This is a list of specific actions anybody and everyone can do to improve the quality of life for all people. The strategy is to foster mutual aid. Mutual aid is the foundation of all prosperity and security. It also is necessary for sustainability (meeting present needs without compromising our future capacity to meet needs). People like to look for solutions to the world's problems in tech because that relieves them from responsibility, but in fact, avoiding responsibility is a large part of the problem. The actual solution requires a conscious effort. We have the gift of consciousness for this exact reason. The solution is not tech but culture. The solution is to teach and practice mutual aid to meet everyone's needs.
That is the purpose of society: to meet everyone's needs. We gathered together as hunter-gatherers to hunt, gather, and care for our young, sick, and elderly better than we could alone. Teamwork is the super power of our species. We aren't just living together because we happen to find ourselves together, but because it is by working together that we are more capable of creating prosperity and security. We must understand that society isn't just a coincidence that we have to deal with, the result of being many humans on the planet. Society has a purpose, it is how we best meet our needs. Society's goal is to meet people's needs.
Once we understand that society's goal is to meet everyone's needs, then we realise that almost all of the problems we see today are caused by people doing whatever they must to meet their needs because their needs are not being met by society. When people kidnap and sell other people to be slaves, when people sign up for the army to go kill others, when people join the mafia, when people lie and scam to sell their products, it always is because they are being paid to do so and they need that money to meet their needs. "If I don't do it someone else will" As long as there is the underlying threat of being a loser of the dog-eat-dog rat race to the bottom, a threat of being excluded from society and left hungry, cold, and alone, there always will be someone willing to sacrifice any and all values for a chance of getting ahead. Only when people don't have to compete to earn a living can they afford to have values. Only when people are sure they will always have all their needs met can they think long-term and care about others and the environment.
This document contains a list of actions that anybody can start doing today to start to improve the behaviors of the people they meet and contact so that they help each other bring about a more abundant and sustainable society. They may seem weak but experience has shown us that they are actually very powerful. Some are more specific, others are more general. Some are free to do and others may have costs. Some require contacts with capabilities or resources, others can be done by anyone. Some are local in person, others are global over the internet. Depending on your appetite to contribute and see results, you can do more or less of these actions more or less often. Some of us do them all day, every day.
If you focus on local actions, even just devoting 30 minutes a week to them, you will be able to see admirable results in as little as a year. Hundreds to thousands of people will gain more access to resources at no cost while they meet and befriend many more people in the community. Hundreds of pounds of waste will be reduced. The community will begin to see that there is a different and better way of doing things that doesn't require either more government or more business. The larger the area you work in, the more diluted the improvements achieved by your work will be, but they are equally there. You absolutely have the power to change the world, as long as you are willing to put in the effort.
There are three general categories of activity. We call the sum of all three of these activities "prosocialising".
A) Advocate free collaboration
B) Practice and organize mutual aid with Free Collaboration Networks
C) Teach everyone to foster free collaboration
If you understand these goals well, you can find new and better ways to achieve them. Below we give you some specific examples of each category.
A) Advocate free collaboration
All social improvement begins with a desire to help others. If people are forced to contribute, it is no longer an act of generosity but instead can feel like theft or abuse. This will lead people to find ways to retaliate or defend themselves from what they perceive as an attack. If people are forced to work a job, they will occupy the position but then may put wrenches in gears, do the job badly, gaslight others who do the job better to keep them from making them look bad in comparison, find ways to steal or gain more personal benefit, etc. Similarly, when people are forced to pay taxes what happens is that politicians are bought, loopholes are found, tricks are developed to make more profit, etc. What matters is the intention to help others and to contribute. "Where there's a will, there's a way". Therefore, fostering in other people this desire to help and contribute is a fundamental task of every human being. This way society functions and works to meet everyone's needs.
If every person goes out for himself, society ceases to exist and we return to the stone age. "If every organ in our body went out for itself, our body would rot in a month." - Jacque Fresco.
Advocating mutual aid is a task that mostly involves communication, advertising, public relations, education, influence, leadership, marketing, psychology, and group psychology. Currently, our society is spending 1.5 T$ a year on advocating consumption, which often involves calling on selfishness, greed, envy, lust, insecurity, vanity, and boastfulness. If only all those resources and professional capacity were instead used to foster mutual aid, probably war and poverty would end in a month. Of course, we as individuals can't compare in capacity to the entire industry of publicity, but here are some simple examples of what you can do.
a) Send a message to all your contacts that educate them about our interdependence, for example using content like one of the following:
Short videos:
How Altruism Defeats Psychopathy | George Monbiot
Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein - A Short Film
Documentary:
A World Worth Imagining: Jacque Fresco, The Man With The Plan
Podcast:
Seriously Wrong Library Socialism, Usufruct
Book: The New Human Rights Movement
b) Find a way in which we are all interdependent on each other and send a message explaining this to all your contacts. For example: "No single person can make a simple pencil." (Here is a great video explaining this) You can even search for an image online that you can add to the sentence so that people find it more beautiful. The more people understand how their well-being depends on the well-being of every other person, the more they will be inclined to treat others as self.
c) Instead of saying "goodbye" you can say "Enjoy a shared world". This is a simple way to promote sharing and remind people that we are all in this together.
d) Send a message to all your contacts, reminding them that there is now enough for everyone. As long as people are afraid there won't be enough for all, they will always stay in a competitive mindset focused on being a winner and not a loser in the "game of musical chairs" for survival. You can use content like the following or just simple reminders of how much we produce in the world (for example enough food to feed 12 billion).
Here is a video to help or give you ideas:
Humans Need Not Apply
e) Take selfies making the C with your hand to show support for investing in the commons and upload them to the networks with #Photos4TheCommons. Take pictures of other people making the C with their hand and upload them to the networks with the same hashtag. Send letters and messages to influential people inviting them to join the Photos4TheCommons project. This helps visualize the goal and intention of making the Commons grow. The Commons are collectively managed shared resources that everyone has access to, like our oceans, our public parks, or our libraries. This is precisely what is needed to meet everyone's needs, a pool of shared resources available to everyone, just as the forest and the sea are to hunter-gatherers.
e) Send letters and messages to influential people explaining the importance of meeting everyone's needs. Even if they don't reply, many times they will see your message and it will influence them.
B) Practice and organize mutual aid with Free Collaboration Networks.
FCNs are special in that they aren't necessarily organisations and most of the time they won't be managing any money and so they don't require paperwork or accounting. A FCN is any tool, method, space, app, or website that is used to facilitate gifting, sharing, volunteering or the management of shared resources. They can be understood as the most efficient way to collaborate and work as a team. Can you imagine if we charged each other every time we answered each other's questions? Of course that is absurd, that would inhibit our capacity to work as a team. it would destroy society. Knowledge is the most valuable resource. The same effect happens with all other resources, the fewer barriers there are to providing each other with what we need, the more effective we are at meeting everyone's needs and progressing as a civilization. This doesn't mean that all restrictions are bad, but that it is better to have less than more. The free flow of ideas and resources is like the free flow of oxygen in our body, it is what fuels life.
a) Create FCNs to help each other altruistically, without self-interest or any commercial activity.
b) Join all the Free Collaboration Networks in your area. This directory can help you find some.
c) Invite all your contacts to these FCNs and tell them how they work. Here are some that for sure you can most likely start using right away no matter where you are: Sharebay for just about everything, Compartir for carpooling, Olio for food sharing, Trustroots for free lodging.
d) In these FCNs, try to meet the demands of others whenever you can. If a group you are in is inactive for a week, write a message to the members to remind them that the group exists, how it works, and how good for everyone it is to use and contribute to it. Regularly motivating people to participate in beneficial activities such as FCNs is key. All living systems require upkeep and maintenance, including behaviors and habits.
c) Create a new Free Collaboration Network with all the neighbors who live on your block and those next door. Knock door to door to introduce yourself and explain it to them. If they are not there, leave an explanatory note with your contact. In the group, explain that the group is only for messages to offer a gift or ask for a gift, and that the logistics must be private to not clutter the group. You can make another group in the same way for sharing, another for carpooling, another for lending a hand, and another for food sharing. Generate motivation in the group and moderate it until enough neighbors understand how it works and then it will start to work on its own.
d) When you discover a new Free Collaboration Network, add it to the list of FCNs to add global directory. Or better yet, sign up as an editor and add it yourself to the global FCN directory
e) Go talk to leaders of social centers, cultural associations, parishes, and other groups and invite them all to join the local (and global) FCNs.
C) Teach everyone to foster mutual aid (Which can also be called prosocialising)
Teach everyone to do all these activities, that is how mutual aid grows and scales to benefit all of society. If we teach enough people, it will eventually replace the dog-eat-dog rat race to the bottom. By yourself, you will greatly improve your city but the more people there are prosocialising, the greater the effect. It is exponential. Also, society has to learn to foster mutual aid and understand that this is what civilization is about, teaching and practicing the golden rule and treating others as self. One day you will pass and society will have to continue to be reminded that its purpose is to meet everyone's needs.
a) Send a message to all your contacts detailing this methodology for improving society. You can do this by sending them the link to this guide or the prosocialise.org website
b) Join the online meetings in our discord server where we meet every two weeks with other people who are working on fostering mutual aid.
c) Get people to interview us on the radio, or TV, or write an article about us.
d) Ask us for printed material to distribute in mailboxes (as community information, not advertising), on car windshields, and directly in hand on the street. You also are welcome to design your own. If you do, please share it with us.
e) Ask us for a poster or banner to hang on your door or balcony or a sticker for your vehicle. You also are welcome to design your own. If you do, please share it with us too.
f) Speak with the mayor or selectmen of your municipality and explain to them how much they can improve the well-being of the people by implementing a campaign to foster mutual aid. You can contact us to help them design a specific plan to their liking, for free.
D) In addition to all these free actions that you can do on your own, we will be able to continue fostering mutual aid worldwide if you help us financially. You can contribute whatever you want at the bottom of our website https://prosocialise.org, a monthly donation is most appreciated.
E) You can also invest in a high-yield investment fund that at the same time generates capital for the Prosocialise Foundation. For more information write an email to [email protected]
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Whatever you do, never give up. Without hope we are hopeless, and where there's a will, there's a way. You are not alone, we got this, so enjoy a shared world