Thoughts about the philosophy of the OSE society 

OSE goals:
(as gathered from the OSE videos, web and wiki page)
 

• - live directly from the basic local resources: soil, plants, sun light, air and water using modern technology which still can be mastered by a village of ~200 people.
• - new self supporting society without artificial scarcities, and hence without crime and war
• - only 2-3 hours daily work necessary to support yourself while keeping all modern comforts

Live directly from the basic local resources: soil, plants, sun light, air and water?

This leads back to the oldest and most important scarcity of all: land! As it is rightly recognized: land is the most basic wealth of all. It provides food, water, energy, all raw materials for buildings and tools. Of course not every piece of land provides all necessary raw materials for modern comforts like water, steel, copper and many others. And the ownership of land is and has always been very unevenly distributed among society.

In the medieval ages where people lived more in harmony with nature (not due to insight but lack of other choices) the feudal system of nobility owned most of the land and most of the commons were slaves or farmers working the landlord's land owing taxes mostly in natural goods and free hours of labor. Today the financial nobility has taken over the control pursuing a very similar model. Most of us work directly or indirectly for the profit of large corporations belonging finally to financial institutions behind which are very few families who keep the real control. (Or did you think the elected politicians are really in control?)

Today the majority of society lives in mega-cities. They often don't own any land or the apartment they live in. They depend for everything necessary to live on other people and have to pay for it. In order to be able to pay they work in highly specialized jobs each contributing a tiny bit to modern comfortable life. Often they work in large organizations producing highly sophisticated products in masses achieving relatively low unit prices by economy of scale (mass production with high time efficiency, not necessarily energy or resource efficiency). The large cooperating number of people can master enormous undertakings like panama canal, copper mines, steel plants, railway system, highway system, power plants, power grid, water supply grid and semi-conductor industry and many more. This is the essence of modern society: high complexity, high specialization, high interdependency, large number of members, large organizations, large challenges, main wealth goes to very few.

Now this modern society is certainly not without many - some of them grave - flaws. On the other hand there has also never before been a society with a better standard of living and welfare for a large part of the society. However history has often shown that complex societies have become instable, declined and collapsed. There are certain signs like financial instability, overuse of natural resources, pollution, social injustice like the decline of the middle class etc. that our modern society's hardest problem has become the very society itself. In history the dissolution or collapse of societies has always been an unwanted, painful process transitioning to a lower standard of living with lower efficiency supporting fewer society members. In case of collapse this resulted in moving away or death by starvation or by diseases and by war of important parts of society . In case of slow decline it meant shrinkage of society by lower reproduction rate. (By the way the latter has started to happen in western civilization since decades already.)

What is the importance of OSE in this context?

If the claim that OSE can provide the same standard of living with only 2-3 hours of daily work turned out to be true then it would be an attractive alternative to the complex modern society. Many who are already today on the loosing side in this modern complex society will already today want to change to the OSE society. They might become the pioneers. Provided they have enough funds to buy sufficient farm land and provided there is enough of it for sale.
Later those, who are not suffering so much in the current modern society but long for a more sustainable life with more time for family and personal interests, will be interested to change. They will become the early adopters. Since they have to loose a relatively comfortable situation they want to make sure the new situation is indeed fulfilling its promises before they change their lives. If the numbers increase agriculture land for sale will become scarce, expensive and unaffordable. And there is no point in buying expensive farm land via a bank loan since you would only replace one dependency by another.
Then there will be a good part of modern complex society who never will want to become OSE farmers for various reasons. They will only adopt it if forced to by deteriorating living conditions. Part of them will become late adopters. Another part will permanently resist.
This might restrict the size of the OSE society to a permanent minority without gaining strong political influence. The incumbents of todays wealth like the industrialists and owners of financial institutions will continue to dominate the ownership of most of the wealth (including owning much farm land directly or indirectly by loans) and they will use their strong political influence to limit the growth of the OSE society. Each person working only for himself stops working for the profit of the large corporations and banks. So it has to be their interest to limit OSE's growth. And they will try hard. Or do you think they will give up their privileged position in society without a fight?

How can OSE grow to a size that will ensure permanent survival?

This is only possible if enough agricultural land is for sale to OSE farmers and enough OSE adopters are willing and able to buy it. This could be accelerated - or maybe  it is the only way - if OSE farmers produce surplus agricultural products and sell it to the open market substantially below market price. This will force large scale farms to either sell their land or adopt the OSE model. Since those farms are most likely deeply in debt to banks, the land will go to the bank and they will at first not be ready to sell it to OSE farmers in order to protect their business model. But sooner or later the banks will loose money on that land because they cannot compete with OSE agri-product prices and farm land prices might drop. This kind of economic confrontation can only be won if the OSE farmers are willing for many years to work more than 2-3 hours daily to produce the necessary surplus. But this will reduce the attractiveness of OSE for many potential adopters. So it is a dilemma or at least a balancing act. A lot will depend on the political awareness and will power of the OSE farmers. Luckily the early adopters are likely to have a high political awareness since they were most likely the underpriviledged in the complex society like workers who lost their jobs and homes because their jobs were moved to low wage countries in order to further increase the profits of the corporations owners. (The people involved so far are highly skilled, well trained, enthusiastic "pre-pioneers" who engage themselves for their conviction to make a difference in demonstrating a new possibility. Let's call them pathfinders.)

How much society is necessary and how complex does it have to be?

OSE will certainly reduce the dependency on many scarcities in number and in importance for those adopting the OSE life style. However one must be aware that there remain many dependencies on big industry products. They can be further reduced at the cost of more daily hours of self-support work. But probably some dependencies cannot be eliminated at least not if modern comforts shall be maintained.

modern comforts:
energy efficient lighting (LED, fluorescent), double glass windows, air conditioning, central heating, closed loop temp. control, modern fabric clothing, modern shoes, TV, stereo, PC, laptop, cellular, Internet, wlan, game console, ceramic or induction stove, oven, microwave, fridge, deep freezer, dish washer, washing machine, dryer, vacuum cleaner, clean hot and cold running water, stainless steel and porcelain kitchen ware and cutlery, water closet, shower, comfortable long distance travel to visit people.

In order to keep these comforts a multitude of technologies are necessary:

Metallurgy:
Ore processing to raw metal, steel profiles, steel sheet, high performance steels, hard, tough, abrasion resistant, heat resistant for combustion engines, roller bearings, cutting blades for harvesters, copper wire, different aluminum alloys (e.g. motor pistons), alloy metals like manganese, molybdenum, vanadium, chrome, zinc etc. metallurgic analysis methods to control alloy quality. Metal cutting tools like drill bits, routers, grinding discs, etc

Chemistry:
Paints for surface protection, adhesives, glues, high performance plastics e.g. for hydraulic piston seals, oils, lubricants, rubber tires, copper wire insulation. fertilizer, crop protection against all kinds of pests, sheet glass, pharmacy products, medicine, cosmetics, sun screen.

Semiconductor technology:
CPU's, highly integrated circuits (like in the arduino microprocessor in CEB press v4 ?)
sensors (like hall sensors in CEB press v4), computers, cellulars

Agriculture (last but not least):
plant and animal breeding, selection, production, responsible genetic technology?, alternative fertilizers and pesticides, soil analysis, irrigation methods, harvest storage, conservation and processing methods, energy production by wood, biomass, oilseeds for bio-diesel, carbohydrate seeds for alcohol, wood growing, harvesting, processing, species selection, pest protection, harvesting method, transport, cutting to beams, boards, veneer, chips, pellets, drying, gluing to compound beams, to plywood, to chip boards

It is hard to believe that a 200 people village is able to keep all modern comforts by creating all of it themselves out of their local soil. Besides their soil might not contain everything they need like e.g copper or manganese.
Why does not each village concentrate on one or two advanced technologies for which they have know-how and or resources and trade with other villages for their different high tech products? Such a level of dependency still seems acceptable without compromising the OSE philosophy.
On top of that there is even another need to cooperate with villages far away: Insurance against loss of harvest and starvation due to drought, flood, storms, pests. The neighboring village might also be affected and cannot help. Therefore only villages farther away might not be affected by the same problems. Each village or farm needs contracts with many distant villages to maintain some stock of resources to give away in times of distress. That way the villages and farms can be insured without dependency on large insurance corporations.
And the villages need protection from outside aggression. This is taken care of by the national government but of course they need to raise tax money to finance that. In order to gain money to pay the taxes the OSE farmer needs to sell surplus production (and work more than 2-3 hours per day). Moreover to sell the surplus production it needs to be transported. So a grid of streets, waterways and railways needs to be maintained. One needs to send mail and parcels and communicate via phone, cellular and Internet. So also such infrastructure is needed outside the OSE farm or village and it is not for free.
The point is that a completely independent farm or village is not realistic but it is also not necessary. If the OSE society grows sufficiently big (in terms of numbers and land) to protect its longterm interests by gaining sufficient political influence there is enough space left to coexist with the complex modern society and benefit from each others strengths. If not, OSE remains an irrelevant niche society as many others. Let's hope otherwise.