Philosophical Garden

The World Needs a Vision of the Future

40 minutes

BOHM DIALOGUE Vol. 5 | July 3, 2022

Robert Kluijver, Julia Ovcharenko,
Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski

Brussels—Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv

Summary

The rationale and method of Bohm Dialogue are described. Self-governance is discussed as a phenomenon that appears when state authority breaks down. Further, self-governance is discussed as a personal individual practice. Does self-governance counteract the appeal of the neoliberal capitalist economy? What is the role of self-governance in envisioning a future?

Key words

Self-governance Bohm Dialogue Ukraine russia war taxation state authority responsibility sovereignty

Timecode

14:33 “держава” [derzhava] as a term

31:10 war as a permanent condition

46:43 capitalist economy

01:02:00 books for the future

01:14:38 taxation

01:29:17 producing visions of the future

Participants

C: Chris Keulemans
D: Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
J: Julia Ovcharenko
R: Robert Kluijver

THE DIALOGUE

D: I’ve read your plan for the future, Robert.

R: Oh, thank you.

D: It’s very interesting.

J: I’d like to explain our ambition. We understand that there are many questions humanity is facing now. They are not limited to national levels. They’re absolutely global, connecting all of us, all around the world. They are so big that we need to coordinate our thinking. Practical philosophy is just a method of thinking, previous to doing. Thinking, then correct wording leads to more understanding of our reality. What is reality right now with all the technologies, with all the natural crises, with different social clashes? The more people meet each other and articulate more differences between their cultures, the more difficult it appears for them to get this understanding, and to find what’s common. This is common in dialogue, in the way we live and work now. Being in long dialogues helps us to understand the world and each other. We think dialogue in the format David Bohm offered his colleagues is a wonderful format to keep the space for speaking and for listening to each other. That’s why we decided to open these dialogues for people who are asking these questions, looking for answers, or maybe just being with the questions at the moment. People who want to think together and to be in this dialogue together.

Ukraine now faces the war. The war has already gone on for eight years, but now it looks like there finally will be a resolution of our relations with moscow. This war highlights so many crises in Western culture, in different Western societies, and economies. It is not only about Ukraine. That’s why we want to be in dialogue with people from very different cultures and experiences.

R: Thank you, Julia. Yes, and I understand that, Chris, you’ve been collecting some of the texts and creating a kind of a platform online where the residue of all these discussions is being kept and built on.

C: Exactly. It’s very much at the beginning, but Julia and Demyan and their friends have a lot of experience with collecting food for thought through essays, podcasts, and walking conversations when that was still possible. Now, as Julia said, we’re trying to reach out to other people across Europe and the rest of the world, like-minded spirits, who are looking towards the future and who have the time and the focus to think about the underlying questions. The idea is, yes, that people who join are very welcome to contribute texts triggered by these conversations, so that the Cultural Hub can start collecting texts on the questions. We have Demyan’s essay as a kind of invitation. Demyan, how are you looking at these, at the ambitions for these dialogues?

D: The dialogue for me is the best way to be in the present. It is a strong practice. It is a responsible practice. All our practices are about responsibility, of course. After we build every dialogue, we understand how to do it together and how to fix these thoughts in our essays. We collect the essays, we illustrate them and we translate them. Then again we will prepare new dialogues with these essays. This is the cycle. I see this as part of a lifelong practice. It’s about logos, of course, and the very interesting category of “news” which is near to logos but different.

R: Do you mean logos in terms of logos like the word?

D: Not only the word.

R: The thinking process, the capacity of a human being to abstract the thought process and create an abstract reality with logos?

D: Yes, and at the same time build very concrete things.

[14:33] ‘держава’ [derzhava] as a term

C: So with this in mind, I would like to use your essay, Demyan, as a starting point for our dialogue of today because it was very interesting for me, and it raises some questions that I think tie in with Robert’s plans for the future. Robert has been writing and publishing these plans for the future online in a very modest way.

I was surprised, Robert, that you have written these texts but have hardly discussed them with others. All of us here have very fresh ambitions and fresh ideas that we have not shared with many other people. Robert, I think this would be an excellent company to test a few of these ideas.

R: True.

C: And same goes for Demyan with his essay. Now, Robert, can I ask you to read, to pick up that essay? And I was thinking about the very first part, about держава [derzhava].

R: Right. The use of this word “держава” [derzhava] which is translated as state but, doesn’t exactly mean that.

In a way obviously this is an etymological question. It’s a bit of a discussion which I’m out of my depth in… I know государство [gosudarstvo]. I do speak russian, by the way, so that would be the word I know for “the state”.

C: I think it’s a very good place, a good starting point: when we talk about the future of our society, sooner or later we have to talk about nation states.

Now, I think, all of us here have said and written before that we don’t necessarily believe in nation-states. But we’re speaking at this moment when a nation-state is being attacked, and when a nation-state is trying to defend itself, and when a nation-state is strengthening its identity through the war. Through Demyan’s essay I understand that the usual word for the state, in the way that Zelensky uses it, is actually antique and means something different from what I understand as a state. If we want to move beyond states, first we have to deconstruct this word and maybe leave it behind. That is, that is my question to all of you.

R: What I hear from Julia and Demyan is, let’s not get dragged down into the terms of the discussions as they’re being held now because as soon as you drop down into that level, then it’s impossible to bring fresh insights in the area.

What I myself feel very strongly is that the world needs a vision of the future. That’s why I created the plan for the future and the criticism that has been leveled from some friends was “but how do we get there?” But no, first we agree on what kind of world we would like to live in, we create a positive vision, because we’re surrounded by so much negativity. I want to create a positive vision. We’re not going to say right now how we’re going to get there, is it possible, how do we get from A to B? No, the vision is critical. I don’t believe it’s actually very complicated because human beings everywhere in the world have been traveling a lot and living in many different places, some extreme places, as they call them, and seeing that human nature is surprisingly similar all over the world. If we base our thinking on that, we can actually envision a future that we actually agree on, and which is very different from the one we are seeing now. I can imagine if I were in a war zone like Demyan and affected like Julia, then I would maybe feel very strongly, but what are we going to get? As in, now we’re paying a high price for the destruction of everything which was there, maybe not everything but a lot of it, so what we’re going to get when it’s over? Are we going to rebuild the same thing that we didn’t actually really like or will we have the freedom to create a new society because it’s really about society? I would absolutely love to contribute to this effort of thinking. I have a question for both Julia and Demyan because I did study soviet studies when I was young. Is this whole idea of самоуправление [samoupravleniye], is that still something that lives, this self-governance idea, or is it something which belongs to the past and which nobody speaks about anymore?

C: As to a non-russian speaker, can you explain?

R: Самоуправление [samoupravleniye] means basically self-ruling or self-governance. We see that in the Netherlands, it seems to be coming back in many different places. But I was wondering: is that something still alive among thinkers in Ukraine or, I don’t know, in russia?

J: In Ukraine I would say it is in practice, especially nowadays.

Perhaps the word is not really used much now. It was in use maybe in the 90s, but then this term transferred more to civic society. What we understand under civic society is really self-governance. How to organize the process for the majority of people to be involved in decision-making? We still have the governance structures like deputies who build radas (councils), on different levels: the regional, then city, then on the national level: the higher council — Verkhovna Rada. It’s a democratic system of governance, but I would say people also practice it in their volunteering. Ukrainian philosophers now even tried to find another word for volunteering, to reflect Ukrainian style volunteering, how people organize themselves in networks, looking for solutions to really acute questions, in wartime. It started during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 as a practice but now it’s scaled up a lot, to millions of people who are self-organized like beehives or ant colonies, a meta organism that decides what to do, how to act. They appear to be absolutely like-minded, and they trust each other when they donate money, they take responsibility for buying goods, for delivering something, for supporting different needs.

C: Your question is great, Robert, because your vision of the future is based on this idea of self-governance and, of course, self-governments beyond and regardless of state. I think all of us prefer to talk about the future by describing that kind of society that we want to go to. You said the war is obviously a catastrophe but it could open up a space for a new kind of living together, and then self-government is a key phrase. It’s interesting to hear that in Ukraine by necessity it was already alive and it’s very much alive today. I see a lot of examples. Demyan, could this idea of self-governance be an answer to the question that you put in your essay? That we should move beyond these archaic, antique words like держава [derzhava]?

D: I see that the problem is not with the system now, the problem is with the people, and with the individual person, with the identity. I mean responsibility, of course, and the level of this responsibility. The second problem is the understanding of freedoms. Lene Rachel Andersen, if you know, in her last book Libertism thinks about freedoms and invites us to think about not one freedom but freedoms.

What kind of practices do we need, and after practices, what systems do we build for our peoples, countries? I don’t believe in countries existing in the next 50 years, next century. In the near future, we need governments and countries and we mean nations. But I understand what Robert wrote, you’re right. With self-governance is possible. I think about, again, how to build rules and how to build practices, how to invite different people from different cultures to practice. Lene writes about Bildung, about Metamodernity, and integrity systems, and how to integrate together everything that humans know. I think about body practice, for example, and about dialogue practice, about philosophy practice. Then we can build our policy systems, city systems, community systems. Small groups may be more sustainable than big groups. You see that small countries are more sustainable. Five million, six million citizens and that’s all. It’s good but no more. How do we build this system for one million people only and then stop, because the maximum number of members for every community may be one million people, for example. It’s about systems, it’s about the future. But now, what I want to understand is how to live with wars? Not IN, but WITH wars.

[31:10] war as a permanent condition

C: But that leads us to two questions, Robert. I have two questions for you but maybe you want to respond first.

R: Yes, how to live with wars? I think we have to understand that maybe war is a kind of a permanent condition. We live in, let’s say, in a highly militarized world and there is always an element of coercion behind everything. This is a little bit of an illusion that we, especially in Western Europe, think: oh, yes, we are beyond war.

Now about the other question, how to build rules, practices for different peoples, different cultures? I like your suggestion of this one million maximum for a human community. What I see is that the war is a moment of destruction, but the powers that have started the war are the same ones who will be there at the end, and they will again create the system in their own image. I don’t agree with you when you say, find self-governance, all these things. It’s nice but maybe in 50 or 100 years after we end the war. Something is happening right now: these beehives, this self, people are taking their own destiny into their own hands, they’re showing trust to each other. Why should we let this be a feature that’s only happening now? Because there’s a complete breakdown and then as soon as the big people, the Pinchuks and everybody around the world, who have all the money for the reconstruction say: now it’s time, we’re going to build a new Ukraine, we cancel all this and everybody goes back into this way of submission, follow the orders of the state. This is a tricky question: we have this self-organization of citizens as a result of the war, but how could that remain and form the basis for the post-war Ukraine? How can we actually build on that, keep that?

C: This is exactly what I’m thinking about all the time and certainly after, Robert, we visited Rojava together.

R: Exactly.

C: Julia and Demyan, I told you when I sent you some material about Rojava in the northeast of Syria where they have this system of self-government and self-governance in place right now.

D: Great system.

C: The good news is that human beings are intuitively open to self-governance, to arranging smaller-scale systems to support each other, so the potential is there.

But what we see, the actual experience is: when the crisis is over, the old powers take their positions in the old way. The question is: are human beings only capable of organizing themselves in a system of self-governance during the breakdown, not after?

R: I think it’s true. I think self-governance is a fallback option, because a human being is a social animal. I’ve seen it in Syria, but I’ve also seen it very much in Somalia, I’ve seen it in Afghanistan. That very naturally when the system of authority, of the government and the state breaks down, people automatically start working together again. Sometimes there can be a transitional phase of war, civil war because the wealth had been too unfairly distributed or some minorities were too much pushed down. That’s the phase that everybody’s always fearing when we talk about the breakdown of the state. But then afterwards it usually goes back into a pretty stable system, we help each other. But we, human beings, are capable of also self-governing in peace. We do not spend all our lives going around our daily lives listening to what the state says, checking in our books if we’re following the law or not following the law. We are self-governed, with our friends, with our family. But the question really is the question of power. How do we avoid the old powers that have created the war, that have created inequalities that led to the war, and allowed these discourses? The one you mentioned before, Demyan, is about the news, about allowing these discourses to run rampant, when people get this feeling of anger towards the other. How can we avoid these from coming, returning to power? What are your thoughts on that, Julia and Demyan?

J: I would go back to the words itself, to self-governance.

We usually start to think about societies, communities when we use this word.

R: Right.

J: As in, it is governance between people. But I would step back to the individual level. Self-governance may be absolutely applied to a person, to an individual, and it begins there, on that level. When I think about democracy and why democracy fails and why we usually say: oh, our democracy that we have it’s not the real democracy, it’s just a step toward that, and we are trying to build it — I ask myself: are we individuals skilled enough to be in a democracy? So maybe this failure appears on an individual level first.

D: Of course.

J: Maybe we are not really efficient in governing ourselves first? And this leads to mistakes, failures on the social level. Here I come to the responsibility: “to give response to something.” What am I as an individual giving as a response to anything that’s coming at me? Any question, any crisis, any resource, anything. What do I do with that? And this is my response: mental, intellectual, physical – body management and body practices. How am I governing my body as an instrument? And soul or mind, both of them? If we can understand all the capacity our bodies have and our brain has and if we are really good at that, this helps us to be together. Then we can come to the level of being in a society.

R: Very good point.

C: Demyan?

D: Same. I see how the economy ruined ethics and this is the problem, yet many people like it. What if we want to change places, and put culture first and before the economy, and we need this practice, as Julia says. We have so many agents of the economy in Western society, not only Western, so many russian agents of economy, of not trusting, not taking self-responsibility. As subjects, we have no evil, we have only our genius. But if our genius is sleeping, then evil ruins our life. I want to share practices that wake people up, that wake up geniuses. We need more and more agents of ethics, more agents and actors of culture in general.

C: Robert, if I understand correctly, we as individuals are capable of self-governance, certainly in times of breakdown because that’s the fallback option. Demyan says we will need to develop our individual practice and responsibility. We will need to wake up our personal genius. In your text, you say from experience that most of the people all over the world share the same desires, the same ambitions for having a good, peaceful life. You don’t write so much, I think, about the necessity of individuals to develop, to learn, to improve, to become a better individual.

R: I actually do. I think that’s the duty that the word ‘self-governance’ actually allows. It has both these meanings. Its meaning of governing your own passions. A lot of people in the West around me are busy with that, because they’re not happy with this social economy that we live in. Or maybe they’re happy with it but dissociated. But they do have this impression of like: oh, no, I have to really work on myself, for example: I was recently in Sudan, and they’ve had a revolution going on since 2018. They emerged from 30 years of military Islamist rule which is absolutely the worst kind of mental condition you can imagine. Surprisingly they all managed to get together to show solidarity, to pull the resources during the whole revolution and to come up with modes of self-governing out of necessity, because there was nothing anymore. There was no food. But what I also noticed is that when they get together in groups, discussing, then they show self-governance also in the first sense. They try to keep themselves from becoming emotional, from going off on a tangent. They realize: we have this group moment now, we should get to a solution; we shouldn’t just be venting our anger and our frustration. With the Occupy movement there was an effort to do that. I don’t think it really worked out but there are several reasons. But there was also an effort to kind of say, let’s get together as a group and try to think together as a group through all these issues which meant also controlling yourself, controlling your own input, controlling your own reaction to people.

[46:43] capitalist economy

R: As both of you were saying, it starts with our own self-confidence. We cannot contribute positively to a group if we are messed up inside, if we are only interested in gaining our own advantage from it. But we’re living in an economy that is pushing us exactly in the other direction. Everybody for themselves, grab as much as you can. The system is like a game. The people are happy to participate in it because it’s an international game. When you participate, you are in the same game as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and you might also become a billionaire, it’s possible. But little by little we are seeing at a global scale an incredible kind of inequality, social inequality which is growing day by day. I would hope that, like in the situation of conflict, of war, when people are back to themselves, are putting in the resources and trusting other people to do the right thing with them, from there we could say: let’s look at this system. What exactly are we actually doing and can we continue with this afterwards? Can we say: in this village, or this neighborhood of this microrayon, we’re going to keep this concentration structure and we’re going to actually work on developing our communal wealth that we all share without everybody trying to grab it for themselves? Which is the drama of the past 30 years, I think, in the whole ex-USSR. All this common public wealth was grabbed and squandered by anybody who wanted to use it to buy a yacht to sail in the Maldives.

C: You just mentioned something; I think somebody should research one day why the Occupy movement failed and the Maidan movement succeeded. Because they were similar in many ways, it’s a very interesting comparison. But our next question is: are we convinced that if people practice self-governance on an individual level and on a social level, they could be resistant to the attraction of the neoliberal market economy as we know it?

J: Perhaps this self-governance brings people a better understanding of their own needs. Because this game of getting the most of life, and competition between these stronger leaders, it’s not about taking what you really need and why, it’s about taking more than others. The understanding of our own needs changes the game: the needs for my body, for my mind, for my education maybe. It may bring us to another vision: that we don’t need that much. Then the resources are there, they are enough for everyone. This might bring about a new type of economy.

C: If we, as human beings, are capable of governing ourselves individually and socially, then we might be capable of entering a new kind of economy, where we take no more than we need and share the common good.

R: I think so. It’s not so distant from us, this idea that you’re actually not entitled to have more than what you need. You know what you need, to produce in your life, to live, to have. You’re not entitled to more than that. That was a kind of golden rule of humanity. You couldn’t go into the forest and cut down all the trees and sell the timber. It was not allowed. If you needed some for your house, yes, you could take some, but you couldn’t just grab everything, as now has become a kind of new orthodoxy. I think that, Julia, as you say, we have to be conscious about it, and then all those beehives will connect together and say: actually we agree on these basic things and let’s keep them as we move out of the conflict, which will happen eventually. It can happen even now in some areas. Let’s keep this basis together and resist the efforts from above, from the neoliberal economy, which is, at the end of the day, still being cared for very much in the City of London and Wall Street in New York to give up. It’s definitely worthwhile trying, I think, because otherwise… I saw the movie Atlantis. It’s a Ukrainian movie from 2019 and it’s about a post-war Ukrainian society, where everything is completely destroyed and where the whole landscape has become a chemical-waste, post-nuclear landscape, and people are trying to survive in this kind of setting. I’m thinking of it because that’s obviously what anybody who sees that movie will say: no, nobody wants that.

J: You see, that’s also how our economy works. Every new Ukrainian movie first goes to world cinema festivals and they don’t go to the cinemas in Ukraine because they are not sure if people would pay enough, if it’s worth showing.

D: So many questions in my mind at the moment. I want to understand all about our future economy. For example, new kinds of common goods. The answer is, I think, in psychology. Maybe in the psychology of all this sport, maybe in the psychology of arts and music, for example. And of course in books. I think about the instruments, and one of the main instruments of how we do it right now is our victory.

For example, two months ago I thought about the post-war world, and three months ago I thought about the pause by being in the pause. But now I think about the moving and about the instruments, which, for example, one million people can grasp and bring to practice. Do we have these instruments or not? And it’s about education too, because so many people want and like to think about how to rebuild our education systems around the world. There are other people, and great people, and great books, and great TED Talks. I see many intellectuals, many professors, many philosophers but I don’t see how to practice. It’s about the psychology of the people, I think. It’s not about the economic system. We have different types of economic systems. For example, creative economy.

C: But when you talk about psychology and taking things step by step, what kind of steps are you thinking about?

D: We built our — not our — we built the library for the future, or future library. People need a new library, we need new books. We like old books but we need, not some, not one, but many new books in one library. Like Britannica, but different. Maybe similar to Wikipedia but not Wikipedia. We need books, paper books by great authors. I think books are the next step between practice and understanding, and sharing, and inviting other peoples, and waking up their geniuses. The war helps us trust each other. It’s a paradox but it’s a fact. A good next step is to share books. If, for example, I recommend you new books, you read them, then we discuss them. It’s a more shareable world than before the war. After the war people won’t like to read books.

[01:02:00] books for the future

C: And, are we not, through these conversations and through the essays we’re collecting, are we not also contributing to this library for the future?

D: Yes, this is us, collecting thoughts for future books.

J: That’s what we expect to appear as a logical next step of these conversations. There are so many ideas coming up during this process and in time they will develop. We hope we may support people in their writing and support participants of these dialogues in becoming authors if their ideas get more complete due to their dialogues.

C: Robert, you’re actually talking to your future publishers here, no?

R: I was thinking, Demyan, you talk about how we get to take the next step. For example, you talk about education now. I imagine that a lot of the education in Ukraine has stopped for children, no? How is it going now?

J: They keep learning. This is how the pandemic helped us — it prepared us for this period. Digital schooling has become common during the past two years. Now Ukrainian children who moved to Germany, for example, take their iPads to German schools, they put on the desk and when they don’t understand something in a German lesson, they switch to listening to their Ukrainian teacher. They are in the same classroom, and they attend both lessons online and offline, they’re so used to that.

R: If there was, for example, a breakdown or a collapse, or, let’s say, the central authority is not capable any more of overseeing the whole process — then, of course, the possibility emerges, which I’ve also seen in other countries where people start their own education. Now we do our own education and then at that point, to answer your question ‘how’, Demyan, we can actually bring our own kind of curriculum and we can teach some new things, for example, about this new economy, about how to self-organize in a more efficient way. That kind of provides the seed for the future developments, or what’s your reaction to it? Is that realistic? Or not?

D: I don’t know now. I believe in small groups and in experiments, and right now we can do so. If great actors from around the world take part in these small groups, then we have good cases.

We haven’t got answers but we’re looking for questions. This is the practice with our psychology, too. We had great practices all together, but we are people only. Are we gods, too? At the same time, we are creating right now. I think about how to help people love responsibility.

J: How to make people enjoy responsibilities?

D: Yes, this is the question, this is the question of psychology. People don’t like responsibility, but they want freedoms. This is a paradox, a very old paradox. Because responsibility brings about freedoms, not the other way around. Maybe you have some thoughts about how to join in the responsibility? What about your life, for example, your practices? Do you work out regularly, for example, or do you build your partnerships, or your personal relationships?

R: We have a good example in what Julia said before about the beehives. Imagine those people who are actually on the frontlines someplace. They’re together, they have to share the responsibilities. They say: we’re together, we have all this and this and this, we must take care of it, we must pay attention to it, we must look after our provisions. Then they share these tasks among the group, and each person has a responsibility. I don’t think in that case people reject these responsibilities. Because they realize: no, in this situation I need to take my responsibility; it will be for the common good. There’s also a certain pride in it.

When you ask about my responsibility, I have children. It’s mostly towards the children now or the beloved ones around me. I have a responsibility to behave in such a way that everybody goes ahead and gets forward. I don’t at all mind giving up my own freedoms for this purpose, because it has good results for other people around me. I know that at the end of the day, all this translates into respect and love. We’ve been a little bit fooled, I think. We’ve grown up in a system where we were only told about our rights. We were not told about the responsibilities. The only payoff is that we have to trust and believe and submit to the state. That the state is the one who’s guaranteeing our rights and the only responsibility we have is to follow its rules, its laws and regulations. That’s one trade-off the modern human being is hearing about: that in exchange for that one responsibility, you get all these rights. This is something we have to break in a way. This is something that you can break when that state is not functioning or when it becomes clear that it’s gaining much more out of this trade. Then at one point when you wake up, you say: why should I be fooled? But again, we’re in a situation we can’t do anything about, because we’re in a situation where everybody has been biased into this, everybody has accepted that deal, between submission to authority and in exchange getting all the rights as they’re spelled out for us. In a breakdown suddenly there is this opening, what we saw in Rojava, Chris, and which I also saw in Sudan recently. People start creating a new world, building their own world, which is based on their own responsibility. It’s based on our own capacity to contribute to the collective good of the people around them, of their community, family, friends, even of strangers. Do you think it might be useful to start working on a vision of where we would like Ukraine to be, for example, in 50 years? I’m only talking about Ukraine now, but we can do it anywhere in the world. What kind of society would we like to have, what kind of society would we like to live in?

C: The first thing I would say now, because it’s a very good point you’re making, all together in this little beehive. For a very long time people have not enjoyed responsibility but they are interested in their freedoms. Most of us live in a state where the government, or the ruler, or the dictator understands this and he says, “You will have your freedoms because I take your responsibility from you, I will carry the responsibility.” And a lot of people have accepted this, as you said, Robert. “Ah, this is a great solution. I don’t have to carry any responsibility because the state has taken it. If something goes wrong, I can blame the state and the only thing I have to worry about is my freedoms.” Now if you want to talk about a society of the future, we’re talking about a place where responsibility and freedoms are in our own hands together at the same time.

[01:14:38] taxation

J: I would bring up here an example with taxes. Sometimes new technologies give us space and instruments for new practices. The banking digitalization allowed Ukrainians to donate money to NGOs and private foundations, and finance the Ukrainian army. Recent external research showed that Ukrainians themselves financed these four months of the war almost entirely with their private money. Perhaps five percent came from the Red Cross, or United Nations, or something else. The other financial support is still promised but not transferred to Ukraine state accounts. Now people realize they are capable of pooling their own resources — and they’ve already put it into practice. My little donation can contribute to a really great process, if everyone is focused on that, on this result. This also creates trust, as we see that this is functioning faster than governmental instruments. Now people are questioning, “Hm, why are we paying taxes?” if we can contribute to social progress by ourselves, us, this is us who decide what should be made next. How much money do we need for that? And the latest example was collecting money for three Bayraktars. They were the first military drones really effective in the Ukrainian War. There was this first example by Lithuania, I guess, where people collected money in three days for one drone. Each of them costs six million dollars if I’m correct.

And Ukrainians said “Hm, if that people are able to collect money in three days, let’s collect money for three Bayraktars.” And Ukrainians collected money for even five of them also in three days. This is at least 15 million dollars. Through these actions people understand how easy it is to practice self-organization if we have instruments for them.

C: This is a very interesting example because here you see people taking their own responsibility.

J: Yes.

C: To donate to something that will guarantee their freedoms, here you see responsibility and freedoms together. But this is very much a war gesture. I think this kind of combination of taking responsibility to guarantee your freedoms is very much a wartime thing. People understood that a long time ago and that is why taxes were invented. Because you want to keep people, let’s say, donating, keep taking the responsibility even after the war is over. That is why they invented taxes.

J: Pay in advance. If the war comes, the state will take care of you, because the state maintains the army to protect you. But if wars don’t come regularly, they still want to keep taxes, so big governments or the state invents different reasons to collect taxes. People lose their connection to the result then. It’s not a gesture of will to pay taxes, but a must; the enjoyment is gone. But with this example, people think, how can we now institutionalize this new way of contributing to our society? If we don’t trust the government, we don’t want to pay taxes because we never get the services from the government that we want or the level of the services. That also created the gray economy, the cash payment and the criminal involvement — because people wanted a kind of parallel state. Those who wanted to live by law and who kept somehow trusting the state, they had to pay taxes. We want rules and we want these rules functioning.

R: The desire for stability is extremely strong always everywhere, and rules provide that kind of stability. But the rules can be made, as in your example. The rules can come from the communities themselves. They don’t need to come from outside.

In Rojava also they have rules, they are quite simple. But they definitely have the rules and everybody follows them. They have to accept them, they have to live by them. That’s part of being a citizen.

C: And their whole Revolution is partly or for a great deal supported by obligatory taxes from people living abroad, from the diaspora.

I’m not the person here who is going to destroy the tax system.

R: No, but if you pay taxes to your community and, for example, the community is organizing schools and the reconstruction of apartment blocks, and the water provision, and electricity provision, then of course, it becomes a question why should we also pay taxes to the government? Because we’re already getting the services we need and the stability and the opportunities for development.

J: Just to follow-up on that. If we are nomads, if we travel the world, if we decide where to live and how to be, we still stay tax residents in our country of citizenship. Sometimes we want to change citizenship but it’s too complicated. Not every nation-state is willing to have new citizens. But what if we want to support with our taxes the communities we belong to right now as temporary migrants. How can we decide and join easily?

C: This could be an individual choice also to pay taxes in two or three places. I believe, Robert, in one of your texts you have also proposed a different kind of economy, and I believe this also includes that you are a citizen of the community where you are based which would mean that you also pay your taxes within that community. Then if you move, you move. The funny thing is our conversation is now coming full circle because suddenly we’re back to the borders that the existing nation-states put on our imagination.

R: The thing about the taxes is that if you could have some kind of capacity to decide what happens with these taxes, then it’s much easier to pay taxes. If you’re receiving a bill, you have no idea where the money is being spent: on saving banks, on subsidizing fuel for the airline industry — that’s actually what most of our money is going to. Then, there’s no desire to pay anywhere. If I’m paying for better schools and the energy transition, then yes, right? So it comes down to this idea of sovereignty. Where is the sovereignty? We have our human sovereignty. It’s very natural, but it’s been taken away from us, and it’s been put in the state, and it’s become completely unspeakable to even withdraw our sovereignty from it. That’s a little bit what you were saying, Julia, about being able to decide where you want to pay taxes. All these things are being decided for us, but as far as I’m concerned, what’s really important is that we see alternative systems arise in situations of breakdown, of war. We have to put the spotlight on them and say, this is serious. It’s not only a stop-gap measure. It doesn’t mean that as soon as the war is over, we’ll return to the previous thing. No, we should actually say “no”, we should see what is happening with how people are self-organizing, how they are collecting taxes to pay for the very expensive weapons which are necessary to win this war. We should put the spotlight on this and say: this is what we’re doing now and actually it’s good and why don’t we continue like this in the future? I think it would really help if we have this image of where we want to go, a positive image with lots of nature, lots of healthiness, lots of good schooling, lovely full libraries and all these other elements that we need. You will find that a lot of people agree on that and say: this is where we want to go and now let’s see how we get there. We get there by doing it ourselves and taking our responsibilities to get there. We’re not going to wait for somebody else to do it for us.

[01:29:17] producing visions of the future

D: I have a fun question: how many of us have to see a positive future, Robert? How many of us? If I want to see it, you want to see it, is that all? And Chris and Julia, and that’s all? How many of us should? What do you think?

R: I think everybody. We should talk about it.

D: Everybody?

R: This should be a discussion you have with the people around you. What kind of future would we like? Let’s talk about it and let’s draw it. We can have artists make pictures of it, we can write it in books, we can find many cultural expressions to show it, and then we can show it to more people, and we can get more agreement. Because basically there has to be a consensus, it’s not going to be a few people who have a nice idea. They’re not going to change anything.

D: What about russians or Serbians, or politics?

R: Just think about the russian people. They have always been the biggest utopians. I mean not only the russians but the Serbians. The people themselves probably have a similar desire for a future. They don’t want to be like machines spending half of their money at McDonald’s every month. They actually want a better future, they want to actually have that future for their own children. Maybe you feel this differently, maybe you feel that there’s a hostility. Right now what you need is the community itself. For people to agree on what they would like in the future. Let’s work for this and let’s take our responsibility to make this happen. Let’s share this. But at least, I think we need artists.

D: We can complicate the system. We add, and add, and add to this system, new institutions, and new thoughts, and new books. New institutions until the system doesn’t create wars. Is not able to create wars. At the moment we see humanity create wars. But if we add that we cannot destroy russians or other authoritarians? I think about it: how many institutions or phenomena can we add to this system? To the point of complexity?

J: So to have enough choice or enough replacement for the old systems?

D: It’s like an inhibitor in this system. Yes, we need these institutions and all these phenomena. For example, news. It’s a very strong, very powerful word, but we don’t use it. We have so many words we know but we don’t use in our daily life and daily talks. This is about practice, about practice of communication with different words.

J: Because when we don’t use them, the meanings behind these words are not in our life. That’s something we lose.

D: I think some of these words can be inhibitors for the system, and not only disturb the war but create the victory. We have the time.

C: We’re talking about the need for new words and also the need to redefine and give new meaning to the old words. For me this could be the cliffhanger until the next conversation.

Questions

How do you experience self-governance in your personal life? For what do you take responsibility? What responsibility do you refuse to take?
What is the nature of responsibility? Is it a state of mind? An experience? A practice? A virtue? Is it necessarily social?
According to the speakers, openings for self-governance appear when the state authority breaks down, for example, during the time of war. Is the reverse also true, i.e. is self-governance disruptive of the state authority? Under what circumstances? Can you think of specific examples of this?