignment of priorities. I am not against the triad “House, son, garden”, but I have met so many people who quickly turned into frenzied philistines, believing that this is precisely the alpha and omega of life, and everything beyond that is from the evil one.
I think that the attitude to the housing of the future will be calmer than it is now.
Yu.P.: — Tell us about our Russian ecovillages.
V.Kh.: “Now I am looking at what Russian eco-settlers are building their houses from. For the most part, they return to wooden forms, reproducing, as it were, folk traditions. This is Vitaly Sundakov, and Galina Borisovna Romanova, who revived the Slavic settlement near Mozhaisk. And in the village of Rodnoe, where about 200 families live in the “second life”, they do it differently, in their own way. Some build houses from adobe — according to Steiner, without corners …
Near Moscow there were 10 settlements. The first Roerich settlement «Kitezh» was founded in the Baryatinsky district by Dima Morozov. He lived in India with Roerich Jr. He wrote the book «Twice Born» — Mahabharata for ordinary people in Russian. And he would have lived in the Himalayas or Bangalore … But no: he created a settlement in the Kaluga region, where he gathered orphans and people who accepted them into their families. At first, it was thought that he would come up with something between a Steiner settlement (a small group of brave intellectuals organizes the communal life of those whom society rejects: mentally disabled people of different ages, etc.) and Gmeiner’s Kinderdorf. Only without the strict requirements of the classic SOS-Kinderdorf, where an unmarried, childless and believing woman must certainly take care of the children. There are already several such settlements in Russia — the first was built in Tomilino near Moscow. These are, as it were, pieces of Austria that exist on Western money. Such a mini paradise. Surroundings treat them in two ways. On the one hand, it saves the homeless. On the other hand, it evokes a feeling of some kind of trick: a blow to the Russian mentality …
Kitezh was built by the inhabitants of the Scottish Findhorn, one of the largest European settlements. It began with caravan camping, but gradually a whole town lined up on the seashore. Now they come to them for experience from all over the world, including from Russia. They learn how to build eco-houses, how to conduct natural agriculture…
Yu.P.: — And what, in your opinion, are the prospects for this Other Planet?
V.Kh.: — The number of people who are determined to leave and live permanently in such settlements is very large today. Why? I tried to understand. I traveled to almost all the cities that were in the top lines of the UN list of the most organized cities on the planet — only I was not in Auckland and Vancouver. And to the question: “How do you live here?” about half answer that they want to leave this glorious city: to fields, forests, to the shores of lakes and rivers. Even today. But they are afraid: after all, this is a sharp change in the paradigm of life. This means that the potential for an “outcome” is high. When 51 percent started popping up in my polls, I said to myself — that’s it, the process has begun, and it is irreversible.
In Russia, I did not ask about it. But there are simply no cities where you can live. In the European part of the ecologically clean, only Ples remained, although it can be called a city with a big stretch. And Novosibirsk and Kazan, for some reason, ended up in the “anti-rating” of cities where you can’t live at all. Probably, the wheels of the train broke, and the UN experts did not reach Novokuznetsk or Nizhny Tagil.
The fact that the «second life» has prospects is noticed not only by me. Some Finnish eco-villages are specially invited by the Ministry of Agriculture of this northern country to give lectures in Helsinki to tell them that living in eco-villages is not at all scary. In total I was in 46 Finnish settlements. Most of them are in the south of the country, about half are from Vyborg to Turku. The most interesting, in my opinion, are near Tampere. Among them, for example, there is a place where for a long time already 100% of lighting and heating is provided by the sun. All this is so serious that international seminars on solar energy are held there.
True, I did not notice the Russians there. Till?