The Viner Dimension

Persecuted, trashed, but still make it work

In our timeline, the Quakers were persecuted for centuries, and to some extent they still are. Even to now, there's never been a year in which a member has not died in prison for their faith, their commitment to pacifism and self-responsibility.

And there's never yet been a year without war - perhaps because it's still as profitable as ever for those who can trap others into doing their fighting for them.

Depressing...

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The Diggers? - in our timeline, they were trashed almost before they got going. In 1649 they started their first commune on unused common-land at Cobham; but within a year, local landlords sent a private army of hired thugs to beat up the Diggers and destroy their farms, their crops, their houses. The Diggers did a couple more tries to make it work, in other places, but everything was soon smashed up again by the landlords' gangs. Cromwell's Parliament simply sat back and applauded the landlords' actions - even though the land wasn't even theirs in the first place. So much for the much-vaunted 'sanctity of private property'...

But from that piece on 'Chance and the Institution', it looks like their Commonwealth's Parliament sided not with the landlords, but with the Diggers. Seems the Diggers not only survived there, they thrived. And with the landlords' 'rights' to possess other people's lives and labour fading fast, the Diggers' model seems to have become the standard there. As from the 'Frenchman's Journal', some form of aristocracy did survive - but based on real leadership, not arbitrary or inherited 'property-rights'.

What's interesting is that I can't find much mention of money anywhere in Aunt Kat's papers - it seems to have faded out quite quickly in the Commonwealth, for internal use at least. Makes sense: if everything's all shared anyway, like within a large family, then money's just an added complication that you not only don't need but that only ever makes things worse. There's enough to fight about already - and if you remove money from the picture, there's a lot less to fight about.

Yeah: makes sense. A lot of sense.

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But there's a catch, of course. A big catch.

Pacifism is fine if everyone else wants to play that way.

No-money is fine if everyone else is willing to play that way.

Responsibility before 'rights' works fine as long as everyone else will play that way.

What happens when they won't? When they don't?

In our world, selfishness and stupidity are everywhere. And they're the ones who always seem to win...

If it's part of human nature, then it must have been there for the Commonwealth too. Utopias don't appear by magic, just because someone wants it to be that way: there's a lot of hard work that's needed to make it happen. Especially with people who don't want to play that way.

So what on earth did the Commonwealth do about that? How did they make it work?

I'm beginning to suspect that a key part of their answer to that would come from the same place as vinery.