BLG-013
I don’t read books one at a time. I read several books at once. I let these books have a conversation. What does this have to say to that? The books are normally not too similar, because that would be boring. I enjoy seeing the connections between books a little further a field.
What does Sudhir Venkatesh’s “Gang Leader for a Day” have to say to A.J. Jacobs’ “My Year of Living Biblically”? Quite a lot actually. What does “Man’s Search for Meaning” have to say that can enlighten “The Long Emergency”? More than you might think.
Currently I am reading “You are Now Less Dumb” and “The Five Stages of Collapse”, and the result is enlightening. Reading a book about common errors in thinking and common methods of self deception while also reading a book that essentially points out that the modern international economy is a Ponzi scheme, allowed me to gain insight into the questions “How did we let this happen? And why is nobody sounding the alarm?”
PREMISE: THE ‘LEADERS’ WON’T SAVE US
I read a lot of popular science, especially on climate change and species extinction and other challenges to my personal prosperity and the prosperity of those who will come after me. And I see a problem. Not the usual problem that people note. I have no desire to rehash the dangers facing our comfortable little system: environmental, technological and ideological. This has been done to death and I leave it to the experts.
The problem I see is that when the experts who understand these problems finish explaining them, they then turn to some imagined age of global cooperation for the solution. I don’t see the golden coming any time soon. Yes, the Allied nations got along temporarily with the Soviet Union in World War Two. But even that was marred by back stabbing and betrayal and the so called race to Berlin to grab the most German scientists. So, I’m not betting the house on politicians suddenly growing spines and consciences in the eleventh hour.
So what can I as an individual do? And don’t tell me recycle.
So that is my question: what can I do?
PRELIMINARY ASSUMPTIONS: ASSUME WORST CASE SCENARIO AND BEST CASE SCENARIO ARE EQUALLY LIKELY
I don’t plan to be one of those people features of Doomsday Preppers, at least in part because I hate reality television by and large. But also because I plan to maintain as reasonable and normal a life as possible for as long as possible. But that doesn’t mean that I plan to lead a conventional life.
If I assume, as I believe that I must, that I will have little to no impact on the disasters that could rob me of the good life and my loved ones; then I must plan under the assumption that a worst case scenario is possible and that I may actually survive long enough to have to endure such a scenario. This means that I need to acquire a host of skills that I do not yet have. I possess more of these skills than a large number of the people around me, but far from enough. I also need to outfit myself appropriately. In the event of a prolonged grid down scenario, I will need a range of equipment designed for short term emergency survival and long term prosperity at a lower level of technological that is possible to maintain for the remainder of my life (and assuming that this could be a very long time).
This means that I need excess time to acquire the skills and the money to support myself and excess money to outfit myself. This means, further extrapolating, that I need a passive form of income- something that will continue producing money after it is produced.
BLG-014
Hating our Biology
Children reach sexual capability (and inherit a genetically encoded sex drive) at puberty. Our culture insists that children not be advised or trained for this transition. Or that when such training occurs, that said training be heaped with a great deal of ‘thou shalt nots’ added for good effect. Our culture is structured and laid out so that young people who break the taboo and ignore our parental warnings are punished.
Adolescents lack the tools, the knowledge and the resources to adapt to the changes that puberty thrusts upon them. We don’t provide them with tools, or information or guidance, for the challenges that they are about to face as the grapple with their transition to sexual beings. We certainly give them no help should they find themselves parents (especially not the girls who will carry and potentially rear these children).
We as adults ask these children to ignore the signals that biology is chemically pumping through their veins even as those signals transform them physically before our and their eyes.
As a unit, the adults of the first world seem to have decided that we expect our children to defy biology, defy the changes in their own bodies, defy the hormones that are commanding them, and basically defy evolution and natural selection. Why do we adults demand this? It’s hard to say with certainty. We hide behind puritanical fear and disapproval of sex. But the rampant sexualization of our consumer society suggests that if this is the case, them we are deeply neurotic and hypocritical at the very least. And while all of this may be true, I suspect that this is a smoke screen designed to stop the debate at an unproductive point in order to hide the real truth.
I think that we seek out ways to put strain on our system, because such strain inevitably results in economic growth. That this growth is created by causing misery within the population is irrelevant. We have a devil’s bargain, grow or die. And so we grow.
Stupid for a Reason
So whose problem is this? Why is civilization full of morons? Because we decided we didn’t like natural selection. Natural selection is nature’s way of eliminating idiots. Lions and tigers and bears are nature’s way of adding chlorine to the gene pool and we decided we liked our gene pool unchlorinated and full of stupid.
We tell children to be careful of strangers, but children are far more likely to be harmed, mistreated, abused or kidnapped by people that they know. How can we prepare children to be cautious of the adults that they would otherwise trust? I think that perhaps this is the mistake. We teach children to trust certain people. When we should be teaching children to assess people. I think that I see the reason for this however, children who were trained to assess and think critically and ask questions from the earliest age that they are able to, would be much more difficult to manage.
Morality
All morality is composed of peace treaties between individuals. Humans are born with no sense of other. Everything is the self. Slowly human children learn the boundary that separates the self and the other. Highly intelligent animals that they are, humans generally then learn to empathize with others. This empathy allows many unspoken peace treaties as the humans in the group are able to project and postulate that others would not enjoy suffering and so the group agrees not to cause suffering intentionally to each other. This agreement is generally unspoken and somewhat amorphous.
But the specifics require more strictly delineated peace treaties- laws of behavior. And so we build laws. But laws change, and the idea that we all understand morality is a false and ignorant statement. Many people are neurologically incapable of empathy and remain sociopathic into adulthood. Once slavery was legal, and women had no rights, and homosexuality was a crime. In most parts of the world these laws would now be considered horribly immoral. Laws change, perceptions of morality change.
Othering people and groups is one way in which laws are created. People or groups are turned into outsiders, being whom the group can safely hate or disdain. Criminals, rival nations, untouchables, slaves, women, gays. This othering removes them for the protection of the unspoken peace treaties. The human mind can only empathize with so many people. Everyone else is the other. Humans need to other people in order to inflict violence on them. When a person presents a threat, the person first other’s the threatening person so that they can effectively respond with violence. And so we other law breakers, disrupters of the current social order.
Othering isn’t always done for the purpose of inflicting violence. People also other, by grouping people together. People define others by nationality, by religion, by ethnicity, by gender, by team or organization. This is done to provide a heuristic set of guidelines regarding how to deal with other people whom the person has not met. This relates again back to morality, because different groups will make peace treaties or agreements to enforce proper behavior between groups. Groups on both sides are expected to behave in an agreed upon manner, and thus the othering is based on the behavior each group expects of the other.
Lonely Monkey
We are humans and we need each other. Humans need other humans. Humans need social interaction and social connection.
And yet.
We have never been more connected while also being more isolated. We can reach everyone we ever knew, through corporate controlled advertising machines like facebook and gmail. Ever interaction is mediated by people trying to turn our every comment or communication into a sale opportunity.
We sit alone in the crowd reaching through the bars of social media, long for the freedom of actual social connection.
We have been surrounded by toys and distractions that we accumulate and use to try and hide from our loneliness if we are lucky enough to have been born into an industrialized nation. But we remain hollow and we remain alone.
We are alone. And worse, we are alone in a dying world. We know the cost of our toys and our distractions. We are reminded constantly of the environment and the damage we are doing. We are aware of the changes brought on by climate change and our continued use of fossil fuels. We cannot avoid thinking about the dangers of overpopulation, even as we seek to keep unhappy, empty, lonely people alive so that the can be alone as long as possible.
We could fill books with nothing but catalogues of our sins against the world which provides us with life, and many have done that.
But what do we do?
Our so called leaders will not help us. Leaders are such in name only and do only what is necessary to keep themselves in power. They are, in fact, followers of those to whom they are beholden: their voters, their sponsors, the corporations who paid their rise to the top, the military that keeps them in power.
So we cannot expect to yell and complain and achieve tangible substantial results.
facta non verba – deeds not words
We must act. And the thing that we must act upon first, is ourselves.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
BLG-015
“Memento mori (Latin: “remember that you have to die”) is the medieval Latin Christian theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.”
-From Wikipedia
The Party Ends
Driving a car seems to transform the minds of the people behind the wheel. Many drivers act as though they are in a race. And as a result they do all sorts of ridiculous things, like barrel through yellow lights, weave in and out of lanes to try to push three cars ahead, and squeeze into bike lanes with no concern for the safety of the cyclists for whom those lanes were intended. Bike lanes are a rarity even in a city like Vancouver that is very Environmentally conscious. And what the drivers of the Greater Vancouver Area have proven is that it is not safe to be a cyclist, even when remaining in those bike lanes. Motorists regularly trespass into bike lanes to sneak ahead for tight hand turns, to get past slow moving drivers, and just to move faster than the flow of traffic. And of course, in most places there are no bike lanes at all. Cyclists must risk riding in the midst a group of giant metal boxes controlled by people who have vocally expressed outright hatred for the fragile cyclists in their midst.
Full disclosure. I walk to work. I own a car, but do not use it for my own commute. And as a pedestrian, I get frustrated with cyclists as they frequently choose to right upon the sidewalks and bully through pedestrians in precisely the same way motorists bully the cyclists themselves. The irony is thick. But I understand why the cyclists do this. They have a stark choice given the motorists disdain and outright rage. cyclists can ride on the road and endanger themselves, or they can ride on the sidewalk and endanger pedestrians. At least in a collision with a pedestrian there is less chance of a fatality. Of course a simple solution would be dedicated bike lanes, separated by a divider so that motorists couldn’t abuse them as they have shown consistently that they will do if given the chance. This is not
necessarily a cheaper option, but it is a simple and straight forward answer that has the advantage of being in line with a future where oil is increasingly expensive, and hard to obtain consistently.
Of course, motorists as a stereotype are in collective denial about this upcoming demise of mass car culture, and this I think is the origin of their rage at the cyclist. The motorist knows deep down that they will not be able to afford the rising cost of gasoline forever. They know that the car is a major factor in climate change. And they hate to feel as though they are not only a villain but an increasingly obsolete villain. And so they rage at the future for showing them their own obsolescence. The Party’s over, but we don’t want anyone to tell us. We’re the guy with the lampshade on his head at the end of the night dancing to music when everyone else has gone home, insisting that the fun will never end and the hangover will never arrive.
The Fallacy of the Noble Failure
I wonder about our tendency to persist in using tactics that do not work. I am struck by the recent phenomenon known as ‘Gamergate’, where a sub group of video game fans engaged in another concerted campaign of harrassment and abuse against perceived enemies (mostly women who had the nerve to point out how sexist the industry still is). The perpetrators of Gamergate attempted to conceal their intentions by hiding the campaign inside a Trojan Horse cause about Journalistic integrity. But since they didn’t understand the concept of conflict of interest and also didn’t understand the ethics standards used in Journalism, their ruse was exposed very quickly for the misogynist infantile bullying campaign that it was. The perpetrators of Gamergate squirmed and wailed and made excuses and tried all sorts of distractions, but nothing worked. They did a fair bit of damage and engaged in what will almost certainly be declared criminal harassment, but they won no meaningful battles int their self proclaimed war.
What did they accomplish? Well, they got the FBI’s attention. Which isn’t a good thing for any subculture closely associated with hacker subculture. They got mainstream media attention, that grew as the perpetrators refused to back down and universally painted the perpetrators as infantile misogynists and almost certainly guilty of criminal harassment. Which isn’t a good thing for their cause. They increased the popularity of their intended targets among non-sexist people on the internet. Which is a good thing, but not for the perpetrators. In fact the group doing the most damage to the perpetrators is the perpetrators themselves. Gaming has had a scuzzy reputation since US politicians railed against Mortal Kombat in the 90s that the Gaming Industry has been trying desperately to shake off. No industry likes to have the specter of legislative censorship hanging over its head, ask the MMA guys. And Gaming was just breaking away from that, but probably not now.
So why would these people engage in the action they did? And more critically, why would they continue it when it became clear that this strategy was causing them to lose not just battles but the long term war that they had fought since the 90s?
I have watched people that I knew personally do similar, persisting in a tactic that they knew was failing to achieve results or was even hurting their future success. I have even questioned these people as to why they persist in tactics that they have seen for themselves do not work. The answer that they give most often is a variation on “But it should work!” I am also reminded of the expression “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Add to this, the observation other commentators have made that the perpetrators appear to be acting like toddlers having a tantrum trying everything within their limited tool box to change things they don’t like. It doesn’t present a picture of a very lucid strategy. And although Gamergate displays this counterproductive strategy very overtly, I can’t escape the feeling that this is something more inherent to civilized culture than we might like to admit. The world still refuses to admit that Somaliland is independent of Somalia. The USA refuses to admit the failure of the war on drugs. The Copyright industry refuses to admit the collapse of copyright in the face of the digital age. The industrialized nations continue to pretend that they can ignore climate change until it goes away. And delusional hope springs eternal for the Toronto Maple Leafs and their fans every year.
We want our strategies to work, and when they don’t we become offended, because we think that they ‘should work’ whatever that means. The obstinence in the face of reality concerns me. Why do we think that reality will bend to our will? The lightbulb was not invented by trying the same prototype repeatedly, because ‘it should work’. We did not discover powered human flight by insisting that flapping wings ‘should work’, and so why do we continue to fall back on this failed strategy? Where do we learn to expect that we can simply impose our will upon reality? My first instinct is to blame parents, but that seems unfair and shallow. I suspect, and fear, that the answer is that our civilization is built around defiance of reality, and so we simply absorb it as first principles- assumptions buried so deep they are part of our cultural memetic code. And I further speculate, that breaking this assumption and removing it from our psyche would would make it impossible to support civilization as an endeavor. In order to remain civilized in our current model we must live in defiance of reality, because our system is not in compliance with reality. Like Breatharians who believe that they can subsist on air (and possibly water) alone, we have built our ideology around a central conceit (unlimited exponential growth as a measure of success) that does not work in the real world. This does not bode well for the future, and neither does the fact that the ideology of this fool’s endeavor renders the majority of us unable to adjust course, because we are convinced that it ‘should work’.
The universe doesn’t care what we want. The ecosystem won’t notice our tantrum. And we need to realize this very soon if we are to survive.
Seat Belts
Do you wear your seat belt in the car? Do you purchase travel insurance when you travel abroad? Do you lock the door to your house? Do you wear a life jacket when water skiing? Do you wear a helmet when playing hockey or football?
If you do not, then likely this will mean nothing to you. But if you do, then you likely understand that this is a safeguard against events not occurring in the way we would prefer them to occur.
And yet we do not safeguard our lives against the lose of employment or our ability to survive against the loss of support systems. Even after Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. Even after the massive foreclosures of the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse. Even after the defaulting of numerous first world nations and the fracturing and Balkanizing of oil exporting nations in both the Middle East and elsewhere abroad. Even after all this, we do not have a seatbelt in case the economy truly collapses.
It isn’t as though this has never happened. The Great Depression is still within the lifetime of people alive today.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 