Flourish (v.)
Federation (n.)
For our purposes, ‘Federation’ means an Atavistic community. A Federation is a group of no more than one hundred and fifty people living together and governing themselves by direct democracy as much as possible. It might have been more obvious to use a word like ‘tribe’ or ‘clan’, but we want to emphasize (i) that we’re not advocating a complete return to pre-agricultural life, and (ii) that even though community is incredibly important, it is a community composed of individuals, freely choosing the arrangement. Thus, a Federation. Why is it capitalized? Because every Federation is a proper noun, an individual entity deciding how to live.
When we talk about ‘flourishing’, we’re talking about a human becoming what he or she was meant to be. This is the point of all of it - the purpose of life. Not ‘utility’, a fiction of enlightenment progressives. Not mere happiness, which can be faked with the right chemicals. Not mere love, though that’s a big part of it. Philosophically, the idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, who thought that this was the appropriate goal of human behavior, but there’s a bit of Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power’ there as well if you look for it. It’s best thought of biologically: a tree is flourishing when it grows and blossoms in accord with its genes and its environment. An animal, including a human, is flourishing when it’s expressing behavior in accordance with its genes and its environment.
So here’s the technical, ‘true’ definition:
Atavism (n):
a : recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination
b : recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity <architectural atavism>
(source: Miriam Webster Online Dictionary)
But we’re trying to make it something more than that - to have it represent what we’re trying to do. Our contention is that by going back, way back, to pre-enlightenment and pre-agricultural practices and philosophies, we can fix a lot of what’s going wrong with society now.
Atavism (n.)
Terminology
Let's get a few things straight.