The solution you're looking for is very simple: Degrowth. Accept that we're not going to colonize the universe, you won't strap a jetpack to your back, you'll never take a vacation on Mars, you'll never know for sure if other planets harbor life, you'll never know for sure what the smallest particles in an atom are, your physical body won't be immortal and you won't have your own robot slaves. In fact, you'll never see the inside of an airplane again, you'll never heat your house again nor will you ever eat tropical fruit or beef again.
Counterintuive as it might seem, the idea that humanity won't expand further and colonize other planets is more difficult for people to accept than the idea that they themselves will have to make some kind of sacrifice. The latter takes wilpower, the prior causes an existential crisis and makes you wonder what you dedicated your life towards. Your daily cubicle labor that makes you miserable must be part of some greater linear-progress narrative right? Surely technology and science will eventually create some kind of paradise on Earth, even if I never get to experience it myself?
Look at science and technology not as a messiah or as a puzzle with a big reward at the end, but as a continual ethical challenge. When we say "we demanded more than the Earth could give", we need to mean it. It's not "we demanded things from the Earth that we should have demanded in another way". It comes down to accepting that mankind was not endowed with some kind of divine obligation to fix a series of technological puzzles that would ultimately lead us to escape the expansion of the sun, but that we are a species like any other, here to derive meaning and pleasure from our participation in a functional ecosystem.
And if you think this isn't relevant, this is in fact the only real problem we're dealing with, the secular religion of progress, the worship of man as the source of his own salvation. Even Greenpeace is unwilling to admit that eating meat is a problem. Look at Greenpeace and beneath the facade of environmentalism you will find a narrative that comes down to: "We're using the wrong kind of technologies to satiate our limitless greed." The very fact that we have to accept limits in our lives amounts to the highest form of blasphemy possible in most intellectual circles.
America as a society is great, because it serves as a perfect example of what we shouldn't be doing. It's a case study of a society that refuses to accept limits. When you receive a promotion, you relocate to the other side of the continent. When two people marry, family has to fly in from all sides of the continent. I'm Dutch, I can step on my bicycle and visit most places my family has lived since we began keeping records.
In China, India and many other places, three generations can cohabit in the same house. In America, if you move back in with your parents after graduating college, you must be a pathetic loser who failed to get his shit together. Among hunter-gatherer tribes, it's common for men to have their own hut and for women to have their own hut. Among Americans, the main household form is now a single person living by himself. Think of the vast amounts of resources you're wasting because everyone needs his own toilet, shower, TV-screen, automobile, refrigerator and so forth.
Among some African tribes, the villagers refuse to modernize agriculture and use heavy machinery, because they enjoy singing communal songs together as they harvest the fruits of their labor, that's what their culture is based around. In America, you work in a cubicle, your parents live in a nursing home, your children to go daycare and your food is harvested by a machine. Is it any wonder people have nobody to confide in any longer?
What we are dealing with is a cultural model that is dysfunctional. There is an error in our cultural operating system. Solar panels, space lasers and Thorium reactors are not going to solve it for us. You have replaced functional communities, where people feel a sense of belonging and dedication to one another, with unsustainable material wealth that's meant to prove to other people that you're not a loser. That's going to blow up in your faces sooner or later.
Submitted March 01, 2017 at 10:00PM by ForWithycombe http://ift.tt/2mFlvqx collapse
No comments:
Post a Comment