41 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2024
    1. 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

      for - quote - know thyself - recognizing our true nature - has never been more important than at this hour of our civilization - Rupert Spira - Deep Humanity - know thyself - rekindling wonder - awakening to our true nature - Rupert Spira

      quote - know thyself - recognizing our true nature - has never been more important than at this hour of our civilization - Rupert Spira - (see below) - 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

  2. Jul 2024
    1. civilization a progress trap

      for - progress trap - civilization itself is one

    2. 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

      for - progress trap - example - from history - Sumerian civilization

      progress trap - example - from history - Sumerian civilization - the really big progress traps uh come with with the invention of agriculture and - i mentioned the first full-blown civilization in the old world the sumerians who perfected the art of irrigation in what is now southern iraq and - for for several centuries everything went really well - They had built canals and ran the water onto the desert and were able to - raise more and more crops and - expand their farmland and - expand their population and - their cities got bigger - their numbers got greater but - what they didn't know is that the kind of irrigation they were practicing - was causing the land to get saltier and saltier - and after a number of centuries they suddenly saw their farm meals declining because of salinity - and they had to switch to crops that could tolerate more salt - and then eventually they ended up producing only about one quarter of the food that they'd been able to produce when they started -and the civilization collapsed - So they had walked into what i call in my book a progress trap - and this is where the myth of progress is so seductive - You do something that in the short run produces obvious benefits so you're getting this positive feedback from some new invention, whether it's - a new way to drive mammoth over a cliff or - it's a new way to expand your farm base through irrigation - but there's a hidden cost down the road which is often hard to foresee

  3. Apr 2024
    1. If that definition of civilization is accepted,

      for - quote - digital decentralised governance - implications of for civilization

      quote - digital decentralised governance - implications of for civilization

      • (see below)

      • If that definition of civilization is accepted, that means that the creation of a non-local digital layer of infrastructure,

        • which allows for the massive self-organization and mutual coordination of trans-local projects,
      • is in itself a fundamental challenge to the civilizational model as we have known it for the last five thousand years.
  4. Mar 2024
  5. Jan 2024
  6. Dec 2023
      • for: plan B, climate futures, dystopian future, civilization collapse

      • title: If We’ve Lost the Climate War, What’s Plan B?

      • subtitle: Why a carbon tax won’t save us, and what’s next.
      • author: Crawford Kilian
      • date: Nov 22, 2023

      • summary

        • a good article that shows the complexity and unpredictability of a collapse scenario and system justification theory, which sounds like the boiling frog syndrome
  7. Sep 2023
      • for: symbiocene, ecozoic, ecocivilization, eco-civilization, animal communication, inter-species communication, Azi Raskin, Earth Species Project, umwelt
      • summary

        • Very interesting talk given by Aza Raskin, founder of:
        • on two main themes:
          • how AI is being used to decode language communication of many different plant and animal species, including inter-fauna, inter-flora and fauna-flora cross communication
          • how AI used to study human languages has detected a universal meaning shape between all languages.
      • reference

  8. Aug 2023
    1. 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.
      • for: ecological civilization
        • Nora Bateson
          • Nora shares about the many diverse intentional communities she has lived in and found them all dysfunctional.
          • The problem is that they have a mission statement, a purpose.
          • The perspectival knowing is different for each person.
          • How do you nurture unintentional community?
          • support unintentional possibility
          • top-down instructional is an unecological process
          • The question "who can you be when you are with me?" is preferred over "what should you be?"
    1. 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.
      • for: complexity, collapse, polycrisis, vulnerabilities - civilization
      • comment
        • the threat of sudden collapse is that our highly interdependent world crashes
        • and we are all specialized cogs in the wheel
        • If sudden collapse happens and complex infrastructure becomes unusable, it takes a tremendous amount of global coordination of specialists to bring the infrastructure back up again
        • global society is not easy to replicate with small groups, as the specialized skills are so fragmented that no small group would likely have the collective knowhow to reconstruct the complexity
  9. Jul 2023
    1. Labor in a fully func-tioning Ecological Civilization will include three essentialelements.
      • for:UBI, universal basic income
      • for: UBI, universal basic income, futures
      • The physical labor required to maintain life’s essential conditions against the forces of entropy.
      • The intellectual labor required to constantly test and advance the individual and collective maps of our ever-evolving territory.
      • The spiritual labor required to continuously renew our sense of individual and collective connection to all that is.

      • comment

        • two of these are articulating the entanglement of the individual and collective.
      • for: ecological civilization, climate emergency, climate EMERGEncy inner/outer transformation, eco civilization, rapid whole system change

      • Title

        • Ecological Civilization: From Emergency to Emergence
      • Author
        • David Korten
      • Date
        • May 25, 2021
      • for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
      • source
      • Description

        • Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
          • William Rees
          • Rex Weyler
          • Nora Bateson
      • Reflections Overall,

        • an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
        • reflections on what is in store for civilization.
      • There is consensus that
        • what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
        • the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
      • There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature
      • Rex

        • emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
        • continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
        • Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
        • we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
        • advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.
      • Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

        • The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
        • and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
        • in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.
      • William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

        • In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
        • Human beings are simply another species and like them,
          • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
          • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.
    1. 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.
      • for: ecological civilization
        • William Rees
    2. 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.
      • for: ecological civilization
      • Rex
        • danger is we will build a model
        • question to Rex:
          • what then is the alternative?
          • admit we are animals
          • if we overshoot, we have to contract
    1. We are as concerned as anybodyelse at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civil-ization seems to be taking.

      Apparently every age feels like they're moving into the abyss, even when they're making great strides.

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  10. Mar 2023
    1. 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.

      From my understanding civilization moves up when the creative thinkers and superior children make advances. Superior children and genius children are what makes civilization move up because they are thinking creatively and doing what needs to be done to make civilization better. This is important to the history of psychology because children that are considered superior or genius will be able to make decisions for the world so civilization can improve. If we look back into history, psychologists can be considered genius because of how they have evolved the science of psychology which could mean they were superior children.

  11. Feb 2023
  12. Jan 2023
    1. 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)

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. ‘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’.

      !- Book Review : Free Range Activist !- Title : ‘Running on Emptiness – The Pathology of Civilisation’ !- Author : John Zerzan (2002) !- Website : http://www.fraw.org.uk/blog/reviews/023/index.shtml

      • All religions have problems with ‘unbelievers’, but that response is insignificant compared to their visceral hatred of ‘apostates’.
    1. 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

      !- Original source of : polycrisis - According to Prof. Tom Murphy, the original source of our current polycrisis is our collective, human need for control and mastery of our environment starting with civilization building itself, - and has its roots over 10,000 years ago in the beginnings of agriculture

      !- Tom Murphy : Comment His thesis is aligned with the work of: - Glenn Albrecht & Gavin Van Horn: Replacing the Anthropocene with the Symbiocene https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumansandnature.org%2Fexiting-the-anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene%2F&group=world - Buddhist scholar David Loy: On the Emptiness at the heart of the human being that cannot be filled by consumerism & materialism https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F1Gq4HhUIDDk%2F&group=world - Korean / German philosopher Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FbNkDeUApreo%2F&group=world - Cognitive Scientist, Buddhist scholar Jay Garfield: Losing the Self: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FE5lW5XedNGU%2F&group=world

    2. 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

      !- collective control of nature : chain of events since agriculture - once we mastered stationary food production - we needed to settle down permanently, giving rise to the first settlements and built environment - surplus harvest needed storage so human settlements were built to stay close to the stores and land producing our food - we started acquiring material possessions, leading to armies to guard them, hierarchies and systems to preserve status - it led to the idea that we could own land and thus began the idea of property, wealth and material accumulation - ownership led to patriarchy, which was associated with religion - monotheism is the great paternal overseer - we had to subjugate humans and other flora and fauna species to serve us - this led to greater extinction and ecological problems

    3. 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

      !- key claim : civilization is inherently unsustainable

      !- comment : SRG When we analyze the meaning of this statement and look for examples, we can find them - When we try to produce a technological solution,it sequesters resources and creates some ecological impact - If we use anything within our complex system, it has an ecological impact associated with it

  13. Jul 2022
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    1. 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).

      The epic meaning of "Bend the Curve" is saving civilization, co-creating a future worth living in the next few years, averting disaster.

      On a personal level the transformation of the individual also conveys epic meaning.

  15. Feb 2022
  16. Jan 2022
    1. 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.
  17. Dec 2021
    1. 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

      Franklin, Benjamin. 1961 [1753]. Letter to Peter Collinson, 9 May 1753. In Leonard W. Labaree (ed.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, vol. 4, pp. 481–3.

      Is Stockholm syndrome a temporary or permanent condition? Likely that it's not permanent and that basic lifeways may win out in a switch of lifeways.

  18. Nov 2021
    1. 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).

      New stories and narratives, in other words, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

      As mentioned above, community economists Michael Shuman demonstrates how relocalizing can create new patterns of behavior consistent with a desirable future.

      The Swiss 2000 Watt society is another example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

      We must engage film-makers, artists, playwrights to create stories of such alternative futures of living within planetary boundaries, doughnut economics and eco-civilizations.

    2. 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).

      Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

      Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives that address both simultaneously.

      Replace petroculture with ecoculture, doughnut economics, living within planetary boundaries and eco-civilization

  19. Oct 2019
  20. May 2019
  21. Feb 2019
  22. Oct 2017
    1. 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?

      I found this statement incredibly depressing yet profound. Depressing in the idea that our central task is learning how to die (really who wants to be that morbid and think like that) (potentially digital humanists?), yet profound, because the soldier is not talking about us as individuals, but as a human civilization, as a whole, as a group, as a collective.

  23. Mar 2017
    1. All of my reasons are what some objectivists would call subjective, but they provide, when added together, a very solid plat-form indeed

      Connection with Nietzsche's construction on running water Yeah, it's only made out of spiderwebs and isn't invincible, but it's quite literally good enough for government work, and we can build a civilization on it.

  24. Sep 2016
    1. heart disease, diabetes and cancer

      Not the best source or argumentation. But these are the key ones we may remember from Eaton, Konner, and Shostack

  25. Oct 2015
    1. 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

      civilization is a major cause of discomfort and provides situations that influences humans to be or feel hostile towards someone or something.. ? Really..

  26. Nov 2013
    1. 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.

      and call it "civilization"

  27. Sep 2013
    1. show that the price we pay for our advance incivilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.

      hence discontent