Distributim is Voluntary and Local

[causticus]

Distributim is a way of life, not some daydreaming visionary's a top-down grand scheme of how everyone else should live. It's a commitment to living local and within your means; a devotion to family and community; and a wholesale rejection of soulless consumerism and its twin, social atomization. Distributism is first and foremost about the home.

Here's how G.K. Chesterton envisioned this system:

The problem in the modern world is that the exceptions get all the attention. The generalizations get none. The exceptions have become the rule. It is now an exception for a woman to raise her own children. But [G.K.] Chesterton’s distributist ideal not only called for mothers to stay at home, it called for fathers to stay at home as well. The home-based business, the idea of self-sufficiency would not only make for stronger, healthier families, but a stronger, healthier society. If everything in a society is based on nurturing and strengthening and protecting the family, that society will survive centuries of storms. A home-based society is naturally and necessarily a local and de-centralized society. If the government is local, if the economy is local, then the culture is also local. What we call culture right now is neither local nor is it culture. It is an amorphous society based on the freeway off-ramp and tall glowing signs that all say the same thing. Convenience is our culture. We all convene at the convenience store, where we get our gas and our munchies and our magazine and we are careful not to look anyone in the eye, not even the Pakistani clerk who waves our credit card across the laser beam. This is a revealing snapshot of our fragmented society: passive, restless, shutter-eyed, lonely, not at home.

Though Chesterton would argue that a distributist society would be most fully realized if it were based on a Catholic worldview, he would not insist upon that basis as essential for achieving such a society. In fact, he would argue that such a society is more congenial to the different religions than any other societal plan. Freedom of religion, as it now supposedly exists under a huge centralized government, actually needs to be “enforced” by that government. The result, as we have seen, is that religion has actually been stifled where the government watchdog is there to “guarantee” the freedom. But local-based governments (supported by local-based economies) are more conducive to religious freedom because people of the same religion would naturally gravitate together. The main reason that people of the same religion tend to scatter in our society and that people of different religions tend to mix uncomfortably is that our society is not based on the home. It is based on the opportunities outside the home. The better jobs are always elsewhere. It is not their religion that makes people chose a place to live; it is their job. It is convenience. It is not philosophy.

Here the religious or spiritual community serves as the cultural glue for the people in a given locality who aspire to live the distributist ideal. A government-run program or plan is totally unnecessary for this to work. The only involvement with government would be the occasional necessity for the community to lobby local and municipal governments to ease up on any red tape or other cumbersome regulations which may hamper family and community-building and sustenance. Economics would be merely a matter of community members pooling resources and expertise together in order to accomplish common goals in a more efficient and socially-harmonious manner.

Distributism is an opt-in system. People who have no interest in anything related to distributism will of course always be free to have nothing to do with distributism; as long as we are blessed with a free society, people will be able to live their own lives in whatever lawful manner they see fit. In many ways distributism fulfills the libertarian ideal of independent, decentralized communities deciding their own fate and resisting coercion from distant, centralized and impersonal bureaucratic government authorities. The only real difference is that distributism avoids promoting the values of atomized individualism and treating people as soulless economic units. Again, distributist economics is mostly just a function of family and community maintenance; it's never an end unto itself.

A distributist economic network can easily be established in any typical urban, suburban or rural area. All it requires is a group of like-minded friends and acquaintances establishing a semi-formal trade network. A closed-access craigslist type of web page or app for swapping goods and skills would easily suffice as a beginner endeavor. Actually, these efforts already exist in many cities and towns across the US, but of course the way they are identified and publicized will vary according to differing ethical and ideological goals.