I don’t remember saying anything about leader-less living. If I did, fine, but that’s not why I applied to TUE.

“Journalistic fame”? Give me a break. Some of your assumptions about me are really quite out of line Dylan.

I’m actually starting to rather dislike you. My criticisms have been objective and based on what I saw as real failings at TUE. You’ve hit back with very personal and unjustified jibes.

I won’t post again. Good luck with the book.

Look, I’m sorry that your brief stay in TUE didn’t give you the journalistic fame you were seeking, and that as a result you are still eking out a living in some hack’s job in India. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again!

“Silly article”? Read it again Dylan. 90% of it is about how much I learnt and enjoyed being there. The few lines I spend on you tucked away near the end are just a description of what I saw in front of me, and what others described. A friend of mine, who also stayed at TUE for a few days, met Angus shortly after it was published, and he said it was the only positive article he had seen about the project so far. Don’t be so self-absorbed.

You’re right, I didn’t know what you were doing when you were absent. Perhaps you were wandering the fields staring at the ground. Perhaps you were under your duvet crying. Maybe, just maybe, you were even meeting ‘planners’ and ‘funders’. The point is if you don’t tell anyone, can you blame them for guessing?

As for my comments about leadership being due to a “powerful longing for a father figure” – really Dylan, that is laughable! Does everyone who sees the merit in having a single guiding hand have ‘father issues’? And I never said anything about “deep personal questions about whether people could live without leaders”. Either this IS a case of mistaken identity or you are just making things up now.

I arrived with no preconceptions and no expectations. After a few days it was clear that the lack of direction was affecting progress, morale and potentially the longevity of the project. Hence my thoughts about leadership.

Just answer me this: Do you disagree that you managed TUE poorly?

And don’t call me babe.

Don’t be angry with me for failing to be the fantasy leader you dreamed of. That’s not me babe.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/the-utopia-experiment-a-radical-crash-course-in-selfsufficient-living-457876.html

I think you’re thinking of the Daily Mail girl who came up for half a day and decided we were all a bunch of lazy slobs making an excuse for ourselves.

The point is I actually cared about this project, was very excited to be taking part, and unlike the other journos who visited, was not doing it purely for professional reasons.

Granted, 4 weeks out of a year is hardly going to give an expansive picture, and yes you set everything up for the start (shouldn’t that be expected though?) but I am also basing my assumptions on conversation had with others who knew you for longer.

The truth is, while I was there, you were a ghost. I know you had some personal issues to deal with, but while that may excuse your behaviour it doesn’t negate its effects. And I’m pretty sure your issues didn’t appear the day I arrived, and disappear the day I left.

Regarding my “yearning for a strong leader”, yes! I personally am no leader of men, just the opposite in fact. So I guess I was overly sensitive to what I perceived as a distinct lack of direction, focus and any semblance of following some kind of experimental method.

If TUE was to mirror real life events, then some kind of leader would have to have emerged soon, and he didn’t. Perhaps that was because the transitory nature of volunteering didn’t allow it. Perhaps the kind of people attracted to TUE are generally not leadership material. I know Agric was also adamant he was not going to step into that role.

But for those of us who were there to learn about living off-grid and sans-supermarket, it was a frustrating experience.

To be honest, I don’t want to sound too critical. TUE was an experience I will never forget, and many volunteers (myself included) are very grateful to you for having sacrificed so much to set it all up. But it is still frustrating that such a good idea didn’t really come close to reaching its potential, for the simple lack of a bit of project management.

However, that was quite unusual. For most of the project, from July 2006 on, I was there 24/7. Who do you think put up the yurts that you slept in? Who do you think planted the first crop of vegetables you ate? Who do you think installed the Rayburn you cooked on, and the hot water tank? I did, with help from Adam and other volunteers who lived on site with me from July 2006 on. You arrived almost a year later, and stayed for a few weeks. By that time, I had been living on site for almost a year.

Your apparent yearning for a strong leader to take control is interesting. But that was never my plan. Sorry.

But I hold no lingering hostility against you and actually, if events happened as you describe :

(”some of the volunteers started taking a perverse satisfaction in thinking about the social chaos and human misery that would inevitably occur *during* a collapse – a secular version of the pious faithful looking forward to the punishment of sinners”)

then I agree, that is disturbing.

I was not a part of nor privy to any of that.

I simply observed a group of volunteers who had put a lot of time, effort, and in some cases money, into the project, who inevitably felt let down when the founder would only appear apparition-like, fleetingly and uselessly, before disappearing again without notice.

Your presence actually demoralized people. You say you were a participant-observer; you were neither. You say you were marginalised; I saw none of that. We wanted you to be an active, engaged and productive member of the group, but you appeared incapable.

I will withdraw my comment that your “woeful management” was to blame for the project’s failure. If the kind of evangelical secularism was emerging that you describe, then I don’t blame you for ending it. But some kind of management should have come from your side to ensure that volunteers were forced into developing the skills and tools to survive, rather than allowed to develop the social and philosophical themes that you say were emerging.

So why then did the experiment fail? Were an opinionated few too influential? Was there not enough interest? Or will you simply blame ‘human nature’?

I myself think the lack of any singular organising figurehead played the biggest role. Without an experimental coordinator to ensure the volunteers had to innovate to get their necessities (food, warmth, shelter etc) nor a leader within the group to push things along, things very quickly grew stale, and the place became more of a budget eco-holiday camp than a survivalist experiment.

“Jimmy D” rightly points out that I myself suggested before the experiment that a return to simple, localised living would lead to happier people with more leisure time and less stress and other problems associated with techno-cluttered 21st Century life. That is true, but it doesn’t contradict what I say in the article above about getting cold feet when volunteers started seeing a collapse as something good. It was the fact that some of the volunteers started taking a perverse satisfaction in thinking about the social chaos and human misery that would inevitably occur *during* a collapse that spooked me, not the more healthy anticipation of a more relaxed way of life that might emerge long after the crisis was over. This struck me as a kind of secular apocalypticism, a secular version of the pious faithful looking forward to the punishment of sinners. It was frankly disturbing and was a major reason for my wish to end the project early.

Due to the sinister machinations of groupthink, my refusal to join in this collective gloating was increasingly interpreted by the volunteers as evidence of mental disturbance. I was marginalised by the hard core of volunteers who adopted an increasingly evangelical tone. “Jimmy D” appears to have softened somewhat since those heady days, but clearly retains some of that lingering hostility to me.

This is clear from his wish to shift the blame for the failures of the experiment from the volunteers on to my own “woeful management” of the experiment. Actually, the whole point of the experiment was that the volunteers should manage it themselves. I made it very clear from the beginning that I was not that of leader, but that of a participant-observer. I wanted to see what kind of “maze” these “rats” would build (to use “Jimmy D’s” own metaphor) when left to their own devices.

Yes, perhaps it was inevitable that they would build something as nightmarish as they did. But that, I’m afraid, is something “Jimmy D” must take responsibility for, instead of foisting the blame on me.