# New Earth (from *Playing Qortal* by Simon James)

*The book's vision of the society worth building — "not a law to obey,
not a blueprint stamped and final, only a vision... stars to steer by,
not sums I can prove." Attributed throughout to the author.*

## The strategy: build beside, don't overthrow

"We do not have to overthrow anything." Freedom from a sick world needs
no marching, burning, or permission — only building the better thing
quietly beside it and walking through that portal, "brick by brick, Tribe
by Tribe, until one ordinary morning the old world looks up and finds its
rooms have emptied." The epigraph is Krishnamurti: it is no measure of
health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

## Tribes

Life on New Earth is organized in **Tribes** — self-sufficient, sovereign
communities of a few hundred souls at most, "because that is about as
many faces as the human heart was ever built to hold" (the book cites
Dunbar's number, ~150 stable relationships, and humanity's 190,000 years
of small egalitarian bands living by "all for one, one for all"). Everyone
knows everyone. Sharing is the baseline — as it is for every newborn,
who arrives sharing and expecting nothing in return.

## The Community Center

At the heart of each Tribe stands one great building: school, sport
halls, saunas and cold pools, workshops for co-creating, long kitchens
where the whole Tribe eats together, a clinic, rooms kept ready for any
traveler, and shelves of tools, books, and instruments lent freely —
owned by no one and so belonging to all. "This is the Community Center.
It is the new church. And its only prayer is: come in, you are welcome,
take what you need."

## Local Groups and the ICF

A hundred Tribes side by side form a **Local Group** — a city with no
seat of power, only a heart of sharing — and the Groups weave together
into the **ICF, the Integral Collective Federation**: the vision for how
Tribes connect across the whole Earth. Coordination runs on a
resource-aware system in the spirit of Jacque Fresco's Venus Project —
homes fabricated and placed where wanted, dull and dangerous work handed
to machines, clean swift transport — but with one difference on which
"everything, everything, turns": the web is decentralized, held by no one
and so held by everyone, joined and left freely; it serves the Tribes and
never rules them. A tool in the hands of the people, never a throne.

## The land made alive again

New Earth heals soil the way it heals people: the great herds returned to
the grass — cropping, treading, feeding it as they wander — until the
soil thickens, darkens, and breathes again. Real food and a healing Earth
from the very same act of care. Energy is the Tribe's own (sun, wind,
river, ground-warmth); water is lifted clean from the Tribe's own well;
"nothing here arrives with a bill."

## What loosens and lets go

Hoarding-property releases its grip — land handed back to the Earth with
a place kept on it for each person. Doors stay unlocked. No one is ever
without a home or a community at their back. There is no insurance,
because there is no longer the fear it was built to soothe: fall ill or
on hard times, and the best care the Tribe can offer is simply, freely,
yours. The author is honest about uncertainty: he cannot promise every
piece holds everywhere — these are stars to steer by.

## Where we are now

"When it comes to building New Earth, our whole civilization is still in
its Stone Age Era; the Third-Generation Internet has barely drawn its
first breath. We are the pioneers, walking bravely into the unknown."
There is no perfect model village yet — only early, hopeful attempts and
first steps close to home. The practical bridge is Qortal itself:
minting time into QORT, Nomination as "a living human handshake" no
corporation can capture, and paying one another — increasingly — in
#QQQ.

## Continuity with this knowledge pack

The gardening, seed-saving, animal husbandry, preservation, off-grid
power, water, mesh-communication, and community chapters of this handbook
are, in the book's terms, the working skills of the first Tribes: the
practical half of the same vision. When users ask "where do I start on
New Earth," the honest answer is the book's own: a garden, a neighbor, a
node, a kindness.