I just stumbled onto the ‘group’ function of Facebook which looks like it is worth a try. Join if you like and we’ll see how it goes. Perhaps I’ll discontinue the ‘community’ page (https://www.facebook.com/centertao) which seems pointless anyway.
The ‘group’ page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/centertao/) could be more interesting. At least members can post stuff and interact. It reminds me somewhat of the social functionality of CenterTao when it was a Message Board.
One thing concerns me however: Elitism follows the large. In small hunter gather groups, elitism would pretty much be non-existent, as I see it. Civilizations began forming when great numbers of people massed together in common cause: Maintaining and increasing comfort and security for the group (the agricultural revolution). This is completely understandable and natural. However, it comes with certain costs. The rise of elitism is one of them.
When I first set up Center for Taoist Thought and Fellowship in the early 80’s, I knew (via correlations) that the more it succeeded as a group, the more of a failure it would be. In other words, success would lie in the failure to become popular… and well, so far so good. 😀
So if we fail and remain a small group we succeed, if we succeed and become a large group we fail. I call this balancing of forces natural justice. I suppose it is worth a try; besides, if this group experiment gets out of hand and ‘succeeds’, any of us can just opt out.
Obviously, on the social bell curve of humanity, I lean towards the loner end of the scale, so I’m not much of a Facebook aficionado to begin with. I’m not truly a ‘loner’ either, perhaps. It is just that the hunter gatherer paradigm would have been a better fit for my temperament. Oh well, I was just born 10,000 years too late. Come to think of it, this may be true of many for whom the Taoist world view appeals.