1> Mahatma Gandhi showed that in some cases, poor people could resist political oppression by economic warfare and collected, calm non-cooperation. If he is understood as an economist, who understood that increasing self-sufficiency reduces the dependence on the State, and therefore, if the State is run by your oppressors, for your oppressors, you get a breakthrough. Gandhi figured out how to get the people to stop paying for their own oppression through their taxes. Do not buy or sell from the English, and now they are paying to control you without covering the costs of their control. They must therefore eventually stop. There is, of course, more to it than that, but this is the basics of my insight into Gandhian economics, which is, I think, a misunderstood and under-applied aspect of the Master of Peace’s work.

2> Buckmister Fuller’s work on reducing the overheads of living well synergizes with Gandhi’s economics, because Gandhian-style self reliance produces poverty. There are hard limits to the standard of living which a single individual can produce without access to amortized capitalization in the form of tools, and Ricardian advantage through doing what they do well, and trading with other specialists, through (often international) trade and economies of scale. Gandian techniques were optimized for peasants. Bucky offers the possibility of taking the energy and materials budgets of people living at almost that level of wealth, and producing a flourishing, wealthy independence and interdependence in key areas like taking one project’s waste streams and using them as materials for another project.

3> Richard Stallman’s work on the economies of post-scarcity societies is critical. Although widely believed to be a civil rights and computing freedoms guru I think that history might recognize Stallman as having invented the first genuine competitor to the Corporation as a way of amortizing the cost and sharing the risks of large scale human endeavors. Because Fuller’s work was entirely tied up with patents (because he wanted to enter it into Humanity’s permanent records) it could not scale rapidly – an effect he apparently understood and accepted. Stallman – thank God – gave us tools to take good ideas and push them out in myriad co-evolving forms rapidly and cheaply, and critically, with productive capacity scaling rapidly to meet demand through volunteer labor. He invented the Prosumer (producer-consumer) in the form of the programmer writing their own software and tools, which they owned the rights to rather than having them be owned by the company, chaining them as a for-pay cog in the machine.

4> George Mason teaches us about individual freedom. Gandhi’s empire collapsed into a democracy when he was murdered but if he had ruled a long life, as the generally assented leader of the Unified Indian Nation, do you think we could have trusted his successors? History teaches us to beware the inheritors of empires. I will not wax lyrical about the foundations of America given the current sorry state of our favorite of the new nations, but you know what goes here: people, such as Mason, who would not sign the Constitution because it did not yet have a Bill of Rights are to be respected, as is that Bill. It is a good template, I think, for liberty and democracy. Needs work because times have changed, of course. As open source projects scale, and as alternative infrastructures run more and more of the planet (both corporate, free/libre and individualistic) we will refer frequently to the collective of the thinkers on Freedom, including these people, and the likes of Hayek too. It is notable that this thinking does not have a single face, as befits the roots of democracy.

5> The fifth pillar is taken from both the Hindus and the Liberals/Libertarians/Founders/Masons of the world. It is the right of each person to believe as they will – one god, all gods, no gods, or any other imaginable permutation. The State is an agreement between people and those Divine Theocracies which claim that political power flows not from the will of the people, but from the barrel of a gun or a Divine Writ must be stopped at all costs from enslaving the rest of us with their religiously-founded laws. Unlike many thinkers in the field, I’m a devout man with strong respect for my native tradition, Hinduism, and also Christianity, Sufi Islam, and many other traditions I’ve had much less contact with. I believe that in the political sphere, religious beliefs must remain as a human prerogative, even if within the religious tradition, politics is seen as being a religious issue. I believe that this approach offers the most promising outlook for a thriving and liberal political, social, moral, ethical and spiritual order.

All of this is in the Hexayurt Project but embodied as a design for a award-winning, govt. backed free-as-in-speech refugee shelter system.