I know I know I know I know I know I know that people are probably getting tired of the subject of the Collapse and of me critiquing the anarcho-primitivist critique of Civilization. Cause honestly, I’m tired of it too. But I feel like it’s such a meaty issue that it needs to be thoroughly chewed and digested before I will be able to move on to other things. And at this point, I feel like I have learned and received so much through the conversations here over the past few weeks, that I need to start integrating - if only for myself - it all into a more coherent picture.
One of the main lessons I have taken away from it all is that systems won’t save us. Thoughts and concepts won’t keep us warm at night. Philosophies do not offer salvation because they are constructed of language and language is riddled with contradictions. It’s inescapable (and possibly for our own benefit). I’ve also learned that history won’t save us. It already happened. It’s over. We can learn from it sure, but that won’t save us. The future, likewise, won’t save us. Because, frankly, we can’t wait. We need help right now to know what’s going on and to find our place in all of it.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us here, right now, alone, or together. We are humans. We are trying to find our way. We have each other and we have ourselves. And we have life and somehow we have to make that be enough. And with any luck, and any courage, it will be.
It turns out that the core values of the human race are not in forming tribes or in reverting to hunter-gatherer societies, or in any philosophical or organizational position. The core values of the human race are laughing, crying, loving, looking, wondering, worrying, smiling, dancing, yelling, jumping, fucking, singing, arguing, fighting, worshipping, thinking, feeling, talking, eating, shitting, sitting, sleeping, dreaming, living, and yes even dying.
That’s it. That’s all we have to work with here, individually or together. Thank God or Nature or the Universe that contained within those simple things are so very much, that contained within those simple things is actually everything - everything we could ever possibly need or want to find salvation. It’s all built right into us. We don’t need to take on or cast off anything to access any of it - except our bodies, except our lives and identities as humans. It’s all we got. It’s all we need.
God bless and Godspeed.
- END -
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99 Comments
Thanks Tim very much for this. I have looked around at gnostic and primitivist sites today and have seen new religions, new priesthoods, new scriptures, new duties, schisms and heresies - all pretty much like the old ones.
Personally, in order to reach what’s built-in without filters and fog, I have found it necessary to cast off lots of conditioning, manipulation, lies and habits to appreciate fully all those core values that you listed.
It is a challenge being a human when as Yves says, there is always someone out there that wants to trick us, including ourselves sometimes.
All the basic things are the best things. Freedom of and from belief is the best thing.
We reach out for meaning with Science, Art, Poetry, and yes prayer. All these are tools to reconcile this time we spend here, with our little fragile egos that we nurture despite our doubts. Of those things listed none is really more important. All are attempts at finding some kind of peace. Peace of mind.
Which one is it? Because if it’s “laughing, crying, loving, looking, wondering, worrying, smiling, dancing, yelling, jumping, fucking, singing, arguing, fighting, worshipping, thinking, feeling, talking, eating, shitting, sitting, sleeping, dreaming, living, and yes even dying,” well, that’s just the long form of saying “tribalism.” What we call civilization is the ongoing attempt to squelch those things–or, when we’re feeling more godlike and hubristic, to “transcend” such “foibles.” Primitivism is about embracing such things, and glorying in them.
‘What we call civilization is the ongoing attempt to squelch those things–or, when we’re feeling more godlike and hubristic, to “transcend†such “foibles.†‘
I honestly don’t see how civilization is trying to squelch or transcend most of those, though I personally could do without the shitting and dying.
‘Primitivism is about embracing such things, and glorying in them.’
And doing it without any style at all, I take it…
You’ve established a manifesto there, Jason, and I can imagine the world being split into a new divide. Civilisation versus primitivism. Is this what you want? A new dogma in which you accuse your enemy of being evil in order to encourage your tribalist troops?
You’ve opened my eyes, just as I was starting to be seduced by “tribalism” and “primitivism”. But not now. I am not going to embrace anything which depends for its rationale on trashing the way of life of most of my brothers and sisters.
I mean, I hate the evils of this world as much as you but to call them “civilization” which is “attempting to squelch. . . laughing, crying, loving, looking, wondering . . . ” you are creating a sinister doom-myth, whose logical consequence is a new hero who renounces laughing, crying, loving, looking, wondering etc in order to fight to the death, by fair means or foul, for these values to be preserved for everyone else.
Whereas in practice these core values, as hinted at by Tim, have no possible sense or meaning unless practised by each individual in the here and now whilst we can.
They are not values to kill for or die for but to be seized in all circumstances. I used to correspond with a prisoner on Florida’s Death Row, who was almost certainly guilty of the crime he was banged up for. The punishment was inhuman, but he managed to cling to humanity himself, more so than his jailers, and do all the things on the list but one.
The more complex a society becomes the more machine-like it must be to continue to function. Hence the technocrats and their dream of solving all our problems by engineering more effective social mechanics.
But humans make poor cogs. These messy “core human values” must be repressed in order to make a human as predicable as a machine. They get pushed to the unconscious mind were they can be manipulated by propaganda and advertising.
The core values of civilization are vastly different than ours. There is some irony that a vast machine made of people and tools made by people does not share the values of those people.
Civilization represents a neurotic desire to control one’s environment, and the first ground that it claims is the minds of the people in it. Tribalism is a mode of social organization with customs that evolve to fit the values of the people.
I sincerly hope that the societies of the future are not civilizations. I would wager that whatever they are, they will be a form of tribalism.
I wish we could dispense with the current dialectical vocabulary we’re using in this debate and find new words to approach the same basic dilemma.
Yes, perhaps it would be helpful if the core values of civilization were defined also, to see who subscribes to them, as opposed to those who put up with them because there seems to be no alternative, or they don’t want to cut off the very branch they are sitting on.
I was once in a cult & it’s a bit like what you call civilization. How do we distinguish perpetrators from victims?
Well, there’s one fine example: the shame we attach to normal bodily functions. But more importantly, civilization introduces the value of hard work, servitude, of working earnestly for another as some noble goal. From “dying for your country” to “be proud of your work,” to “respect the office even if you don’t respect the person,” the values of civilization are contradictory to the values of humanity. Maintaining hte normal, healthy relationships in which “laughing, crying, fucking,” etc. flourish takes a certain amount of time and energy–the very things civilization takes from us in the largest portions. By the time we’re done with the day’s labor, it’s all we can do to simply prepare ourselves for the next day of it. In the most intensely civlized (industrialized) societies, the family is stripped down to the nucleus, and sometimes even less than that. Social isolation is growing.
Now, no civilization is pure. We have friends, we have parties, and so forth. But these are not things of civilization; these are relics of tribalism that endure in our civilization in spite of the pressure civilization places on them. As Steve Thomas wrote for the Anthropik Network in “The Face of Anarchy“:
Or, if you prefer, the insight of the medieval Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun:
So, civilization must exist within certain limits of tolerance for the human being, a tribal animal. Some elements of tribalism must be afforded, or the system will be intolerable. But what Tim’s identified as the “core human values”–and I’m largely in agreement with him on this–are exactly what we mean by “tribalism,” what Ibn Khaldun called “the tribal values.” Civilization is what acts against those values. No society can exist solely by civilization’s pull, but the two systems are as much set against one another as the opposing poles of a magnet.
Now, the key thing to bear in mind here, before someone suggests that tribalism may require a civilized counter-balance, is that tribalism did just fine on its own for two million years. In fact, it did better. Civilization remains disastrous; it tolerates just enough tribalism to make the system tolerable, not to make it “good,” much less “workable.”
Civilization and tribalism are opposed systems. One’s “evil” and the other “good” depending on whether you share the “core human values” Tim suggested, or if you think humans should be gods to “transcend” such “foibles.” This is what makes me a primitivist, but one could really go all-out and embrace the mad dreams of domination.
But most importantly, these aren’t two camps of people. They’re two different systems, two different ways of organizing society. Yes, all of your friends and relatives, and you yourself, and me too, were raised in the civilized way. When we recogize its shortcomings, and its self-destruction, and we realize the preferable nature of tribalism, what sense does it make to gather “the primitivist troops” and march off to war against those who, like us, have been victimized by civilization? What sense does that make? Sure, like the victims of child abuse, they’ll make excuses for civilization, and cling to it, and insist that civilization only beats them because it loves them, but primitivism is not a war on civilization. It’s a call to build something better, to move beyond civilization, and to set an example that it doesn’t have to be this way–that it’s okay to be human.
Exactly. That’s what primitivism is all about. To sieze those values, not to fight for them; to practice them, not to die for them. That’s a civilized attitude, the very attitude we renounce.
Of course, that’s also the only attack on civilization that would ever possibly succeed against it: not a violent assault, but a war waged with laughter and tears, a demonstration that living as a human being is not some unattainable fantasy or dream. Look at the things people have said this past week; despite the fact that tribalism worked for two million years, that it’s the only system that’s ever worked, we have people saying it’s a dream, a fantasy–that what’s realistic is the system that’s destroying itself right now in record time, setting a new record as the most monumental disaster in the known history of the known universe. Has any evolutionary system ever failed this quickly, or this spectacularly? But it’s this–not the time-tested and still working system of tribalism–that’s realistic? People won’t see the alternative until they see someone with skin the color of unbaked cookie dough lives it, obviously (and probably not even then–abused children always side with their abusers). But if you want to convince people to abandon such an awful way of life, the only way you’ll ever do that is to live a better life.
Hear, hear, Jake; I agree with everything you wrote. Well said.
Civilization tells us that people exist to serve others: a corporation, or a nation-state, or a church, whatever. Civilization tells us that the value of a person is the value of his labor, what he can contribute to society. Civilization tells us that hierarchy is normal and inevitable. Civilization tells us that it is virtuous to listen to our “superiors,” and the highest calling is to die at their command.
Civilization is a type of culture; a system. If you’re talking about a flesh-and-blood human being, you’re talking about a victim. If you’re talking about a concept or an idea or a belief or a technology, you’re likely talking about a perpetrator. Even the elites are victimized by civilization–why do you think they’re so often killing themselves?
I am now totally convinced that primitivists will say almost any damn thing as apologists to defend their stripping of culture outlook . Why. ?
From a logical point of view it is not defensible.
It seems like just about the most jaded thing now to me that I have run into lately.
How is it it takes so much defense.? Why is it that it only appeals to a certain academic niche. ?
It is obvious to me that this is a cult. People in this cult have to study it carefully to understand the rudiments. Then suspend other belief systems, and be a part of this one.
Jake , I have no idea how or from what you formed your ideas about Technocracy , buy I can assure you , you are either an ignorant person that likes to make up their own definitions to suit their imagination, or you are an anti-intellectual person that does not care for any truth.
Unlike the primitivist stuff, we advise people to read our study course. People can make of it what they will. We don`t care. We just put the information out for people that are interested.
There is no propaganda , or advertising in a technate.
There are many educated fools, but no fools that are educated.
It’s not a “stripping of culture.” Tribes are also cultures, and they have as much culture, by every measure, as any civilization.
Saying it over and over again don’t make it so.
By that criteria, what isn’t a cult? By that criteria, Technocracy is a cult too. Hell, so is existentialism. But primitivism doesn’t require careful study–primitivism is actually just the normal human instinct. You do need to study it carefully if, like me, you want to answer the sophistry used by progressivists who try to debunk it, but that’s a very different thing. Anything you want to be sure of for yourself is going to need some careful study.
As for a cult–wouldn’t we need a leader for that? Isn’t our constant questioning of anyone who assumes such a position of prominence proof that we’re not a cult in any meaningful sense? We tolerate no leaders whatsoever.
I’m really tried of this style of rhetoric, Skip. You don’t have any evidence, you just make bald assertions (a logical fallacy), and then accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with you of being ignorant or worse. How’s THAT for a cult?
“You are either an ignorant person that likes to make up their own definitions to suit their imagination, or you are an anti-intellectual person that does not care for any truth.” I don’t know any primitivist who doesn’t encourage other people to find out for themselves. We have whole libraries of books and studies to support our position, and you’ll notice I drop citations left and right.
But maybe that explains your rhetoric better than simple logical fallacy: projection. You charge me with everything you’ve been doing. You accuse me of underhanded techniques like putting words in your mouth (because I asked you a question); you accuse me of not wanting people to question me, and you get bent out of shape when someone questions you. Hmmmm.
Certainly looks like a lot of propaganda now….
Any educated X is an X that has recieved an education, that has been educated. If someone is an educated fool, then he IS a fool that is educated!
You know, I think that much of the problem here is language. Jason, you’ve ended up defining anything negative within modern human culture as “civilization,” and everything positive you ascribe to “tribalism.” Why is this useful? It seems bound to instigate defensive reactions among the majority of people, for whom the term “civilization” is not defined as a system of domination, hierarchy, etc. but rather just as “the system in which I live.”
The answer to both questions is: because everyone uneducated in ecology and anthropology seems to think that hunter-gatherers lived short, painful, disease-ridden lives and that exponential growth is perfectly sustainable. It takes someone with an academic background to figure all this out.
Dude, seriously. LOL. So says Mr. All-You-Need-Is-Technocracy. I’m not calling Technocracy a cult, necessarily, but you personally gush about it with a cultish devotion. As for primitivism, you need to learn the difference between “people who disagree with me” and “people in a cult.” Neo-Nazis do not belong to a cult. This doesn’t make them not stupid. This doesn’t make them not wrong. This just makes them not a cult. It’s just like a lot of liberals who throw around the word “fascism” - even to the point of calling anarchists fascists. Words have definitions for a reason. Learn them and use them properly.
I love how soon this paragraph comes after the “primitivism is a cult” accusation. Unlike Technocracy, primitivists don’t have a “study course.” We encourage people to read everything - by primitivists and non-primitivists, academics and philosophers. Primitivists pretty much don’t agree on anything enough to even warrant writing a “study course.”
I’m not sure what information you feel we’re withholding from you, or what information you feel we’re somehow forcing upon you. This isn’t even a conversation we started or a blog we own.
If I had actually done this, it wouldn’t be. But that’s not what I’ve done. I’ve actually spent a good deal of time defining civilization, because the popular view defines it as anything good (which is equally useless). I use the term in its precise sense, as related to its etymology in the Latin civis, or “city.” Civilization is defined not in terms of whether it’s “good” or “evil,” but insofar as it relates to a society’s complexity. Specifically, civilization is a culture which pursues complexity as the answer to all problems at all times. Tribalism is any other kind of culture.
Now, when you look at the consequences of a society that pursues that kind of strategy, what you end up with is pretty much everything we think of as “bad.” This makes sense: why wouldn’t our sense of what’s right be shaped by the evolutionary expectations of the tribalism we grew up with?
This is very useful, because then these problems are no longer unsolvable things that we simply have to tolerate, but consequences of a way of life out of step with human nature, and an unsustainable approach to complexity. It’s useful because it means our problems can be solved, and it shows us how to solve them, whereas otherwise, we simply have to accept them as the facts of life.
Interesting that you will even fight over this old fashioned put down that really needs no explaining.
You fail as a compelling proponent of your cause.
Why.?
It just requires too much abstracted reasoning, which is belief in abstracted arguments that do not make any particular sense.
Don`t feel bad. I would chopped up , chew up , and spit out any one in your group. You did your best.
It is very difficult to defend a belief system.
I do admit that technocracy also is a belief system. It is based on fact though, and our social proposal is a secular/humanistic one. We do not need brainwash or convince people about it. Just try to educate as to our research. We also are survivilists. Very different approach.
I most fully defined civilization in thesis #13. It would be helpful if people could read the terms in which I’ve actually defined civilization before ascribing definitions to me. I should also mention that this is not merely my definition; this is the technical definition of “civilization” used by anthropologists, those who study cultures, cultural systems, and how they operate, i.e., the most relevant field of study to such an inquiry.
If it looks like a duck , and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.
Primitivism itself doesn’t require any abstracted reasoning whatsoever. If you trust your instincts and simply live your life, forming your communities as sustainably, elegantly, and simply as you can, you will be living primitively. Primitivism is what comes naturally to us. To do anything else requires abstracted arguments, and there’s the problem. We’ve all been subjected to baseless, “abstracted arguments that do not make any particular sense,” like Hobbes’ Leviathan. We’ve been trained to think of primitive life as “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” So we don’t follow our instincts; we don’t live primitively. That teaches us not to trust our instincts in general. This leads to the denigration of our spontaneous thought, as Malcolm Gladwell addresses in Blink.
The “abstracted reasoning” we’re applying here is the salve to the wounds civilization’s inflicted, because it leaves us half-way. If we continue and press on, we come out the other side, and find out that cases like Hobbes’ were utterly devoid of all evidence. We keep on pressing, and find out that primitive life isn’t the squalor we’d been told–that, in fact, it’s actually a very good way to live. Primitive life comes naturally, but primitivism is needed to pull us along the rest of the way, to undo the damage that a little bit of civilization’s learning has done.
I don’t think you’ve done that with any of us. In fact, I find your arguments to be nothing more than the tedious reiteration of your claims without any substance or evidence. I think you’ve been “chopped up, chew up, and spit out,” because it’s so abundantly clear from our exchanges that you have nothing but bald assertion to back up your position. Where I’ve consistently cited the supporting facts, and multiple sources devoid of any ideological bias to back up my position, all you’ve done is tell us about your study guide.
And yes, I’ve read it. Its failure to account for diminishing returns leaves it DOA, as far as I’m concerned, and I found its approach to Jevons Paradox positively puerile.
We’re not here recruiting for primitivism. We’re just here to “keep the door open”–to put up an adequately strong front that at the very least, someone who might stumble on this might not be totally turned off by the misinformation and half-truths beng used to discredit it in this assault. As I mentioned, surviving collapse is a question of imagination, and we do what we can to spark as much imagination as we can. The attacks launched from this site have the effect of shutting down imagination, so we need to do what we can to keep that window as open as we can.
But your counter-attack here is laughable. Primitivism is the philosophical response to the facts discovered by modern anthropology, debunking the flawed assumptions that provided the basis of everything from Romanticism to Technocracy. Your study guide sure seemed like brain-washing to me; but primtiivism asks people to read widely, and not just from primitivist authors. Some of the authors we cite most often are not primitivists at all. So on what grounds can you call anthropological research “brain washing”?
Definition by secular cult opposition:
Secular cult opponents define a “cult” as a religious or non-religious group that tends to manipulate, exploit, and control its members. Here two definitions by Michael Langone and Louis Jolyon West, scholars who are widely recognized among the secular cult opposition:
“Cults are groups that often exploit members psychologically and/or financially, typically by making members comply with leadership’s demands through certain types of psychological manipulation, popularly called mind control, and through the inculcation of deep-seated anxious dependency on the group and its leaders.”
“A cult is a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of [consequences of] leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.”
The common anti-cult definition summarised,
* Manipulative and authoritarian mind control over members
* Communal and totalistic in their organisation
* Aggressive in proselytizing
* Systematic program of indoctrination
* New membership of cults by middle class
– Wikipedia
That pretty much sums up the colloquial definition of the word “cult.” Now explain what any of this has to do with primitivism.
I suppose this is the limitation of language. I agree with your ideas for the most part, but I do think that framing your arguments using the term “civilization” can be problematic, insofar as it’s not just a term for most people but a mythological one.
This is not a problem with your argumentation, per se, but I think it can be an issue with your communicating your ideas. You essentially have to spend a lot of time redefining terms again and again and arguing with people over the validity of that definition, trying to apply logic and rational detail against deep-seated mythology and symbolism. Just wondering if there’s a better way, short of creating a counter-mythology and falling right back into the same trap.
Yes, I suppose it would. But you have to admit that you’re a pretty voluminous writer, and rather than digging through your thirty theses to find the information, it is a bit more convenient to extract implied definitions from your posts, whether or not that’s fair. Besides which, statements like this:
(1) go beyond your technical definition of complexity, having moral, psychological, and spiritual implications, which directly touch on the mythology of civilization and not just the narrower anthropological definition of it, and thus (2) may come across as moral judgments of civilization, even though you may only consider them logical extensions of your definition of civilization.
Anyway, I’m not trying to be combative here, though maybe having this conversation in the midst of a much more heated debate is not the best way to go.
It’s funny that you mention this, because it’s something we’ve been talking a lot about. We both started on this path with Daniel Quinn, who made up new definitions in the very same interest of being unbiased. “Taker” was civilized; “Leaver” was tribalistic. What we found, though, was that these new terms made it impossible to research his claims; anthropologists used a completely different set of terms. And before starting a conversation about this with anyone who hadn’t read Quinn’s work, we’d have to go through a tiresome vocabulary lesson.
The benefit of just using the accepted anthropological terms is that at least academics know what we’re talking about right off the bat. And people unfamiliar with the field will at least know which terms to look up in various books to see if our claims carry any weight. If we made up new terms, a la Daniel Quinn, no one - not academics, not laypeople - would have any idea of what we were talking about. That would require much, much more explanation.
And as a consequence, I’m often accused of playing a semantic game, but I see one major value in it: it is precisely that mythologization of “civilization” as humanity’s penultimate achievement that goads us into pursuing greater and greater complexity, no matter the cost to ourselves, our fellow human beings, or even our planet. Even if people could understand the detrimental effects of too much complexity on a Pleistocene alpha predator adapted to a simpler world, if that mythology is not deconstructed, then that’s simple the price we must pay for our glorious ascencion to godhood, our transcendance of the frail, “fallen” human condition.
So, I think we have to address that mythology, and the best way I know how is by keeping to the technical definition and pointng out that everything we think of as “good” about civilization is more than four times older than it, while everything “bad” about it is unique to it.
Quite true, which is why I’ve reiterated and condensed my position several times here for the past week. Understandable for anyone to miss, but it does get very annoying. I apologize for being short.
You’ll note that this was in response to someone asking what civilized values are, in contrast to human (or tribal) values. No, these are not part of the definition, but a solid definition is the beginning of the analysis. With this, I’m trying to move beyond mere definition, into the implications of such a system. What does a system like that value? What does it promote? What does it create? What are the moral, psychological, and spiritual implications of such a system? Those implications are not part of the definition, but they follow from it, just as moral, psychological and spiritual implications follow from our definitions of everything from “murder” to “wisdom.”
There IS a moral judgment here, of course. First, we define civilization. Then, we examine its implications. Then, we draw a moral judgment. Each step is a different thing from the other steps, but each one builds on the last. I do not think it is fair to say that I’ve defined civilization as “something bad,” but by the same token, I do think it is fair to conclude that civilization is fundamentally something bad. Does that make sense?
By the same token, I think we could define “murder,” then examine its implications, and then conclude that it is fundamentally bad, and I don’t think that would mean defining murder simply as, “something bad.”
So I’ve established a few things:
1. Primitivism is not the way to go — it plays into the hands of terrorists, misanthropes, and rich conspirators at Davos.
2. Technological civilization is also not the way to go — it plays into the hands of state terrorists, anti-life bigots, and rich people selling crap.
3. Giving up and jumping off a damn cliff is not an option — it plays into the hands of whoever benefits most from not having their schemes disrupted by our righteous action.
4. God frowns at the idea of killing a whole bunch of people in the name of an ideological utopia, even a primitivist one.
5. God also frowns at the idea of whatever the hell all that scary “will to power” crap was Nicq McDonald was talking about with the making new species and melding with machines and taking plans for the future from the Popular Mechanics edition of Paradise Lost.
6. God especially frowns at the idea of doing nothing and does not under any circumstances want you jumping off a damn cliff. Jeez, it’s hard to tell what he doesn’t frown at.
You’ll find someone who’ll tell you that about anything. I still don’t follow how “the implications of X might not always be nice” is a valid counterargument to X, though.
Good thing primitivists aren’t killing anyone–just trying to create a society that can survive when civilization kills itself.
Hard to say, since you can’t really trust anyone who claims to convey his will. I go by the one indisputable relic of the gods, however many they may be (1, 1000 or 0): the universe around us. I’d say that a good indication of the gods’ will is the way they created us, before we started presuming to be them.
Yeah, what both of you are saying makes sense, although it’s still less than ideal. In one way or another, you’re still using a specialized lexicon that will cause confusion for some. Adding to this confusion is the fact that other people, even other primitivists, may not use the same definition of civilization, or may use it in a less technical or specific way, or may simply put the emphasis on the mythological rather than the technical. Not your fault, but still an issue. Really, language is so insufficient to communicate complex ideas. Especially written language.
Based on your definition of civilization, which I now understand better: Yes.
Although sometimes the distinction seems fairly subtle.
Indeed, but I think in that we’ve come down to a basic issue in any kind of communication, regardless of whether the subject is primitivism or anything else. Cue the existentialist critique!
Jlhart7 , I will tell you the honest truth. There is no god so don`t worry about that aspect of it. You do not need god to have some scruples.
It is perfectly normal to kill people. If it was not you could not do it. Nature provides our limitations , and god or Nature as you say, makes killing part of its work.
But is it a good idea.? Is it practical.? You would be doing a lot of that as a survivalist no doubt , post collapse.
That does not sound pleasant to me, or you.
If you do it someone will want to take revenge on you , and then it may be your turn to be be killed. Why not avoid this tact.
There is always someone with a bigger stick to hit you with.
It is just common sense to include everyone in the future.
Maybe after a while we could whittle down the population in a civilized manner. At least in North America.
Jason I assume you are a liar. I already know that you can twist and turn a hundred different ways to make the concepts of belief seem palatable. It is obvious that you did not read our 1934 Technocracy Study Course , which is available for free, other wise you would be more knowledgeable as to it.
That’s fine most humans are liars , I don`t hold it against you at all. You are probably so used to making up lying arguments for your survival ism , that it is second nature.
If you do actually want to look at it , it is http://www.technocracynow.org It is a free file for your computer. I suggest you read a chapter now and then , and keep it on your intellectual back burner. You also Lamanna.
I know you two are smart as hell. We are an educational/research group. Once you took a hard look at our stuff , I think you would go for it. It does not require any belief, except maybe that it may be a good idea as real alternatives go.
I also suggest you keep an eye on our official site. http://www.technocracyinc.org
Just for fun you might also take a look at N.E.T. or Network of European Technocrats. They are doing some interesting things. Just google N.E.T.
So, wait … I took the time to read your cultwashed little “study guide,” and I didn’t buy it, so … I’m a liar? Mighty white o’ ya!
WOW! That’s quite a monument to self-important condescencion there! It’s like I’m being scolded by the Universal Archetype of the Jewish Mother herself!
Y’see, Skip, you have to allow for the possibility that someone might be able to look at your material and find them utterly unconvincing, without jumping to the idea that they must be ignorant or lying. Otherwise, well, you’re just being a cretin. Honest people can come to differing conclusions. I assume you read your study guide; you found it convincing. I also read it, and found it … well, I’ll be nice and just say, “not.” I also know that there are honest, educated people who don’t agree with me about primitivism. Notice I haven’t called you a liar, ignorant, or underhanded simply because you disagree with me. But you’ve called me all three of those things–and now I am quoting you–because I don’t buy into this “Technocracy” nonsense.
Which, oddly enough, is the kind of bullying attempts at coercive persuasion that most typically mark a cult–isn’t there someone you were accusing of putting together a cult recently, Skip?
I am not sure what you read or thought you read. You quote a Study Guide, that you apparently read.?
I am not talking about that. Our original Technocracy Study Course is what I said. Hear me.?
I am not sure but that may have been one of the rewrites of the techca site that has been mentioned a few times by me and a certain Dean Cameron , that has been discredited that you read.? You are mixed up a little I think.
Again that could explain this ignorance I mentioned. This is understandable if it is the case. As mentioned all humans are liars. Some are easier to spot and others more difficult.
I read the thing you keep linking to, and I thought it was a waste of my time, how’s that?
I still don`t believe you. You no longer have any credibility with me. I may have to become more forceful in exposing your fraudulent claims for your survival ism pet peeve theory , or groups theory.
I have been rather kind and allowing for you as I did not understand fully what hogwash you seem to like.
Also there are so many logical arguments in your thinking that I don`t think it is worth my time to even wade in . I just kind of skimmed some , mostly for fun.
I have not called you an idiot, yet. I have tried to restrain my self from going to far in that kind of direction, in fact I called you smart as hell. Lots of times idiots are smart as hell. If someone does call you an idiot, the first step if it is true , is to stop being an idiot.
Do you follow me.?
Your ingenious theories seem really anti human to me in a lot of ways , some of which I have touched on.
There is something called the dog mentality. You seem afflicted with that. It means ; If you can`t eat it, or fuck it , piss on it.
While I promote technocracy as an interesting alternative culture, you seem very dead ended , jaded, and hung up on the throw in the towel and give up, and go back to what you think of as a natural life.
I took a walk in the woods today by Minnehaha creek to go bird watching. Then I went to an Indian place and had some curried lamb. then I went shoe shopping. I had to fill up my tank . Tonite I am going to a discussion group.
This is all kind of fun. No possibility of that under survival conditions.
I’sa sawry, mah’stah, I’sa be goo’ nah….
No, I’ve noted how pedantic you are, so I stuck with “ignorant,” which you’ve already used. I know how keen you are on precise quotation.
Where? I’ve read you repeating that, but I’ve been waiting for some kind of rationale so I might have something–anything–to respond to.
Technocracy’s own of those big lies that tries to lull people back to sleep, to get us to stay complacent. If I let that go unchallenged, I’d be as selfish as people say I am and just looking out for #1. After all, it doesn’t diminish my imagination or survival, but it will get all of your victims killed one day.
What are you talking about? Aside from the shoe shopping and having to fill up your gas tank, that’s a pretty typical primitive day. Now, imagine that every day, without 8-12 hours of tedious labor devoted to someone else’s well-being, and you’l start to get a notion of what primitive life is actually like (as opposed to the misinformation spread by Hobbes & co.)
Wow, really?! Golly, thanks, mister! All you’ve done in every post you’ve made is declare how superior you are to us, how we might as well not even try debating you because you’ll beat us, hands-down, without even trying, and, in fact, you already have beaten us; we’re just too thick to understand your genius. Meanwhile, what have you actually said, aside from bluster and bombast? You’ve recycled tired old stereotypes about primitive life, all while referencing no one and ignoring all our citations. You’ve pushed Technocracy on us like some kind of afterschool special pothead. You’ve accused us of being cultish, then when I gave you a definition of the word cult and asked you to explain how primitivism has anything to do with it, you suddenly and inexplicably fell silent. And all the while, you’ve insisted upon your superior debating skills. Well, pardon me, but those skills of which you speak so highly are not visible to me here.
To have a “throw in the towel and give up” attitude would imply that we find something good in civilization to pursue, that we now feel is no longer possible. On the contrary: if given the choice between a primitive life free from civilization and the lavish life of, say, a Paris Hilton, I’d without question choose the primitive life. This isn’t “throwing in the towel.” This is wholeheartedly embracing a way of life that we’ve been violently and coercively kept away from for 10,000 years.
Well, in civilization’s own mythology, it likes to call itself a massive, generations-long project to create a happy life. Of course, we already had a happy life, so civilized mythology requires us to reject the obvious facts–that, or it tells us about some “Fall” that removed us from that happiness, and we now need to put forth all this effort to work our way back.
So from the frame of civilized mythology, we’re definitely “throwing in the towel”–giving up the civilized project, the most important thing Homo sapiens have ever done.
Of course, we reject that frame. Our argument is that this project moves us further from the goal it espouses, and that we’ve been moving further and further from the happy life we started from for 10,000 years. So from our frame, it’s not “throwing in the towel” at all. Rather, progressivists and primitivists pursue the same goal: it’s just that progressivists work very hard, and very stupidly, in a counter-productive manner that just pushes them further from where they want to be. We think of ourselves as taking the smart, easy way to that goal.
When I was young, long before I knew what anarchism or primitivism or the internet was, I used to daydream about how cool it would be to be raised by wolves and not have to go to school. Later on I wanted to be an anthropologist, not because studying other cultures appealed particularly, but because I thought it offered the best opportunities for joining a tribe. Which, even back then, seemed to me to be a lot more fun and meaningful than having a job
So arguably, primitivism is part of my core values. I was (and still am) a big bundle of primitivist feelings independent of any manifesto or written philosophy or system or academic rhetoric. Those things have been useful for me to work through these ideas consciously though. (thanks Jason, Giuli, et al.)
To use a Zen analogy, The Tribe of Anthropik are pointing at the moon, their finger is not the moon.
The same reason abuse victims defend their abusers.
Because we fear change–even change for the better–sometimes more than death. Humans are wired to accept the culture they’re born into–even if it’s a self-destructive, terrible culture.
Because the only way our culture can survive is by accepting on faith that life outside civilization is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” This is not a matter of evidence to most people, but of faith. It cannot be questioned, and no amount of evidence will make them consider otherwise, because it’s not an academic question. To question that recieved wisdom would be to question everything we’ve ever done with our lives. Many of us would rather clod along in misery, than think that we’d been had or used or abused for so long.
Those are two different questions. First, why no one wants to, because that myth above has succeeded. Life outside civilization is horrible, and it doesn’t matter how untrue that statement is, we will believe it to the bitter end because to do otherwise would be to throw into question everything we’ve ever known.
The second, because civilization has a good deal else in common with abusers, including the threat that if you leave it, it will kill you. Civilization is a jealous god, and will brook no other form of society.
You’ve confused their nature with their training. These people had to be trained methodically to reject such beliefs. We need to beat animism out of our children. We need to medicate natural-born hunters. The list goes on and on. That’s a very different thing from human nature.
People in civilization are victims of abuse, and abuse victims are very good at rationalizing their plight. We in civilization are very good at rationalizing our plight. We rationalize why war, or disease, or poverty, or hunger, or isolation, or wage slavery, or any of the rest of it is acceptable, or tolerable, or somehow unavoidable. We usually accept these as necessary evils, despite the fact that for 99% of our time on this planet, these “necessary” evils did not exist. It helps for us to isolate our history to only other civilized peoples who shared the same problems, and to project our problems into the past (like the “Overkill” theory).
I don’t know much about “good” or “bad” in terms of moral absolutes, but I know the effect that civilization has on real, flesh-and-blood human beings, and I know a justification of abuse when I see one. “Evil” seems about as apt a term as I can think of for the things civilization does to 6.5 billion people.
Of course–they had to. Everything they’ve ever known, everything they’ve ever believed, everything they’ve ever done depends on that myth being true, so we’ll continue to believe it’s true, no matter how much of a lie it’s exposed for. We have to.
It just occurred to me the other night how I have often wondered whether any luck I have had or whether any situations where I have been saved as in - yeh it was shitty but it could have been a whole lot worse - or wherein I have always been saved from the worst - was due to the Chesed of my ancestors - on my father’s side. Chesed is similar to the Buddhist concept of merit.
So think on that - that perhaps your good fortune or your saving graces have been due to the Chesed of your ancestors.
But I suppose people prefer intellectual argumentation too much to just consider this on a contemplative level. It’s far easier to blast it apart with words and intellect and … ultimately … nothing.
No … really … contemplate it - it’s not rational - it’s not intellectual - you can’t really cogitate about it. It doesn’t work that way. No ritual works that way. No reaching to the infinite works that way. You can’t even really talk about it - you can only talk around it. And talking doesn’t do anyting anyway.
Try it. Shut your brain up and don’t be afraid. See what comes to you.
That was supposed to go here. Peaknickster, my response got caught in moderation, so it’ll be a few hours before you see it. There were a few supporting statements I made as links to full essays we’d written on the topic, rather than rehashing the whole thing at length, so I guess it thought I was spamming the comments.
Peaknickster, Thanks for pointing out the obvious. Seriously. I have been trying to make Jason and Lamanna think in the terms you point out here. I believe your thesis is right, as I thought Slomo was also right in his analysis.
As with any belief system, be it some religion or supposed cultural truism , people many times lose track of the fact that the things, they so called believe in, are not true. They are abstracted poetic concepts. Nothing wrong with that of course. To each their own.
While I tried to understand and be sympathetic towards these survivalist/primitivist ideas, at a certain point like you have just done, after contemplating them logically, It is better to just come out and give an opinion.
It is very difficult to defend belief.
As I mentioned, I answered all of Peaknickster’s points easily–they’ve just been caught in moderation. It comes down to our enculturation. We accept our culture, and even defend it, the same way that a victim of abuse defends his abusers. It’s a well known syndrome on the individual level. Civilization simply moves that dynamic to the level of an entire society. The fact that the abused defend their abusers no more disproves abuse than when it happens in a dysfunctional family.
You mean like Technocracy? If you’re going to make grand claims like that without also including your own pet theories, you’re just being a hypocrite.
Then how do I do it so easily? Yes, it’s frustrating to have my answers blocked by moderation, but there’s not much I can do about that.
Here’s my embargo’ed response, sans the supporting links, in the hopes that it will get past moderation so it can be seen. My previous post had a number of links back to essays we’d written on Anthropik, supporting contentions simply stated here, but that apparently was caught as spam. I’m posting this stripped version because the dialogue going on right now is being diminished for its absence, as evidenced by Skip’s contention that these ideas are unchallenged, or that primitivism is “difficult to defend,” a notion being lent evidence now simply by the vagaries of the site’s spam filter–hardly the rock-solid foundation a good discussion should begin with!
The same reason abuse victims defend their abusers.
Because we fear change–even change for the better–sometimes more than death. Humans are wired to accept the culture they’re born into–even if it’s a self-destructive, terrible culture.
Because the only way our culture can survive is by accepting on faith that life outside civilization is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.†This is not a matter of evidence to most people, but of faith. It cannot be questioned, and no amount of evidence will make them consider otherwise, because it’s not an academic question. To question that recieved wisdom would be to question everything we’ve ever done with our lives. Many of us would rather clod along in misery, than think that we’d been had or used or abused for so long.
Those are two different questions. First, why no one wants to, because that myth above has succeeded. Life outside civilization is horrible, and it doesn’t matter how untrue that statement is, we will believe it to the bitter end because to do otherwise would be to throw into question everything we’ve ever known.
The second, because civilization has a good deal else in common with abusers, including the threat that if you leave it, it will kill you. Civilization is a jealous god, and will brook no other form of society.
You’ve confused their nature with their training. These people had to be trained methodically to reject such beliefs. We need to beat animism out of our children. We need to medicate natural-born hunters. The list goes on and on. That’s a very different thing from human nature.
People in civilization are victims of abuse, and abuse victims are very good at rationalizing their plight. We in civilization are very good at rationalizing our plight. We rationalize why war, or disease, or poverty, or hunger, or isolation, or wage slavery, or any of the rest of it is acceptable, or tolerable, or somehow unavoidable. We usually accept these as necessary evils, despite the fact that for 99% of our time on this planet, these “necessary†evils did not exist. It helps for us to isolate our history to only other civilized peoples who shared the same problems, and to project our problems into the past (like the “Overkill†theory).
I don’t know much about “good†or “bad†in terms of moral absolutes, but I know the effect that civilization has on real, flesh-and-blood human beings, and I know a justification of abuse when I see one. “Evil†seems about as apt a term as I can think of for the things civilization does to 6.5 billion people.
Of course–they had to. Everything they’ve ever known, everything they’ve ever believed, everything they’ve ever done depends on that myth being true, so we’ll continue to believe it’s true, no matter how much of a lie it’s exposed for. We have to.
I’m going to see if I can post my supporting links individually. For wage slavery, see Why Work? For how we have to methodically train children away from the animism that comes so naturally to them, see Giuli’s recent post, “Of Animism and Animorphs.”
On the topic of “medicating natural-born hunters,” see another of Giuli’s recent posts, this one on ADD, which Thom Hartmann calls an affliction of “hunters living in a farmers’ world,” “Human Tendency Disorder.” Giuli’s also working on an article that should go up later today, on how closely civilization resembles abuse on multiple levels. I’ll link that here when it goes up, too.
And finally, on the subject of projecting our current destructiveness into the past, see my critique of the “Overkill” theory in “Overkill, Overchill & Human Nature.”
So in fact, primitivism isn’t hard to defend at all. I appreciate the points Peaknickster raises, but they’re not exactly the zinging indictments that Skip seems to think they are. From a primitivist perspective, they’re actually exactly what you’d expect. This kind of trauma doesn’t heal that easily–why would you expect it to? But it’s still very much our human nature. The fact that training us to expect anything less was so traumatizing for us should be evidence enough of that.
I’ve got a lot of problems with Jensen, particularly when it comes to what he intends to do about the problem of civilization, but I also agree with a lot of what he has to say, particularly in addressing the nature of that problem. Jensen, a survivor of an abusive father who victimized both him and his mother, has written very openly about his experiences, and written extensively on the parallels between civilization and abuse. His writing is voluminous, so here’s an online essay that highlight some of what he means: “Insanity & Free Will.”
If civilization is a dysfunctional family, then what does a healthy one look like?
Okay, I’ll read this. I’m to be out of town for the rest of the week, so I won’t be responding to anybody.
But I will say one thing…
But those 6.5 billion people cannot exist without civilization. So how can we say that “evil” things are done to them if, quite frankly, they would starve to death if they tried to retribalize? I don’t know about you, but most people would prefer life over death, no matter how bad that life was.
So, in a way, leaving civilization would kill all those people–since civilization makes their existence possible, despite their meager existence.
Again, while I do not think of primitivists as genocidal maniacs, I just think that, if modern civilization was sustainable, then it would be unethical to try to stop modern civilization because of that requirement of mass death.
I’m fine with primitivists wanting to live in tribes, but they don’t have the right to force others to live that philosophy. The fact is, Jason, that you might feel that primitivism is a proper “ism,” but then, all “isms” feel their ideology is the proper one. Just look at agrarians who cite the same statistics about misery and abuse that you do, but draw the line at the Industrial Revolutions, and preach for a return to communal agrarian life. They are just as adamant about their beliefs even though you can see many problems with them.
I won’t argue about abuse. I disagree because abuse is subjective. For example, if I have sex with a 13-year-old girl, it is abuse in our culture, but it would not be in another culture. I also believe I must keep my mind open to people who might like civilization.
Unless of course, there was a way to feed 6.5 billion people without modern industrialized civilization (and/or its agriculture). I’m not trying to argue that there is one, but I wanted to state the underlying basis for my moral argument I was making to challenge the “evil” concept. In short, if there was a way of feeding 6.5 billion people, and they could leave, then the moral arguments regarding primitivism would change (minus the arguments of civ’s unsustainability, that is).
Of course, they never would have been born in the first place had civilization not created them, so again, who’s the villain? Civilization created a mess it can’t clean up. It created a population it can’t support, and churns out massive numbers of people that it abuses. Many people are quite content to call a woman “evil” if she has more children than she can support; stretch that to its most insane extreme, and then make the woman the worst child abuser the world has ever seen, and you have a portrait of civilization.
Except civilization doesn’t make their existence possible, either. That kind of population can only be supported by methods that aren’t sustainable–that means that kind of population can’t be supported.
Indeed, if civilization was sustainable, you might have a point. You might have a point if up were down, black were white, or one were zero, too, but a sustainable civilization is a contradiction in terms. Humans exist at very high trophic levels, and the earth simply can’t support billions of us. It can support millions of us, but not billions.
Who’s forcing anyone? I’m just trying to spark the imagination of as many people as I can. The entire human species will live primitively by 2200, but this isn’t a matter of revolution; it’s a matter of evolution. Primitive life can’t support everyone, but most people aren’t going to hear this message anyway. The people with enough imagination to try is a much smaller population than what the earth could support primitively, and when civilization fails to support the people who depend on it, the only ones who will survive will be the ones with enough imagination to try living beyond civilization. Primitivism isn’t why so many people are going to die–that’s civilization’s fault. Primitivism is the reason that anyone’s going to survive.
Yes, but fairly lacking in evidence. I’ve gone head-to-head with them, as well. People have tried to find problems in my evidence, but I think I’ve refuted their arguments pretty completely. This isn’t about vehemence: it’s about evidence. We shouldn’t be swayed just by someone’s convictions, but by the supporting evidence they can offer for what they have to say.
No one likes civilization, though many say they do. They like some of the things that civilization tries to destroy but persist in spite of it, like art, music, etc.; they like some of the things they associate with civilization, like technology, that are in fact far, far older than civilization. But no one likes civilization–no one likes to be stuck in a hierarchy (not even the ones on top of it–they keep killing themselves), or used as a cog, or stripped of their basic human dignity and reduced to a mere unit of labor. People say they like civilization, but when you press them on what they like about it, they list off things that have nothing to do with civilization–things that are present, and often far more abundant, in the most primitive, uncivilized societies on earth, things that are at least four times older than civilization, and common to all human cultures, civilized and uncivilized alike. If I say I like civilization, and what I like about it is a list of things utterly irrelevant to civilization, do I actually like civilization, or am I simply defining everything good in my life in terms of my abuser?
That’s the connection with abuse, not some subjective definition of what constitutes abuse, but the fact that all the ways in which an abused child relates to an abusive parent, or an abused wife relates to an abusive husband, are the exact same ways that we relate to our culture.
My brother and I had a rousing discussion about Star Trek some time ago, and decided it was a sustainable civilization, because of the replicators. This could produce enough resources for their civilizations without draining their ecology, because the energy for them came from dilithium crystals. Not the dilithium known to chemistry, of course, but a fictional material that could be used in a matter-antimatter reaction.
In other words, magic. Not real magic, like David Abram writes about in Spell of the Sensuous, but magic in the sense of the suspension of the laws of physics. If some pesky, unassailable fact just weren’t so, civilization could be just fine.
You run into the same problem with perpetual motion machines, and in both cases, it always comes down to the same problem: the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy.
So what? It might be possible in a thought experiment, but it’s not possible in this world, so what does it matter? In this world, civilization is unsustainable. In this world it is incapable of ever being sustainable. In this world civilization is the most murderous system that has ever existed, not only creating a population of billions of human beings it could never possibly support, but driving forth the worst mass extinction this planet has ever seen, and threatening the very survival of multi-cellular life on earth.
Next to that, what does it really matter if civilization could be sustainable, if the laws of physics weren’t in effect? They are, and we have to live inside them.
I fail to see the analogy here; since I would not consider that woman “evil.”
I have seen that asserted numerous times by you but I fail to understand the backing for such an absolute claim. You argue it is because it must expand–but I fail to see why. Why must civilization always expand? Again, while it is true that the evidence is important here, I fail to see the evidence as to why civilization must expand, especially since it is a human-created society and you have stated that it is not in our nature to expand.
This is a semantic problem I have with the word sustainability. Unsustainability does not equate impossiblity. If so, why are there 6.5 billion people today? Obviously they can be supported for a time, regardless of their sustainability, and they are currently existing. I think a more proper measure is not sustainability but how long something will last. Civilization did last for 10000 years regardless of its unsustainability.
It could if there was a sustainable way of cultivation that supported them. I’m not here to argue that there is; I’m just positing another thought experiment and I disagree that thought experiments have no merit–as the basis for all of our claims do start from thought experiments. We had to think about an idea before we verified it, after all.
But how is this so if you assert that civilization must always grow? With that argument, the Ancient Egyptians were sustainable because they were able to farm the Nile without draining their ecology. The Ancient Chinese were sustainable because they were able to farm the Yellow river without draining their ecology, and terracing stopped soil erosion. Terracing also stopped the Incas from draining their ecology as well.
But how if we see that not all civilizations at one time drained their ecologies? If civilization must always grow, how could Star Trek’s civilization be sustainable?
So you are basically saying that civilization comes against the laws of physics because of its need to expand. Again, you have based so many broad assumptions on that argument, yet I cannot see the backing for why a society like civilization must expand.
The mass extinction you mention only occurred when civilization industrialized and became global, not when civilization started. Sure, it led to it, but that wasn’t the way it was when it began. Also, while the overkill theory has been exaggerated, people did cause extinctions pre-civilization–you said so yourself, in Australia. This does not justify civilization’s existence, obviously, but it does show that sustainability is about finding a balance, not about whether or not you cause extinctions. The extinctions you mention is evidence of a failure to find a balance, but extinctions per se do not prove anything unless there is a return to a certain level of balance. And if a civilization was a sine curve of limited growth and collapse within a territory, that would be a balance since whatever extinctions in that territory occured would not spread worldwide.
This is where I must disagree with you. You cannot think outside of the box that people must hate civilization, yet so many others can, even other more moderate primitivists. How can you say that no one likex civilization? How can you make an absolute assertion? Who can? Have you talked to all 6.5 billion people on this world? This seems to me like blatant arrogance–people are unique and thus have different emotions. You cannot assert something like that which cannot be proven.
Besides, I can list things many people like about civilization–urban/suburban living, colleges, universities, movies, cars, computers–that did not exist prior to civilization. Most people I know who live in cities like living in those cities, as well as suburbanites. I have a friend that relocated to a small town of 2000 for work from a large city. He says that he feels alone in the small town, and visits his former city to retain his mental sanity.
And also, actions speak louder than words–regardless of how people feel, the fact that so few people actually walk their talk about their hatred shows that they justify the existence of whatever misery you feel you must think people have. I also told you that my father refuses to camp or live in any way resembling primitive, and would prefer civilized life. And I cannot see how you can deny the existence of an elite in civilization as not better than the forager’s existence–the elite man does not have to work, whereas the hunter still has to hunt and dry his meat by himself, and cut it himself. Even the civilized person can choose to do other work if he wishes. I can understand your argument for a person in a poorer area, but then, the fact that the person in the poorer area may like his life shows that just because you work harder does not mean you are miserable.
My friend went to Africa, where people are suffering due to civilization. She said that people there are quite content with their lot in lives, and know themselves much more than in America. I also notice there is little “openly primitivist” activity in Africa (despite primitivists talking about it so much). So maybe our discussions reflect that aspect of American culture where we are not content with our lives and thus we question and think about them.
Art, music, technology, etc. are older than civilization–but there are so many more numerous forms of it in civilization. In my civilized metropolis I have access to blues, cajun, reggae, rap, rock, country, and more ethnic music. I have access to modern art, impressionism, pottery, movies, comic strips, electronic art, and much more. I love movies, and they could not be replicated outside of civilization. I would not be having this conversation without the technology of civilization. I have access to writing and lots of different books and authors, and even though there are pre-civilized societies with writing (the horticultural tribes of the Phillipines).
But how does civilization try to destroy art, music, technology, etc.? Those things seem more diverse, as civilization is, with more complex ways for humans to live.
I do not see how reverting to a tribal existence will improve my life. I see that civilization enables me to do many things I could not do as a tribesman, and will live life to the fullest until civilization burns out, and die if civilization is inherently unsustainable. I am still mentioning that because again, while you think it is absolute truth, many other intelligent people have arguments to counter that, and your scenario that you mentioned of the entire human race living primitively (unless, a few pockets of civilization, maybe) only works if civilization is truly unsustainable. I don’t feel qualified to agree with anyone yet, you might be right, but so might your critics.
I like my large-scale society, and would feel stifled in a small band. In a tribe, you have art and music but are limited to a much smaller amount of it (it’s obvious that it’s more complex in civilization) and have access to people all over the world on the Internet. So how can you say that the forager existence gives you access to more art, music, philosophy, etc. when there is obviously so much more in civilization? And I’m in the middle of a career program to study to work in a school in a special-ed classroom. Without civilization, I won’t be able to pursue my dream job.
In fact, my life would be a lot easier if I just continued my life and stopped thinking about these ideologies. So I don’t see how primitivism has helped me at all.
Where is the backing that civilization cannot live within the laws of physics? I don’t see physicists stating that.
But if those 6.5 billion cannot be sustained except temporarily by unsustainable methods, I cannot see why they would think of civilization as evil if it is keeping them alive, and I was challenging your assertion that EVERY person thinks civ is evil.
In your previous post, you pointed out that civilization creates a myth that if you do not submit to it, you will die. Doesn’t the fact that 6.5 billion people can’t be supported by a hierarchal civilization that forces submission support that idea? How is it a myth if those people would die, and will die if civilization collapses!
Like I said. You cannot see civilization except only as abuse.
Sure…but that requires evidence, and your arguments to be true. Let’s not forget that Christians, Muslims, etc. also argue that anyone who isn’t them will not survive the Rapture. I’ve read “Eschatology of the Left” on your site already, but am just stating another tautological point.
True, you might think you have refuted them, but since many people disagree with you with a set of evidence, I can’t say that you’re right yet. I’m just going to remain agnostic about it, because I don’t know what to say.
And most people I know thinks their evidence is right while others has some flaws in it, regardless of who they are. So just because you think you right does not mean you are.
Nor I. Irresponsible, perhaps, and yet when it’s billions rather than a dozen thus put at risk, the “e” word begins to flow more easily for me.
This is an issue I’m literally writing a book on: you can see the rough draft in the Thirty Theses, but I’ll try to condense it here as much as possible.
It’s a game of Prisoner’s Dilemna. If you and I are hunter-gatherers, then all is well. We can go hunt and gather longer, but that’s no guarantee of having more to eat. In fact, it’s something of a guarantee that we won’t have enough to eat next year. We have a sustainable carrying capacity, because what we take each year is less than what grows each year (in truth, this equation is balanced by an energy input from the sun).
Now, let’s say I throw that away and starting going into agriculture. Agriculture is differentiated from other cultivation, like horticulture, in that it is beyond the point of diminishing returns. In other words, it takes more energy for me to pull my plow, dig my irrigation canals, and so forth, than I get from my food. Obviously, this can’t work, so I use some kind of “cheat,” like draft animals that can pull my plow for me. They use grazing lands I wouldn’t otherwise be able to use, so it’s OK that I’m actually getting less energy than I’m putting into it, because I’m not the one putting in all the energy.
Of course, we’re still riding the razor’s edge of starvation. And since there’s not a whole lot of domesticable species, and what there are tend to be incredibly closely related, we’re subject to any kind of perturbation that comes along. It’s the ultimate version of putting all your eggs in one basket. We starve a lot, and we eat a diet that’s not very healthy for us. Our domesticated animals give us zoonotic diseases, so we have epidemic diseases for the first time, and we’re malnourished, so while your elders are in their 60s, 70s or 80s, the oldest of my people are lucky to see 40. But despite all this, we’ve got a food supply we can always increase and store away, so our population booms. We’ve got a huge, teeming mass of sick, malnourished farmers, while you’re living with a small band of healthy, happy hunters.
Now, let’s also say that I really, really want to stay sustainable like I used to be and not expand. But now I find something else out: the irrigation, monocropping, and other techniques necessary to produce so much food are destroying my soil. I could stop using such unsustainable techniques, but that would mean less food–actually, that would make me a horticulturalists, and scale me down from the city level to the village level, from the state to the tribe. But we’re trying to make a sustainable civilization here; we already know tribes are sustainable, so that’s out the window. Unfortunately, that’s really my only option: so in order to make my civilization sustainable, I have to make it no longer a civilization.
So instead, I’m compelled to expand into new lands, lands that haven’t been killed off by my agricultural techniques yet. I have to invade you. Of course, your happy, healthy hunters don’t want to live like my sickly, starving farmers, so they fight to the death. It’s not use–we’re a horde by now, absolutely overwhelming. Nothing can stop us. You’re civilized now, too.
Now we play Prisoner’s Dilemna. We’re both farmers now, so we can both increase our complexity essentially at will, but you’ve already learned that if you’re less complex than me, I’ll use my complexity to clobber you and run you out. So now we both have to increase our complexity, as much as we can, whenever we can, because if we don’t, then the other guy will, and then he’ll conquer the other one of us. It doesn’t matter if we can see that this is disastrous–we have to keep at it. It’s like an arms race–it has to be abandoned by everyone at once, or end in fiery armageddon.
This is how the entire planet was farmed. Richard Manning’s Against the Grain puts this history in its proper, horrific context, and also highlights the continuity with our current Green Revolution, as a means of further “cheating” now that we’ve finally run out of arable land to gobble up.
Civilization, unlike other forms of human society, is capable of expanding, and because it is capable of it, it is compelled to do it by threat of what might happen if it does’t. This isn’t just competition between civilizations, though; it permeates every level of society. The competition between someone at a desk job and his coworkers is likewise a game of Prisoner’s Dilemna, where they all accelerate civilization’s growth, to the detriment of all players. Just look at how working hours in the U.S. have skyrocketed, with fear of replacement–one couldn’t ask for a better example of this at a low level of society.
Civilization has expanded for 10,000 years, and we should bear in mind what a small amount of time that is on the scale of social organization. It’s less than 1% of humanity’s total history on this planet, and for most of that time, it was a distinct minority among human social systems.
But yes, anything is sustainable on a sufficiently short timeline. Burning your house down for warmth will work for several minutes. But when you create a large population that you can’t sustain, you ensure that die-off will happen. That’s what the ecological concept of overshoot is all about, and that’s exactly what civilization has done. 6.5 billion canot be sustained, not even on the term of a few more decades, so civilization, like any overshoot scenario, has ensured massive die-off. Placing the blame for this on primitivists is no better than placing the blame for abuse on the victims.
There is such a thing as sustainable cultivation; it’s called horticulture, or permaculture. But to be sustainable, you need to use intercropping, you need to support non-food species, you basically need to create a full-blown ecosystem. This does not scale well. Horticulture, as Marvin Harris shows in his Cultural Anthropology textbook, is the most efficient subsistence technology we have, but in absolute terms, it cannot produce enough food to support more than a few millions if implemented on a global scale, with a densty that gets you to a village level.
To produce more food requires compromises with sustainability: packing in more food and less non-food, to begin monocropping to allow more scale, or to otherwise make the system less sustainable. To support anything like our current population requires voraciously unsustainable methods. This is not a matter of conjecture or thought experiments; this relationship is well documented. Billions simply cannot be supported. Anything that would allow billions in the short time, destroys its own ecological foundation. It is a guarantee of die-off.
That’s not true. They did, in fact, do some damage to their ecologies, but their ecologies were generally able to replenish themselves at an equal rate. But complexity wins in the end. Note the Aswan Damn in Egypt, which has ended the annual flood and had enormous implications for Egyptian agriculture. Because Egypt was in contact with other civilizations, the game of Prisoner’s Dilemna pushed both it, and the cultures that sometimes beat it, to ever-higher levels of complexity. In any possible scenario, something like the Aswan Dam eventually emerges. Even in the most healthy ecosystems which might be able to keep up with low levels of complexity, eventually a level of complexity is reached that is sufficiently high to destroy that ecology. Every ecology has a level of complexity it can maintain: if your society depends on cosntantly increasing its complexity, you will eventually cross that threshold.
Any alpha predator moving into a new area causes a certain period of adjustment. Most of the Pleistocene extinction was over before humans entered North America. Humans are part of the world, and have an impact on it, but the impact of pre-civilized humans is most easily compared to the impact of wolves or lions, while the impact of civilized humans makes even comparisons to previous mass extinctions fade by comparison.
The current mass extinction is far, far beyond a mere attempt to find balance. It’s an unprecedented catastrophe in the planet’s history. Completely unparalleled. It is the single greatest catastrophe in the earth’s history.
A civilization’s existence is predicated on growth, because at its most basic level, it is a losing proposition: farming costs more energy than it provides. If you use less energy than you provide, you’re not farming anymore, you’re gardening, and you’re not supporting cities, you’re supporting villages. This is perpetuated throughout the civilized system, because the only way to make the current shortfall work is to balance it against the promise of future gain. Our current civilization uses the interest system to express this, but previous civilizations used patronage and feudalism to achieve the same end. A civilization that does not grow betrays the most basic promise that makes agriculture work, and makes agriculture an utterly losing proposition.
There’s an excellent example of what I’m talking about. What do they like about urban/suburban living? Usually, they’ll say something about the activity, the hustle and bustle, that there’s always something to do. That’s what primitives get out of their fairs, and because they have real relationships with one another, the fairs are all they need. What about colleges and universities? Is it the buildings themselves? Probably not. It’s probably the learning, or the partying, both of which are very much a part of primitive life. Cars and computers? I doubt they like these things in and of themselves. They like the things those technologies afford–maybe transportation, maybe feeling cool, maybe the chance to talk to someone online you feel really understands you. In other words, the things people are REALLY after in these things are never civilized. They are, in fact, things that civilization squelches, and primitive life nurtures.
Why should it be so surprising? We didn’t evolve in civilizations; we evolved in tribes. Our deepest wants are tribal wants, even if we satisfy them with superficially civilized relics.
I think you fail to understand how difficult leaving civilization is while civilization is still growing. It’s a death sentence. Socrates’ notion of implied consent because he lived in Athens made a lot more sense when there was still an “outside of Athens” to go to. Today, where can a primitivist go?
Of course, civilization’s peaking, and will soon contract catastrophically. Then you can judge people by their actions, because that will be the first moment when there will be a space opening up where primitive life will be possible. Civilization’s need to grow precludes any possibily for co-existence.
His associations with such things have more to do with enculturation, than the things themselves. I doubt he’s reacting to the activities themselves; rather, he’s reacting to a cultural construction of them.
The life of the elite approaches that of the primitive. The lifespans, diets, and health of our elites rival those of the hunter-gatherer. The elites must still work a few hours a day to keep their empires going: just like hunter-gatherers must work a few (2-6) hours a day to keep themselves happy and well-fed. Even the activities of the elite–hunting, fishing, camping, etc.–approximate the primitive life. This was the ultimate origin of the phrase, “the Noble Savage,” noting the similarities in lifestyle between any given hunter-gatherer, and Europe’s kings.
The difference between foraging tribes and agricultural civilization, is that in tribes everyone lives like a king, while civilizations enslave millions so that a small elite can live like savages.
Why would they talk about it? Primitives don’t talk about primitivism. Why would they? They’re already living it. It’s not “primitivism” to them, it’s just their life. “Primitivism” is a very artificial bridge that tries to move us from where we are, to where we want to be. I’m not saying Africa, torn by the legacy of European colonialism and suspended eternally half-way through collapse by meddling minions of complexity like the World Bank or the IMF, is a model of primitive life, but they’re closer to it than we are. Some want more complexity; some less. Either would be an improvement, because the only thing worse than civilization is to be caught in between.
But civilization destroys that! It creates homogeneity through globalization (once upon a time, it was called Hellenism). The process is never complete, but that is what civilization drives towards, nonetheless. Meanwhile, the richness and diversity of primitive art is far, far beyond anything offered in the civilized world, and through fairs and trade, one is exposed to other styles from far away as well. It’s just another myth that civilzation offers us more diversty in art; in actual fact, the catastrophic loss of diversity in our art is one of civilization’s major crimes.
You’ll live longer, you’ll be happier, you’ll be healthier, you’ll enjoy more art, more music, more knowledge, and more diversity across the board–artistic, cultural, ecological, you name it. Now, it’s up to you to decide whether or not that’s an “improvement,” but I think you’d be a very unique person if you think that isn’t.
Most of the human race will refuse to hear it. It doesn’t matter how true it is; they have to believe that civilization is humanity’s highest achievement, and they will die rather than question that. We identify with our abuser, and will defend it till the end. That’s why I say that survival will be a queston, first and foremost, of imagination. What I can do to help is sow the seeds of doubt in civilization, and spread a little fertilizer that maybe will spark the imagination about what life might be like beyond civilization. Maybe a few people will survive because of my efforts that might not otherwise have. If so, it will all be worthwhile. Maybe you’re not one of those people. Maybe you’re already too entrenched in the mythology of this civilization to question it. That’s your choice, ultimatley, and I can respect that. But I also hope that maybe someone else might read this discussion, and begin to question if that’s really what he wants for his life.
No, you get more of it. Much, much more. More liesure time means more art, and with fairs and continent-wide trade networks, and a real ecological basis, the art is more diverse and more profound.
I do not believe that you’re really looking for a large group of people to connect to. I believe you’re looking for a small group of people that truly understands you. In our civilization, no one has the time to do that, so you reach out across the whole world to find someone who can. But in a wandering free family, getting to truly understand you is what most of life is about. You won’t need to circle the world. Your tribe–your family–will not only have the time to understand you, but they’ll have every reason in the world to do so.
Because that’s a false impression methodically created to maintain faith in our civilization. The breadth and diversity is superficial, and dwindling, while REAL diversity is catastrophically wiped out.
Do you really want to define yourself so narrowly, or is this how you express your desire to contribute to your society? Tribes need educators too, y’know, and not all children are born without impediment or problem. Wouldn’t it be nice to be more than just one narrowly defined specialty, to be respected as a person, and to contribute to your society in many different ways, as your talents and the opportunity allow–including teaching children with special needs?
Sure you do. Nothing can grow infinitely in a finite universe, and the universe we can get to is finite, even if the universe beyond it may not be. So any way of life that depends on constant growth is doomed to fail.
I didn’t say everyone thinks civilization is evil, I said no one likes civilization. They THINK they like civilization, but what they like is usually something that’s still here in spite of civilization.
I didn’t say the myth was that if you don’t support civilization you’ll die, I said the myth was that life without civilization is horrible. But you’re right, 6.5 billion can’t be supported without civilization. Then again, 6.5 billion can’t be supported with civilization, either, so in what way does this justify all the rest that civlization is responsible for?
Oh no, I can see it as many different things. Many of those things, like “necessary evil” or even “better of two evils,” require me to ignore some known facts of the matter, but I can see several views of civilization even wihtout that. I just find the view of “civilization as abuse” to be very helpful in understanding how civilized people relate to their civilization.
For any action or combination of actions we take, it will fall into one of two possibilities: either it will allow civilization to grow, or it will not. If not, we cause collapse. If so, then civilization will grow to the physical limits imposed by things like the earth’s resources, or the ecological requirements of human life, and collapse–possibly as part of human extinction. Either way, civilization collapses. QED.
What’s the alternative? Growing forver?
Which is why I phrased it like that, but the only perspective I have is my own, y’know?
But those techniques obviously did not deplete the soils of Egypt (prior to the Aswan Dam) and China (prior to colonization). You did not explain why Chinese soils did not erode, nor did you mention the Incas in your reply.
So if the soil is not being destroyed, why is there a need to expand?
Also, why does horticulture only scale at the village level? And what about permaculture?
Also, what village level are you talking about via horticulture or permaculture?
But they do not say that civilization MUST always grow, and is reliant on constant growth.
True, and I do contribute in other ways. I just thought that specialization and careers were unsustainable.
Because I’m not an expert on Peru or China, but I think this is a very superficial rebuttal. If they could have capped their complexity at the ancient Egyptian level and no more–well, yes, if a lot of things. If perpetual motion machines worked. The fact is, the Prisoner’s Dilemna is an escalation that cannot be escaped, even if everyone invovled want to stop (I doubt any of the nuclear powers are keen on nuclear war, and yet they’re still compelled to maintain their arsenals). Egypt couldn’t just stop when it was still sustainable–it could have more complexity, so it had to go for it. Eventually, it reached a level of complexity–with the Aswan Dam–that undermined its ecological foundation. Every ecology has a threshold of complexity it can bear, and any system that depends on constantly increasing complexity will eventually cross that threshold.
Let’s use Egypt, since it’s an example I know well. We’re both lords of ancient Egyptian nomes, and a wierd decade has opened up an oasis near me that isn’t normally fertile. Now I know that if I expand there it won’t last, but I also don’t know what oases the rains might have left next to your nome. Are you farming some temporary oasis right now, gathering the forces to take my lands? I need to start farming all of my oases, just to keep up with your plans against me.
So, even though it might be sustainable in this particular ecology (the Nile), it’s still compelled by the Prisoner’s Dilemna to expand beyond that at the first opportunity. Notice, too, that the Middle Kingdom was bigger than the Old Kingdom, and the New Kingdom was bigger still.
Permaculture basically is horticulture. A lot of permacultural techniques were first used by horticultural cultures. But it caps out at the village level for limitations of scale. Population density is largely a function of food density, and while the operative parts of a permaculture garden can sustain higher density than a modern farm, they need more land around them, so that the average yield per acre across the entire system is lower. When you factor in the energy cost of transport and other factors limiting scale, you wind up with permaculture able to support villages of about 300 people or so.
The Rubicon of specialization separates emphasis from exclusivity. If you’re just the guy who likes teaching kids, there’s no problem. The problem arises when you’re the only one who knows how.
But Peru and China did prior to colonization by the West. Same with the ancient Egyptians. Their levels of complexity did not deplete the arability of the soil until they were colonized.
So you’re not an expert about the Incas and the Chinese? They were civilizations, and people like John Michael Greer argue that this is evidence they were sustainable. And if you are not an expert, how can you say that the rebutal is superficial if you’re not an expert on the civilization?
I’m not a total expert of those limiting factors, transport, and scale that you mention (and I’ll definitely do some research here), so I won’t argue you here–I’ll just remain agnostic. But I won’t debate you here either. I do know, however, that un-civilized societies did have villages much larger regardless of their sustainability, like the Iroquois, Seneca, and the Kwakiutl, and the Iroquois are horticultural.
As for the population arguments, since you have argued that human population is a function of food supply, it is obviously possible to feed 6.5 billion people at this present moment–otherwise there wouldn’t be 6.5 billion people.
Well, now I’m really off to a trip for the rest of the week, so you may respond to my present comments, but this discussion is now over.
I’ll return next week as I brim with curiosity about your theories, Jason.
And finally…
Why is this a problem, and a Rubicon?
Egyptian complexity increased through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. Now, the ecology of the Nile was extremely abundant–it takes a lot of complexity to break it. Its threshold was very high. But with complexity steadily increasing, that threshold had to be reached eventually. It happened to be the Aswan Dam, but no matter how you set it up, such a level of complexity would eventually be reached. I don’t know as much about China or Peru, but I know their complexity was also increasing, and I believe there was some evidence of the ecology beginning to tip.
Pointing out that they were conquered by a more complex neighbor does little to change this fact of escalation, as such conquest is precisely what motivates the Prisoner’s Dilemna that underlies this compulsion to grow.
I’ve certainly studied them both to a certain extent, but I haven’t dedicated years of study to either one. Egypt I know a little better. But it’s a superficial rebuttal on purely logical grounds. My argument is, “X, therefore Y,” in this case, competition and the Prisoner’s Dilemna, therefore growth. Your rebuttal took the form of, “Aside from instances of X, not Y.” You pointed out how some civilizations still had a theoretical sustainability at some earlier point in their escalation, even though the historical record shows they did expand, without exception, at all available opportunities, and that at least one of them is no longer at a point where they are sustainable. So, it’s not really a rebuttal at all, is it?
Do I know you, “Peaknickster”? You’re using the EXACT same arguments that one “Taylor” used at Anthropik recently. He, too, responded voluminously in comments, and he had a penchant for sock puppets. We ended up having to ban him simply because he was monopolizing all of our discussions, and trying to keep up with him was running me into the ground.
At any rate, anthropologists argue whether to place the Haudenosaunee in horticulture, or agriculture. The Leauge certainly had many things in common with states, and their production levels and techniques had a lot in common with agriculture. The Kwakiutl, of course, weren’t horticulturalists, but foragers in a very unusual circumstance, and thus bound by very different dynamics. Now all these things are called “villages,” but of course, things like density and population are better seen through the lens of their subsistence technology, than where they fall on our scale of population density. The villages you refer to were one of two kinds: (1) short-lived ones (because, as mentioned above, anything is sustainable on a sufficiently short timeline), or (2) dependent on tribute from outlying villages. This required a collection of surplus into the center, which had to be maintained through some sort of coercion, whether ideological or military. Regardless, the exertion of such coercion is necessarily brittle, and the regular production of sufficient energy to maintain such complexity is usually (save in rare exceptions, like that of the Kwakiutl) unsustainable.
The result of all this hemming and hawing of course is that there will likely be small pockets where geographically-hemmed, neolithic kingdoms rise and fall, even centuries into the future. I consider this a very different thing than the global hegemony civilization now inflicts.
Quite right. But the means to feed 6.5 billion people for one year is supplied by a given ecological resource base. However, in order to feed 6.5 billion people this year requires techniques that deplete the ecological resources needed to do the same thing next year. Eventually, we will be unable to feed our population, as the ecological base required to produce that much food is destroyed by producing that much food. This is exactly what agriculture has done in a swath across the world, as Richard Mannng fully explores in Against the Grain. From the Fertile Crescent to the Dust Bowl, most of the world’s deserts have been created, or enlarged, by agricultural practices. This is what it means to be unsustainable: the current practice eliminates the resources necessary for future practice, so that eventually, the practice will need to be given up.
With emphasis, you’re simply playing to one’s skills. With exclusivity, you’ve introduced a new level of complexity, with full-time specialists. Now you have a class that produces food, and a class that consumes it. You can move this inequality around all you like, but the fundamental mismatch of such systemic inequality with the evolved human sensibilities of egalitarianism (humans, cross-culturally, experience less stress even when they have fewer resources, so long as everyone around them has just as little) means that such a system cannot work for humans for very long.
No, I’m not Taylor, but I can see I’ve gone too far with arguing with you. I can’t understand your arguments about human nature, and why a society with specialization cannot work for humans for very long solely on the basis of human nature (since the Kwakiutl and Sungir had specialization and did not collapse for 10000 years).
I apologize for running you into the ground.
I just don’t see how anyone can assert a claim like this, since we don’t know every person in the world, and thus cannot see why you can say that NOBODY, NO MATTER WHAT likes civilization. I can’t see why you can’t think outside the box.
Okay, I’ll go now. I’m not expecting a response anyway.
I’ll just wait here in the Chicago area as the collapse comes, since I’m sure you’ll argue it is doomed to collapse…I read Taylor’s comments on the Anthropik forum. but no, I’m not him, even though we do live in the same metro area.
Holy shit! 74 comments? Too bad I won’t have time to wade through all this until Friday. I was hoping this would help to end the conversation not make it flare up even worse!
WTF, mate?
Now you know how we felt.
As promised…
If you’re not Taylor, then there’s no need to apologize; it was Taylor who ran me into the ground. But I must say the resemblance is uncanny. I didn’t know Taylor was from Chicago, but not only have you hit on the exact same points, you’ve also adopted here the exact same, passive-aggressive “I don’t expect a response” answer that he favored. You’re both pursuing careers in special education. My main problem with Taylor (besides the fact that I just plain couldn’t keep up with his comment volume) was his use of sock puppets. Wouldn’t have had any problem if he’d just been forthright about who he was, instead of trying to trick everyone. But you’re not Taylor, so I apologize for the mistake.
In both cases, they didn’t have exclusive specialization; they had emphasized specialization.
You don’t need to ask everyone on the planet in order to draw a conclusion like, “Nobody likes being immolated in a fiery conflagration.” We’ve studied the psychological effects of hierarchy, disparate access to resources, and the other defining traits of civilization, and we know that these are fairly universally negative. Sure, conditioning can make even the most degrading experience pleasant, but that takes training and conditioning. I could train someone to enjoy being burned, but I think it would still be a fair statement that people don’t like being immolated in a fiery conflagration. So, when someone says they like civilization, they’re not talking about the defining traits of civilization—intense compulsion to growth, massive complexity, domination by others, disparity of wealth, overpopulation, etc.—but some other thing that they’ve attached to that concept, like art or music. Of course, as we’ve seen, such attachments are misplaced, so that leaves civilization with all the bad and none of the good. Follow?
Truth doesn’t need so much defending, certainly in this present company. An excess of words distracts from the case.
Benign change, like physical movement in space, can only come about inch by inch. To be thrust suddenly back into the Stone Age as allegedly threatened to President Pervez Musharraf by the US Government via Richard Armitage, would be extreme violence.
People don’t change course by being defeated in argument. They change course because it feels good to do so, or from necessity.
With all due respect, I think that it’s fairly obvious this isn’t true. Most people believe many things that are not true, and will defend those things endlessly. So truth does need quite a bit of defending, quite often.
This is precisely why I’ve largely given up on any possibility of anything other than collapse–because most people will never be convinced, no matter how overwhelming the evidence is. Even those who are, are largely powerless to act on it until civilization begins to collapse. If we’re steaming ahead towards collapse, and most of us refuse to see it, and those who do are powerless to do anything until it’s thoroughly underway, then in what scenario is there a way out of it?
Anyone who’s debated literal 6-day creationists (or pro-Iraq war Bushites) will tell you, truth needs a lot of defending. All the time. Endlessly.
With respect, surely there are more constructive things to do with one’s precious life than engage in debates with them?
There is a certain threshold at which I simply walk away, but admittedly, my threshold is very, very high. In debates such as these I am generally less concerned with persuading the other party, than in the discussion as it is preserved. Those who attack primitivism serve the purpose of lulling people back to sleep, convincing people there is no problem with civilization and that things are progressing just fine. If people want to believe this, then I certainly can’t stop them, but if someone believes this only because no one answered those notions, because no one offered a rebuttal, and they saw such ideas go unchallenged … and if, because of this, when civilization collapses they die simply because no one ever sparked their imagination to consider the possibilities of life beyond civilization … then am I not culpable, by neglect? Whoever wants to believe that we can grow forever will do so, regardless of what I say. Whoever has the imagination to consider life beyond civilization, though, needs that spark to inspire it. I am indebted to others who sparked my imagination, now it’s incumbent upon me to keep that spark alive. That means wading into discussions like this, and making sure that someone who comes back and reads through all this can see that the spark is still there, no matter how many people try to smother it.
Indeed, but your argument was that truth didn’t need to be defended. Just because it would be foolish to defend it in some instances, doesn’t mean that defense is not required - as evidenced by the large number creationists in this country.
If any one is gullible enough to wade through all the idiotic muddlings of belief you have made I pity them. They would have to be lost souls, grasping at straws, or believers in your brand of thinking. Believers being the operative word.
It is rather funny to see a young dog chase its tail. Every once in a while they catch it and sometimes even bite it. Reality bites usually then makes this tail chasing stop.
You two are much like snake handlers and holey rollers for your belief system.
It has been pointed out that nothing can grow for ever. Technocracy grapples with all the problems of maintaining society. I know you are not interested though, that is why it is not fun to debate people that already think they are either inspired by god in their arguments, or like you two, who are intellectual dead enders bent on your comic and dehumanizing beliefs.
Should I mention that I think the same of Technocracy? So what? You think as you do, and I think as I do, so what good does this kind of rhetoric do? It just proves you know how to use invective.
Except for diminishing returns. Or Jevons Paradox. Hell, your study course even made the case that we could have agriculture without soil, so long as the constituent chemicals were there, without any understanding of the ecology of microbes, insects and other plants that make for a healthy crop. That’s actually exactly my problem with Technocracy. It begins with the hubristic assumption that human reason is capable of accounting for all the factors involved. That damned study course just proved over and over and over again how wrong-headed that assumption is. It failed to mention so many critical factors that are so often overlooked.
I put in the time to read your study course—have you read the Thirty Theses? As for dehumanizing, I can’t think of anything more dehumanizing than the mass society Technocracy envisions. Despite the occasional nod to the fact that humans are animals, it still maintains that human population is an independent variable, rather than a function of food supply, and it plans on how to feed billions in a sustainable scheme based on hydroponics and an utter ignorance of soil ecology. At the most basic level, that kind of overpopulation is dehumanizing for the basic reason Asimov (himself having a Technocratic sympathy) said: “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you jam more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more there are, the less one person matters.”
So, congratulations, Skip, you’ve proven again that you can use rhetoric and invective. I hope I’ve proven the same. Perhaps with that out of the way, you might finally mention a fact or two that you think supports your contention that primitivism is so “comic”? You’ve thrown up a lot of softballs, but nothing I haven’t been able to hit. I think you need to tone down the hysterics just a wee bit until you do, don’t you?
Again I have no idea what you have been reading , but not the Study Course. Could you quote me the line in it where we are planning on feeding billions.? This again is disinformation on your part. Again you prove that you will do anything to try to get over with your ideas.
Nod to humans as animals.? We have a chapter entitled the Human Animal.
Also we are not a Democratic system as you mention. Not hardly at all. No politics involved unless you count electing only one person.
Only one person is elected in our system , the reason being there is no one above them to appoint them to higher office among our Sequence Directors. That would be the Continental Director, who also can be recalled very easily. This person attains this position through an open ballot. The only one. Don`t accuse of Democracy. Not true. Democracy is Fascism of the many. No thanks. Science eliminates Democracy .
Funny you call it , that damned Study Course. I think I got your number when comparing your belief musings , to religious people, and their stubborn insistence that the unreal is real. You got yours through a stilted interpretation of science. Not that much different . Brain washing is brain washing. The old joke, if you believe the premise the rest is easy , applies to pseudo-science as well as religion.
Human population is a function of the food supply. So what else is new. Da.
As I have said your Tainter is from our school of thinking. We do not argue with the fact that we are going to do the crash test , and soon. Then the nightmare begins in the world you envision, or an interesting , humanitarian, and scientifically oriented world begins , maybe for this area. No doubt much of the rest of the world is doomed due to lack of resources. That will be too bad, but you have to start somewhere. We chose North America. It is a uniquely American concept.
So you think confusing the tongues will work. ? How many more belief systems by ignorant barbarians will humans go through again.? How many dark and crippling belief systems of torture and lack of knowledge and understanding. ? How many people will just wipe out the other tribe for their belief system , which like yours does not really make sense , unless it is emotionally opted for as a belief system, akin to religion.?
BTW , We are not hung up on any particular way to grow food. Whatever the most up to date science , and fact based way is the way. You would have a hard time saying that science is biased. It`s not. The latest science is the same anywhere. It is not a pet cult of ideas about what is best for humans.
I read this—it’s linked from your site with the text, “Click HERE to read the original Technocracy study course first published in 1934. This book is key to the understanding of technocracy.” I assumed from that, that this was the holy “study course” you keep invoking.
Section 23.6, on agriculture, sketches out an agricultural “plan.” It comes up with a purely theoretical maximum yield based on the idea that nitrogen is the only necessary input (”Could you quote me the line in it where we are planning on feeding billions.” p. 248, last paragraph), and when it finds that our actual yields are much lower (perish the thought!) it concludes that “our American agriculture is operating at an extremely low efficiency—less than 10 percent of the theoretical maximum, and only about 15 percent of actual best performance under field conditions.” (pp. 249-250) Of course, it’s not the actual data that’s at fault here, but the theory: there’s a lot more that goes into working cultivation than just nitrogen. The study course even goes so far as to state:
The stupidity of such a statement defies belief. Plants rely on far more than just the inert chemicals present in soil. Healthy soil is an ecosystem of its own, with microbes, insects, and other plants supporting one another. This is why hydroponics has proven so difficult in actual practice, despite theories as in Technocracy. Now, compare this facile understanding of ecology to that expressed by primitivist author William Kötke in The Final Empire:
Given that the Technocracy study guide not only plans to feed the two billion people on earth in 1930, but also to dramatically increase that food supply. So I think it’s fairly obvious they plan to feed billions from that, don’t you?
Yes, that was the nod. I read it, and it was certainly better than most of the assessments of human nature, which normally rely on our separation from nature. And yet, there was still no real acknowledgement of what that implies: like the human population being a function of food supply, just like any other animal. Now, it does acknowledge that birth rate in other animals is dependent on energy supply (p. 69, paragraph 1), yet on p. 157, it mentions “the increase of education and of birth control” as means by which humans can control their own birth rate. In other words, despite the nod to humanity’s animal nature, they still refuse to believe it, because they don’t follow through the implications of that fact.
Who said it was? I quoted Asimov, who felt that democracy couldn’t survive overpopulation any more than human dignity. It was the dignity part I was interested in, but I decided to quote fully despite the fact that not every word of it was immediately relevant.
You know that’s a democratic system, right? (Not in the classical sense, but certainly in the modern political science usage) Calling it not a democratic system doesn’t change the fact that you meet all the defining criteria as much as any contemporary republic.
Again, this is meaningless bluster. I could say the same of you. I called it “that damned study course” because I forced myself to read it all the way through, despite the fact that it was one of the most aggrevating things I’ve ever forced myself to read, alternating from insulting my intelligence, to utter overconfidence in its shallow analysis.
That’s possible, but do you actually know this? Have you read Tainter?
Now, we know what primitive life is like. It’s the only way of life in which most people are happy, most of the time. It’s the way of life where people live longest and healthiest. That’s your “nightmare”? Where do you get an idea like that from?
Of course, I know where you get it from—it’s our civilization’s essential mythology. The better question is, why should we believe it any more simply because you repeat it forcefully, when there is such an abundant body of evidence debunking it?
I’m not sure I could follow that logorrhea correctly, but I’ll do my best….
(1) “Confusing the tongues” allows much greater diversity of thought, since thought is so firmly rooted in language. See Sapir-Whorf.
(2) Primitive societies are actually amazingly similar in their beliefs: they’re all animists. Animism is actually firmly rooted in our experience of the world. See David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous. He’s a doctor of philosophy, and he ties animism to phenomenology.
(3) Torture is only known among the civilizations you seem intent on preserving (the Haudenosaunee practiced torture, but I’ve written a good bit about them as a proto-civilization in many ways), and knowledge is withheld from people only in hierarchical civilization, where the culture’s knowledge is reserved solely for the elite, so that masses may be kept ignorant and subservient.
(4) Tribes rarely wipe each other out, but never for belief systems. Really, no one dies for religion. I wrote an article on Anthropik titled, “No One Dies for Religion,” where I showed this, but I won’t link it here for fear of the spam filter.
I know. That’s just one way in which Technocracy ignores the important factors of culture (see my thesis #8—any culture is, first and foremost, a strategy for obtaining food), in favor of its oversimplified theories. As one would expect from such a theoretical approach, it fails to grasp what the most important facets of a functioning culture is. Technocracy’s axiom is the same as the Enlightenment’s: that human reason is sufficient to comprehend the universe. Without that axiom, how could we ever assume that humans could simply dream up a system that actually accounts for all the complexities a culture must deal with?
That’s true, but despite its protestations otherwise, I see Technocracy invoking science often, but rarely actually based in it. Science is a wonderful tool, but science also tells us how limited science is. From those limitations, we would never think that science would be sufficient to put together a functioning culture (see complexity theory or chaos theory). In the 1930s, we were still deeply influenced by what Catton called “the Age of Exuberance,” and it shows in Technocracy—its unbridled faith in human ingenuity and the endless possibility of invention to allow us to grow forever. The study course positively drips with it. But since then, science has progressed, and what we’ve learned is primarily how little we’ve learned.
So, what is “the most up to date science and fact based way”? Unsurprisingly, the more we learn about indigenous societies and sustainable living, the more we learn that way is the way evolution gave us before we presumed to know better, and start making our own culture—i.e., civilization. Permaculture is a veritable case study in this—a scientific exercise in re-inventing the wheel, only to find out these same techniques had been used by horticultural tribes for millennia.
Of course, if you’d extended me the same courtesy I did you and read the Thirty Theses, you’d know this already. I defend primitivism almost exclusively in terms of the latest science. It’s a very academic work. I notice you didn’t answer me about whether you’d read it….
, the endless possibility of human invention , to allow us to grow forever , you mention above.
We say just the opposite.
You are used to using this arguement on every one.
You do not need this arguement when talking to a Technocrat, we see that as a given.
Not only are we not going to grow forever, we are going to crash and burn. Sooner rather than later.
Jason again you do not get technocracy at all. You say above that not only does Technocracy plan on feeding the 2 billion people on earth in 1930, but dramatically increase the food supply etc.
How you got this idea I do not know. Technocracy is a closed system for North America only. Our plan of the Technate is only for North America. Think of it as a big new Tribe of people that are free of belief systems, but also embrace the best of culture .
We were not planning on feeding the population of the 1930 world of 2 billion. Don`t know how you interpreted that.
Technocracy is strictly a plan for North America only. Think of it as a big Science tribe if that helps. Freedom of and from belief. Secular/Humanistic. No belief. No Politics. Advanced Ecology. Limits of growth . Environmental repair. No banks. No insurance. Every thing free. Housing , food, education, free. Belief laughed at for what it is. Brainwashing. Minimal work. Abundance. Education. Freedom of action.
Also when you mention growth and invention which you do frequently it is in the wrong context when talking to a Technocrat. We know better, and also know that the crash test is coming soon. Sooner rather than later. That we both know , and that I know you won`t disagree about.
Well I didn’t see anything about massive die-off, so I assumed you planned on keeping them all alive. Wow, you guys were really planning on billions of people dying and you weren’t even telling anyone? Damn, that’s cold.
Technocracy definitely has that uniquely American flavor, and of course that’s where it’s history lies, but I thought the hope was for other regions to pick it up. I mean, the Tribe of Anthropik is for us, but we’re also hoping to provide an example for others. If Technocracy’s just for North America … wow, that’s really selfish.
Unless, of course, you count the belief that human reason is godlike in its unlimited capacity, or that human reason is sufficient to imagine a functioning, complex system. Secularism and humanism are both beliefs, too, of course.
Except a fairly complicated political system of directors, appointees, and administration–which would be the definition of politics….
These two points contradict one another. If everything is free, there are no limits; if there are limits, then nothing’s free. A cost in energy is still very much a cost–it’s really the only cost that ever really mattered.
People are limited in the sense that one person can only eat so much food , and you can only own so many pairs of pants. It won`t make sense to hoard in a system were you don`t need to. A good education minus the consumer brainwashing will change things.
It is not a Political system. More like a meritocracy/vertical advancement business system, minus the money aspect of decision making. Money determines all choices now. No money in our system. Only energy. Descisions would be made from that standpoint.
A secular/humanistic system qualifies as a belief system, as does any theory about culture from humans. I mentioned that before. I don`t have a problem with it. I don`t claim as you do, that you are right about human behaviour and human destiny.
Ours is only a practical and realistic approach. With humans there is no right way.
As far as billions of people dying that is a pity. Nothing can be done about that. This is nothing new. Our plan is for north America to survive the coming energy/resource collapse. You have to start somewhere. It may be possible in the long term to assist the world with other land area technates. If they are interested.
As stated before the cost of energy is a scam, run by the power possessors. Energy can be free. How energy is produced is the real question. Do we leave a nasty big footprint producing it , or do we do it with as little ecological damage as possible, and try to go for no damage as a goal.
Thanks for your responses. I respect your replies, and with 74 comments, I think that will do. I rspect your apology, and I understand why you considered that.
But I disagree that you think it is a fair statement about people not liking to be burned–since if someone does like to be bruned, then quite frankly, they like to be burned, and that disproves that absolute rule.
And if you need to kick me off here, Tim, you can. I respect your need to read through all this.
Well, as we’ve already seen, humans are animals, and all animal populations are products of their food supplies. If food is free, then everyone can have all the food they want, so everyone can have as many children as they want, so the population would explode. If you want to limit population, you need to limit food supply, which means food can’t be free, and since food is the basis for everything else, then nothing else can be free, either. This is just one example; others abound. You can’t have it both ways.
Based on whose ideas of what is meritous? A meritocracy is still very much a political system. You compare it to a business, but surely you’ve heard of “office politics”? Even egalitarian bands have political systems (in their case, the gossip loops and formal consensus). The only question is the nature of the politics.
Heh, funny, the central pillar of Daniel Quinn’s system of thought is “There is no one right way to live.” Of course, each tribe has its way, but there’s no single right way for everyone. Primitivism is not a single thing, of course; it includes the overwhelming majority of humanity’s cultural diversity, since civilizations are forced into a very narrow band of conformity by how incredibly marginal and tenuous its foundations are. But we’re also talking about evolution: not all ways are equal. Primitivism looks very, very different, depending on where you are, because it’s an adaptation to your own “spirit of place,” wherever that place may be, so there can never be a global vision of primitivism. In fact, it’s largely its homogeneity that makes civilization so untenable. It could work, concievably, if it could tolerate staying in a particular geographical niche–but it can’t. It has to grow. It has to impose itself on everyone, and consume all life, or it will die. That’s why it’s self-defeating. Primitivism doesn’t have any vision of how all people should live; it spreads out a whole wide spectrum of possibilities and says, “The way you’re living now is killing you and everything around you. If you don’t like that, there’s a whole world of possibilities that don’t require that at all.”
But, back to the topic at hand, you may not have a problem with a secular/humanist belief system, but others do. Note how agitated you are with the imposition of others’ beliefs–such as when Christian beliefs are imposed on you. I stifle at this, myself. My question is, you may not have a problem with imposing secularism or humanism on others, but how can you justify imposing your beliefs on others, when you object to it so much when it’s done to you?
But if that’s what Technocracy believes, don’t you have a responsibility to do more about that? I mean, as primitivists, we deal with the moral implications of collapse and how to help others all the time. In the Tribe of Anthropik, it’s consuming our lives. Yet this past week is a fine example of how we’re raked over the coals for not doing enough in either regard. We’ve been called an elementary school for terrorists, worse than Christian theocrats, and even worse, because dedicating most of our lives to trying to mitigate collapse and help others survive it is not enough. Yet Technocracy foresees the very same problems, and doesn’t even mention this in the study course, and has no care whether its model can be used by other geographical regions. If primitivism is so evil because we dedicate our lives to this, how much more evil must Technocracy be to not even try?
I’m a bit aghast. I’m being attacked on all sides because I’m not doing enough, though I’ve dedicated my life to it, yet here you are, foreseeing the same thing I do, but you’re not doing a thing about it–why am I the one being attacked, and not you?
You can only eat so much, so you can only have so much energy. Energy I spend on X is energy I’m not spending on Y. If I eat a fruit, the cost is the energy it takes to pick it; the return is the energy in it. If I want meat, the cost is the energy of the hunt; the return is the energy in the meat. Energy always has a cost, because nothing in this world is ever truly free.
The reason there’s a footprint at all is because energy always has a cost. The footprint is an expression of that cost.
I think you are a nut. Your argumentation is always stilted toward your belief system. You are brainwashed. Your thoughts don`t add up to any kind of reality. You twist and turn a million ways.
The availability of food has nothing to do with population. Japan and Italy are an example of that. Again what you are saying is that food can not be free. In a Technate food is free. Education brings the population down.
You are nit picking about my saying it is not a political system. It is not a political system. It does away with politics. You don`t understand this apparently.
Again you are emotionally invested in your groups theories. Your natural way of humans as tribalists is only romance for you and your friends. My opinion.
Within a year of the Study Course being published , Technocracy was the fastest growing social movement in the U.S. Then is was squashed by the powers that be , and some societal things from the time period. We expected to be the next system and still do. There wasn`t 6 billion people back then to predict problems about.
If we had established ourselves then things would be very different here and elsewhere. We still think that if we are going to survive as any thing other than a collapsed fascist/authoritarian state run by corporations and religious cranks , our system will be a good and logical alternative, while maintaining a high energy, and vital intellectual humanitarian culture.
As stated earlier a human can put out only about 1/20th of a horse power of energy. Humans have been replaced as workers by Machines. A machine can create any number of things . The old fashioned concept of work, whether from your point of view as hunting and gathering , or going to a factory is pretty much over, or should be. We should be a play culture. Testing our selves by doing what we want. You do not understand Jason that you want to control people. Your theories don`t allow for much individuality. Large areas can be set aside for the things you like to do. Be primitive if that is what turns you on. You won`t get many takers , unless we are forced into it, and we don`t need to be.
While it is a pity that the world is overpopulated why guilt trip any body about that.
It is just a fact ,as what happens when there is not enough resources and to much population.
We pull the plug on the rest of the world , to get our house in order. If that sounds cruel to some so be it. You have to start somewhere, and the whole world is to big a place to start. We are uniquely set up here to begin here. We have the resources to survive, and have an interesting , vital, humanitarian , and practical program.
I think the same of you. So what? Where’s your evidence? As a more crass person might say, “Put up or shut up.”
*sigh*
Typical. For all the talk about being based in science, it’s really not, is it? For science, see my thesis #4, where I debunked such puerile counter-examples as Japan and Italy as being based in an extremely superficial understanding of our current social system. In a Technate, food is not free–it takes energy to produce, energy to harvest, and energy to consume. By calling it free, you’re merely ignoring whatever costs you can externalize. As for education, a common misconception, but correlation is not causation. Education does not bring down population; rather, education, like population, is a function of energy via complexity (also a function of energy). In a more complex society, a new member takes long to be enculturated, because there’s more “culture” to enculturate. This raises the energy cost of raising a new member of a society: the energy to educate him, to feed and shelter him during this period of education, and so forth. At the same time, such complexity usually diminishes the value of a child as a provider for his parents in old age, so the marginal return per child diminishes, so population drops.
Of course, our level of complexity is dependent on externalized costs and the exploitation of less complex areas of the world, so if those areas were to be made as complex as us, it would be at the cost of our own complexity. So, the population dynamic in Italy or Japan is a very localized phenomenon that’s dependent on the population dynamics in Mali. You can rearrange the patterns all you like, but human population is, was, and ever shall be a function of food supply.
No, I don’t understand. You say it does away with politics, and then you describe a political system. I don’t understand that.
Yes, that is your opinion, but I’ve not made any mention of my “romance” theories. I’ve made mention of actual studies done on human population, on social complexity, and on how they relate. You’ve simply re-iterated Technocratic talking points. So you’ll forgive me if I think it might not be me, but you, who’s simply emotionally invested in your group’s theories. (It should be mentioned I have many unique ideas in primitivism, and what I’m championing here does not come from any “group”–I have no “study course” to promulgate, unchanged since the 1930s. I have only the arguments I have made and the evidence I have gathered, so there really is no “group’s theories” for me, there’s just “my conclusions.”)
But there was two billion, which was already a major problem. Today, Islam is the fastest growing social movement in the U.S. Does this lend credibility to the notion that there is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet? If not, then what does your study course or history do to support your veracity?
When you get right down to it, there’s one major dividing line between Technocracy and primitivism. Technocracy believes that its theory will work, while primitivists know theirs will work. It’s working now–it’s been working for two million years. In all that time, it’s the only thing we’ve come up with that actually has been proven to work. And yes, it is “a good and logical alternative,” and while it may not maintain high levels of energy or complexity, it certainly does foster “a vital intellectual humanitarian culture.” Been doing that for two million years.
And before that, by livestock. For the purposes of a society, the two are interchangeable: both take in fuels that are useless to humans (whether grazing fields or oil), and transform that into energy humans can use. Given the study course’s discussion of engines, I would think you would understand this. This being the case, all the Industrial Revolution signified was the innovation of more efficient engines–a revolution in scale, not in kind. Humans had been using such “engines” to make agriculture work for 10,000 years before James Watt ever considered what he could do with steam.
You mean like hunter-gatherers, who enjoyed far more liesure time than any of us? Of course, machines can never replace all the work we need to do. It’s simply not in the nature of a machine to accomplish certain tasks, particularly those that involve any level of ambiguity, and to get the sophisticated machines that can even approach that limit, you need a level of complexity that brings with it a long, long list of such tasks that must be accomplished. It’s Jevons’ paradox–the more machines we make to increase our liesure time, the less liesure time we have.
I had no idea that I had such a desire to control people. I’ll report to the Continental Director immediately and see what he has to say about that impulse. But I’m afraid the facts belie your second statement: individuality has always been maximized in primtive cultures. Of all the forms we’ve tried, we’ve never had any that allowed for greater individual expression and freedom than among primitives. See Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, where he debunks many of the misconceptions about primtive life as “stifling” individual expression. This perception came from the “bad old days” of anthropology-as-imperialist-apologia, with heavy Eurocentric bias.
Not in any system dependent on growth. What’s set aside is simply consumed later. Our National Forests are as fine an example of this as one could ask for.
I don’t know, ask the people here who’ve been raking me over the coals the past week for it. I just want to know why I’m being singled out for this kind of abuse when I’m doing all I can to avert it, while you also see it coming, do nothing, and yet I don’t see one person here calling your movement an elementary school for terrorists, or worse than Dominionist Christians plotting a theocracy, or a crazed cult of genocidal madmen, or selfish, or inhuman, or any of the other things that have been hurled at me. Why do you think that is? My own pet theory is that it’s because Technocracy keeps alive that myth of human divinity, that our powers are limitless and godlike, while mine threatens our dominion by putting humanity in relationship with the rest of the living world as part of it, rather than ruler of it. I think that’s what really has everyone so upset, and why no one’s jumping on Technocracy.
Again a lot of false framing of things from my point of view Jason. We are not a growth system like you seem to think.
As far as people accusing you of stuff, that would go with the territory you have staked out. People are suspicious of others that want some, what many would think of as , not fun program, for all.
I would hope that you rehabilitate yourself with something more real than your present theory.
I do think you are a little mad. When you recover , I personally invite you to join our movement. You seem spell bound with this theory.
I wrote a full-length book on the evidence that we are. I’m afraid it’s going to take more than you saying “nuh uh” to convince me otherwise.
Primitivism is proven to be “fun.” It’s the only one that is! Yours sounds to me like mind-numbing drudgery, so I don’t think that’s a very useful criteria. So why do I get the flak about not caring or being selfish when I’m dedicating my life to helping others in the face of this catastrophe, while Technocrats have been, by your account, planning on this for some 60 years now without telling anyone, and, by your own admission, not caring about anyone who isn’t (1) a Technocrat and (2) a North American?
Being the only social system that’s ever actually worked out, I’d say we’ve pretty much got the market cornered on “reality.” Technocracy’s never actually been implemented. It’s all theory. I’m talking about a way of life that’s been working successfully and fulfilling all the goals you espouse for two million years; you’re talking about some plans on paper that nobody’s ever tried, and you’re lecturing me about being unrealistic?
The same to you, Skip.