The Big Answer

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Faith Popcorn and Lys Marigold outline 16 trends they are forecasting for the future. This 1996 book updates her earlier trend book: The Popcorn Report. It predicts clanning, “. . . the inclination to join up, belong to, hang out with groups of like kinds, providing a secure feeling that our own belief systems will somehow be validated by consensus.” (Again, MCs are right on trend. We’ve felt for decades that the 21st century would see more people getting together with like-minded people for reasons of lifestyle improvement, friendship, childcare, and common interests.)

Their book needs updating to reflect the new Internet and cell phone and texting and IMing and emailing and—especially—social networking realities such as Facebook.

As always, she—and her co-author—provide the reader with especially insightful predictions and ideas. They suggest that virtual reality would be a great way to test various experiences out to see if you really want to experience them in reality. An example is having a baby to take care of. Here’s what a fellow named Richard Jurmain did that confirmed the Virtual Reality trend they foresaw: He invented a doll called Baby Think It Over, which is being sought by schools and clinics to counter teen pregnancy. It’s programmed to shriek and wail at random times night and day. “A weekend of this ragged ‘realism’ probably works better than all the sex education courses ever devised.” Amen.

Exasperated mom with crying babies—if only she'd used the Baby Think It Over doll!

They point out that people once cocooned for fun, for cuddling, and just generally to be with their families, but now people are staying at home for security and safety in a scary world. They’re scared. Workplace homicides are on the rise, as are school shootings. Private security firms employ over two and one half times as many people as public law enforcement services do.

They also outline a trend they call Communal Clanning. They say there’s already “. . . a new wave of collaborative communities, allowing you to choose ‘family’ members by common bond, rather than determining family by blood. . . . Co-housing . . . is finding acceptance here. . . . These places are like a return to small-town life, when you knew—and helped out—all your neighbors. Plenty of babysitters, someone to get your kid off to school if you have the flu . . . Often, for people who don’t have a mate or are empty-nesters, co-housing offers a way to Click with others.” One such clanner said: “The way we have been living doesn’t work. Due to the small size of today’s families and the scattering of families, our kids have no chance to experience the support of a big support system. We rarely see their grandparents and most of the elderly are treated like pariahs. . . We’re craving some deep, meaningful contact.”

They say “At BrainReserve, we think co-housing will Click in the decade and century ahead. In place of real estate agents, we’ll have Co-housing Counselors . . . who will match up would be neighbors or housemates. We’ll have Co-housing Clearinghouses on the Internet or 900-number phone lines, where people can post openings in co-housing communities and screen applicants. And maybe someday we’ll be watching the evening news on Election Night and hear reports on how the ‘co-housing vote’ is swinging. Because co-housing—and the tightly knit new Clans it creates—promises to be that big a phenomenon.”

As you can see, MCs (thought up in 1987—see Why Register for an MC?) are a prescient idea. But the above ideas have flaws which MCs correct:

• Few Americans, ourselves included, like words like co-housing, commune, communal and clan. Dump all of them. Words like community and micro are liked and the community movement is on-trend. (Microcommunity will be a popular word.)
• The word clan may mean simply a group of people with similar interests, but the Klan wrecked it—it’s poison. It’s also associated with inbreeding. The word’s a nonstarter.
• The word commune was forever wrecked in the 60s and 70s by people too much into promiscuous and substance-abusing lifestyles for their own good. And the association with the word communism has also forever wrecked this word as well as the word communal. But beyond the word itself, it involves too little privacy, too much dependence, too much pooling of economic resources, too much crowding, and too little personal space. The word’s a nonstarter.
• Co-housing reminds us of European welfare states, commune philosophy in which people share amenities somewhat socialistically, and poor people in other countries who must share housing out of economic considerations. It will never be popular in America. But beyond the word itself, it involves sharing types of amenities that most Americans won’t want to do. The word’s a nonstarter.
• For people to suddenly consider others as “family” simply because they have common interests is inappropriate. And it will backfire for the same reason that communes have almost always backfired: Relationships, parenting and communication are not something that one does well naturally even with one’s own family. Factor in people one is unfamiliar with and suddenly a “family” becomes a war zone.
  
  Without Third Wave application of proven knowledge entering the picture to replace the random, haphazard practices people have in these areas, what will occur is obvious and this is backed up by every psychologically knowledgeable expert on human behavior around, as well as experiences most of us have had in our lives: People without real parenting, relationship and communication knowledge will parent the way they were parented, and relate and communicate the way they were communicated to when young. The abuses, put-downs, discipline problems will continue, as will all the other errors, from one generation to the next.
  
  Occasionally someone gets counseling and evolves insight enough to cease the dysfunctional patterns and begin doing what works

  Occasionally someone gets counseling and evolves insight enough to cease the dysfunctional patterns and begin doing what works. Also, sometimes people strongly react to what their parents did with them when they were young so they try to do the opposite, but this is usually an attempted switch from permissive to authoritarian or vice versa. And it oftentimes backfires, because the psychological forces at work trying to make them conform to their parents’ methods are too strong. So they revert to old ways, or, worse yet, vacillate back and forth between harsh and passive parenting.

  
  41% of first marriages in the U.S. end in divorce and it's a lot worse for 2nd and 3rd marriages

  And to the degree their earlier experiences didn’t fill their needs well, they will also find themselves centering relationship goals unknowingly on indirect self-acceptance, trying to get others (spouse, offspring, friends) to parent them and take care of them—which will backfire, of course. Since over half of marriages end in divorce, the normal stresses in normal families can already be seen as often too much to preserve family relationships, mostly because of the just-cited reasons. But add to this even more people to botch relationships with, engage in conflict and jealousy and mistrust with, and revert to old, psychologically-programmed patterns of dysfunctional behavior with, and you can turn a partial mess into utter chaos.

  
  Over half of marriages end in divorce, so many people don't ever marry
  
  
  Sibling rivalries are the legacy of steep-gradient nurturance; manifesting negativity, jealousy, conflict, blaming, and miscommunication

  Relatively few families enjoy effective, compassionate, nurturing parenting and relationships, but it does happen. (See Authoritative and Democratic Parenting Programs for ways to empower this.) Such lucky individuals are shocked to learn what most other families are like and how others' relationships are a mess of negativity, jealousy, conflict, blaming, and miscommunication.

  
  Many parents let the TV babysit their kids. This is NOT a nurturing situation. This situation does NOT fill needs.

  Or others' relationships are relatively nonexistent, since there are few if any siblings, both parents work, so such people get "watched" by babysitters who use TVs to babysit kids, and such kids are stuck with trying to get other friends to nurture them which couldn't possibly work. So they seek obsessively for indirect-self acceptance via the other-directed Facebook activities and texting back and forth as if they need reasurance they're acceptable every minute of every day. Underlying this is the reality that they find themselves to be unacceptable, because parents found jobs to be more important than them—which made them feel unloved and not okay. Of course, parents were trying their "best" and bought their kids lots of stuff (like cell phones and TVs) out of guilt.

  
  Smartphone

  The authors are absolutely right that there are strongly felt needs to: want elderly people to be part of family configurations (as long as they’re not under the same roof, usually); have a large supply of competent—even loving—babysitters; have neighbors who you really care about and desire to relate to; and have a big support system of people to nurture not just the kids but the adults and elderly of each family. And the yearning for more social connectedness in singles and empty-nesters which the authors cite is just as valid. But there are many problems that need addressing.
  
  (MCs deal with the intrinsically invasive nature of communications in groups of houses where all relate to all by using PSBs and “alone” signs and certain rules. They deal with the dysfunctional parenting, relating and communicating patterns programmed into most of us by establishing the best possible patterns in those areas from the word go. They deal with the symptoms, act-outs and “tape” playing due to unfilled needs by creating an optimal need-filling environment and establishing relationship patterns (using P.E.T. strategies) that interrupt old ways and encourage and teach new ones. They deal with the need for “deep, meaningful contact” via close encounters of the three kinds, wherein it is realized that making life work for a single group is an inadequate response to the situation humans find themselves in, in their communities and on this biosphere. MCs create the context for empathy, spiritual inspiration and compassion. A full person likes nothing better than giving, and once their own MC is running and working great, they help interested others create MCs. See Why Register for an MC?.)

  
  Registering for MC search and match