‘The Destiny of Civilization’

the words know thyself were carved above the entrance of the temple temple of apollo in delphi and stand as such at the dawn of western civilization and i would suggest that at this hour of our civilization this recognition of the essential nature of our self and therefore the recognition of the essential nature of all people all animals and all things has perhaps never been more important than it is now

civilization a progress trap

the really big progress traps uh come with with the invention of 00:07:20 agriculture and i i mentioned the first full-blown civilization in the old world the sumerians who perfected the art of irrigation 00:07:33 in what is now southern iraq

If that definition of civilization is accepted,

I can tell you that   my experience is that intentional communities  are not only not fun, but a disaster.   00:51:53 And one of the reasons they're both not fun and  a disaster is that they have a mission statement.   They already know where they're going and there's  some abstracted map-like idea that everyone thinks   that they're cohering to. But then it turns  out that everyone actually interpreted that   differently and the way they interpreted it  yesterday changed. And so that thing becomes   00:52:16 the territory on which you are in polarity with  each other and not the thing that you agree about.   The thing you fight about most is the mission  statement.

as the issues have become so complex and plentiful that no one can hope to be knowledgeable enough to make competent decisions about them. This is the point at which highly complex societies start to collapse of their own weight.

Labor in a fully func-tioning Ecological Civilization will include three essentialelements.

If I can pick up on that, Rex is going back to   something I said a little bit earlier about  unsustainability, or at least unsustainable   00:46:47 behavior being a natural phenomenon, because  we are far better than any other species   at exploiting our habitats.

Well, I'll say there's a danger in that question.  It's a good question and it's a question we should   be asking, but there's a danger, and that  is that we're going to come up with a model   for ecological community and then we're going  to make it happen. And that right away violates   everything that Nora just pointed out. That's  absolutely critically important.

We are as concerned as anybodyelse at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civil-ization seems to be taking.

Whether civilization moves on and up depends most on the advances made by creative thinkers and leaders in science, polities, art, morality, and religion. Moderate ability can follow, or imitate, but genius must show the way.

Inother words, we have projected backward the idea that there was aself-contained “Western civilization” (a concept that didn’t even reallyexist until the early twentieth century)

‘Running on Emptiness – The Pathology of Civilisation’John Zerzan (2002) All religions have problems with ‘unbelievers’, but that response is insignificant compared to their visceral hatred of ‘apostates’.

it really all does 00:06:53 trace back to the start of our what we call civilization our civilization meaning Agriculture and then settlements and cities so prior to that we lived in approximate equilibrium with ecosystems

once we took 00:07:21 control of our food production a lot of things happen so suddenly we had Surplus we needed ways to store that Surplus we had settlements to stay close to our stores and the land that was producing our food we started 00:07:34 accumulating material possessions that led to hierarchies and systems to kind of preserve that status standing armies to protect those stores from 00:07:47 yourselves and other nearby populations it led to property rights this crazy idea that we can own the land and the property rights together with accumulation of material possessions led 00:08:02 to uh want a desire to continue that ownership into further generations and that led to patriarchy scheme which by the way got tied into our our religious 00:08:15 schemes and became monotheism so you have this great paternal um sort of overseer and then you know we had subjugation of humans and animals to do work for us led to all kinds of 00:08:27 ecological problems from Soul soil degradation habitat destruction um Extinction rates far above normal and all the rest all the things that we see today just sort of a connect the dot straight 00:08:40 from this idea of Agriculture so not now that we've kind of dialed up this rate of Destruction it's more obvious what the pattern is showing us which is that this initial impulse to control nature 00:08:54 was itself kind of a flawed um premise and consequential very consequential so since then we've actually been doubling down on that idea of control so that we keep trying 00:09:07 to control more and more but it's never going to be enough we're never going to be full Masters and so it's going to fail it's guaranteed to fail and unfortunately this system that we've constructed is so 00:09:21 huge that the failure is is almost by definition going to be spectacular and awful and lamentable because we just built it up so large

I think it's really kind of the philosophy behind our civilization is not even remotely 00:10:43 predicated on principles of sustainability and just to be clear something that's not designed to be sustainable is almost certainly unsustainable you'd have to get you know crazy lucky for 00:10:56 something that wasn't designed to be sustainable to you know accidentally be sustainable our civilization is very clearly not uh sustainable and I like to think of 00:11:08 flight analogies here so a rock is not designed for sustainable flight it can't continue level on definite flight it can however be launched to soar upward for a while but inevitably 00:11:21 it's going to come back down toward Earth and I think our civilization is very similar because it's also like a rock not founded on principles of sustainability 00:11:34 it can soar upward for a time as we're doing now as we spin Earth's inheritance it's a big spending spree and it's great fun for the paying passengers and lots of 00:11:46 satisfaction but it's temporary and patiently waiting is Earth and what I would call Planetary limits so that's going to find us before long

An important aspect missing in typical flow models is that in order to produce enduringcommitment a goal should correspond to something truly valuable. For example, while the goal ofshooting a maximum number of spaceships in your game of Space Invaders may be clear, it doesnot satisfy any real needs. Therefore, playing games, however enjoyable at the time, if continuedlong enough will eventually leave you with the feeling of having wasted your time. One way gamedesigners try to overcome this limitation is by creating a sense of “epic meaning” (McGonigal,2011), i.e. situating the game action in a narrative context which implies that something truly greator valuable is being achieved (like saving the world from alien invaders).

For example, if you pre-build a swordman, a spearman and an horseman in 4 cities, you can produce a total of 12 units in 3 turns. This make you save a lot of gold in units maintenance for a good amount of turns.

Among the most eloquent commentaries on this wholephenomenon is to be found in a private letter written by BenjaminFranklin to a friend:When an Indian Child has been brought up among us,taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet ifhe goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramblewith them there is no persuading him ever to return, andthat this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, isplain from this, that when white persons of either sexhave been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and livedawhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, andtreated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail withthem to stay among the English, yet in a Short time theybecome disgusted with our manner of life, and the careand pains that are necessary to support it, and take thefirst opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, fromwhence there is no reclaiming them. One instance Iremember to have heard, where the person was to bebrought home to possess a good Estate; but finding somecare necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to ayounger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gunand match-Coat, with which he took his way again to theWilderness.30

Many high-carbon activities are also highly routinized. From a psychological perspective, this bears the hallmarks of habitual behavior, in that environmentally significant actions are often stable, persistent, and an automatic response to particular contexts (159), e.g., commuting by car repeatedly over many months or years. Theories of social practice offer a contrasting account in which routines coevolve with infrastructures, competencies, conventions, and expectations (160). For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social significance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobility (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumption have led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patterns of domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoor temperature control (163). Although such assemblages shift over time, policy and action intended to reduce emissions have been ineffective in coordinating changes throughout these social and material configurations. As a consequence, routinized, commonplace, and largely unconscious behaviors remain mostly unaffected, with many high-carbon activities even growing and expanding (e.g., frequent flying).

As the emerging field of energy humanities (168) is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies are deeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169). Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offer a “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).

Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism:Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash

we need to consider the possibility that ‘Oumuamua was sent by aliens, the dangers of unscientific speculation, and what belief in an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has in common with faith in God.

civilized

Or, as a soldier of a desert war wrote in last autumn’s New York Times, is our central task the task of learning how to die—not (as he put it) to die ‘as individuals, but as a civilization’ (Scranton, 2013), in the Anthropocene?

All of my reasons are what some objectivists would call subjective, but they provide, when added together, a very solid plat-form indeed

heart disease, diabetes and cancer

civilization is a key cause of antagonism: 'society, in trying to pro- tect us from what we want (ultimately, an end to internal tension), instills in subjectivity a profound malaise, while providing "an occasion for enmity"' (Lane 2004, 28).2

Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water.

show that the price we pay for our advance incivilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.