The Forest People, which is about the Mbuti, — thewonder

One of my favourite books - even given the usual academic backlash.

What seems to be more reasonable, ethical, and viable is to actively disengage from society as such, salvaging what is good of it that we can, and to just kind of let it all fall apart. — thewonder

Isn’t that relocalisation of economies and transition engineering. I don’t even consider it a battle of left-right - globalising political theories. The best outcome after the collapse of state level order would be communities able to sustain local order - however that looks.

, I am extraordinarily doubtful of that a supermajority of the population is going to agree to participate within a socialist society in the coming eras, I do think that a pluralistic syncretic society is not only requisite, but also preferable, as the incorporation of political ideas outside of what I would prefer to tell you flat out is, but will say that I understand as Anarchism will have the effect of providing a certain balance to what would necessarily be an experiment in governance. — thewonder

But aren’t any political systems the kind of theory led approach that will have little relevance in a collapse back to small communities scratching a living?

The longer you live, the more experiences you have learnt to deal with, and so the less you need to learn. You've long had it all figured out down to the level of automaticism. — apokrisis

I wouldn’t say it’s the number of experiences you cope with that produces growth but the manner in which you organize those experiences. And each useful reorganization propels you into a new world , accelerating the possibilities of further growth rather than impeding them. Personal growth is akin to technological advances in cultural history. They evince an overall accelerative character.

What would be your ways of revolting against death?

Isn’t that relocalisation of economies and transition engineering. I don’t even consider it a battle of left-right - globalising political theories. The best outcome after the collapse of state level order would be communities able to sustain local order - however that looks. — apokrisis

Sort of, I guess, though order can become quite terrifying when brought to a point of excess, as it very well may be, given a societal and ecological collapse.

But aren’t any political systems the kind of theory led approach that will have little relevance in a collapse back to small communities scratching a living? — apokrisis

There'd have to be some model to work with. Anarchism seems rather apt for such generalized chaos.

What would be your ways of revolting against death? — Corvus

Honestly, doing things like reading the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, but, I would imagine that there is a kind of joie de vivre that I could actualize upon.

Honestly, doing things like reading the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, but, I would imagine that there is a kind of joie de vivre that I could actualize upon. — thewonder

Sure. I like the Rimbaud poems. They are mostly surreal, dark and nihilistic, but the vocabulary and atmosphere it creates is deep and rich. Problem with pleasure from life is that they can run out of steam, and take us back to the entrance to nihilism. And still time will keep dragging all of us to the dark reality of the future, where death is waiting.

Buddhism tells us the best way is, to detach every good thing in life. Desert everything, and just have a rag around the body, and beg to survive meditating and praying. Then life becomes so simple, banal and painful, death will feel like rescue from this world of suffering, taking us into some nirvana world. Understandable logic to some degree, but not for everyone, and definitely not for me.

I wouldn’t say it’s the number of experiences you cope with that produces growth but the manner in which you organize those experiences. — Joshs

I’m counting the number of adaptations. But of course that amounts to the same thing as the number of opportunities for reorganisation.

And if I single out experience, that is because the psychological model involves attentional processes creating some novel response, and that then bedding down into an accumulation of habit level - subconscious - response.

Personal growth is akin to technological advances in cultural history. They evince an overall accelerative character. — Joshs

That view is very much a product of living in a world of accelerating social and technological change - the one driven by fossil fuel exploitation. In a world living off the solar flux, adaptation would be asymptotic. Growth can approach its best fit in a stable world.

So personal growth is fun. And also stressful. I have nothing against it. A balance of the positives and negatives can always be the target.

But I want to be clear about how unnatural it might be to live “forever” in accelerative mode. That would require an exponential supply of energy and materials to match - along with a sink for the entropic waste the social system must transport across its physical boundaries.

If we can crack fusion in the next decade, it could be game on again. But if it is a civilisational future to be built on wind and solar, then that is a very different growth regime.

There'd have to be some model to work with. Anarchism seems rather apt for such generalized chaos. — thewonder

The transition town movement makes sense. We don’t have to repeat the medieval era because we head into the next stage with a technocratic governance mindset that is highly effective. Small rational communities will function very differently from small irrational ones.

So the question becomes do you live in a society that votes for modern technocratic best practice? If your country collapsed, there is a better chance that some actually civilised form of community order will result if you do. Otherwise, expect good old barbarian politics.

If I was framing this as a political discussion, then that might be the useful contrast. What does each pole of this response look like - the greenie dream of technocratic rule and permaculture, or the new barbarism of folk now equipped with assault rifles and recent memory of individualistic ideologies.

If we can crack fusion in the next decade, it could be game on again. But if it is a civilisational future to be built on wind and solar, then that is a very different growth regime. — apokrisis

Isnt there a distinction to be made between growth defined in classical economic terms ( GDP, etc) and growth of knowledge( scientific, technological, philosophical , literary)? If there were a catastrophic disruption of access to sources of energy for technological use, do you really think this would prevent individuals from continuing to transform their ways of understanding the world?

I think that that's kind of a false dichotomy. You contrast technocracy, which, as it is advanced by whom you call "greenies", cyber-utopianism, I think, it is called, with a fringe set of political philosophies as if we ought to take the former at its word without any form of critique whatsoever.

Isnt there a distinction to be made between growth defined in classical economic terms ( GDP, etc) and growth of knowledge( scientific, technological, philosophical , literary)? — Joshs

My position on this is based on my view of biological systems in general. So no. The two are clearly coupled. It is rooted in physical law - the second law of thermodynamics as applied to dissipative structure.

Dissipative structure is - to cite Stan Salthe again - a story of infodynamics. So the growth of information is the growth of the structure that creates the entropic gradient that dissipates the available free energy. And the availability of some source of free energy (along with a convenient sink to take the resulting waste) are then the reason that some informational structure would inevitably evolve to do the job.

Life and mind - biology and society - are accidents waiting to happen. If some store of free energy has accumulated - like half a billion years worth of heat distilled planktonic hydrocarbon trapped in deep sediment (petroleum), or ancient buried forests of carbon (coal) - then that is a glut of free energy in clear want of a technologically-minded social and economic system. And eventually such a system evolved to do the job - a system reaching its monetised apogee of unbounded growth under neo-liberal financialisation and globalisation.

So sure, the popular understanding of modern life is based on the mythology of the sciences versus the humanities, technology versus literature, base physics vs higher spiritual values, etc. The good old heaven and earth metaphysics that wants a clear separation of realms and responsibilities.

And that false dichotomy is the reason for so much angst - as expressed in the OP. Reality doesn't make sense if you try to live it by being both a romantic and a rationalist in some way that is authentic to both those cultural memes. But nor does reality give you a chance to live by just one of those two ways of life as the reality is they are two halves of the one whole system. Popular culture has just failed to recognise that fact.

My point is that information and entropy are wedded together in the form of a dissipative structure - the infodynamic thesis. And biology is all about the paired growth of negentropy and entropy. So if you see through the obscuring veil of the culture wars - the rational Enlightenment and its irrationalist Romantic reaction - you will see how the burning of fossil fuels demands iPhones in colours that best match your rainbow personality.

Fossil fuel puts pressure on the human race to finish the job it started as quickly as it can. In the early days of the industrial era, the burning was constrained by production capacity. There was inefficiency in terms of society delivering the knowledge and capital to maximise the burn rate. But we sorted that out by educating the globe in terms of STEM subjects and things like property rights and intellectual patents that made the informational flows as liquid as possible.

The bottleneck then became the human capacity to sensibly consume everything that boundless fossil fuel and resource mining could produce. And so we responded at a global social level to fix that as well. We invented a consumption-led economic model. We sold it to the mug public as the ultimate expression of self-actualisation. We pushed people into Macmansions with garages full of plastic crap and gaudy status symbols that spent a brief time being an impulse buy before making a lingering journey towards some public tip.

We then moved into selling experiences and personas as well. What is a bucketlist or an influencer except some new high in terms of essentially heedless entropy production? But fossil fuel really needs bucketlists and influencers to meet its embodied desires. The second law of thermodynamics is the hidden hand behind all forms of modern accelerating growth.

If there were a catastrophic disruption of access to sources of energy for technological use, do you really think this would prevent individuals from continuing to transform their ways of understanding the world? — Joshs

Individuals have always done fuck all except be expressions of their social systems, which are in turn predicated on some prevailing dissipative ecosystem organisation. If you are a society living in a rainforest, you learn how to come up with "new ideas" within the adaptive limits of that framework. If you live in a ghetto, or a gated community, or a rural service town, or a cosmopolitan elite, likewise.

The hidden hand behind social organisation is not the free and noble human spirit - the tiny part of the brain that has been touched by the divinity that lies beyond the realm of the brute and earthly.

One thing the growth of information does give us is some actual understanding about the truths of human existence. Although I would agree - it is part of my own thesis - that science as a whole is a diligently technological enterprise. And so you have to be able to filter the mechanistic excesses of its reductionism to see the wholeness of life and mind as the natural by-product of the Cosmos's generalised trajectory from a hot Big Bang to an eternalised cold and empty Heat Death.

I think that that's kind of a false dichotomy. You contrast technocracy, which, as it is advanced by whom you call "greenies", cyber-utopianism, I think, it is called, with a fringe set of political philosophies as if we ought to take the former at its word without any form of critique whatsoever. — thewonder

You don't need solutions until the problems bite. No one needs a seat belt to drive around a car. A seat belt is an entirely fringe concept that only starts to make obvious sense after the crash.

And the greenie response is hugely varied because the right answers depend on the actual degree of civilisational collapse - which itself won't be distributed evenly.

I've been involved in the controversies and politics of environmentalism for decades now. And it is heavily critiqued. Critique is not the problem. The problem is defining the exact speed and degree of the changes that will demand our best thought-out responses.

That's all well and good and all, but how does technocracy effectively resolve anything? It was the preferred millenarian social organization that ushered in the industrial era and the same that brought about the so-called "information age". Obviously, in fields that require expertise, there is a need for specialists, but, structuring the whole of civil society as if it were an engineering department doesn't seem to make too much sense to me.

So the growth of information is the growth of the structure that creates the entropic gradient that dissipates the available free energy. And the availability of some source of free energy (along with a convenient sink to take the resulting waste) are then the reason that some informational structure would inevitably evolve to do the job.

Life and mind - biology and society - are accidents waiting to happen. If some store of free energy has accumulated - like half a billion years worth of heat distilled planktonic hydrocarbon trapped in deep sediment (petroleum), or ancient buried forests of carbon (coal) - then that is a glut of free energy in clear want of a technologically-minded social and economic system. And eventually such a system evolved to do the job - a system reaching its monetised apogee of unbounded growth under neo-liberal financialisation and globalisation.
[ ... ]
What is a bucketlist or an influencer except some new high in terms of essentially heedless entropy production? But fossil fuel really needs bucketlists and influencers to meet its embodied desires. The second law of thermodynamics is the hidden hand behind all forms of modern accelerating growth. — apokrisis

:up: No "country" for white swans, Adam Smith/Karl Marx.

[The] general line of reasoning is that, in order to salvage the ecology, civilization needs to be so radically transformed that it can only effectively happen after a revolution. Personally, I think that this too is quasi-eschatological, near messianic, and, in all likelihood, completely undesirable, but people within the Left have totally insipid notions of what an actual global revolution would actually be like. What seems to be more reasonable, ethical, and viable is to actively disengage from society as such, salvaging what is good of it that we can, and to just kind of let it all fall apart. In the aftermath of the decline of civilization as we have come to understand it, an alternative and radically new society could hopefully be created. — thewonder

:mask:

The biggest problem with revolution is the morning after. — Slavoj Žižek

That's all well and good and all, but how does technocracy effectively resolve anything? — thewonder

I'm thinking of top rated societies like Scandinavia, Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan. Or south east Asia in general. Or how the UK and US used to be.

City planners, national utilities, an effective civil service. It is not a secret how to govern rationally.

A strong society has strong institutions that look to the long view ... coupled to strong democracy that allows constant short-term challenge to those institutions. And you can engineer that balance. It is not about a conflict between left and right, good and evil. It is about plumbing and food security. Boring stuff that keeps the lights on and things headed in desirable directions.

Obviously, in fields that require expertise, there is a need for specialists, but, structuring the whole of civil society as if it were an engineering department doesn't seem to make too much sense to me. — thewonder

Technocratic just means there is a fundamental acceptance that society is a rational project and not some eternal power struggle. And being rational means engineering the checks and balances of there being both enough competitive tension and enough cohesive cooperation.

The best understandings of societies is based on them being coalitions of institutions. So you can have both artists and engineers, or galleries and laboratories. You form institutions for everything that seems to matter. And at every scale of the social system from state to street. Then they freely contest for resources and status.

This doesn't need extreme political theories - either about communism or capitalism, left or right. Instead it needs general acceptance that the job of a political system is to encourage the right kind of institutional structure. Everything becomes a shade of some form of social democracy - until fossil fuel looks up and sees its accelerating rate of entropification being threatened. Then you get a bout of creative institution destruction like a world war or Thatcher's Britain. Society can be steered away from the long-termism that was beginning to creep into human affairs - ecological responsibility, anti-consumerism, social equality, etc - and rebuild itself with the shortest institutional timeframes in mind.

So see "technocratic" as a code word for countries like Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand and others that have no choice but to have excellent governance. Big bloated countries - ex-empires like the UK and US - have the geopolitical capital to run with a lot of avoidable friction. They don't need to be excellent across the board. They only have to maintain an acceptable level of adequacy in their key institutions. If the US needs expertise, there are any number of top PHds it can import.

Would it be fair to characterize your thesis as a kind of techno-dialectics? There seems to be a fair amount of Marx in it , with technology moved to front and center. Have you read Richard Lewonti ?

An interesting and optimistic assessment of technocracy that I'd have to think more about. I'm used to hearing the term used in a much more negative context.

Would it be fair to characterize your thesis as a kind of techno-dialectics? There seems to be a fair amount of Marx in it , with technology moved to front and center. — Joshs

It is absolutely Hegelian. And also Peircean - as Peirce also saw the Cosmos in terms of a universal growth of reasonableness.

The challenge here is to understand why the world is so mad when humans have become so wise. We must be missing something and we can no longer blame original sin or the dark Darwinian ape that lurks within.

In particular - with climate change, peak oil, consumerism and neoliberalism - we must explain why that is a system with now a mind of its own that continually keeps reasserting itself.

I started off in ecology at the time of the Club of Rome and the first stirring of the Green movement. And so I've always had one eye on our attempts to take the long-term future seriously. I've have seen how rational precautions are always trumped by ... well, some Trump figure or other. And yet - as with the neo-liberal reforms of the the 1980s - the short-termism can also be absolutely rational. Irrationalty doesn't have to show its face until disaster is right there waiting at touching distance and not a problem for your great-great grandkids.

So my argument is that things went to another level with the industrial revolution and its unlocking of the fossil fuel bonanza. Society shifted from an organisation based on words as a semiotic code to one based on numbers. Science and technology could unlock fossil fuels by thinking in the pure abstraction of logical form. And so what had been a realm of social discourse - a world organised by words - became a realm of mechanism, a world designed for the benefit of mechanised entropy production.

People used to run society as all they had was the spoken language that had evolved to do that particular more restricted job. But when maths and logic came along - as the final Platonic-strength incarnation of semiosis - the whole system reorganised itself to have a higher level of being. A Noosphere some thought. A virtual reality cyber realm, others still fantasise. But I'm sorry. I only have to offer a far more prosaic form of Gaianism. There was this shit-load of burnable plankton gunk and carbonised tree that someone had to figure out how to burn. Homo sapiens was the natural candidate to step up to the plate.

There seems to be a fair amount of Marx in it... — Joshs

I'm not big on Marx. He was correct about economic basics but a muddled romantic on human nature.

A strong society has strong institutions that look to the long view ... coupled to strong democracy that allows constant short-term challenge to those institutions. And you can engineer that balance. It is not about a conflict between left and right, good and evil. It is about plumbing and food security. Boring stuff that keeps the lights on and things headed in desirable directions. — apokrisis

On a second review of your post, it seems like you're just arguing for an effective Liberal democracy. That's just how Liberal democracy is supposed to function.

This doesn't need extreme political theories - either about communism or capitalism, left or right. Instead it needs general acceptance that the job of a political system is to encourage the right kind of institutional structure. Everything becomes a shade of some form of social democracy - until fossil fuel looks up and sees its accelerating rate of entropification being threatened. Then you get a bout of creative institution destruction like a world war or Thatcher's Britain. Society can be steered away from the long-termism that was beginning to creep into human affairs - ecological responsibility, anti-consumerism, social equality, etc - and rebuild itself with the shortest institutional timeframes in mind. — apokrisis

That seems like some kind of post-apocalyptic vaguely right-wing regionalism, which is neither not extreme nor beyond charting on the Political Compass. I'm also fairly unsure as to how not looking into the future or considering ecological responsibility is supposed to resolve the ecological crisis.

On a second review of your post, it seems like you're just arguing for an effective Liberal democracy. That's just how Liberal democracy is supposed to function. — thewonder

What do you prefer to liberal democracy then? What do you think works better - and so what you would like to see restored as much as possible in a climate change collapse scenario?

That seems like some kind of post-apocalyptic vaguely right-wing regionalism, which is neither not extreme nor beyond charting on the Political Compass. I'm also fairly unsure as to how not looking into the future or considering ecological responsibility is supposed to resolve the ecological crisis. — thewonder

Why is re-localisation right or left wing? It is about living within the scale we will be reduced to once the basis of global just-in-time material flows has vanished. We can get ready for that inevitably by imagining it now.

And I wasn’t advocating short termism. I was fingering that as the obvious current problem.

The fact of death provides a basis for which we ought to live according to Friedrich Nietzsche's thought experiment, that of the eternal return. To accept death is to admit defeat. We can only die and lose, and, so, perhaps there is something to accepting it? I would prefer, however, to wage my revolt for as long as I have either the health or mind to do so. — thewonder

I always read the Eternal Recurrence as a cancellation of the argument. I imagine Fred suffering sermon after sermon given by his father about death making sense. Acceptance of the moment as a given means there is nothing to wager about and if there were, you are broke.

In other words, a part of his ongoing argument with Pascal.

Oh, I see. I had misinterpreted your statement.

I have previously given a rather expository post as to what I prefer to Liberal democracy.


I haven't known Nietzsche to say much of Pascal, but, perhaps you're right?

Personal growth is akin to technological advances in cultural history. They evince an overall accelerative character. — Joshs

What do you say to people who argue that the notion of personal growth is often an archaic and romantic one and problematic in its measuring?

I haven't known Nietzsche to say much of Pascal, but, perhaps you're right? — thewonder

Nietzsche talks about Pascal in a number of places. His objection to Christianity has to be related to objections to Pascal as a sort of struggle with the last worthy opponent supporting it.
How that might relate to the opinion I just gave about the Eternal Recurrence is hotly disputed in various quarters. I don't intend to contend on that level.

My reading is only one way to understand the text.

Does anyone ever considered the NDE as a scientific prospect to explaining life after death?

Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/near-death-experiences-ndes/

I have previously given a rather expository post as to what I prefer to Liberal democracy. — thewonder

Do you mean?....

Anarchism is a political philosophy and it can more or less be simply defined as "libertarian socialism".

I could see why you then might reject my description of liberal democracy as a collective of institutions.

But have you read Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Goverment: A Study of Social Pressures, 1908?

His story is that society is composed of interest groups that formulate pressures which result in government level accomodations.

This could be groups organised around moral or social issues - liberty and equality groups - as much as around economic issues. States and cities are locality-based groups. The justice system is composed of its law groups. And because people could belong to many groups, it becomes a complex web. No simple divides like left vs right, or religious vs atheist. But instead a hierarchy - a nested hierarchy - and so not a rigid hierarchy but a hierarchy equipped to evolve over multiple temporal and spatial horizons (see Salthe again for the textbooks on that).

So what Bentley was focused on was the pluralism which is a variety of institutionalised habit - the organs of the organism - that still need to have some scope to learn and adapt. It was a pragmatic view of a working whole that had proved itself over time.

That is about allowing vigorous and messy interest promoting - strong competition - but within a plastic set of global social constraints so a holistic balance can be arrived at. This pluralism contrasts with the socialist/communist notion of social engineering where disinterested technocrats impose order on a passive crowd (after the angry mob has done with stringing up the bourgeoisie and has been sent off to their collectivised farms and collectivised factories).

So where I speak of successful modern technocratic societies, they are more "anarchic" in being an active and dynamical jostle of institutions. The state is merely a framework for delivering some kind of structured accomodation to the mass of often conflicting desires.

It is a very organic understanding of society. Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man is a good recent book giving an overview.

Do you mean?....

Anarchism is a political philosophy and it can more or less be simply defined as "libertarian socialism". — apokrisis

Effectively and ineffectively, yes.

The hey is about allowing vigorous and messy interest promoting - strong competition - but within a plastic set of global social constraints so a holistic balance can be arrived at. — apokrisis

So where I speak of successful modern technocratic societies, they are more "anarchic" in being an active and dynamical jostle of institutions. The state is merely a framework for delivering some kind of structured accomodation to the mass of often conflicting desires. — apokrisis

Right, but what you are still describing is just a functional Liberal democracy. It's as optimistic to suggest that, given a global societal collapse, Liberal democracy could be brought to its requisite best to adequately cope with the situation as it is for me to offer some form of nonviolent gradualist Anarchism. What I wonder of the Liberal democratic project is if it isn't or hasn't already achieved as much as it can. I feel like, after the fall of civilization, trying to revive Liberalism just may not be enough. You'd have seven or so people in a small city committed to the project and just generalized chaos everywhere else.

You'd have seven or so people in a small city committed to the project and just generalized chaos everywhere else. — thewonder

I’m not talking about reviving anything but starting the construction of a politics appropriate to the situation as it is likely to be - to the degree that is predictable.

This is the transition town approach. Start today in very small places and rebuild local community. Create the local money, the time banks, the community gardens, the town wind farm, the local militia, or whatever else seem like the necessary institutions of life in a few years. Cities can start planning on their own scales by reconnecting with their surrounding countryside in terms of food security, energy harvesting and transport solutions.

It’s not rocket science. Just an enormous shift in mindset. People will actually have to learn new habits. And who doesn’t hate that?

I'm sure that's entirely sensible or, at least, seemingly so, but that does seem to just be a localized reconceptualization and salvaging of Liberalism. I'm more or less suggesting that this should be done to a certain extent, but also incorporating something like Libertarian Municipalism. There is sure to be a post-civilized general malaise. I think we ought to have some vision.

What do you say to people who argue that the notion of personal growth is often an archaic and romantic one and problematic in its measuring? — Tom Storm

I just slap them. Does wonders for my personal growth.
Seriously though, there’s a way of talking about development without reducing it to a linear progression. For instance , Kuhn can talk about the development of science , but not as an accumulation of facts. Rather , we can replace a way of seeing with one which is more useful to us in a relative way , in a different way than what it replaces.

Upon looking these things up, the transition town movement seems to be all, well, good, and all, but the United States reentered the Paris Agreement by executive decree in January of 2021, and, so, the doom and gloom of this Rupert Read video, I think, has become partially, though not entirely, outdated.

The thing about environmental alarm, though, is that most people who don't support doing anything about climate change just simply think that it's already too late, and, so, though it adds some gravity to the situation, it doesn't necessarily have the effect that anyone might want for it to.