No Hexagram Today

[degringolade]

Rococo / Paul Revere/ View of the Town of Boston

So, one of my semi-frequent reads is Charles Hugh Smith’s “Of Two Minds”.  He’s OK.  He kinda peeves me off and on, so he will probably never get up to a routine read, but he is definitely someone I drop in to visit occasionally.  In baseball terms, I would rate him as a solid infielder with a low-200’s batting average.  No all-star game for him.  Bat him about seventh.

I am writing this because he whiffed badly the last time at bat.  When you read this, you just want to bench him for a while.  

Let’s talk about what annoys me the most about blogging.  Most of the issues that folks get all het up about are focused around what the society as a whole is doing and how these kinds of things don't fit the idealized world that lurches around the inside of their skull.

Charles is pretty good at this.  I have kept an eye on him for a while while reading his stuff.  In a sense he is a classic “minister” willing to tell you how his lifestyle choices and advertisements can be yours by just following his direction all the while making sure that the plate is being passed.

I kinda admire his lifestyle, he got in while the getting was good and lived the island life before the top blew out of the market.  Good timing and good cash management has taken him a long way.  I am certain that he has worked hard, but being a boomer like me, he also grew up in the “hard to fail” era.  

When he says completely asinine statements about “trying to prevent collapse”, he is talking his preacher talk.  Where a person wants to create a subscription system to let them tell you what is important to them and charge you for the service.

Nope, sorry charlie.  Your daydreams aren’t going to prevent “collapse” any more than mine will.  Collapse is a societal issue.  Individual actions have little effect on societal functions because the rest of the society’s actions have their own motivations and directions.  To be arrogant enough to say that warning everyone is going to do something other than give you rights to say “I told you so”, is a good way to earn a punch in the throat after the shit goes down.  

Nope, you are just trying to monetize fear of the increasingly likely chance of “collapse” (whatever the fuck that means) by saying you are trying to “prevent” a nebulous and frightening construct of your own mind. 

Earth abides. 

Comments

RAKES AND BULLDOZERS AND OTHER IMPLEMENTS OF DESTRUCTION

[mschmidt]

The argument that technology cannot save the day because it takes too long to develop, is an attempt to be rational, but the argument is still founded on the idea that technology offers solutions. Homo sapiens is the tool user – this is one of the major awards that Homo sapiens has won hands down every year since its beginning. So, the author’s thinking does not stray from the idea that humans might design tools to solve problems … that earlier tools have caused.

Perhaps the author did not dig deep enough into the happenings of the universe to get to what needs to happen at this stage of the game. It is one thing to analyze the collapse of earlier human cultures, and a very different thing to analyze the collapse of Nature itself.

Why should anybody imagine that the use of tools would not reduce the lifespan of a species? Perhaps it is right here where human thinking takes a wrong turn.

What if the process of shortening the lifespan of a species, begins with the species first tool? What if technology itself, regardless of its form, is always the problem and never the solution, if the goal is the indefinite survival of a species? What if every tool that increases the lifespan of individuals at some point in time, reduces the lifespan of the species? Why would this not be what somebody would naturally expect? Where else does somebody expect to get something desirable for free? People pay people, but nobody pays Nature, and people disregard that no human pays Nature.

People seem to think that humans have a will to survive that is a natural trait. If so, then Homo sapiens will continue to make new and different tools that will in every case shorten the lifespan of their species, not to mention other species.

By observing how Nature operates, it seems that the key to the indefinite survival of species, is that no species makes a tool; in other words, NO species uses technology.

A tool provides advantage for individuals of a certain time, but it must extract something from Nature that individuals in the future will not have, that they would have had otherwise. Obvious examples are tools that cause something to go extinct.

Consider the tools that harness energy. Everybody seems to imagine that some new tool that delivers clean/unlimited energy to mankind is some sort of panacea. Why would giving humans access to more energy not speed up the shortening of the lifespan of the species, and most other species?

Sooner or later the fact that humans are animals has to matter. There is probably no species of animal that would reject the use of a tool that provides advantage for individuals of that species. Where humans have an opportunity to back up their imagined intellectual and moral superiority to the beasts, is to recognize that humans need to STOP using tools to extract profit from nature. The problem is that humans are animals, and they will never do this.

Thus, the role for science and technology, is to make life better for individual humans now, while disregarding that every new tool will shorten the lifespan of their species, and who knows how many other species.

The situation is summed up pretty well by Kurt Vonnegut’s, “and so it goes”.

If somebody wants to complain, they need to contact God because he made an animal that would surely use tools. The scenario is similar to people who want to complain about all the quaint local bookstores being gone. They need to contact Amazon to complain, but the problem is that Amazon made the complainer stop buying books from the local bookstore.