FRIDAY, OCT 30, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
Eric's 600 Word Summary
As if posterity mattered
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: SPEAK TO POSTERITY, FROM THE WIRES, FEWER WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
Abstract: Everyone seeking a higher education should write a statement, 600 words or less, that sums up their existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere. If they have none, then don't bother applying. On graduating they should write an updated statement. If they have nothing to change, the university has some explaining to do. Everyone should rewrite their statement at least every ten years. Jack Alpert has offered his 600 words, and his merits consideration. Everyone should sum 'it' up in 600 words. Do it now; why wait? Those applying to graduate school should offer a zeitgeist statement in 256 characters or less, short enough to be inscribed on one's tombstone or cremation urn (or cardboard box).
Coos Bay (A-P) — My 600 word narrative, updated 5/8/22, as told by a storytelling animal:
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We of the present received industrial society's growth economy as a gift. For all born in cities/towns the gift was given to their parents, grandparents, and in fewer numbers their great grandparents on back 8-280 generations for some.
Envision a car as analogous to the now global fossil-fueled economy. It is a car that has not merely kept on and on for 300 years, but unseen minions work to make it better. It now goes faster, runs smoother, is more reliable and safer than ever. There are problems, but the trend is clear. It has never 'run out of gas'. Praise be Lord Car!
Another story: you're in a car with friends on a joyride. They decide to go to Vegas on a shortcut, a 200 mile dirt road over the mountains that gets used maybe once a month by somebody. There is surely enough gas to go 200 miles (on mostly level pavement), but you ask if anyone is concerned about running out of gas or maybe breaking down?
All, eager to paint the town, deny any concerns. Do you ask to be let out on the highway in the desert at high noon with no water before the car turns off on the dirt road?
Seemingly no one ever gets out of the car no matter how much evidence and reason is offered for concerns that it can stop working and at some point will as all prior empires have. We are not rational animals, but rationalizing animals. Ursula K. Le Guin envisioned a societal paradise, enabled by a Faustian bargain, that all learn of in their youth and virtually all accept. If you haven't, read her 3.5 pages. Know that no one can choose to walk away.
Yet some walked away from Omelas never to be heard from again. Very few, always alone, and that is the only way out of the dynamic we are all part of and serve. Did they all die soon after leaving? No one knew, but walking away from the global growth hegemon is the only viable option.
But being the only one to walk away (vote with your feet) is not viable. So few now walk away that any who do must walk away alone. But... but if only 0.01% of humanity walked away, then.... Yes, but zero you know have so far. Change, however, is the only certainty. Walking away is posterity's future (if any).
Predictions are problematic. You give the next person you see keys to a new car/job (you have many). If those who are offered the car have no prior experience with one, don't know what gasoline/growth is, then what percentage of those who take the growth car (and are only told how to start and steer it) will just happily keep on driving until it stops?
And the outcome? At some point all Empires driven unto overshoot stop forever after. If those who agree to 'seek out the condition now that will come anyway' get out of their car now and agree to go somewhere not dependent on cars and live car-free low power lives, then some may persist. The car culture (Hubbert's monetary culture) will fail. Good or bad? I don't know, but those who walk away from Omelas/Modern Techno-Industrial society before it fails could take valuable information with them. That is the source of my optimism. Posterity be served—we moderns (including post/meta/ecomodernists) must STAND DOWN and listen to Nature to persist.
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'We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.' ―David Suzuki
And who is our unfortunate child kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery? Who but posterity?
The consumer life of evermore is an overshoot debt that posterity, the child, will pay. Knowing this....
William James:
'Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?'
The Raven as totem animal. Comment on your existence. in < 257 characters.
William Rees:
'Many people are startled to learn that most of what they believe to be true, most of what they think they know, is literally made up... products of the human mind, massaged or polished by social discourse and elevated to the status of received wisdom by custom or formal agreement. All cultural narratives, worldviews, religious doctrines, political ideologies, and academic paradigms are actually “social constructs” [domains of discourse].... One passively acquires the convictions, values, assumptions, and behavioral norms of his/her tribe or society simply by growing up in that particular milieu.... Some well-known constructs are entirely made up – “capitalism”, “communism”, “civil rights”, and “democracy” [aka human exceptionalism] for example, have no true analogues in the non-human world. These and similar concepts were birthed in words and given legs entirely through socio-political discourse [as honed into fine words by products of a broken educational system].... Science is unique among formal ways-of knowing in that scientists explicitly test the validity of tentative constructs (hypotheses) about the real world through observation and experiment [i.e. they listen to Nature] and adjust their understanding accordingly....'
'Things can get complicated – any economic paradigm is an elaborate socially-constructed model that may contain (or omit) other models that are themselves socially constructed. By now it should be clear that much of what humans take to be “real” may or may not bear any relationship to anything “out there”. More remarkably still, most people generally remain unconscious that their collective beliefs may be shared illusions – a cognitive enigma that may well determine the fate of humankind. No matter how well- or ill-founded, entrenched social constructs are perceptual filters through which people interpret new data and information; and, because our constructs constitute perceived reality, they determine how we “act out” in the real world. Millions [or billions] of lives may be jeopardized if those in positions of authority [fail to listen to Nature,] cherry-pick data guided by some dangerously faulty but comfortable social construct.... Let’s acknowledge that all economic theories/paradigms are elaborate conjectures and that none can contain more than a partial representation of biophysical, or even social, reality. If this is an important general limitation, we should be particularly concerned about today’s dominant neoliberal economic paradigm (the economics of capitalism)... enamoured with the idea of a self-regulating (free) market, would have the real economy adapt to fit their models.' —William Rees, End game: The economy as eco-catastrophe and what needs to change 2019
3/27/22 SUBNOTE TO FILE:
I endeavor to improve. A perhaps better statement in 452 words for those who already suspect that, 'Huston, we have a problem', is on the home page, but may have been overlooked amid all the other words and infographics.
9/11/22 SUBNOTE TO FILE:
The idea of a need to walk away is included in The World Ecolate Elders' Warning to Young Humans.
1/4/2024 SUBNOTE TO FILE:
The condition of not believing or disbelieving anything, of abelief, is the walking away. The condition of believing in choice, that there is an entity that chooses (a Self), is life as you know it. Believing you have no choice changes nothing. You remain a fly in Wittgenstein’s fly bottle. The condition of being out of the bottle is abelief. Bliss, oh ye believers, is abelief.
