Friday, January 29, 2010

The Green Beautiful-Youtube

My daughter showed me a movie she had found on Youtube in 9 parts. I found it to be a utopian science fiction movie. I was surprised it had been banned by the European Union. However, as I watched it with my 20 year old daughter I realized why. The premise of the movie is humans from another planet. It appears we are genetically the same and one of the women is from here but doesn't find out until her oldest children are about 18 to 20 years old or so. So she comes to earth to find out about her relatives. It is a very funny movie in some ways because on her planet there is no government and there are no wars. Everthing is decided by consensus of the people. There is no money, instead everything is done through the barter system so people trade food, clothes, services, whatever they make or have to each other and they share knowledge about everything and maybe most important of all everyone has to decide how many babies to have that year based upon how good the crops were so nobody starves.

Yes. The movie is obviously utopian, idealistic and so in some ways a fable. But the people on this planet are not much different than farming communities of old before they were overrun by warlords, corporations and governments.

I would highly recommend watching this movie. I found it very idealistic and childlike but also inspiring. I could see people especially during these hard times of buying large farms together and trying to live like the people in the movie in an idealistic way.

Since I was 21 in 1969 I have met hundreds of people who tried to live like this. However, it usually doesn't work that well for very long. One or two people's problems make these kinds of situations intolerable in real life usually after a few years. But in the meantime sometimes they can be wonderful. Just don't expect it to last 10, 20 or 50 years working perfectly. There is likely only a 1 to 5 percent probability that you could make something like this work fairly well for 50 to 100 years. But then again it totally depends upon the people doing it. Just remember the weakest link of any group usually brings the group down.

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