The Heart-Centered Way of Symbiotic Culture, Chapter 12, Part 3
From Siloed Systems to Sacred Networks
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
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You are in Chapter 12, Part 3, The Heart-Centered Path to Symbiotic Culture: from siloed systems to sacred networks — Sarvodaya, Revisited — Coming Full Circle
Chapter 12 posts:
Living in Truth: Building a Parallel Polis Within a Spiritually Hostile Regime
The Ancient Blueprint – A Missing Piece Hiding in Plain Sight
I Write the Book, the Book Writes Me
Are you trying to figure out where this is All Going? Read Building Bridges to a New World — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.
Previously from Chapter 12, Part 2
We turned our sights to Europe to look for generative projects that could use my expertise. We spent a week in an Austrian alpine valley, where another permaculture farmer had developed a method of using the wastewater from tourist hotels to service greenhouses. This could extend the growing season in the area and provide fresh produce. Since the hotels in the area had 10,000 rooms, this could be a formidable resource.
I spoke with one of the local hoteliers, whose hotel had been operating for 500 years, serving merchants traveling from Italy to Germany. He seemed genuinely excited about reducing reliance on importing food from the outside. This was a very insular community. Although it was in Austria, you had to drive through Germany to get there. He wanted to arrange a meeting with the mayor of the town, an indication that the idea of self-sufficient regional economies could catch on with local communities like these.
I thought about Hawaii, where 90 percent of the food comes from outside. As with many previous colonies, centralized corporate agriculture and monocultures replaced local food crops, removing agricultural wealth and shipping food the natives would otherwise eat overseas.
To a certain extent, this same model, based on extracting wealth rather than preserving and restoring the land, has become nearly universal. In any case, the hotelier at least was interested in this new way, but we left the area before anything firm could develop.
That’s when an intriguing opportunity emerged.
Sarvodaya, Revisited — Coming Full Circle
My Sri Lankan friend and mentor, Dr. Ari, founder of Sarvodaya, would be turning 90 in November 2021, and I received an invitation to attend his birthday celebration. While the timing didn’t work for me to be there for his birthday, I contemplated a visit. I hadn’t seen Dr. Ari in several years, and given his age and my already being footloose and “home-free,” perhaps this was my next stop.
I had been to Sarvodaya once in my life—in 2012—to commemorate a Buddhist Temple Dr. Ari had built. That was where I met my future wife, Marta.
I ended up talking to Dr. Ari’s son, Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, the President of Sarvodaya. Vinya is a tireless individual who, following in his father’s footsteps, has continued to expand the movement's legacy. He became excited when I shared my experience building Symbiotic Networks and translating Sarvodaya principles into Western local food systems and economies.
Life came full circle when I realized I could support Sarvodaya and Vinya in pursuing the next level of bioregional self-reliance and economic development.
Going to Sri Lanka, in some way, seemed like a natural response to me surrendering to what’s next and opening my heart to the world.
Right after the holidays, I left for Sri Lanka. My stay was open-ended, although six months seemed “right.” Marta stayed at her family home, traveled around Europe, and then was set to return to Hawaii. When the war in Ukraine broke out, however, she decided to stay and do art therapy with Ukrainian refugee children coming across the Polish border. She grew up in that region, and the family still has a home about five miles north of the Ukrainian border.
I landed in Sri Lanka in January 2022, eager to reconnect with Dr. Ari and then work with Vinya and other leaders to apply what I had learned in Reno to their unique situation on the ground. As you will remember from previous chapters, Sarvodaya has developed a network of some 15,000 towns, 5,000 connected as a “commonwealth of village republics,” within a movement building a parallel society—each based on a Sarvodaya Society—and a national network with great potential to “Connect the Good.”
However, Sarvodaya hasn’t grown in a vacuum.
As with nearly every other “developing nation” on the planet, modernism has significantly influenced Sri Lanka. Sarvodaya’s local networks still exist in a “taker” culture plagued by institutionalized corruption.
Following a civil war in the 1980s, one dominant family came to rule through nepotism, resulting in a new wave of unrest due to food and energy shortages that came to a head in March 2022. We’ll get to that shortly.
First, some more background on the challenges and opportunities Sarvodaya faces in these times. One way Sarvodaya has grown was through the establishment of village banks. Residents, business owners, and especially farmers needed a reliable, trustworthy way of saving and borrowing, so these village banks sprang up. However, as the Sarvodaya organization grew, their system to track these monies proved inadequate.
In 1999, the government forced them to create an overarching financial organization, Sarvodaya Development Finance. While not formally a bank, this organization provides many services a bank would provide—a place for savings, personal and business loans, and micro-loans. Sarvodaya Development Finance now has some 500 employees, an impressive number in a country of just under 22 million people.
So, this simple village network economy system has created a national financial institution.
In 2021, the government wanted to ensure enough money was on hand to protect each depositor’s assets. Hence, it raised 2 billion rupees (roughly equivalent to $20 million) to become a public company, with Sarvodaya members as shareholders. While Sarvodaya owned 80 percent of the old Development Finance, this new configuration gave them a 56 percent share, with private investors owning the rest.
Interestingly, the chairman of the board of Sarvodaya Development Finance, who had once run the stock exchange in Sri Lanka, was an establishment figure whose new mission was to uplift the poor through this national system.
Until this visit, I hadn’t realized how Dr. Ari’s original vision, a distributed network of village economies, had evolved into a more traditional non-governmental organization with an imperative to grow itself. While Sarvodaya had already mastered connecting communities through these village economies, it had yet to fully develop a “distributive” system to share business resources.
For example, during one of my early visits to a business owner with a plant that makes aloe vera drinks, I noticed that the company would greatly benefit from more distributors knowing about its product.
Considering those needs, I approached Vinya about using Blockchain technology to facilitate business development and unlock some of the community's frozen assets.
It turned out that both Vinya and the chairman of the board of Sarvodaya Development Finance had been working on something that fulfilled the function of a “Smart Village App.”
One of the benefits of blockchain is that it would enable a crypto-currency—like our idea at OneSphera—to reward beneficial and connecting activities inside the community and local economies. Just as our experiment in Reno emerged against the backdrop of a fundamentally extractive global economic system, Sarvodaya’s functional and beneficial network was embedded in a corrupt system, a fiefdom of “takers.”
Meanwhile, there was a strong urge to move forward and create multiple local, independent business networks catalyzed through the Sarvodaya infrastructure.
Dr. Ari and Vinya named this idea the New Economy Initiative, which would involve mapping out the resources impacting hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of people.
This would be quite an expansion, considering Sarvodaya is the only “living” example of a spiritually-based, bioregional network of village economies.
The next step would be to create a vast database of businesses, producers, consumers, distributor networks, and other supporting organizations in every region and village, addressing the following questions:
Who’s producing what, and how much are they producing?
What are the costs?
Who is selling these products?
What could be produced locally that was currently being imported?
How else could this database impact efficiency? For example, there are one million rice producers in Sri Lanka, and their products pass through a multi-level chain of producers, distributors, millers, more distributors, wholesalers, and resellers at markets and retail stores. Over the last several decades, this chain has become inefficient and corrupt, creating extreme pricing inequalities.
You will recall the anecdote from Chapter 11, when 14-year-old Ari created a coconut husk co-op to streamline the supply chain, eliminate extractive middlemen, and flatten the economic hierarchy. Instinctively, he saw a perennial problem in any financial system that became top-heavy and corrupt. Some seventy-five years later, talking with Vinya about the same middleman problem — heavy supply chains that create huge price asymmetry between the bottom and the top—would bring Dr. Ari’s early understanding full circle.
At a time when so much high-tech data tracking is top-down and secret, this business network would be an open-source, transparent database that would enable grassroots connectivity and greater business-to-business commerce. It would also allow “pricing visibility,” which means recognizing which costs are necessary and which aren’t—particularly identifying unnecessary middlemen.
This bottom-up symbiotic network would accelerate fruitful connections inside all these communities, disintermediate middlemen, and grow genuine prosperity. It would put Sarvodaya—and its virtues—at the forefront of Sri Lanka’s economic development.
Sarvodaya would continue growing as a unique, spiritually based, regenerative economy network through this new initiative.
We planned to begin with a model Symbiotic Network of independently owned businesses in one region and then scale to other areas. We were gaining momentum when the food crisis hit, and we shifted our priorities to helping Sarvodaya develop a national food banking system, part of a larger food security initiative.
Stay tuned for Chapter 12, Post 4 … How a Parallel Society Strategy Addresses Crisis.
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This "pruning" reminds me very much of agroforestry. Every so often a system grows weeds and some plants get too big, shading out smaller competitors. Thus in agroforestry there must be an aggressive pruning. This is similar to thinning and second thinning that you find in forestry. ONLY in forestry the aim is to remove the smaller plants and less healthy trees so that bigger timber producers will thrive and not energy wood (less valuable / useful timber is burnt rather than made into products). In agroforestry the weeds are removed, and then the larger plants are pruned, with the prunings and weedings being used for enriching the soil.
In this case you point out the rise of middle men, agencies that are not really needed and how large players can act as a monopoly or monopsony. In some ways the diversity of investors in the "not-quite-a-bank" is countering that. Yet they are not a commons / coop of villagers. So here we have a financial pruning or weeding. I think it is interesting to ask where did the weeds come from? AND how were they able to survive and grow? Also to me this is maladaptive behavior and I wonder how we might repurpose or change this situation to design out the growth of weeds in the first place. What could be a virtual mulch!? How might this rentier class be altered to gain useful livelihoods that are mutually beneficial to them and those who are being exploited- so they are served rather than taken advantage of?