In Wales they burned the houses of Londoners. In Ireland, the houses of Americans. In Ladakh, within a few years of the money arriving, the prejudice against Nepalese labourers grew to what Helena calls monstrous proportions.
She has stood in all three places and some forty language groups in more than a dozen countries had pulled her in, and from those points on the ground she saw a pattern no national conversation contained. The same breakdown everywhere, arriving from nowhere local. It comes from the empire of banks and corporations that pays no taxes and answers to no one. She watched it in Sweden in the seventies, at the peak of its egalitarian success: people alone, frightened, depressed, alcoholic, suicidal. A system of separation, working as designed.
I had come with the question I promised last time. The membrane. How does a community hold a boundary that can open to a stranger and also, healthily, refuse one, without becoming the thing that burns houses?
She did not answer the question I asked. She answered a better one.
The foundational unit of healing, in her experience, is about twenty people. Thirty at the outside. The size of the extended family we evolved inside. Small enough that everyone has a voice and everyone uses it, about the sadness and the grief and not about the weather. She knows a project where men who had been violent to women were offered a year in prison or a year of group therapy, and the ones who learned to weep, she says, learned compassion. The prison projects she knows report recidivism at a fraction of the norm. She gave me no number and I will not invent one.
So I asked the sharper version. What stops one unhealed person from hijacking the twenty?
Size, again. In a much smaller group the same person is an incredible annoyance. In a group of twenty, she has watched it many times, a tolerance develops that embraces and subdues. The difficult one is held instead of expelled. She was careful to add that this is not a recipe that always works. But it is the closest thing to a membrane she has seen, and it is not a wall. It is a number of people who know each other’s grief.
Which is where the burning houses come back in.
In a group like that, nobody is the handicapped one, or the Muslim, or the Buddhist. They are Mary. They are John. Are they kind, are they helpful, are they generous. The labels fall away, not because anyone banned them but because they stopped carrying information. That is why she thinks the corporate version of inclusion is so counterproductive: the checklist that declares your group illegitimate unless it contains every labelled category. That is not connection. That is the same divided identities, issued by the same system, now made mandatory.
Nationalism and localism, she said, are antithetical. The connected are hard to recruit. The uprooted are easy.
So arson in Wales and Ireland or elsewhere is not, first, racism. It is what happens when a community is overrun and economically insecure at once, and both conditions are manufactured upstream. The growth economy pulls the poor in from the periphery to build the roads and clean the laboratories. The war machine and the tourism machine move everyone else. Compassion for both sides, she insists. For the immigrant and for the enslaved CEO who has no time and sees only numbers. Judge nobody. Name the structure.
I told her that is why I use molochian shitshow. Last time she took the word away from me. This time she let me keep it, because what followed it is the part she agrees with: almost nobody wakes up in the morning asking how to make the world worse. The higher you climb, the less time you have and the more abstract your inputs become, until you are running as fast as you can to be the one on top when the merger comes. Everybody scared. Everybody faster.
And the charge that all of this is elitist? She reads it as the empire shaping the worldview of the very movements that might threaten it. The people who start local food projects, she says, are often people who can afford to go against the tide. Not indebted. Not enslaved. And what they start, in the cases she knows, runs on a sliding scale: those who can, pay more, those who cannot, pay less or nothing. I added one precision, which she welcomed. Economic success here means livelihood, not financial return. Investment to extract profit and people coming together to support each other are, in her words, night and day. We keep using one word for both.
Twenty people is the cell. It is not the community. You cannot keep the water public, build housing anyone can afford, or put more hands on the soil with twenty people. That needs many cells, touching. Which is the question we ran out of time on, so next time: how do a thousand uncoordinated groups of twenty become something that can face a government?
The instruction has not changed since the first conversation. Find the others. Then the rest of the twenty. Then do the one thing no checklist can do for you.
Listen to the full conversation above.
