Fascinating comment from “prunes” on a recent post here:
Boltzmann, who developed statistical mechanics and the ‘heat death’ vision of a world degenerating into ultimate randomness committed suicide. [see also this]
A horror of entropy is based in mistaking probabilities for real things. A probablity is a quantitative description of a state of knowledge, nothing more. [...]
If you mistake abstractions for reality, then you will be forced to a pessimistic conclusion, you have placed faith in non-existence. There are no atoms, forces, mass, energy, these are all reciprically defined and have no meaning outside of statistical prediction. [...]
So why does randomness increase as time increases? All that means is that Nature escapes our predictive abilities, simply because something is random to you does not mean it is random to any possible observer. The order that underlies creation is a transcendental order that escapes description or capture, it is the same order that underlies our being, how can we continue to ignore it?
As I said in a post earlier today, it seems that within philosophical systems such as Primitivism and the ideas surrounding Peak Oil, what we are seeing is extrapolation based on current facts, taken instead as an inescapable fact about the future. This however ignores the long-standing purpose of prophecy within communities. Prophecy looks at what’s happening now and makes educated predictions about what will happen IF things don’t change. The fearful vision inspired is thus designed to PREVENT itself from coming to pass. In those traditions, God creates prophets because people are supposed to heed the prophet and change their ways (since their own actions and inactions lead them to their current situation), not because God is bent on bringing his wrath to the earth.
Prophecy is corrective, not predictive.
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56 Comments
God smod. My favorite definition of god is , dog spelled backwards , and thats a son of bitch.
I will take science over Reverend Hagee or Mr. Jack Van Impe of Christian broadcasting fame.
All prophecy is , is a logical extrapolation of the present. Any one can do that , and you do not have to be a religious crank to be a prophet , or a so called shaman.
I’m still not sure why it has to be one or the other to folks like you, though, Skip. In foisting this either/or spectrum upon people, you simply reinforce the notion that you want your church of science to replace the church of religion.
The prediction of collapse is not an extrapolation of current trends. It is the only possible result in this universe. under these laws of physics, of a system that requires constant growth. If this system ever stops growing, it collapses, and since it will have to stop growing at some point, it will collapse. This requires no extrapolation of current trends (though that could give you a better idea of the timeframe). It is not probabilistic. It’s the most basic syllogism. To be anything otherwise would require the suspension of the laws of physics themselves. The only way this prediction could possibly be wrong is if the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy were disproven, and everything we know about the universe turned on its head.
prophets and shamans are badged thus so that people know what to do with what they say and do………..we all know how to play roles when the they are clearly defined. without the nametags we are all the same bags of bones rattling around after all………….
A price system must continually expand.
Nature provides a boundary for this.
Our system as Jason says is dependent on expansion.
An oak tree only gets so big. Then it deteriorates and falls.
We are no different. This is a natural law. However it is possible to have a system that works with nature . Not perfectly , because nothing is perfect.
But, It is possible to have a system that cooperates as much as possible with the laws of nature. That would be a fact based society, not a belief based one.
Our culture thinks it can break some natural laws. Natural law will break our culture instead. Its a hands down bet.
Here is another syllogism : Humans are stupid , I am a human, therefore,,,,,
The whole point about being a stupid human is to become less stupid, throw off the brainwashing, and go forward.
In our political/religious system we have now, the whole focus is to keep people stupid.
Why. ?
To keep everything going the way it is.
Why?
To keep the everything for me and nothing for you, for type of society that we have now going.
Is it a conspiracy. ? No just a bunch of stupid people.
Every thing ends, as long as we are here lets keep the good times going in a life enhancing way.
We could be a model society here, and this is the logical place to be one because of our resources. They call us modernity.? Not.
Americans are not smart.
We are just Blessed with the most incredible array of resources in the world.
A non growth society , based on secular humanistic principle would be a start. Integrate science and nature as closely as it is possible to do.
It would be better than this , what we have.
It is very apparent to most that we are about to crash and burn . It won`t be pleasant because we are actually more vulnerable to collapse because of our advanced technology.
It will be a shame to destroy ourselves because we were unable to let go of our previous culture.
It really needs to be let go of. It will kill most every one in a pretty humiliating way soon. Just being a member of this culture is an embarrassment. We look like a bunch of stupid warmongering idiots to any one with a brain.
Skip, I agree with much of your comment, but I looked over your stuff on price systems, and I have to say, I’m not terribly convinced. Medieval feudalism, Roman patronage, and so many other systems denigrated price systems and trade in general in favor of social networks and obligations. Frankly, that’s the more common mode of civilization. Yet these societies exhibited the exact same premise of growth that our current civilization with its price system evinces. Don’t you think this suggests that the problem is more basic than prices?
As for the oak tree, it’s worth noting that an oak tree doesn’t grow until it falls apart. It grows to a good size, and lives a long and healthy life pretty steady at that size, and then it dies. Or, the cells in your body reproduce, bring you to a certain size, and then you live a long and healthy life, and then you die. When the cells keep on reproducing past that, without any concern for the organism they’re part of, we call that cancer.
Our culture now is a runaway cancer.
You are looking to far into the past for analogies to the technocratic concepts. The 17th century was a stark change with the steam engine.
By 1913 the machine replaced human labor for the most part.
A human can produce about 1/20th of a horse power.
All through the centuries prior to the 17th human labor ruled.
Our present culture has not thrown in the towel and realized yet that work has become a non issue.
Our belief system doesn`t understand this yet.
We should have evolved into a play culture beginning about 1913 and become more and more evolved into a technologically brilliant , and also nature sustainable culture.
Why haven`t we. ?
Because the glue that holds together our society is the belief systems that all maintain the class/caste systems.
People just can`t give that up when it would make perfect sense to because as of modern times with technology we no longer need to have a scarcity based system as capitalism is . I know that this is plain to you.
We could have an abundance based system .
The scarcity based system keeps every one in fear.
No job, no food , no place to live, very frightening.
That is the way people are controlled in a price system.
In a technocratic system those are non issues, that system being based on sustainable living in abundance. Also freedom for the human spirit.
The energy debit system for obtaining the essentials is to keep an energy accounting system as it relates to population.~ ! Make sure its sustainable.
That is why I say your Tainter got his information from us I believe.
Have you checked on that.?
I do not mean to diminish him at all .
As said this is one of the few reality based concepts that I have run into recently other than Technocracy. It is really cool . He is right on using energy as the way to measure what a society is really about. Ha. ~!
Is the price system more basic than prices ?
Yes Indeed.
When the price system is removed , and a secular/humanistic system is used, a lot of problems go away. Freedom of and from belief. Science system.
All these belief systems were made to poison the human mind.
Why would a normal person work to make someone obscenely rich.?
They are programed by the religious/political systems to do so. They have been directly since about 2200 BC. You can actually track back the modern price system mentality of brainwashing to that time in Babylon.
They even said they were doing it in the Sumerian creation myth and why. Much like Hitler said what he was going to do in his book.
The creation myth is a trip if you haven`t read it. Very interesting Ju Ju hocus pocus. Brilliant really . It caught on like wildfire at the time. It was novel. People fell for it.
I focus in on that moment in my book , and try to put my finger on the exact time when the unilateral contract with god idea first started. Funny ha. That was the beginning of the end.
Betrayal of the human spirit.
It is about a lot more than money for sure. Belief is the thing. Belief in things that are not real to control and manipulate your neighbor. P.T. Barnum Ala, 2200 BC. I expose , or just go beyond all that. Peel off the layers of bullshit. Sound like fun.?
My book may end up as an underground manual for people in a post apocalypse world.
It will explain in a truthful way what we were all about , why we failed , and the opportunity we had to create a good society.
It may take a thousand years or it may not happen.
My hope is that it does happen , and soon , and it may. Once we collapse, which is just around the corner , a type of technocracy will either have to be instituted or we will not survive as a civilization that is any much attractive.
If you can imagine a society like we have except about 10 times worse that is what is what it would be like in a collapsed price system that they make work anyway.
A real hell.
People replacing robots. Wage slave slaves and a super class structure.
Our technate could be fun and interesting. Which sound better. ?
I love a beautiful oak tree. I visit several occasionally. There is nothing more lovely
Somewhat on topic: I’ve been reading a book on causal inference. Roughly speaking, this is a technical field concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of what a “cause” is and how it compares and contrasts with a correlation. This is not just philosophical, because the issue of causation comes up in very practical epidemiological problems. In particular, it becomes important to know whether cause can be inferred from the associations evident only from observational data (sometimes it can) and also to know what kinds of data must be collected if one wants to prove causation, not just association. There are computer-science and statistical/probabilistic principles behind this all.
Anyway, one of the startling comments in the book was this: in any framework of associations, there may be many possible causal structures that are consistent with that framework. Not all of these causal structures are consistent with the time sequence. So how does the human mind actualy pick the “right” one, the one that is consistent with the time-axis? The author conjectures that the human mind is actually hard-wired to pick a causal structure that is consistent with entropy, which usually corresponds to unidirectional time. MY interpretation of this is that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is simply a statement about our perceptive framework: our minds are pre-programmed to see only entropy, and hence the time-axis that corresponds to entropy.
Now if you could retrain your mind, through meditation or magick or whatever, to see beyond entropy, what will that do to your concept of time and cause?
Actually, let me turn that question around. If you train your mind to see more and more entropy (think of the really dark conspiracy theory and collapse/apocalypse websites), do you entrench yourself deeper and deeper into the temporal world?
Again, to someone like myself who bears towards buddhist and gnostic belief systems, this is not a purely theoretical question. Over the last few years I’ve been under the impression that learning about conspiracy and apocalypse would bring me closer to spiritual liberation. But what if it’s doing the exact opposite?
One more thing: I want to repeat my one and only criticism of Jason Godesky’s thesis. Jason: although you lay out a convincing argument in your 30 theses (is it now 30+?) you do not allow for the possibility of a miracle. As Zac has stated recently, the human race has a history of being saved “just in time”. Therefore, your reasoning may have a serious flaw.
slomo, I don’t think counting on a miracle is exactly a strategy. The odds are always against it. It’s worth noting that all our previous “miracles” were on the table and ready to go; they were just too expensive to consider until things got tight. That’s why I’ve spent so may articles on Anthropik evaluating coal, nuclear, wind, ethanol, etc.: I’m going through each of the candidates for our miracle, and finding out that not one of them could actually do it. Not even a combination of them. Now, maybe some miracle will save us, and I’ve noted this a few times. This would be an unparalleled disaster, far far worse than collapse. It would allow civilization to continue for another century or more, in which time, we actually would begin to threaten the earth with a global ecological collapse. If such a miracle occurs, then all hope for humanity’s survival dies with it. This window of collapse is pretty much our species’ last chance to save itself. If we don’t collapse this time, then we’re probably looking at the end of all multicellular life on the planet. If that miracle occurs, then in 300 years, the amoeba will probably be the most complex organism on the planet.
Skip, I see the Industrial Revolution as a revolution in scale, rather than kind; I see the Agricultural Revolution as the principle revolution in kind. Yes, you’re right, most of our labor is done by machines now. But before that, the caloric deficit of agriculture was made up with domesticated animals. Richard Manning’s Against the Grain is a great illustration in terms of agriculture, and how the major changes in civilization followed from the use of hand plows, then ox-driven plows, then horse-driven plows (the root of “horsepower”), and finally, the mechanical equipment we use today. How do our machines differ markedly from the domesticates we used in previous centuries? How do modern GMO’s differ from the process of domestication? The Industrial Revolution was a major intensification of the complexity of society, spurred on by the energy subsidy of fossil fuels (as Tainter discusses both in his book, and in “Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies“). But these are differences in scale, not kind. So when you say I’m looking too far back to see the exact same pattern among Roman patricians and medieval lords, I think you’re begging the question somewhat. My point is that I think the pattern is much older, and much more basic, than anything having to do with the Industrial Revolution. As evidence, I point to the fact that the exact same pattern is continuous, long before the Industrial Revolution. The first time we see this pattern emerge is with the Agricultural Revolution, and we find the exact same pattern expressed among all agricultural societies. That being the case, I find the price system critique to be somewhat shallow. Based in that same pattern, of course the price system also evinces that pattern, but that suggests that the price system, and our current problems, are not causes of one another, but both results of the underlying pattern of social organization and subsistence–the same pattern that we see in Roman patronage and medieval feudalism, a pattern that emerges with the Agricultural Revolution.
Wow, this is VERY similar to some ideas I’ve been playing with. Without knowing any more detials, this sounds like a philosophical application of the Maximum Entropy Principle, or very much like some of ET Jayne’s maxent thermodynamics. Could you leave a comment with the name of the book?
Why not lay out all my cards on the table here. After a samadhi experience, I could no longer really believe in physical concepts except as ideals to be realized in statistical models. But there are no atoms, etc.
After entropy, that is, after unpredictability? We are no longer “in time”, and the One surveys itself. (as with all metaphysical statements, the validity of this can only be determined through personal experience, please do not take my word for it.)
Maybe the best way to illustrate the issue is to say that arranging events along a line is sometimes a convenient way to look at them and sometimes misleading, but never absolutely necessary. It is a convention.
All that said (and I hope it is not too incoherent) I also feel there can be no expectation that the god necessarily protects us from the consequences of our actions, either. Whatever good we may do in the world, it can only be the outward sign of our inward life.
Jason — I’m not criticizing the intellectual substance of your reasoning, which is sound (aside from some minor details I’ve pointed out in the past in the comment sections of your site). What I’m suggesting is that you have an outlook that is profoundly pessimistic.
I’m *not* suggesting that we sit on our hands and do nothing. There is no question in my mind that serious crises are on the horizon, whether or not we find a miraculous source of new energy. But I would suggest that a more optimistic orientation might actually be critical to navigating through this mess. I am not content to simply wash my hands of the fate of 3-5 billion souls without creating a positive space within which a better solution might emerge. This is a question of cognitive framework, not of statistical realities (of which I’m all too aware).
Very coherent (to me at least). I have come to the same conclusion, both from a rational process and also through experience.
Causality (J. Pearl, 2000). I have to warn you that this is not a philosophy book, it is very technical and concerns inferences made in epidemiological and econometric settings. The conjecture I referred to is a tangential comment in between some mathematical examples illustrating a difficult theorem.
I don’t think of myself as pessimistic at all. I actually think I’m extremely optimistic. A pessimist would expect the human race to die out completely after all this; I do not. A pessimist would imagine civilization to keep going until it destroys all life on this planet; I do not. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way out of overshoot, but I still contend that I’m quite the optimist. Pretty much everything “bad” will destroy itself, and those of us who have the imagination to even consider any other way of life will get to experience what it truly means to be human in our own lifetimes. That’s an unbounded optimism that’s been robbed from us for 10,000 years. In fact, I think the only people I know who have that much hope are primitivists. The rest settle for a much more limited optimism in a pessimistic world–like “hope” that we can continue growing indefinitely, so that this civilized reign of terror can go on forever and we can finally extinguish the last flicker of hope for freedom or humanity that torments us in the back of our minds by reminding us of how much we’ve lost. I don’t find much optimism in that.
Primitivism, to me, is all about creating that positive space within which a better solution might emerge. The better solution is sankofa: to move forward by retrieving the things we’d forgotten. If there’s still a population of 6.5 billion, then there’s no solution, just a continuing crisis. I’d like to believe that the gradual deflation is possible, and tribalism is the best way to make that happen I think. It’s also the best way to survive if that doesn’t happen. Isn’t that the essence of optimism? To hope for the best and plan for the worst?
No worries, I have quite a bit of statistics and inference under my belt (actually, came to metaphysics via history of logic via info-theoretic AI.) Looks like about half the book is available online. I see the author is a Bayesian, always comforting to see one’s own prejudices confirmed
Thanks!
Jason ,
you may be to heavily invested in your perspective to allow for a new way to think about things. Nothing wrong with that . Your choice for you.
I suggest you do some more looking into the basic concepts of what our group is proposing and have proposed since that late 20`s.
Even though you glorify, and make great claims for a so called natural existence, or say that this may be inevitable as the collapse occurs in order to survive it , there are other interesting options for a society that go along with keeping a high civilization.
I see your view now as a kind of tragic escapism, that sounds frankly nasty to me. Worst case scenario of living off worms, and Robins maybe with a few dandelion greens thrown in.
I don`t care to give up my electricity. I hope I won`t have to.
You ask, How do machines differ markedly from domestics used in previous times.?
Think about that question you ask.
Now I would say it differs as to night differs from day.
I think you are way overboard invested in to many pet theories that lead back to Tainter. We are a high energy civilization. Big difference between a horse and a machine. Total difference.
You do not see it though, which I now find comical.
Try being a back to the lander and tell me the difference then.
With a horse I don`t think you will be having a lot of free time.
Cloudy logic you are using.
As mentioned I am pretty sure that Tainter either directly or indirectly developed his material from the Technocracy Study Course.
Being a person who likes to paddle around in the back waters of history, I could trash around the past endlessly to come up with the kind of stuff you are mentioning here , Roman patronage, feudalism etc. - not relevant to our machine age. Those society`s were all based on the human machine for power.
I try to keep a bigger and broader overview. Follow me.?
There is a lot more to the Technocracy material than you apparently know about for you to say that you find the price system critique to be somewhat shallow , tells me that you are not nearly as smart as you think you are presently , and I would hope that this closed minded attitude of yours will change. We are looking for new members now , and you with your native intelligence would seem a likely candidate. Technocracy is a lot more interesting , fun, broader, and more humanitarian than your Mr. Tainter stuff. That is my opinion.
To J,
No one is proposing a church of science. We are not in the church business.
You betray your ignorance with that remark as to the subject. I have studied different aspects of spirituality and religion my whole life.
That is one of my main interests, and it led me to the technocracy movement.
Please do not dumb down the proceedings to infer that spirituality does not play a part in technocracy.
That is actually what it really is.
Freedom of and from belief.
Fact is , that technocracy has very little to do with science , except use`s science as an administrator to our social proposal , our social proposal being based on reality and not belief. That does not exclude spirituality. Our program is a spiritual one ultimately. Understand.?
As far as belief , we could not care less. People can believe whatever they care to . Total freedom of belief is a part of our plan, and a lot of creativity.
Science is not the thing. Science is unbiased , and free from belief.
It is the social proposal.
Spirituality would no doubt be taught in our education sequence.
Religion would no doubt be hashed out as well. I am sure that the difference between the two would be pointed out. Religion being a control mechanism devised to brain wash and control people for material gain, and spirituality being a subject that tries to get at our thoughts of meaning , purpose and beauty. Am I clear on this now.?
I agree with this assessment, but for an entirely different reason. It’s not that I believe that the lifestyle espoused by primitivists isn’t superior. Quite the opposite. It’s just that most primitivists have no program for getting there, other than collapse or Jensenian violent resistance. Both of these entail vast amounts of human suffering, are not guaranteed to lead back to an Edenic paradise, and are in fact not even guaranteed to result in survival of the very people espousing these beliefs. I would argue that they are guaranteed to lead to brutal tyrrany on a more local scale, at least for a very long time.
We need a practical program, grounded in today’s world, that will lead back to the Edenic paradise that many of us seek but has a much higher probability of success.
I, too, am more interested in the bigger and broader questions, but your response misses the point entirely. Agrarian societies did not rely on human energy. Agriculture steps away from horticulture at the moment that it begins to require more calories of work than it returns in calories of food. This could never, ever work if we only have human energy–and they didn’t. They used domesticated animals, like oxen or horses, to essentially “cheat.” Land too rocky or otherwise unsuited for plowing could be grazed, so that energy could be used, via animals, to plow more crops, and make agriculture workable. All that’s changed with the Industrial Revolution is that we use solar energy collected by plants and stored in fossils, rather than solar energy collected by plants and stored in animals. This has allowed a much larger scale–industrial agriculture burns 10 calories now for every 1 we consume, as opposed to the more modest deficits of agrarian societies–but it’s still exactly the same pattern: we leverage some other energy source that we can’t process directly, in order to make agriculture work, despite the fact that it would normally be a recipe for starvation. So, the fact that you side-stepped the question with rhetoric rather than offer any actual answer, speaks volumes, I think. Both domesticated animals and modern machinery clearly play exactly the same role in modern and ancient agricultural practice; the difference between the horse and the tractor is one of scale, but that is precisely the same difference that separates the ox from the horse. Despite a great deal of bluster and self-congratulation, I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that the Industrial Revolution created any new patterns of society that were not already evident, though it is abundantly clear that it accelerated existing trends by an order of magnitude. This is a major distinction, particularly with regards to your position on prices, and precisely why I find the analysis shallow: it does not explain why the exact same problems predate price schemes. If these problems are a result of our price system, why did these problems still exist when there was no price system? If it cannot explain the past, how can it possibly provide hope for the future? My position is that if you want to isolate the cause of a problem, it must be something held in common by all those systems that have the problem, and absent in all those systems that do not have the problem. To be fair, I use the second part of that premise to criticize the ideas of other primitivists, such as John Zerzan’s contention that our problems began with symbolic thought.
So, if today’s problems are shared by past civilizations, then their example is extremely pertinent, because for all of our glitzy technology, all we’ve really changed is the scale of our civilization, not its nature. I’ve often heard dismissals of that–that past collapses are irrelevant, because we’re industrialized now. Of course, the Romans held their own innovations in similarly high regard, but that didn’t change their collapse at all, did it? I have yet to hear a compelling rationale to that dismissal. All I’ve heard so far is mere hubris.
As for a positive, humanitarian vision, I think some amount of electricity will be in our future for a long time, being so easy to generate now that we know how. But at the same time, I think it’s obvious we won’t be running it nearly so much for very long. Electricity will take its place as an occasional part of our lives, but no longer a constant one. As for not wanting to “give up” your electricity, this is where humanitarianism truly comes into play. What are you willing to give up for your electricity? Your freedom? Security? Community? If you gave up all those things, and got a blow dryer in return, would you consider that a fair deal? Because that’s the deal civilization offers. Primitivists are the ones who aren’t willing to give those things up just for a few electrical gadgets. Civilization isn’t about electricity; civilization is about control. Technology is a human universal, and once civilization crashes, we’ll be free to discover what a sustainable level of technology is. But, if technology is universal, why are primitives so, well, primitive? That’s simple: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” As Daniel Quinn argues, civilization has become very good for inventing things, but very poor at providing for the things people truly need. Primitives don’t invent much because they don’t need much. They live in the “original affluent society.” As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention,” and no one is needier than the civilized. We invent so much because our lives are so deeply unfulfilling, because we have so many needs, because we lack the things humans truly, deeply need: security, freedom, and community. So, if you want to keep our “high technology,” the price will always be our humanity, because when you give people what they need, they become content, and content people aren’t terribly motivated to invent new things. They’re more interested in living their lives and enjoying the only wealth that really matters: experience.
Does this count?
Well hell, that’s pretty much everything Anthropik’s about to a T.
Brilliant Slomo, There is nothing humanitarian, that brings us all along with this concept of survival , post collapse of , I hate to even use the word, primitivism. Is that really the word, or is there a better one to describe Jason`s ideas. ?
I will add Slomo , that we are the only organization that does have a program for getting there from here minus those two words you used, human suffering , and brutal.
Where is there.? A long way from here. A lot more interesting , creative and fun than here. Our program unlike most others is not a betrayal of the human spirit.
Jason: I’m at work so I didn’t have time to read your “Escape Plan” carefully, but I did skim over it. It appears to be geared towards individual survival. There is nothing wrong with that, per se. But it’s not sufficient for generating policy. And like it or not, policy is the only way out of this. As you say:
Decision-makers at the top are not going to be “swept away”. They need to be convinced that it is in their collective interest to power down. This is a slow process, and will not lead back to true primitivism for several centuries (if we’re lucky).
Just a handful of people going out and living in the wilderness isn’t going to change much. Likely you’ll be killed before anybody ever hears of your existence.
Frankly, Skip, I can’t see anything in your program but baseless fantasy, but it does strike me as a very fundamental betrayal of the human spirit. As I pointed out above, we do have a plan of how to get from here to there. As for the term, primitivism certainly has a good deal of baggage, but I’ve yet to find anything better.
A society , the type that we propose , is no longer a consumer/brainwash society, experience .
As you have mentioned before sustainability is far from our growth society mentality.
Creativity would be the hallmark of a technocratic society.
Time to think, and experience would be its basis.
There is no point in glorifying the past . It was a stage.
While humans may not survive because of what we are doing now, we also could be on the verge of a golden age of a high civilization, the likes of which has never been seen.
What would be the basis.? A truly humanitarian system that managed to strip away all the accumulated bullshit of belief systems, and allowed people to be as free as possible .
Remember our system disposes of money and politics, insures complete freedom of and from belief. The only way to run into trouble in our system is if your fist contacts another. Then you have a problem.
That’s exactly what it is, because policy is useless here. You’re not going to enact any kind of policy. It’s simply impossible to get mass acceptance of something that allows vulnerability. That’s the principle of the Prisoner’s Dilemna: only a few people are capable of deciding what’s in the ultimate best interest, when the possibility of being betrayed is on the table. So I disagree strongly with your contention that policy is the only way out of this. Human nature suggests otherwise. It suggests that policy is completely useless for this.
Decision makers would very quickly be swept away in a crisis. Look at New Orleans after Katrina. People banded together, formed “tribes,” and set the idea of “leadership” aside as an unnecessary luxury that could not be afforded. Leadership had to be imposed from outside. What if there was no outside to impose it, though? That’s collapse.
As for convincing leaders to powerdown, I can’t see that as a realistic possibility. The first leader to do so will merely be signing his country up to be conquered by those who don’t. Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies has an excellent discussion of peer polities that speaks to precisely this. In a peer polity, individual elements cannot choose to maintain a steady state, or even grow less voraciously. If they do not keep pace and advance as quickly as possible, they will be consumed by those that do. It needn’t be direct military conquest; economic or cultural domination will suffice. See neocolonialism. That’s why policy is useless.
If we time it right as civilization contracts, who’s going to kill us? But that’s why we’re doing this so publicly, to let people know that it can be done, to help people learn from our mistakes. We’re trying making the New Tribal Revolution open-source, so when it comes down to it, and the single most important division between those that survive and those that do not comes down to the imagination to even consider a different way of life, we’ll have helped as many as we could, as many as were willing to make that choice. Most people would rather die than live a different way, and that’s their choice to make. I just try to help as many people as I can to see that they do have that choice.
You know , I read all the Tarzan novels when I was a kid. I loved them. I do not think that that approach is very realistic now though for a culture basis.
Interesting for you to say our program is composed of baseless fantasy.
Again you now seem comical to me now that I understand your approach. Technocracy is based on science. Does science seem like baseless fantasy to you.?
I suggest you move on from the Tarzan approach to our approach. If our approach works , there may actually be a place to go out and play Tarzan in , which I would like to do also. If your approach happens get ready for a terrible nightmare, not just for you, but for everyone.
Skip, I think the vision you outline above is contradictory. If people are happy and content, what motivation do they have to invent? “Necessity is the mother of invention”; we have two million years of stagnation (from the progressivist’s point of view) as evidence that happy, contented people don’t invent much. They already have all they need. So which is it–does your society thrive on invention, or does it provide people with what they need? Because the only way to make a society that invents so much is to take away the things that people most fundamentally need.
As for Tarzan, of course that’s not a reasonable model. He was alone; humans are social animals, and naturally form tribes. The reclamation of true community is one of the highest priorities of primitivism. Tarzan was a fictional ideal of the Romantic “Noble Savage.” That’s not what I’m talking about. Primitive societies have their problems, but they’re far better than what we have now. We’re under no illusions about this being a utopia. We’re not pursuing perfection; we’re just pursuing something better.
No, but science would seem to indicate that Technocracy is impossible. Science has shown us that invention is subject to diminishing returns, that our lives are bound by the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, and that there are limits to growth. I have a pretty healthy respect for science, but I find the scientific basis of Technocracy … wanting.
You know, Jason’s got a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. And I’ve got, from all I’ve read, essentially the same education but without the fancy piece of paper to prove it. I think it’s safe to say that we’re basing this on a little more than Tarzan. Primarily, we’re basing our ideas on what tribal life is like on ethnographies that describe what tribal life is like, and on archaeological findings that describe what tribal life used to be like before civilization. Guess what? That’s science too.
The very things you are talking about Jason, the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy and the limits of growth is the very basis of the technocracy movement.
You just need to explore it and you will be in for a treat it think.
By the way Tarzan had Jane at least for a while , and that seemed to make him happy.
I will stick with my opinion for now that you are a romantic. I can`t think of any other reason why someone would care to give up civilized amenities for what you think of as a kind of natural freedom.
Why not combine both as much as possible , and hope for the best.?
All culture ends.
Even the world ends.
Our fate as humans is knowing that and still pressing ahead to find hope , faith and love. Are we doomed .? Yes, no doubt someday , May as well have fun in the meantime , and try and concoct an interesting and meaningful culture before the blade falls. Maybe it won`t fall for a while. Maybe we can postpone it or maybe figure out a way to not make it fall. Maybe.
lamanna , that is indeed science and very interesting and I don`t mean to sound dismissive.
My style of writing is a throw back to the old Greek rhetorical/polemic mode of say Isocrates or Demosthenes, don`t let that get in your way. You may have noticed that this style raises lots of questions , and I think it is the very basis of a good communication and free speech.
I pull out the stops, but do not argue except to learn.
Jason , You bring up invention a few times like that is a big issue. It isn`t. Not for the Technocracy plan. Invention now is tied to making money and profit. Those are dead issues in a technate. This is a fundamental point that I do not think you are listening to me say yet. Society would be turned on its ear.
Not the same.
Different values.
Different approach.
Scientists don`t like to destroy or waste resources unless they are chained in a system which is based on that , as our current price system is.
Interesting discussion. I agree with much of what Jason and Giulianna have to say, and I agree that we’d all be much happier living a life that is similar to that lived by Indians/native-Americans. Where I take issue is the actual transition from “here” to “there”. Jason, you’re basically admitting that collapse is the only way:
The reality is that such a collapse will entail untold amounts of suffering. In case you haven’t noticed, Katrina isn’t all free love and flowers. The misery in New Orleans is intense and relentless. Much of it is being caused by the existing hierarchical power structures, but that is my point. Those structures aren’t going away, and the cognitive impulses behind them aren’t going away, any time soon. In the wake of collapse will be warlords and petty but brutal tyrrany. Your movement needs to deal with that reality.
I understand your game-theoretic arguments (Prisoner’s Dilemma, etc.) and while I agree that those are serious risks, I think we owe it to the immediate future generations to at least try to power down gently via policy. The political incentives will come, and there will be time for solutions to be heard and perhaps implemented.
I am prepared to accept that policy solutions will fail, but I cannot in good conscience just surrender to collapse.
Technocracy is based on the premise that we can invent our way into utopia. That requires invention to be an independent variable. Science tells us it’s not. Invention is subject to certain limitations. It’s subject to diminishing returns, for example. I know Technocrats like to dismiss Jevons Paradox as a consequence of the price system, but even if we’re talking pure EROEI, Jevons Paradox remains–and diminishing returns even moreso.
What amenities am I giving up? Primitive societies have art, philosophy, knowledge, medicine, and all the rest in abundance. The idea that primitive life is somehow a difficult one is a Eurocentric fantasy. Primitive societies enjoy vastly more liesure time, lives of utter abundance, and the kind of freedom that the domesticated mind can barely even imagine. So instead of a sink with running water, I live near a mountain stream. That doesn’t seem like a terrible imposition to me.
You sound like a primitivist! That’s why we’re not willing to live as domesticated cattle for the glory of our “leaders,” when we could be living the life of ease and abundance that is our species’ birthright.
I’m not talking about invention for profit. Invention means coming up with a new idea nobody else has tried. Beyond mere money, this requires time and energy–time for research, energy for experimentation, etc. That’s its cost. It also has a return, in the form of the invention itself. But what we find is that we take the “low hanging fruit” first. All the most obvious things have already been invented. What’s left is either less obvious, so it takes more time to think of and more energy to test so it costs more, or it’s only a marginal improvement on an existing invention (like the iPod nano vs. the iPod mini), so it doesn’t have much of a return. Either way, the marginal returns on invention, even in the most basic sense of energy, diminishes. You get less bang for invention buck, so to speak. The result is that the level of our technology levels out. That’s why I say that we’re about as technologically “advanced” now as we’ll ever likely be. There’s a little bit more room for advancement still, but only a little bit before we start getting really close to that asymptote.
But that’s not a reality. Look at all the previous instances of collapse. The warlords and tyrants had less power. Our perception is clouded by Classical sensibilities; we forget how awful the Roman emperors were, and thus it’s lost on us how much of an improvement the barbarian warlords really were! Katrina is an example because under stress, people turn tribal. But of course, that’s under stress. Stress isn’t pretty. But the whole “dark ages” scenario is simply a flight of dystopian fancy with no grounding in plausibility or historical precedent.
How can there ever be a political incentive to destroy yourself? I do think you’re right that we have an obligaton to try, but I think we also have an obligation to try the most effective ways and not waste our effort on hopeless projects like convincing politicians to implement some kind of powerdown policy. If this has any hope at all (and I doubt it does), it has to be as a grassroots movement. That means the single best way to help that is by setting an example and PROVING that another way of life IS possible.
That means the single best way to help that is by setting an example and PROVING that another way of life IS possible.
I can’t argue with that. But it’s going to be difficult to live as an example and prove its superiority while avoiding the tanks rolling over your trees. I think you even discuss it in your Theses: by taking yourself out of the prevailing paradigm, you make put yourself at a disadvantage and ultimately lose the game. I think your current argument is that the primitivist way of life will be a dominating strategy post-collapse, and while that may be true in the very long term, I don’t see it in the short-term.
There is no way to collapse (in any meaningful sense of the word) without massive destruction and suffering. I think that’s where Tim started in his critique of your movement: the primitivists seem awfully cavalier about this uncomfortable facet of your movement. It’s like you don’t want to talk about it. You keep saying how much better primitivism will be, and I don’t disagree with you on that point, but you keep glossing over the transition period. That’s a huge elephant in the room.
On the contrary, if you’ll look at the tag cloud on Anthropik’s main blog page, you’ll see that the word “collapse” is by far the largest and the brightest of all the tags. We talk more about collapse on the site than anything else. But people don’t usually argue very vehemently about whether collapse is going to happen. More often, it’s not the idea that civilization will collapse that they have a problem with; it’s the idea that tribal life isn’t “nasty, brutish, and short.” That’s the case in this thread, and that’s why we haven’t been spending too much time talking about collapse.
You talk alot about the mechanics and inevitability of collapse, using very impressive econometric and anthropological arguments. I don’t take issue with any of that. But I don’t recall you ever discussing the moral dimensions (though admittedly it’s been awhile since I read the Theses). This whole recent discussion started when Tim brought up the somewhat ghoulish implications of the primitivist movement and its anticipation of collapse. I’m not saying that you or Jason are morally suspect in any way, but there is a way in which you sidestep that issue, and I think that’s why a lot of people in Tim’s corner of the world are a little nervous about your approach. The moral dimensions are very important here, and it really does make a difference whether one just sits and waits for collapse to happen or if one actively tries to do something to ameliorate the situation, even if it be doomed to failure, or even if it might doom all multicellular life at some future but unspecified date.
Are you implying that it would be better, morally, to try to prevent the collapse that is the one chance this planet has to retain at least a little of its biological diversity? How is that a better thing than letting it go down now? What if we succeeded? Our species would become extinct, along with most or all other multicellular life. Yeah, it would make us feel good; it would make us feel like we’d done something good. But we wouldn’t have done anything good at all. We’d have saved 6.5 billion people and doomed their 9-10 billion as-yet-unborn descendents. That’s kind of like saving the lives of three S.S. men who will then go on to kill 30 Jews each. (Not that the 6.5 billion people alive today would personally kill their descendents; the metaphor isn’t perfect by far, but you get what I mean, right?)
Your moral calculus is predicated on a lot of uncertainty. In this regard, I would apply the Precautionary Principle: better to ameliorate things that we know are on the immediate horizon than try to prevent some hypothetical catastrophe in the somewhat distant future. I’m not saying there is no immediate crisis. There most certainly is. What I’m saying is that we need to address the immediate crisis in the most morally feasible way, and not try to address some second crisis in the future while letting the present go to hell. The problem with your analogy is that you don’t know for a fact that those 3 SS guys are going to kill 30 Jews each. You would only know that in hindsight. There is always the possibility of redemption. Which brings me back to my original contention: the primitivist movement, at least that espoused at Anthropik, is profoundly pessimistic in its assessment of human spiritual potential.
J & G: In truth, I don’t really want to argue with you. Your vision for the future is sweet and you’ve done a great job of articulating our collective predicament. This is a very difficult subject for all of us: how the heck are we going to get through the next 25-50 years!? I’m being critical, but I acknowledge that there is no easy solution here. I’m grateful that we have the opportunity at least to discuss it.
Well, to torture the analogy a little further, the only way I can save those 3 SS officers is by killing 30 Jews of my own. Then each of those officers will have to choose whether they’re going to kill 30 Jews (they don’t think that’s even a problem, and probably at least two of them think it’s a very good thing to do), or whether they’ll leave 3 SS officers to die. In a way, it’s a kind of moral cowardice, isn’t it? You’re just passing the buck.
Technocracy is based on the premise that we can invent our way into Utopia.
Not true at all Jason, and by making that statement you reveal that you are not as smart as you think you are on this subject. In fact it appears you know mostly more than nothing, but not an amount to be able to speak to what technocracy is or is not.
Another way to say this is that you are ignorant.
That is not a crime.
The whole point of being ignorant is to learn more and then not be ignorant.
Contrary to this statement that you put out , like a thing that is true, technocracy does not have that much to do with invention. Just the basic science that as you say has yielded so much already. The pity is that that yield, has been muzzled by the price system into a real slave society as you say.
Also you are wrong in using the word Utopia. That is not a part of our lexicon. I have never heard a serious Technocrat use that word in relation to technocracy. Technocracy is a pretty hard assed concept. No unicorns and dancing maidens in the format.
It is not idealistic.
Not at all except in the humanitarian sense.
It is a realistic way to possibly survive the coming trauma of the type of world we have created with our Political/Belief/Money system concepts.
Utopias , or what these different belief systems claim is their concepts of such, are what we have now. This system is what we want to get rid of. There is no political or belief system solution to our present problems.
Using our current approach can only make things worse until the straw that breaks the Camels back , breaks the Camels back , and we destroy ourselves.
This will happen sooner rather than later, so we must act, or as you say our civilization will crash and burn , and it will be every man for himself.
That does not sound so hot to me.
Technocracy is an out.
Maybe the only one.
Otherwise you are going to experience this thing that you think about so much.
I don`t think you would actually like it.
With Technocracy , yes you can have the best of both worlds, or at least that is our hope. Our Monad symbol as I have said is symbolic of balance. A tricky but worthy goal. Nothing Too much.
Jason, I’m not following your elaboration on the analogy. How explicitly are we killing 30 Jews (whom I’m reading as future generations) by saving 3 SS officers (whom I reading as present-day civilized persons)? I don’t mean implicitly or hypothetically or statistically-probably-given-current-trends. You have accelerated the analogy, and now I’m asking you how we are doing this explicitly. If you are including the animal and plant people in the equation (not to mention 3rd world humans) I can kind of see your point, but those animals and plants and brown people are going to get wiped out in any conflagration that constitutes collapse and its aftermath. We’re killing them now today, but letting them all die in a catastrophic collapse doesn’t seem morally superior. I’d rather figure out a way to save them now, even if it practically only means only some of them.
To build upon your analogy of SS officers, I’m thinking of Bernhard Schlink’s enigmatic character in The Reader, who does egregious things as an officer in a concentration camp but whose actions have the net effect of saving the lives or lengthening the lives of a few girls who otherwise would have died; in other words, a human person doing the best she can in a very very bad and almost hopeless situation.
And by the way, Jason, one could easily interpret your strategy as passing-the-buck. Your Deus-ex-Machina is the Collapse itself. I can tell you right now: it won’t go the way you’ve planned and prepared for. It will be long and drawn out and unpleasant for everybody, especially the primitivists. It won’t be like a car crash, it will be like AIDS: the first bout of pneumonia feels like a catastrophic hit, but it’s really just the herald of a long slow and painful decline.
The thing that bothers me most about the Anthropik approach is the arrogance with which you assume that things will go exactly the way you’ve laid them out. There’s plenty of intellectual arrogance to go around in this discussion, so you’re not unique in that regard. But I really would ask you to take a second look at your philosophy, because it has some really unattractive qualities that turn people off. It’s too bad because much of what you say is really important and needs to be said.
Skip, I’ve been following along the the thread of your discussion with Jason and Giulianna. And while I appreciate your optimism and willingness to engage in the difficult work of making the world better, starting where we are right now, I wonder about the belief that scientific principles can really address some of the core issues of humanity. In a previous thread I called this “spiritual wholeness”, and you rightly criticized me for being vague in a statement that was criticizing other vague concepts. But what I mean is a sense of interconnectedness, both among humans within a community and among life forms within an ecology. The cultures that move the Anthropik people had a much greater sense of this (and this can be demonstrated reasonably well using anthropological and sociological data). That is why I believe it is worth it to get Anthropik to work out some of the less attractive features of their philosophy.
Slomo, I think Bush is a cipher and an fool , but it is interesting with what he threatened Pakistan with.
Bombing them into the stone age. This was meant to scare the hell out of the leader there.
Apparently it worked.
Worked in the sense that he was intimidated and frightened.
Life is tough there anyway and tougher yet does not sound good.
I really think now Slomo, that I have a pretty good handle on the Anthropic/Primitivism type of outlook now, and while interesting , it reminds me of the people that get together on weekends to reenact civil war battles or reundevous like the fur traders.
I hope that does not sound demeaning. I am not trying to be. I think most people would react to going back to the stone age, or bronze age, much like the ruler of Pakistan. Something to be avoided.
Now that I know where these two are coming from, I believe they both may become interested in my groups approach, if they let go of some of their preconceptions.
I believe the main reason that they are primitivists is that they thought that was the only option they could reconcile with. I hope I have spoiled that for them , and they get a renewed interest in changing and saving the nasty system we have into something that is not so bad , and possibly fun.
We take a radical approach from the present approach , but really a sensible approach from the current system. A practical approach.
I have to say that I still think that it is glamorizing and romantic to think that life had more meaning to these rustic people than us.
It is true that we are bedeviled with lots of brainwashing and thoughtless brutality and so forth, but it is possible to clear the intellectual decks and be a thoughtful , sincere and creative person who stretches out their hand to life, and begs for meaning in a positive way. That is what we are all doing . Science , art, poetry, all are a begging hand for meaning. None have any more value than the others. We are all bowing and scraping for meaning. I don`t mind doing it.
That is our life. Comical isn`t it. May as well make the best of the situation.~ ! ~
Skip, I have to be honest, I haven’t yet read your stuff, so it may be that we are philosophically on the same page. I’m a scientist by day, and so I wear a technocratic hat throughout much of my daily life.
I’m not suggesting that we are prepared to go back, literally, to the stone age (I’m certainly not and I frankly doubt that Jason and Giulianna are). What is scary about true stone-age existence is that we have none of the skills to cope with it. Again, I doubt that one can competently learn those skills in a single lifetime or even ten generations. (Another conceit of Anthropik). It is impossible to go back.
What I propose is moving in a forward direction that incorporates the core experience of interconnectedness in a life that makes some use of technological amenities, in a controlled way. (And by “controlled” I mean self-disciplined and self-aware, not through brutality from above.) So, when I talk about spiritual wholeness and primitive ideologies, I’m talking about a self-disciplined and self-aware kind of consciousness that recognizes the interconnectedness of all life, values community and communion with other life, a way of life that is non-hierarchical and independent within the bounds of community.
Jason and Giuliana have done a remarkable job at showing that the values of pre-civilized people were, in many ways, better than our current values. They have also competently demonstrated that we are currently on a path to self destruction, “if current trends continue”. But I believe they are looking backwards to a way of life that is forever lost. To attempt to recover it will result in catastrophe. However, with a kind of vision Anthropik has to offer, I believe we can recover some treasure from the past. It is a mistake to think we can turn back the clock to those days. However, it is also a mistake to reject the gifts that the past offers to us.
Let me put it this way, then. Humans are band animals. As this discussion highlights, human intuitons of right and wrong, of scale, and priority, all break down when we’re forced to deal with groups that are too large. Dunbar’s number. Even if Technocracy could invoke the kind of magic necessary to make a negative EROEI process like agriculture net positive without relying on a deritrus energy source, you’re still keeping humans in a context to which they are ill-adapted, and that is the root cause of most of our problems.
“Every man for himself” is a losing strategy. Those who follow that strategy will also die. Humans are social animals. We need to form communities. Not alienating, abstract, mass society where I’m supposed to share some special bond with some stranger who lives half a world away because we’re “fellow citizens,” but a real community with the people around us.
As I said, it’s a tortured analogy. But if we want to keep 6.5 billion people from dying, we need to keep the current system going. That means we need to keep killing 200 species every day, we need to keep baking the earth, we need to keep gobbling up more of the planet for our own use, and we need to keep driving forward the worst mass extinction in this planet’s history. If we want to keep 6.5 billion people alive, we need to keep making our planet uninhabitable for multicellular life. Then, if we succeed, the next generation will have a choice: to keep 9 billion people alive, or continue that wanton destruction. We’ve probably only got a few more generations before we reach the ultimate endpoint of all this: where we actually succeed in destroying all life on this planet. Then, we’ll wish that 6.5 billion human beings were the only loss we had to take. It will seem positively blissful by comparison.
Because if we ever let up on that campaign, if we even slow down to any considerable degree, we cause collapse, and fail in our stated goal of saving the civilized population. That devastation is the cost of 6.5 billion human beings; it’s the energy needed to maintain that much flesh at so high a trophic level. And since energy is neither created nor destroyed and we’re already need far more energy than could ever be harvested from renewable sources like the sun, there’s not even much we can do to reapportion the crisis.
Ah, I see you’re working from an incorrect assumption. Take a look at previous examples of collapse. Horrible for the elites, but typically pretty good for the underclasses, and very good for the ecology. In collapse, civilization retracts. Ecological devastation is reduced, exploitation of the poor is reduced. Heck, the existence of the poor sometimes go by the wayside, if society collapses far enough that the economy can shift from scarcity to abundance. Technocracy may make some hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky promises about that kind of thing, but the fact remains that only primitive societies have ever done it.
What makes collapse so horrible is that instead of us victimizing the rest of the world, we become the victims. The other advantage of collapse over the current state of affairs is that collapse ends. So for the ecology, and even for most of the human species, collapse means an end to all this suffering and constant death, not an intensification of it. Most of the world is already collapsed, propped up by North American and European complexity. They’re caught in the worst possible place–in between. They suffer all the horrors of collapse, but they cannot reap any of the benefits. Knock out those supports propping them up, and the suffering finally ends, and they finally get to enjoy the better life that collapse promises on the other side.
In our analogy, such a person would be helping to cause collapse, by slowing the rate at which the “Jews” are murdered, or the rate at which ecosystems are consumed and the subject masses exploited.
What I’ve laid out is a pretty broad outline, but it’s what every collapse has in common. I know a lot of people raise hypothetical points about roving warlords, or how it will be “ong and drawn out and unpleasant for everybody.” If that does happen, it wll be one for the record books, because with dozens of cases of collapse, there’s not one that doesn’t fit into the broad outlines I’ve painted. My “arrogance” is based on the fact that anything else would be utterly unprecedented–and not for lack of a sample.
The fact that our culture can only compel obedience by brainwashing its masses, contrary to all evidence, that any alternative is “nasty, brutish and short,” and that the misery we endure is simply the way things are meant to be, does nothing to change the fact that it is a myth, however necessary that myth may be to the maintenance and propogation of systems of domination and control.
Well of course. Because they don’t know anything about what life was like in the stone age. They believe the lies propogated about it, and don’t bother to research it any further. So when you say “back to the stone age,” they imagine starvation, barely scraping by, spending every moment in tedious labor just to survive–things that, ironically enough, are characteristic of agricultural life, not foraging.
I’ve read a good bit about Technocracy, even before meeting you, and I think my choice of the word “utopia” was apt. Besides being entirely unworkable, it also is something I find as deeply dehumanizing as civilization itself. The solutions Technocrats propose are superficial. Maybe they’d give us a high-tech patronage system like the brutal Roman Empire, or a glitzy type of feudalism. But the idea that you can just wave a wand and bring everything down to energy exchange is more than a little fanciful. I’d even go so far as to say that money is a pretty good proxy of energy flow in our society, so I don’t think you’d actually change much by getting rid of the middle man.
Even when it’s been proven mathematically? I think it’s a flagrant disregard for science that thinks that the human animal wouldn’t be well-adapted to the social context it evolved in, and arrogant in the extreme to pretend that we can invent something better than two million years of evolution.
These are the very skills humans evolved to learn, why would we expect it to take more than a lifetime to learn them? If it takes more than a lifetime to learn them, wouldn’t that mean no one’s ever learned them? Who’s ever lived more than their own lifetime? That statement doesn’t make any sense!
Now, if you mean a great deal of knowledge has already been lost, you’re absolutely right. But we know the basics of hunting and trapping and gathering wild edibles and building shelters. There’s really not very much at all in terms of “learning.” There’s a great deal in the way of practicing, but practice is something we’ll be doing for the rest of our lives. We don’t need to be expert, we just need to be passable. Maybe we’ll never enjoy the two-hour workday of extant foragers, but if it takes us four or six hours a day to provide our needs, I think we’ll be OK. I have no conceit that we’ll see what it’s like to be “fully” rewilded. But we will be feral.
I disagree; I think to not attempt to recover it will result in catastrophe. If we don’t, then we’re just going down the same path we are now–”current trends continue.” But I’ve also tried to promote things like animism in its own right, because at least an animistic civilization is slightly less destructive … and maybe a few will go the less obvious way with their cognitive dissonance and change their behavior to meet their beliefs, rather than the vast majority that simply changes their beliefs. It’s a lever that might help, so I’ll pull it as hard as I can.
What are the less attractive features of our philosophy? Collapse is not part of the primitivist philosophy. As I argued before, in a previous thread, a philosophy implies that there is a certain way in which people should live. Collapse doesn’t in and of itself imply that civilization is useless; that’s one interpretation out of many possible interpretations that someone can lay on top of it.
If it’s impossible to learn these skills in a single lifetime, then how do native children know everything they need to by age 12? We’ve been taking classes and reading about these necessary skills - they’re really not all that difficult. Identifying wild edibles, medicinal plants, poisonous plants, setting traps, bow-hunting, fishing, building shelter… believe it or not, none of these things are actually particularly difficult in and of themselves. They’re pretty hard if you try to do all of it by yourself, but then, that’s why tribes are so nifty.
Don’t tell the !Kung that - they get very upset with people who treat them as though they’re living in the past.
Hunting and gathering is happening now. Tribalism is happening now. Not by First World neo-tribalists; by actual indigenous groups. Yes, we’re trying everything we can to destroy the very last of what they have, but they are still alive. This is not a relic of the past. This is something that can happen now, that is happening now, and that will happen again in the future.
Jason consider yourself beaten in a fair debate by me. You may not think so .
That is my opinion.
It may take you a while to acknowledged this , but I think you will after a while.
I see now that you are not interested in logical arguments, and you really are a believer of this romantic hogwash that we are somehow developed to be your image of what you think we are developed to be, or rather your groups image. It has been interesting chatting with you and your friend. As I mentioned your movement got their information from ours , and twisted and turned it abit. I find it unpalatable, but to each their own.
Slomo I like you. You have raised some basic and profound ideas concerning the underpinning of these concepts that have helped to bring out the strong and weak points of primitivism. I agree with you that it is not a good thing, and ends in a horror story if that is the way it goes, which I hope does not happen but could.
We will have wasted 10,000 years of experience for nothing if primitivism becomes what we end up with.
Although it has been interesting debating this idea that I knew nothing about, I will say that it takes to much belief in, to many abstracted constructs about what humans are truly like. To think that human evolution stopped 10,000 years ago , and we must be play actors to some old defunct mentality does not make sense to me.
For an interesting read that may open your eyes Jason and Lamanna , I suggest you read our precedent document the original Technocracy Study Course. I think that you both will see then where Tainter borrowed the fundamental basis of his ideas from. I believe that this will be a good learning experience for you both.
You may stick with your present primitivist ideas. There is no accounting for what people think.
I think though that your perspective will not be the same if you read our study course.
Thank you both for illuminating the subject the way you have.
I feel you you are good spokespeople for your current idea.
You are both welcome to join Technocracy .
We need people. I hope that this deprogramming process that I have started becomes very clear to you both, and you have a change of heart and drop your silly beliefs .
You are believers you know.
Nothing wrong with that, but now that you may know, maybe you could actually do something useful like promote Technocracy.
It is a short step to it from where you are.
That is my judgment.
Well, Skip, thank you for your unending condescension and your bizarre habit of calling me by my last name. (It’s either Jason and Giulianna or Godesky and Lamanna - pick one and go with it.)
Slomo, very interesting point. I will have to think on this more.
Sorry , I just like the way Lamanna looks and sounds, Giulianna.
Yeah, you have a really cool name. I agree.
I have to say that Slomo is right , and I resonate with these thoughts of his. I don`t think our friends here are the violent resistance types , but otherwise I will go with your thesis. I also like the way you have framed this issue as a humanitarian one.
I don’t think so either. And as I said, it is not them I am worried about - it is either the degraded dumbed down (or “pure”, depending who you ask) version of the philosophy they espouse which I think will lead us to violence.
Thanks, Skip. It’s rare that anybody agrees with me