A Little Tease, and Why the United States Needs to Embrace the "Folkhögskola"
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August has been crazy! Sorry for our lack of posting. We’ve been working on our new episode, teased below, and other exciting, new projects. Hopefully September will be more consistent.
It’s happening, everyone! The damn thing we have been working on for the past four years is finally, albeit slowly, starting to come together. As you all know we recently decided that Death in The Garden wasn’t a film, but rather it’s a series, and our first episode is almost done.
Making that shift from film to series was a big creative relief and opening for us, but didn’t quite alleviate how daunting this project is. It required us to really rethink how we wanted to structure our story and thoughts in film form, which led us to the conclusion that this format would allow us to make considerably more films and material. That being said, it has required a lot of time to get this restructuring going.
But I am happy to say that we are nearing the finishing of our first episode. In the next 3-4 weeks we will have the first episode released, here on Substack, titled:
What is the Human Animal?
Here is our very complicated timeline for this inaugural episode. This episode really serves as a foundation for the rest of the short films we have planned for Death in the Garden. In that little timeline is hundreds of shots that required us to travel around the world, to create at home through creative experimentation, through complicated animations, and, of course, interviews. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done including some extra filming, animation, and graphics, but it is coming along nicely and Maren and I are feeling better and better about its completion.
Due our need to access a wider audience, we will indeed be releasing the episode on YouTube but we will be posting the video here (and on Patreon) two weeks early for our paid subscribers. So if you want to see these videos early and without the obnoxious ads on YT consider becoming a paid subscriber! And if not, no worries—you can always get them for free on youtube.
Thank you all for being here and supporting us along this long and winding path of learning and figuring out what the fuck we think and how to put into words and images. Stay tuned for more updates.
The Power of the Folkhögskola
A while back, Jake and I had Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen on our podcast to discuss European Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), animism, and Nordic mythology. For those of you who are not followers of his project, Nordic Animism, I wanted to share his recent video discussing the origins of an incredibly important Nordic practice known in English as a “folk high school”. This concept, called folkhögskola is a powerful tool within Nordic countries to allow their citizenry to have access to traditional knowledge and connection with one another. This tool is also fundamental to their ability to maintain healthy democracy, because it encourages a model of “lifelong learning” that helps deepen consciousness about traditional knowledge, develop individuals’ self-awareness, and engender connection and collaboration with fellow travelers, all outside of an academic setting — and it’s all for free, too.
Ever since we came across this concept in our own travels to Scandinavia, we’ve tried to explain it to people back home in the United States. Our democracy is fundamentally crumbling under a lack of consensus reality, political polarization, and an inability to break free from binary, Manichean thinking. This left-brained, either/or understanding is not only flawed, it may play an important role in the death of the republic. Our “democracy” has long suffered under a somewhat-Spartan representative system that thrives on a stupefied population too sick, exhausted, and impoverished to challenge anti-democratic tactics, systemic partisanship that leads to never-ending cycles of filibuster and bullshit, and an overall impotent, unpopular government structure (looking at you, two-party system). Politics has become theater, but a theater that nevertheless serves to further incubate suspicion, disconnection, atomization, and alienation from our fellow countrymen. Scandinavian countries, by contrast, have been much more successful (and stable) as their culture is built on a more robust foundation of social welfare and a belief that all members of the society have the right to lifelong education and are entrusted to utilize that right.
We experienced a folkhögskola firsthand the first time we went to Sweden to film Fjällbete, the Swedish hub of the Savory Institute. You can watch our short film here:
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to include everything in this short film, and what was left out was the folkhögskola that Jörgen was hosting, teaching the principles of holistic management, a powerful framework developed by Allan Savory. Holistic management allows farmers, but really anyone, to assess the given context of their lives and make decisions that consider the “wholes” that we are all part of. For instance, we’re all aware that we are part of families, friend circles, professional networks, but we’re also part of the greater ecosystem of Earth, as well as our particular environments. Holistic management assumes that while we’re all part of a great, contiguous ecosystem, our responses to our particular environment and social forces are contextual, and therefore our decision-making must consider the complexities of that context.
I’m no expert in holistic management, but over the years (explicitly and through osmosis) we’ve learned a lot about the framework from so many of its brilliant practitioners. Although the presentations were in Swedish, we were nevertheless able to feel the energy and excitement from the group of students. People we spoke to were so excited to be learning about holistic management and looked forward to sharing what they learned with their loved ones, colleagues, and friends back home. In general, there was a feeling of camaraderie, community, and a sense of unity — that the more people who were able to attain this knowledge, the more successful and sustainable their country could be. Everyone there was focused on expanding their knowledge-base to do the most good.
There are so many different folkhögskola-like courses that could be taught in the United States, in addition to holistic management. People could teach artisan trades, shepherding courses, carpentry, and so many other skills that people want to learn, but can’t afford to. If the U.S. political system spent less money perpetuating an endless us versus them narrative (or on the military industrial complex), perhaps the country could actually invest in social programs that bring people together and teach them valuable skills that would actually help strengthen the country. Alas, that’s not what this theater production is all about. Regardless, we have a lot to learn from Scandinavia here in the U.S. of A.
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