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PROPHETS AND LOCAL ECOCOMMUNITIES. THE MICRO-COMMUNITY PROGRAM AND THE NEW KOMA NETWORK! András Takács-Sánta In colloguial language, a prophet is a future-teller, one who sees into the future. Nevertheless, the original meaning of the word was very different. In Old Testament times, those people were termed prophets who could find ways out of critical times; who tried to guide a society straying in the wrong direction to the right — the divine — path; who strove to facilitate the evolution of a new social order and new mentality, that is, a new culture, by criticizing the dominant social establishment and the prevalent way of thought. In the age of the ever deeper crisis of our culture, there is dire need for prophets. The gravest conseguences of this crisis include, for example, extremely unjust inequalities in wealth, or masses of people being forced by the global capitalist market economy into soul-killing drudgery for most of their lives, through a combination of reward and coercion. Still, the most menacing consequences of the crisis are ecological. About half a century has passed since it dawned upon us that we were rapidly destroying the ecological bases of our lives (McNeill 2000). For decades now we have been faced with the ecological crisis, which alone should be enough to force us to profoundly change the direction of our culture. So far, however, all we have managed to achieve are minor corrections. Market-based, consumerist culture is still predominant practically all over the world. We have managed to cope with environmental problems that could be remedied by relatively simple technological responses, the mitigation of which harmed few power interests, and in the meantime the dominant culture did not need to be questioned — for example, the thinning of the ozone layers or the lead pollution in the air of large cities. However, global climate change, the mass extinction of species, soil degradation or the toxic effects of several synthetic compounds cause severe anxiety throughout the world. A new culture would be needed to stop the decay: the radical transformation of our thinking and of the social and economic institutional system. Although such a change does stand a chance (for one thing, lots and lots of people have realized its necessity all over the world), for the time being this is only visible at the subcultural level. Instead of the everyday meaning of the word “institution”, it is used in this paper in the sociological sense: an institution is what becomes systemic (institutionalized), a system in a society. Social institutions are those constituents of a society that can reproduce themselves and exist across generations. There are economic, political, legal, ' Based on Takäcs-Sänta 2019 and 2020, modified at several places.
