For this issue of the magazine, we found Douglas Stevenson, a long-time member and spokesperson of the community and the author of the book Out to Change the World. We asked to speak with Douglas about how the community has evolved over the past fifty years and what lessons have been learned by its members.
(Note: I always say I am a volunteer spokesperson)
Jeff Carreira: Hello Douglas and thank you for speaking with us for this issue of The Artist of Possibility. Given your extensive experience in one of the most famous and largest experimental communities that emerged out of the counterculture of the 1960’s, The Farm, you have written a book about the community with the wonderful title, Out to Change the World. My understanding of the story is that Stephen Gaskin, while teaching at San Francisco State College generated so much enthusiasm among his students that a large group traveled in 60 vehicles across the country to found a community in Tennessee. When I was an engineer I learned that experiments never fail, rather they end, and then we collect data to understand what happened and use what we learned to design a new experiment. We are hoping to learn from you some things that will help future generations form better communities
Douglas Stevenson: That sounds good. I'll just mention for the record that a friend of mine who left The Farm during the time we call the changeover in September of 1983, wrote an article entitled, Why The Farm Collective Failed, and I was given the opportunity to write a counter-opinion article called Why The Farm Survived. I understand where he is coming from in his article, yet I have a different viewpoint. You can find both of the articles in the press section of The Farm website.
I certainly wouldn’t use the word failed to describe The Farm because we’re still here, and I believe our current model is more replicable than the original. The current incarnation of The Farm is more comfortable for people to embrace than the original vision centered on personal vows of poverty. Of course, I would call it a vow of abundance rather than poverty because we believed that if we all share then there is plenty for everyone. Still, that ideal is harder for people to embrace today.
Our belief system was founded on the idea that there was plenty for everyone, and one of the distinguishing characteristics of The Farm was that we believed in lifelong commitment. We would say three days or the rest of your life, meaning that you could visit for three days, but beyond that, you need to make a lifelong commitment. A lifetime commitment was what our population was built on for the first twelve years of our existence.
People who came soon found that we were not just about hard work, we were about very hard work. We were giving 110% of our energy and living in households of 20, 30, and 40 people without running water, electricity, laundry facilities, and a lot of other things. It took enormous dedication to stay.
You might be surprised to learn that our population leaned toward type A personalities. We were driven, idealistic, and willing to commit ourselves completely. Now 50 years later, the spirit that was coming out of the sixties and seventies isn’t around. People are concerned about climate change and driven to go back to the land, but not with the same idealistic spirit. Our community has adapted and we’ve become more mellow and laid back. I see us today as an ecovillage where everyone lives their lives and earns their own income.
Jeff Carreira: This is so interesting and I would like to ask you more about the revolutionary spirit that emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s. That spirit was driven by the disillusionment of young people around events like the Vietnam War, and the seeds of that movement can be found in the disillusionment that occurred after World War II that led to the beat movement. It was all fueled by the belief that there was a better way to live and a better way to be human. I wonder if we've become more cynical today about the possibility of changing the world. Maybe the enormity of issues like climate change make it difficult to feel hopeful about the power of community. Perhaps the necessity to fight our global problems supersedes the ideal of creating a better world. What do you think?
Douglas Stevenson: I think we've been beaten down as a culture. When we were coming out of the sixties, we thought anything was possible and that we really could transform the world. The political powers at the time didn’t know what to do with that spirit. Whether it was the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement or the massive anti-war demonstrations, or the media exposing the truth of the war, the power structure was not going to let that level of revolt happen again. So today you see the media is largely owned by corporate interests and the government is much more in control of the narrative.
We’ve reached the point where it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing you do because anything I do will be swallowed up by larger forces. In my public talks I often make the point that coming out of the sixties, we felt the sting of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, not to mention the loss of some of our rock and roll heroes like Janice Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix. We received a message about the danger of what we were doing and for many of us the seventies became a time of turning inward in search of spiritual wisdom. The growing interest in going back to the land was fueled by a desire to move closer to something that was beyond politics.
There is still some of that inward searching happening today. Many people realize that if they want to find happiness and fulfillment, they have to start by working on themselves. And that might mean detaching from the greater culture and finding a more peaceful way of life. I would like to see this spirit grow and blossom because I truly believe that people who have stronger community ties have happier lives. I’ve had friends in this community for fifty years and now I'm now friends with their children. We have an extended family network of uncles and aunties similar to what you might see in more traditional cultures and it is beautiful.
What I am talking about is different from what you typically find in a city setting among a circle of friends that may have united around a cause or purpose. We have circles of friends too, but our lives take place in a setting that is immersed in nature and that allows us to absorb deep peace into our systems.
Jeff Carreira: Before joining a spiritual community myself, I had worked for five years in a group home for adjudicated teens. I saw the tremendous positive benefit that the teens experienced during the nine months of our program. I also saw that many of them returned to old behaviors once they were back in their original environment and ended up in adult prison. I realized that unless human consciousness evolved we would not be able to help anyone.
When I entered a spiritual community I thought that we were going to unlock the code of spiritual evolution and change the world. I was in a profoundly ecstatic state of unbridled optimism. I'm aware that today that degree of optimism looks naive, and it probably was naive, but I would love to hear you talk about what you think is possible in the world.
Douglas Stevenson: The Farm has served two functions. First we were a flagship. We carried the banner of a different future and we provided an example that others could follow. The farm is also a lifeboat. I think we will experience even more tumultuousness in the future. There are rough seas ahead and we show people how to surf them. During such challenging times the first priority is maintaining life and teaching others how to survive through the storms. Right now our community is learning how to stay afloat through the craziness of the economy, the pandemic, possible stock market crashes and any other calamity that might befall us.
Jeff Carreira: I know that you became a leading spokesperson for The Farm in the nineties and you’ve been intimately involved in the community for fifty years. That puts you in a unique position to be able to tell us what the counterculture communal experiments have taught us. It seems imperative to me that human beings learn how to get along together, and if we can’t do that in small groups, how will we ever be able to do it globally? I would love to hear your thoughts on what we've learned and what guidance you would give to the community builders of the future.
Douglas Stevenson: What comes to my mind is conflict resolution and nonviolent communication. I think we're fortunate that there is a school of nonviolent communication. For our first ten years we resolved conflict the best way we could. We did it our own way, where we were all obligated to speak the truth to each other. Living in those communal households we saw each other's faults, and you can always see someone else’s faults easier than you see your own. Slowly we learned what worked and what didn't work. We learned to speak with compassion and not out of competition, spite, or pride. We have survived for so long partly because we learned how to resolve conflicts better. That and the fact that we were big enough to weather the inevitable storms of social drama. No community is immune to social drama, but being able to work through those is key. Fundamentally that means learning to speak the truth with compassion. If we can do that we can overcome our differences and work things out.
Jeff Carreira: Following up on what you just said, the community that I lived in for twenty years was often very intense. We valued intensity and very direct communication. We also lived with very little privacy so everyone knew a great deal about everyone else. I have come to believe that is a time for intensity and even confrontation in community, but there also needs to be room for ebb and flow. There needs to be enough space to back off. If the intensity never lets up, things tend to blow up. In our community you could say we were only interested in breakthroughs, but if you want sustainability as well as breakthroughs there needs to be some give in the system.
Douglas Stevenson: A great deal depends on how well people can handle themselves when they are challenged or find themselves in the middle of their own social drama. People need to be prepared for that. Only people who learn how to handle themselves under pressure are able to remain in community for the long term. As the community diversifies, we’ve needed to incorporate more rules and contracts so that we can avoid problems. In the beginning, we just figured things out as we went along, but now we have more explicit agreements. For those of us who came into the community when it was young and free, these new developments can feel discouraging, but I think it does help with sustainability.
