Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - UTOPIA: the Callaway Cut

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Permaculture! Anarchy! Pagan Sex Dungeons! ToE's Andrew Callaway revisits his 2017 tour of intentional communities for our five part Utopia Series. We are calling this one UTOPIA: The Callaway Cut

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Utopia. Back in 2017, I produced a five-part series called Utopia. The conceit was that for each episode, I would talk to a writer or a philosopher type about the idea of utopia and why we humans can't seem to pull it off. And TOE's Andrew Calloway would visit a real life intentional community. At first, I felt like I'd chosen the good job as I didn't have to cruise around America

sleeping in my car or outside. But as soon as Andrew started calling in from the road, telling me all about how he was partying with pagans in the woods. I remember being insanely jealous. And now, after spending a year inside here on the island, well, I'm even more jealous. Andrew recently put together a supercut with some updates on how some of the people and places he visited are doing today. We're going to call this one Utopia, the Calloway Cut. I'm really trying to, like, stay away from the idea of commune.

I'm like, this is not a commune, but some of what we're doing is a little communal. And I don't know how to reconcile that yet. Dustin Nemos didn't have the money to homestead. So he decided to start a community with other people that have the same value system as us, voted Trump and stuff, you know, quality people. Dustin convinced some quality people to pony up the cash for a plot of land and the dense forest. We cut down a couple trees, mostly with an axe, which sucked. There's a creek on the property, but I didn't get to see it. I could take you down there and show you.

We probably will get ticks that way. For now, it's just him and his wife. She's pregnant, so she's refusing to help me lift stuff. She says it's not good for the baby. Wait, so do you have another job or source of income right now? Are you focused fully on this? The wife works at a restaurant in town. I still have some passive income from online stuff I've done, like affiliate marketing and such.

Is that from like blogging and stuff? How does that all work? Well, you know what? I'm a pretty honest person. I was involved in some adult stuff at one point and that gave me a nice passive income to sit on. Is that like hosting or like acting? Acting. You know, it beaded waiting tables, which is what I was doing before. And I actually made enough to, like I had multiple apartment buildings and stuff. It's probably the best thing that ever happened to me, losing all that money to that lady who's under investigation. I don't want to say her name. Despite their conservative leanings, Dustin is convinced his fellow non-communists won't

judge his porno past. In fact, he's certain his community will be free from cultural conflicts, because of their shared love for the book that inspired the name of Dustin's community, Galt's Retreat. John Galt is a fictional character in an Ayn Rand book, Don't Hate Me. John Galt saw the problems with society, and much like what we're doing here, he decided to leave. He said that I'm going to stop the engine of the world, and we're going to leave and let the other people that were mooching off the productive people learn the hard way because

they won't listen. So in the fictional story, they went to a secret place called Galt's Gulch. And, you know, the economy probably, I guess, fell apart after that. I haven't even read the book, honestly. But, you know, I've seen so many quotes from Ayn Rand now at this point, I feel like I've probably read half the book. As you can imagine, Galt's retreat didn't last for very long. In fact, just one month after the segment originally aired, Dustin Nemos changed course. He went back in front of the camera, starting a YouTube channel of his own.

And you can read all about what he's been up to. Because while Dustin may not have read Atlas Shrugged, he now has a book of his own. QAnon's book, An Invitation to the Great Awakening, shot to number one on Amazon's list of bestsellers. Dustin Nemos is a fixture in the Q world. In 2018, he published QAnon, An Invitation to the Great Awakening, making him quite literally the guy who wrote the book on Q. So the fake news has really gone from ignore QAnon to attack. And it's beautiful to see.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they attack you, and then you win. And we are winning, my friends. When I was on my way to Galt's retreat, I wanted to record an origin story. But as I drove away, I never would have dreamed that years later that guy would be leading one of America's biggest and most powerful communities. And he really is one of the leaders. You can even see him in the new HBO documentary series. This is a new movie from Disney, of all places, and you guys know how I feel about Disney. It's filled with pedophiles and abuse. I'm just saying, there it is.

You see it? That big, beautiful, brazen Q right there on the chest of this guy's shirt. But I wasn't looking for Q-topia. In fact, QAnon represents pretty much everything we wanted to escape from back in 2017. It was right after Trump was elected, and he was bragging about the size of his nuke button and pulling back every climate regulation possible. All I could see in the future was Mad Max. And now, on the one-year anniversary of the COVID lockdown, it's clearer than ever that no one is going to protect us from the next apocalypse. If we want to save the world,

we're going to need some big, radical, utopian ideas. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I mean, I was dropping acid, experiencing revelations, and it was changing my life and my perspective about everything. Phil Schweizer is a founding member of one of the oldest hippie communes that's still around today, The Farm. We really started The Farm in 71 back in the days when it was Mother Earth news and back to the land and grow your own food and get out of the city, we started in San Francisco. And we left on October 12, 1970.

I think it was Columbus Day. Coincidentally. Out to discover America. When Benjamin sent me off to find Utopia, this is what I had in mind. Not anything Columbus-related, more just that I wanted to drop some acid, have some revelations, and get off the grid. That's what Phil did at the farm in Summertown, Tennessee, conveniently located less than half an hour from Galt's Retreat.

I wanted the next stop on my trip to be a place with real staying power, so I could find out how to make a utopia that can last. The farm was one of the biggest hippie communes in the world, and it was a full-blown capital C commune. There were no personal possessions on the farm. And according to Phil, everybody was welcome to join in. Anybody that wanted to come here came here. We had what we called an open gate policy. This, to me, is an incredible thing about the farm. Most communes kept their gates closed

or fell apart after a troublemaker showed up. The farm built their own school and said, we can teach people to live in community. I had one kid that was a committed kleptomaniac. He lived in my house and he would take stuff and put it all under his bed as if you were never going to find it. And we took care of him. There were kids that were in our school that were probated to the farm by local courts that said, well, if you can live with the hippies for six weeks,

well, I won't put you in jail. Just go out there to the hippie farm. We were really trying to do things, extraordinary things. We had a proposal in the 70s that we publicized that pregnant women that were thinking about having an abortion, we would say, don't have the abortion, come to the farm, we'll deliver your baby for free, and then we'll take care of your baby. If you ever want it back, you can come back and have your baby back.

Okay, problematic anti-abortion views aside, that is an extraordinary thing to offer. Drop off your kid here and pick him up whenever you want. By the end of the 70s, there were nearly 1,500 people living on the farm, and half of them were kids. But by the time I arrived on the farm, things had changed. Right now, our population is probably averaging in the, I don't know, 60? Maybe even older? Average? It turns out that if you want a utopia that can last, it has to be able to adapt.

We had too many single moms, too many kids. I don't mean to say we had too many. It was just that we couldn't afford these people. We had a new start in 83, which is the point at which we said, the commune thing isn't working, at least not at the scale we're trying to do it with 1,500 people. Let's make it a co-op. Even if it wasn't just an issue of the economics, we were maturing. We started having our kids and families. We got to the point where we said, we want to manage ourselves. The changeover was an example of how we could adjust, that we could be flexible about how we maintain the community. Being flexible meant figuring out how to go back to capitalism.

Since everything was shared and everything was owned in common, how do you decide who gets what? You know, it gets to be, you know, there's all this stuff. What about that car that's been used for the midwives? You know, who gets that? And, you know, there are people that left that didn't really want to leave, but that they had to because they couldn't afford to stay. Yeah, it was hard. A mass exodus followed.

In two years, over a thousand people left. Today, there are under 200 residents. For me, pulling up to the farm felt like walking into a ghost utopia. The only reason I even met Phil is because I was staying with him. I walked around the farm for days, looking for somebody, anybody. Every once in a while, I could hear somebody laughing off in the distance. But I never found the party. When I set off for the farm, I was hoping to drop some acid and have some revelations. Now, I wasn't even sure I was going to find a second person to interview. I was getting nervous. First Galt's

retreat, and now this? This Utopia show is going to suck. People have a really big expectation of like a lot more community happening. Then they come in on the surface. It really doesn't look like it, but it takes a bit more than five or six days to really get the feel of like, okay, there are things happening. You just have to be kind of like in on it. Thank God I found Laura. Three years ago when she was 25,

she was on a road trip with her boyfriend. They stopped by the farm to check out the geodesic dome, and they never left. Sometimes I just, like, am laying in bed, I'm like, I can't believe this is my life. Like, I'm in Tennessee, I'm, like, with all these crazy hippies, it's great. Laura is a baker,

but if she wants ingredients, she's got to drive to Kroger's. Because these days, there's no farm on the farm. There's a lot of gardens, but, yeah, no. Back in the 70s, it was a huge farm, but when it came time at the changeover in the 80s, when people were like, okay, now you gotta start making money, no one really wanted to take on the farming because there's not a lot of money to be made. In fact, Laura has to commute two hours to get to her coffee shop job in order to make money. But she has big dreams for this place.

Part of our goal in being here is to attract more people our age and show that the farm has so much potential. I mean, it's already done all these great things. We could be reviving a lot of these great things. For instance, I want to have a bakery on the farm. There used to be a bakery here. There's potential to, like, be doing all of these things again, more farming and food production.

And more and more people my age are interested in that. Laura helped me see that the farm could be so much more than a suburb for hippie retirees. But still, for me, I mean, if I was coming here with a partner like Laura did, you know, that would be one thing. But as a single guy in my 20s, I'm just not sure I want to live somewhere

the average age is over 60. But according to Laura, I might not have to worry about that for long because she knows how to bring in millennials to Airbnb. Yeah, well, we have made so many good connections through Airbnb of people who would not normally come to the farm. Jason, who is our facility manager, his partner booked us through Airbnb.

She had never heard of the farm. She wanted an outdoor hippie retreat. She found us, met Jason, and now has moved to the farm. All because she found us through Airbnb. That just blows my mind that people can find out about us through that and just totally fall in love with the place and it can just change the direction of their life. It was time to move on out. For my next utopia, I really wanted to go off the grid.

Someplace that's not on Airbnb. And fortunately, I had a connection. My French teacher from the seventh grade, Molly, had sent me an invite to a secret Facebook group for a pagan community called the Valley of the Dragons. I wasn't really sure what to make of it. Molly was being kind of cryptic about what all was going to go down there, but I trusted her. She is one of the best teachers I ever had. She made me feel like the kids who laughed at me and called me a weirdo, loser, were wrong. I did sort of get the idea back in French class that she was up to something, though, you know? She gave me a book by Marquis de Sade, which was a clue, but now I finally have a chance to find out what was really going on, and I was excited to get one last lesson from my old

teacher. When I pulled into the campground, I knew I had the right place, because the first thing I saw was a huge stone dragon. There were already people getting their tents set up, and I was happy to help. I have to admit that I get skeptical any time people start talking about things like magic, you know? But I was hoping that as long as I was here, maybe I could pick up the basics. Some people are trained, and some people are just born that way and that was me. That is Mama Bond, a 68-year-old natural-born pagan.

She feels real lucky to have found this place. They laughed at me and stuff when I was a kid. I talked about magic. So I quit talking about it. Went through life for a long time forgetting all about who I was until I met these people that were just like me. And I was like, I've come home.

I found this place, and when I walked through the gates, everybody kept telling me, welcome home. Hawkins, another pagan, who is super happy to have discovered this community. These people don't know me, but they're welcoming me home. I'm like, well, that's pretty cool. People jumping in like you did to help set up tents and things. You know, absolutely awesome community. And I said, this is what I need to be a part of. I felt pretty welcome, too.

You know, even though I had a microphone, everybody was happy to talk to me. And after all the tents were set up, I lit a cigarette and I started exploring. And I found one of those medieval wooden things, the kind that you would put your head into and your hands. It's called a pillory. This guy, Solitaire, explained to me why it's there. We're kind of into ropes and chains around here. And we have that reputation, and we own it.

It also comes in real handy if I catch you dropping a cigarette butt on my yard. Before I could explain that I always hold on to my butts, Molly came to the rescue. Hey! Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Molly's been coming here since she was 19. It was 1994, and I was in a pagan group at Virginia Tech. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Molly's been coming here since she was 19. It was 1994, and I was in a pagan group at Virginia Tech,

and we found out about it from some website that it was posted to on accident. We had an epic, epic good time. I ended up naked and painted red. Is that right? That guy agreeing with Molly is Brent, the friendly pagan neighborhood lawyer. Molly was the one who first brought him here to help her friend Annie. She was a lesbian in Kentucky in 1997, and her partner died, and everything was in her partner's name, and they had three little kids.

So we needed legal services for free. And she had a very conservative family. So we did magic to manifest Brent. Long story short, yes, we said we need a pagan lawyer, and then there he was, and we brought him here. And next thing you know, he bought a big chunk of land. We'll just say that we convinced him. We sure convinced him, didn't we, Brent?

We sure convinced you that you wanted to buy land here. Annie ended up moving here too, with her son, And he was exposed to a lot. One festival we were at, there was a woman who thought he was the reincarnation of Alistair Crowley and who decided that she was going to pretty much seduce him when he was like 14 years old. And she was like a stripper. Like really good looking. She just, you know, if he had been a girl, she would have gone to jail. But as it was, you know, I would not be cool with that happening to my son.

I would try and kick that bitch's ass if that were my son. Gatherings were larger back in the 90s and early 2000s, way bigger. Right here. Now you can't be naked at sea anymore. 2000s, way bigger. And we were called the Free Tear. Free Tear. And now you can't be naked at sea anymore. But now the community is more solid and stable. You've got families and you've got longevity going on. You don't have just 15 acres of people coming,

350 people coming to party and have a ritual experience. You now have people committing their lives to being here. So that's different. We should show them the little mermaid grotto over there. We hopped in Brent's golf cart and went on a tour. Yeah, this is Avalon. It used to be our big bonfire was in the meadow here. And we used to always be afraid of burning these electric wires above me.

Then we stopped by the Dragon Circle. This is a very sacred, sacred space. We have put a lot of people's ashes here. Further off from the campgrounds and the drum circles, they showed me some of the shacks where people live full-time. They don't have any toilet or shower. They use the municipal toilet and shower there. A lot of it it's about trying to figure out like minimalist living. Like if you cut down how much you need, or don't really need that much, then you don't have to work as hard to make money to cover your expenses.

They're poor mountain people. It turns out that the valley isn't one big community. It's kind of a network of several small communities. A wizard with a huge white beard and a cane named Rizzard explained that there are a lot of varieties of pagan in this network. You have a spot that's all goddess worship and across the street you have Babylonian Ishtar cult, you know. This is a tolerant place. We actually have a Christian that lives here on property. The next morning at the community breakfast, Solitaire, the guy with the pillory,

told me that diversity is one of the biggest strengths of this place. All paths are sacred and there is unity in the diversity. We are a functioning anarchy. A functioning anarchy is a pretty big claim. But whatever they're doing, it seems like it's working. My son's father and Ricky, the father of my daughter, we love each other, you know, and they call each other baby daddy. And we all own that property collectively, which I just think is something that's really beautiful

because there's so many people that have such a hard time co-parenting, you know, and even respecting the other person at all. And somehow we've just figured out how to have property together, have kids together and love each other. And it's not weird. This is baby daddy.

Oh no, it's not weird. This is baby daddy. Oh no, it's not. Baby daddy's girlfriend. That's a pretty good example of what sets this place apart from the outside world. If you live out in Mundania, not only do you get stared at and people think you're a weirdo, who cares what they think? We're the weirdos in that world, but they're the weirdos in our world.

Mundania. Everyone here uses that word. It's what these pagans call the regular world, where normies live. Here, Mama Bond told me, you can be empowered to do your magic thing, whatever that may be. This is some place you can come and be safe from the outside world and practice your rituals and do whatever you do magically that you really can't do out in the rest of the world. But okay, what are these rituals like? Of course, considering the spiritual cosmopolitanism, there's a lot of variety. But most of the magic I experienced in the Valley of the Dragons looked a whole lot like partying. One great night by the fire, one of the visitors there for the festival offered me some acid.

And let me tell you, you know, drum circles aren't usually my thing, but this acid was pretty good. I was really feeling the vibes. But then, they started to change. An argument had started around the fire. And one of the visitors, this guy about my age, was raising his voice at an older woman. And she hissed at him. It scared the shit out of him. He ran away screaming. And I didn't know if I was hallucinating or what.

But this lady clearly had some magic. Anytime there's even a slight violation like what just happened where someone wants to know my name, he wants to get in my physical space, I'm like, who the fuck are you? It's not okay. So in a way, a community like this is a huge godsend for women. That's cheap. And I was so high during this conversation, it's a miracle I was able to find the record button.

Nevertheless, she explained that this community is a godsend for women because they've managed to make things pretty egalitarian. We've had some good results, like instead of women dancing and men drumming and trying to lust after all the butts in front of them, we now have people dancing and people drumming and trying to lust after all the butts in front of them. We now have people dancing and people drumming. She had dreamed of living in a pagan neighborhood for a long time. And now she's living the dream. Kinda.

Of course, I'm here and now I'm up to the bar. I want, you know, community. Communitarian community. So I have to quit bitching about that and go, hey, look, I got my pagan neighborhood. Lots of owners and tenants and hierarchy and all kinds of great stuff. Oh, boy.

Somebody was describing this as functional anarchy. Yeah, that's so fun. Not really. There's a certain level of anarchy in that rituals and things are frequently ad hoc, meaning, hey, who, we're doing this, you know. It's a form of anarchy. Who relates to who when and what happens

and what kind of projects are chosen is fairly anarchistic to some extent. But no, the landowners are the poobahs and the tenants are the workers, worker bees. It's still an unequal

situation in the extreme. She thought it was pretty funny when I told her why it was there. So Molly sent you. Yeah. She's such a trickster. She's like sending you to investigate this

as a utopia. That's funny. I could make an analogy to the Puritans who came here saying, oh, at last! Utopia, freedom! And they brought all their bullshit with them, so it didn't help that much. So it's a great retreat for people who are trying to get away from more oppressive conditions. When I woke up the next morning, I was feeling pretty disappointed. Chi had broken the anarchist spell.

But before I left, Molly took me on one last field trip to a place that not only helped me understand just how important having a retreat is, but was also a lesson in how magic works around here. Ah, okay. It's called the Den of Iniquity. Oh boy. This looks fun. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's some toys here.

Various whips and leather, leather things. This is like chained up to all sides of the wall. I've got to sit in this harness like this. Oh wow yeah I see how this could be helpful. All those horrible things you guys probably thought about me that what I was actually doing was far more debaucherous than you just weren't being creative enough. Like, you couldn't even begin to think about my reality. How dare you? Molly clearly got a lot out of this place.

Back when she was teaching me French in San Francisco, she would fly all the way here just for the weekend to get away from my bratty classmates and I. She didn't have any power over us. We were her mundania. But when she retreated here, she was a goddess. And it's not just about kinky sex. It's that when she had it in this sex dungeon, she had the power. Magical power. See, pagan magic isn't just about making stuff levitate or talking to the dead.

It's about manifesting changes in the world by making changes in yourself. You know, one of the reasons that sex magic is so popular here is because sex is the cheapest way to transform your perspective. I personally think every community should have a den of iniquity. is because sex is the cheapest way to transform your perspective. I personally think every community should have a den of iniquity. It's an incredible place for self-empowerment. But the revelation I had when I took that acid was about how easy it is to bring all the mundane inequities into our dens of iniquity.

For example, when one of the members of the community tried to take me into the sex dungeon, the gates were closed. The owner gets to decide ad hoc who fucks like a goddess in the den of iniquity, and who fucks in the woods like an animal. And look, fucking in the woods is great. But if we're going to build a utopia that could change the world, the master-slave dynamic has to stay locked in the sex dungeon. We have to move beyond the poobahs and the worker bees.

Beyond landlords and renters. I know now that the magic in the Valley of the Dragons is real. But I am not looking for a retreat. It was time for me to move on. For the final stop on my journey, I had high expectations. Because the farm didn't even have a farm, and the pagans were a little too focused on sex magic to really worry about the environment all that much, I feared that everyone I had met so far on my utopian road trip would be dying in the climate apocalypse just like us city dwellers.

I wanted to get truly off the grid. This is the hydro. All it is is water that's caught in a creek. So I went to Earth Haven, an eco-village carved from 329 acres of forest outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Lyndon, my tour guide, is showing me their new micro-hydro. It starts as a four-inch pipe, goes down to a two-inch pipe. This micro-hydro is like a tiny dam that uses the rivers of Earth Haven to generate electricity 24 hours a day. Water hitting from both sides of the turbine spins, makes electricity, makes 12 amps, roughly to 15 amps.

Now they don't have to worry about using up all their electricity from the solar panels at nighttime or on cloudy days. I chose Earth Haven because it was full-featured, it was off-grid electricity, and it was off-grid with water. Those two are massively big for my decision. Right now, Earth Haven has over 50 members living across seven housing centers. We're going to come up on our housing neighborhood. The plan calls for 150 members who live in 14 neighborhoods. These are all the little huts, and they're bigger huts. Earth Haven is an ambitious project.

That's a lot of culture, and that's a lot of economic opportunity. There's already a lot of businesses on site. For example, the Yellow Root Farm, which sells eggs and produce. Corn, squash, basil. And the place where Lyndon works, the useful plants nursery. You won't find anything in here that is a tulip from Holland, for instance. Ain't got none of that. You know, we got things that are useful and mostly edible in some ways.

Every piece of Earth Haven serves a purpose. The whole place is designed to work like the wilderness did before humans messed it all up. Even down to the very path we were walking on. This is the old path. We're finally getting it right. The old path went straight down the hill. The new one follows the natural shapes of the land. This path honors some of the principles of permaculture. Permaculture is the philosophy that holds Earth Haven together. The term was coined in the late 1970s by two white guys studying the permanent

agricultural systems of indigenous people. They're curving it, right? Any water that comes, it's caught by all this brush and sucks it into the ground. Permaculture means working with nature instead of fighting against it. The new path, Linden pointed out, curves like a mountain road in order to prevent

erosion. It's funny the word erosion is similar to the word road, because a lot of roads erode. Hi. Hey there, Andrew. Andrew, Courtney, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Further on down the path, we ran into Courtney, who is gardening. These are my okra. We're the same age, but she's been studying eco-villages all over the world for years. For her, permaculture isn't just permanent agriculture, it's permanent culture, because it's also about humans. Tending land is a mission, you know? To grow enough food to sustain yourself is a mission. And in order for a group of people to be together working side by side in an altruistic way, it's like we have to revamp the way we're interacting socially. And there's a whole branch now called social permaculture

that's looking mostly at people. As we learned at the farm, growing enough food to sustain yourself just doesn't make good business sense in capitalism. Social permaculture, on the other hand, turns to nature for clues on how our society should operate. Nothing in the ecosystem has paid off its debts. When you look into the forest, it's like some plants are feeding the birds and some plants are giving them a home and some plants are holding the soil down. And imagine if one little tree was trying to do all that by itself. Every single thing is dependent on something else. In our individualistic society, we talk a lot about codependency as a bad thing. In permaculture, the term for a good kind of dependency is interdependence.

Through interdependence, we can build a society that is far less wasteful. But it's hard to shake off the old way of doing things. We get trained by institution all of our life to be competitive so that it fuels the consumer economy. My roommate said to me the other day, like, how about we get a cow? And I was like, no, no, because somebody here already has cows and I buy milk from them. In order to build an interdependent culture, Birth Haven needs people who are ready to embrace this new mindset. We are looking for people who are able to walk the edge between the new culture, cooperative culture, sustainable culture, and this dominator culture that we find ourselves in.

Patricia is one of Earth Haven's first settlers, and she told me edges are central to permaculture. For example, at the edge of a creek where it overlaps with the land is where you get the widest variety of species. And in an ecosystem, diversity is key for productivity. But the wrong kind of edge can totally destroy an interdependent system. Obviously, when you put out the word, the vibration out there that you want edge critters,

you get the edges you're looking for and you get some other, in my opinion, rather dysfunctional edges. Earth Haven has to turn away a lot of edges, like the elderly homeless population. I want to live in community because I'm going to be dying and I need somebody to take care of me and I have a social security check. And some single parents. Here, here's my kids. Take care of them. We do want to take care of your kid and heal you of all your traumas,

but unfortunately, we can't. It turns out I'm a bad edge, too. The utopia seekers who think that we've already got utopia here and they're just ready to move in. It's like, where'd I put my hammock, you know? Oh, there's an ugly expression, but I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway. You know, the pioneers, when they were heading west, they did not throw the cripples onto the back of the wagon.

If they had to, they'd drug old grandma on her deathbed across the prairie. But basically, this is a pioneer deal, and we need incredibly strong, emotionally mature people. This place is no retreat. And in fact, the people of Earthhaven didn't really love the name of this series. Utopia is a distraction from the deeper purpose of life. It's actually what got us in this trouble in the first place, the pursuit of a perfect world. Chuck Marsh is one of the founders of Earthaven. Sitting down with him in this house felt like being in the presence of a guru.

Utopianism is about creating an ideal, you know, the Garden of Eden. We can't live in the Garden of Eden. Obviously, it was too much for Eve and Adam to handle it. Perfection is not what we're after here. It's a selfish imperative. We have to get down into the grit of life. That means more than everybody retreating in their personal little hegemon. That means loving life back where the web of life has been ripped asunder.

Chuck told me that searching for utopia means giving up on what we already have. Permaculture is about maintaining it. A house that's not maintained, a life that's not maintained, a culture that's not maintained will squander and fail. We need to learn to value maintenance again, because maintenance is love. At Earth Haven, everyone seemed to have their own definition of permaculture. But Chuck is the one who got me to see its full potential. Permaculture could save the world. We have to take charge of designing our way out of this existential dilemma that we find ourselves in here in the 21st century, facing the extermination of humanity.

It's going to require deep vision driven by design. This is why the permaculture design community has so many gifts to offer us. Like it's just basically this one big world that you get to live in that's not like the regular world. It's a world inside of the world. That's Aiden, one of the many kids I met while I was wandering around Earth Haven. She grew up here and likes it way more than Mundania. I don't know, it's not so repressive.

Like, if you really need to go to the bathroom, you can go in the middle of the woods. You know what I mean? In fact, she loves it so much, she's planning really long term. This is an amazing place, and I totally want to raise my kids here. My mom's going to give her house to me until I build my own house, and then we'll have our houses next to each other on the land. And then when she dies, I get both of the houses, and then I get the land.

Everyone at Earth Haven has a 99-year lease. But there are some questions about the validity of these leases and the eyes of North Carolina law. So there might be a problem with Aiden's dream. When somebody's not happy and they want their money back, Earth Haven's very vulnerable. That's Jeffrey, an officer at Earth Haven.

This vulnerability that he's talking about is why the community set out to do a restructuring. At Earth Haven's weekly potluck dinner, he explained it to me and this Danish guy who was also visiting. I find it really refreshing, that setup where you can pass it on to your children.

If that agreement was consistent with North Carolina law, I would agree with you. It is not. It is not. What's the legal issue? Is it the 99 years thing? Is it more complicated than that? Let me back up. There's a deed and there's a lease. Two different legal documents. I got something that looks like a deed, therefore you own it.

Ah, but you only have a lease, you don't own it. Earth Haven owns it. That's our current problem, and we've been working on fixing it for the past six years. We haven't been able to take a member for six years. No new members. We're floundering here. For Patricia, the restructuring is putting everything Earth Haven's worked for at risk. Because in order to complete their plan of interdependence, For Patricia, the restructuring is putting everything Earth Havens worked for at risk. Because in order to complete their plan of interdependence, they need another 100 members.

Nobody can build a home. They can live here as a guest, a renter. But they want a homestead and get their gardens and their perennials and their chickens. Some people have left to go someplace where they could go and plant their perennials next month. The restructuring should be over soon, Patricia told me. But she is crestfallen about all the time wasted on bureaucracy and lawyers. We've invested way too much energies in our governance. So has Chuck. You know, we spent a huge amount of time

in decision-making and committees and sucked energy away from actually getting stuff done. So don't get caught in that pit. I'm going to send the kids to hell! It seems to me that the kids of Earth Haven, like Aiden, have already inherited something way beyond deeds or leases just from growing up here. It's like this sort of paradise where you're just like Donald Trump and like and everything like that is like outside and you're just like talking about primitive skills and they're talking about who is going to run the world. Aiden's got permaculture and her blood.

Get to know your neighbors and like talk to them and then maybe you should work together instead of like being like okay this is my house this is your house this is my property line of my my land and it's your property line of your land and don't go on my land or I'll sue you. Maybe you should combine and then you get more like land if you're together. You know what I mean? Earthaven really is the perfect place for Benjamin and I. The internet is super slow,

so we'd have to be really deliberate about how we used it. And there's not that much cell reception, so everybody has a house phone. I think Benjamin would be much happier. I personally gave up on the news while I was there. You can't just idly scroll through Twitter here, because what you have instead is so much better. A real community. For example, all the young people were helping Chuck out with his garden since he was sick while I was visiting.

To me, it just seems so much easier to live in an interdependent system. But according to Chuck, easy is not the right word. It's hard soul work to stick with this in the cauldron that we call Earth Haven. I hate that name, by the way. Too hippy-dippy for me by far. This is not a haven for the Earth. My actual personal name for this place is Heartbreak Ridge. Heartbreak Ridge?

Yes. It's where you come to have your heart broken again and again and again in the transformative process. If you're not willing to courageously allow yourself to be broken open and have your heart broken again and again and again, there's no point even beginning that journey. It's like an alchemical process in which the dross of our lives is thrown into the cauldron of an endeavor like this. And out of it, that which is not essential is burned away, leaving us with the core the core of what it really means

to be a human and alive in these times. Chuck died of cancer shortly after my visit. He was buried on the land. I think of him kind of like a Moses figure now. You know, he did all this work, but he didn't live to see his mission accomplished. But you know, Chuck was thinking way beyond

getting himself to the promised land. Your mission needs to be bigger than you can even hope to accomplish in a lifetime. If it's anything smaller than that, it's not big enough and you need to re-examine it. For many of us, we knew that we may never realize the benefits of the work that we did. We were really doing this work for those yet born, for future generations. This has always been an intergenerational transfer project. If we don't reweave our functional interdependence,

if we continue to fall back on independent thinking and our independence, then we'll fall short of the mark. That's not what it's called for. That's what got us into this. It's too much independence. Too much false attraction to freedom and things like that. That's not true freedom. Freedom is not found there.

Freedom lies at the end of a well-lived life. Listening to Chuck in this moment made it clear Heartbreak Ridge is my kind of utopia. But according to him, that meant

it was time for me to move on out. When I hear young people saying, oh, I was drawn to move to Earth, I want to say, well, I hope you don't plan on staying. Because if all the conscious people gathered in a few safe places with those people they're comfortable with and were lost, don't go to those sweet, comfortable places.

Go there on vacation. Go there for a sabbatical. Learn what you need to take to begin and go out into all those 3,000 counties that are hurting all over America where towns are dying, where economies are failing, where despair is rampant.

We need to go to the places where the need is the deepest. Go there and help your fellow human beings find themselves and their way back to health and wholeness and take part in those communities and start building the alternative nation where you live and where you choose to settle today. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Utopia, the Callaway Cut.

This episode was produced by Benjamin Walker and Andrew Calloway. I'd like to thank everyone in all the utopias who spoke with Andrew, even if they didn't make the final cut. You can see some pictures from Andrew's journey at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. And remember, next time you're feeling down, yes, there are some Dustin Nemoses out there, but for every one of them, there's also a Chuck Marsh staying away from the spotlight

and laying the groundwork for something amazing. I grew up with a lot of people around me making jokes about how Earthaven would be the perfect place when the big apocalypse comes and we can grow our own food and like we could block off the entrance and it's like that actually happened the apocalypse did happen earth haven is a good place to be now it's like it's not even happening it's safe here so we were right we called it that's a. She's 16 now, and one full year of coronavirus has her more convinced than ever that Earthaven is the place to be. I feel like I have more people around me that I know will support me.

Like, I know a lot of people. Which can be hard, especially when, you know, you become family with a lot of people and eventually some of them are going to die. Then you have to deal with a lot of grief. And when I was listening back to your podcast, I heard Chuck and Patricia, they both died before we were done, which is really sad. When Aiden says they're done, what she means is that the restructuring is complete.

But Patricia didn't live to see it. She and Chuck are just two of the people that Aiden's had to say goodbye to over the past couple years. It was Chuck and Patricia and Kim Chi and Su Chi and Rosetta and Rowan. Rowan was big. So there's been a lot of people who have died in the past, like, six years or something. So, yeah, that can be hard. But knowing that many people can also be really good. I think that many people dying kind of got everybody to be a little bit more ready if something goes wrong.

For instance, when coronavirus happened, everybody was on it. We had like meeting plans and like we were very ready. And like we've been through stuff now. And I feel like that has helped us grow and be more mature when it comes to the darker side of life. If that makes any sense. No, it totally makes 100% sense. And it also makes me feel like, you know, if I was smarter, I would probably know some kind of permaculture term.

Yeah, regeneration. There we go. You're welcome. And what does that mean, regeneration? It's basically like the circle of life, right? Because if a plant grows and then it dies And then it makes more fertile soil for something else to grow That's even better

And then it just keeps going and that plant gets bigger And it regenerates out of death and becomes better because of death. And I think that that is kind of what Earthaven did. Wow. Boom. There you go. Thank you. You're welcome. I've learned something from living here, at least. Aiden has a YouTube channel where she makes incredible music.

You can find a link to that and more at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com slash utopia. And yeah, Earth Haven is finally accepting new members. And I have to say, they have some pretty incredible apartments available for like $300-$400 a month. So I kind of really highly recommend that you check it out, see what it's like. You know, I think I may have to head back there pretty soon myself, actually. Also, Andrew just put together a pilot episode for a fiction podcast. It's a slightly different vibe, but still totally awesome. It's called Hyper Fuckfaced, and it's airing on Frequency 101, which is the podcast version of Channel 101, the monthly film festival where Broad City

and Rick and Morty got their starts. But what this means is that Andrew needs listeners to vote in order to get a second episode order. So please, all of you, head right now over to hyperfuckfaced.com for all of the details.