Variously described as “refreshingly irreverent,” and “a mockery of humanity”
Nathan Rosquist
Karma: 29
Rationalists seem to like to experiment on themselves, and that’s easier to do in a supportive structure of some kind. cf Sangha
If you want to succeed, you need to find the Right Conditions to do so.
Good questions. This was not intended as the Open-Source Guide, but more of an introduction or an outline of what’s possible. My own understanding of How to Run a Monastery (Without Religion) is pretty shallow still, so I’m hoping to connect with others that are thinking about these things. I have some other blog posts that I might bring over that get to some specifics, based on personal experience or historical sources, but the Guide is yet-to-be.
“My first impressions on the hardest parts of making a “rationalist monastery”: be getting people to voluntarily unplug from all of their input streams, and agreeing on how to run things.
Completely! The coolest and most wretched thing about setting up any kind of intentional community is that you get to choose what the rules are. (First you have to decide HOW to decide on rules, who gets to make what decisions and when, and how to change rules).
One rule could be that:
people have to give up all their input streamsbut it could also be
let's all experiment for one year with not using devices after 10pmor
no talking between 9pm and 9am; no sex on the Ides of March; no eye-contact when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars; no device-use in the building when dinner is hotI guess an Open-Source Guide could be more like an API, showing inputs and outputs, and what parameters you might conceive of tweaking, and how that’s gone well or terribly for others. The classical model (people of a single sex living together more or less completely cut off from the world) is pretty fucking intense, and there are groups like the Carthusians that take it to incredible extremes, living basically as proximate hermits. Check out Into Great Silence.
My only advice right now is: find people who want more or less the same thing that you want, and take SMALL STEPS together.
Revenue streams
Some facts up front: 1) we’ve never owned any property, and 2) we’ve never paid anyone a salary, strictly speaking. These would be great, but we haven’t been able to make them happen yet. A corollary of 1 is that we have always either bartered our artistic services for space to live in (e.g. with municipalities in rural Italy who want to do something with their crumbling monastery AND want people to enact artistic events to drive tourism) or rented space to live in. A corollary of 2 is that we have (almost) always relied on people who could volunteer their time as staff, artists-in-residence, work-traders, etc. in exchange for “meaningful experiences,” + and sometimes room & board or a plane ticket. The long-term community has been comprised of people who have side-income. Right now we’re renting a farm-house in Vermont and running summer programs (“Art Monastic Laboratories” and “Artmonk Retreats”).
Financial income to run programming has largely been from:
donations from individuals in the US
grants from the EU
an agriturismo (farm hotel) we ran for a couple years in Umbria
money paid for artistic services (e.g. we had a pretty great wedding band touring around central Italy for a while)
We’ve made literally tens of dollars selling products made by artmonks, e.g. knit objects, paintings, and an excellent (if I do say so) Bay Leaf liqueur called Lauro based on “an old monastic recipe.” (I actually met with a liquor-law lawyer to investigate setting up a distillery or an infusery here in CA, but the idea fizzled because I got overwhelmed with the capital needed upfront to start something like that.)
We’ve brainstormed other cool methods to bring in revenue, including but not limited to a printing press, painting icons, doing “creativity consulting”, but have yet to follow through on anything to the point of steady revenue.
One thing I’ve learned is that people who make a living with “art” tend to have gotten used to running pretty low to the ground. They can turn a food budget of a few euros/person/day into amazing feasts.
Another thing I’ve learned about self-defined artists is that some of them are very narcissistic, and some of them are self-destructively generous. All told, they make unreliable non-profit administrators.
Open-Source Monasticism
Just brainstorming: Some portion of the karma for an edit could be added retroactively by the % of page likes that happened after the edit. This would mean that (part of) karma is not a fixed thing, but sort of like dividends for the investment of time and energy in an edit.
The idea that the labor share of income has been historically stable is often taken as a given, but it’s more of a “stylized fact” than an unchanging law. Measuring non-wage compensation, like healthcare and retirement benefits, is notoriously tricky, which makes it hard to get a clear picture. And if capital—like machines and software—ever becomes a perfect substitute for human labor, that historical stability could completely fall apart.
On top of that, even though GDP and worker productivity have risen over the decades, many workers, especially those in low and middle-income jobs, haven’t seen their wages keep up. Since the 80s, a bigger share of the productivity gains has gone to capital owners, executives, and highly skilled workers, leaving others behind and deepening income inequality. Declining union membership, globalization, and shifts in labor markets have further eroded workers’ bargaining power, lowering their share of income—even in industries where technology is designed to work alongside people.