Friends, dogs, and faint wood smoke
A slice of the collective wisdom
Hacker News put together a long thread on things people had been “doing wrong” which rapidly turned into a super intense sharing of collective wisdom from The Nerds.
It’s really good.
It made me think about my share of the “collective wisdom” and it was getting kind of long for an HN reply.
So here we go.
The first learning: interdependence, oppression and colonialism.
If you’re reading this in the first world your lifestyle is supported by slaves. The richer you are the worse this problem is. I wrote “the future of stuff” about it.
Nobody knows how to solve this problem. We can burn clean spots here and there with focussed attention but the systemic incentives to mistreat human beings are so-far unstoppable. Labour unions and democracy are about the best games in town for stopping labour being ground into the dirt by capital but right wing death squads and worse are deployed to keep imported raw materials and manufactured goods as cheap as possible.
Nearly everybody who is “politically active” is avoiding dealing with this problem because it seems insoluble. As a result most of the “right on” / “left wing” / “progressive” political work is built on an utterly hollow foundation. As I once said, “there’s no point in open source software running on hardware produced by slave labour.”
Once you are clear that consumption almost always involves mistreatment of humans somewhere in the supply chain and that we have no concerted approach to solving this problem yet you are on the road to political wisdom. Watch how nearly everybody around you has some excuse (I certainly do) for their participation in this system. Same thing is happening with meat consumption and the large scale cover-ups of systemic pedophilia problems in institutions like the churches. We all know there’s a bedrock enduring horror in our ways of life and we seem to be unable (not unwilling) to organize to fix it.
The second learning: your mind and its lies
If you are young your mind is filled with lies. Adults feed you a total mess of horseshit to keep you docile. Some people stay inside of that web of lies their entire lives and pass it on to their children. Santa Claus, Jesus, and The Flag are the same entity: the passifying lie. You can read “Prometheus Rising” and get a good guide to dealing with those lies pretty quickly. The external social lies and fads are the easy stuff.
The real bastard is that your hardware is lying to you. It tells you that sugar is good for you. It hides the pigs behind the bacon. It tells people that sex is central to their value as a human being. It keeps trauma alive for decades after the people involved are dead.
You’re running a bunch of software which was intended to get a creature like you but not conscious or capable of rational thought through the process of biological reproduction most of the time, on average. If you don’t have much to lose those biological systems will drive you to take crazy risks or just cut all motivation and leave you in the gutter. The biological substrate is utterly ruthless, certain of itself, and invisible. The rational mind that most of us identify as “my mind” is essentially locked inside of this marauding tank and making itself feel like it has control by yelling “go left!” every time the tank starts to turn left thereby maintaining the illusion of control.
The place where this kicks most people with problems in the ass is C/PTSD (complex / post traumatic stress disorder). Trauma is mostly damage to that biological substrate.
The rational mind knows that it is not our fault that the dog died suddenly beside us in the back of the car on a road trip. But we freak out and we stay freaked out. The biological substrate is not much on world modeling and theory of mind. It’s a simple beast: monkey see, monkey do. Monkey see a bad thing avoid that thing and its context forever: safer that way than making a guess about cause and effect. Maybe the dog really did die because we were yelling at Mom about getting our hair dyed.
Maybe this is all our fault.
So all this nonsense must go. Mostly that’s in the general domain of therapy. Rogerian / Person Centered psychotherapy. Pair with a robust meditation practice if it suits you. You’re not going to get the life that you want while the biological substrate is pointed at a different set of goals from the rational mind. The instincts are enough to drive a really not very smart person to success, prosperity, and a large happy family with a little luck and good circumstances. People who live more “in their heads” are often in conflict with the biological base that the mind-versus-body war consumes most of their energy and leaves them ineffective in the real world. The mind can sabotage and shut down the instinctive layer in a number of ways and vice versa. They are much better working together but that is easier learned in childhood than as a confused adult. There’s simply no way to go through life happy without some significant systems integration work there. If the biological substrate is moving towards its evolutionary goals it is happy and it is the only part of your being that knows how to be happy. The mind does not feel much: the soul is in the body!
The bitterest part of this process is dealing with the protective lies we tell about other people particularly our parents. When we are kids we are programmed to see them as gods. As adults we figure out they are just another generation of confused monkeys terrified of death, poverty, illness, and all the rest, just like we are. They are powerless to help us.
The third learning: meaning and death
So this is some brutal shit here. If it was not plausibly the end of the world within your lifetime I’d be talking about love and work and children and the meaning of life.
We are past that point now.
Now the question is about the meaning of our deaths, not our lives. Not in the immediate sense of “argh we’re all going to die!” but everything about our lives is navigated relative to the risk of human extinction. Or more likely the extinction of all big bright social animals. This is an unacceptable outcome. But the first world militaries continue to make nukes and bioweapons and nanoweapons and space-based nuclear weapons and robot weapons and AI weapons and you know all that stuff can do is kill people.
Eventually it will do what it does.
And then there’s global warming and climate change and climate chaos and deforestation and so on as we break the habitat in which our species evolved. We are taxing that environment hard to produce a truly gigantic amount of food and shelter for eight billion apes and throwing away half of what we consume.
It just ain’t right.
And here we are mired as part of the problem by an instinct to consume that we just cannot seem to control.
Something ain’t right.
Fat, sugar, booze, risk, opiates, a sense of feeling powerful, the need for speed.
We are hungry for more life and surrounded by substitutes for that life. Given an open plain dotted with forests and lakes, free to roam and hunt and build, most of us would be as happy or sad as our ancestors were. But if you imagine dropping a McDonalds on the ancestral plains of humanity and giving away nearly-free hamburgers all day and all night you can imagine the scrimmage out front. Apes eating until they can’t stand. Apes killing each other for a place in line. We are those apes: we did not evolve to handle abundance and it’s driving our species mad.
So was scarcity when it was socially imposed rather than an absolute feature of the environment. High complexity societies turn many of us into victims because we are as poorly adapted to civilization as Swedes are to living in the equatorial sun: they burn like toast. Everybody around you thinks this is normal but it does not matter how plastic we are: we remain as out of place as dogs in the back of a parked car. For our entire lives.
For most people the apex of happiness was a meal cooked on an open fire (the grill) shared with family and friends. Throw in a few brewskis and there we go. Or maybe it was a house party.
These are pleasures which we share almost unchanged with the last half a million years of our species. Same for swimming and domesticating animals. What makes us happy is old.
But the happiness of the old ways is in short supply. The machine which produces polished marble floors and tuxedos and 60mph moving rooms on wheels (never mind those things in the sky) requires 60 hours a week and beyond that slave labour to maintain.
We just can’t live this way and have happiness or justice.
We need a science of happiness. A careful study of what makes people tick and how to create the conditions for welfare as efficiently as possible. One of these structures is inside of Hinduism; it was an advanced civilization without much access to industrialization back in the day and so most of the effort went into social innovation. Making people moral through education and giving them supportive frameworks to live in was the goal. Peace and prosperity reigned at times. Much is to be learned there not in the religion alone but in the attitude to life: it also produced unrivaled economic prosperity until about 1000 years ago when they started to lose wars and the culture imploded. Make of that what you will.
Right now the next wave of “we’re going to fix everything” is psychedelics. Decriminalization and legalization are coming in America and the pharma industry is waiting with open jaws. A lot of people will tell you that stoned apes invented language. I’m here to tell you that stoned apes in an industrialized setting are going to be programmed apes imprinted to ignore their own happiness in favour of socially constructed religious experiences. The Ketamine Vatican. A society this sick and this conformist is not going to tolerate the creation of freedom at scale.
So for you as an individual I have some advice. It is fairly simple.
- Do not blind yourself to the injustice of the world even if you cannot currently help much.
- Learn how to live in harmony with your own body to the maximum extent that your life will permit, and keep working to make an ever-deeper union.
- Spend as much of your life doing what makes you genuinely happy as you can without harming others in the process. Genuinely happy is doing a lot of work there: if you couldn’t explain it to somebody 50,000 years ago you are probably living inside of an empty socially-constructed indirect happiness. We have not changed much. Stick close to the primal base.
Friends, dogs, and faint wood smoke.
What then of these gigantic imponderables? How to live with the slavery our society places upon ourselves and others? How to deal with the fear of nanotechnology grey goo marching over the horizon turning forests and grass into more self-replicating assembler machines? What do we do about the nukes?
All we can do right now is wake-up-in-place. Be keenly aware of these problems and talk to other people about them. Dismantle the collective forgetting that occurred after Hiroshima and Nagasaki when we all agreed not to think too much about the bomb so that we could simply live. The same thing happened for climate change: we knew in the 1980s what we were getting ourselves into here and did nothing because it went straight into the same bin as all the stuff about the Bomb.
We built a mechanism of repression at a cultural level to handle the nuclear fear and now we live in it. It is paralyzing our ability to act on climate change, never mind all the other even-more-scary worse stuff. We have to be able to tell each-other the truth about what we know, what we fear, and what we face in order to be able to take corrective action.
Doing as much as you can of the simple animal pleasures is what keeps you sane while your mind rouses itself from the torpor and starts to plan a way to fight our way through the 21st century to a new era of peace and prosperity: villages with solar panels, filters for water, and satellite internet. Cities that look like gardens swarming with bicycles and kids.
The transformation needs a new kind of consciousness more in keeping with investigative journalism than sainthood. It needs us to get to the truth about things and start acting on what we know.
We are for now trapped in this mess. It’s a collective action problem: we lack a critical mass of people who are behind any one solution to these problems and the previous attempts at imposing those solutions top-down universally turned into genocidal messes. The only thing that’s managed to keep running is the carefully-managed war of all-against-all that we call capitalism or “the free market” which gradually fritters away the entire wealth of our planet for a handful of consumer goods too fragile to pass on to our teenagers never mind our grandchildren. Nothing is built to last and yet the kids will need stuff when they come.
Where is it to come from?
Long term thinking will solve all of this. We are not stupid. We are just afraid: The Bomb foreshortened all of our futures, drove us collectively mad with fear, stopped us planning ahead for a future we subconsciously did not expect to live long enough to see and then we did not die. We have to stop panicking and start planning for the long haul resource management problem.
That’s our challenge now: how do we turn what we have into what we need?
I believe we will make it but that not much will be left standing of our culture by the time we are living a One Planet Lifestyle, providing for all, and doing no ecological damage to speak of.
(Video of whales sleeping for scale)
