Nov 1, 2022·edited Nov 1, 2022Liked by Zero HP Lovecraft
Brilliant insights, as you already know.
I would make one slight point, about the inefficient and dysfunctional nature of geopolitics.
"The Amish can only survive as long as the (perceived) value of exploiting them is less than the (perceived) opportunity cost of doing so."
Plutarch writes that Lycurgus (mythical founder of the Spartan laws) designed Sparta to be poor, both to remain equal internally, and be undesirable to invade from external rivals.
Sparta was in some ways a Communist, monastic society where men took vows of poverty and devoted themselves religiously to military duty, and all gold and silver was confiscated by the government and made worthless.
"It need not be said, that, upon the prohibition of gold and silver, all lawsuits immediately ceased, for there was now neither avarice nor poverty amongst them, but equality, where every one's wants were supplied, and independence, because those wants were so small."
—Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Lycurgus
This sort of Communist monastic society required EXTREME discipline, fanatical indoctrination from childhood in order to be retained... it was an unstable equilibrium that later was destroyed by a scaling problem. Sparta only functioned when it was a small city-state. This government system was poorly adapted to be an empire.
Success ruined Sparta. Inflows of wealth "corrupted" Sparta (provided perverse incentives for defect-cooperate equilibrium)
Plutarch writes:
"In the time of Agis, gold and silver first flowed into Sparta, and with them all those mischiefs which attend the immoderate desire of riches. Lysander promoted this disorder; for, by bringing in rich spoils from the wars, although himself incorrupt, he yet by this means filled his country with avarice and luxury, and subverted the laws and ordinances of Lycurgus; so long as which were in force, the aspect presented by Sparta was rather that of a rule of life followed by one wise and temperate man, than of the political government of a nation."
Entropy is of course an inevitable force, but you are correct that strategic, religious, cultural retreat from technology offers short-term stability at the price of long-term defeat by someone willing to grasp Steel and build superior weapons.
In Dune, Frank Herbert writes about the downfall of the Navigator Guild — who chose to be parasitic mercenaries, intermediaries, and specialized in transportation so that their organization wouldn't be corrupted by DIRECT power and authority:
"he thought then about the Guild - the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed.
They had never dared grasp the sword . . . and now they could not grasp it.
They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators.
They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died.
Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.
The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation."
About 30 years ago, when I was in my 20s -- this was the early 90s -- I had a dream that we (I and others) had magic flying mirrors that were the source of all kinds of interesting and useful information. It was understood that these mirrors were capable of betrayal, perhaps even that betrayal was a certain outcome. It seemed prophetic, so I remembered it.
like you I struggle between a primitivist and futurist worldview
the former, for reasons you state, is an impractical ideal. Yet I practice creating "space" in my real life off the internet to indulge this and live that as reality for those moments I am alone in my car traversing the high desert nothing in view from horizon to horizon, we seem so small when we leave our metropolises and suburbs.
the latter, is inevitable and will swallow up the former but this doesn't need to be a bad thing. There are many post industrial comforts and temptations that degrade and degenerate us, but we also have access to better fitness, better nutrition, more freedoms in many senses than a medieval peasant (despite argumentation to the contrary)
So the choice, in a sense, is ours to make of the future what we will. Perhaps making "primitive spaces" is the answer, both externally and internally.
( National parks are essentially "primitive" spaces, some are even so strict as to only allow wooden, unpowered boats onto certain waters. )
> In order to survive in war, in trade, in any kind of existential struggle, it will be both possible and necessary to spin up legions of virtual humans, copies of the smartest and most ruthless individuals we can find, and deploy them to solve intellectual problems. These “people” will be “born” and “die” millions of times over, after living lives which are nasty, brutish, and short, being monomaniacal slaves to whatever objectives are fashionable at the moment, being tortured or bribed into compliance and then discarded the moment it’s expedient.
Who's to say that this hasn't "already happened" (to apply a temporal metaphor that may not exactly apply). It may be that maya, the world of illusion, the samsara in which we are forced to circulate, is merely a machine used for a higher-order computational purpose?
All of these dead-end electron-based transhumanist fever dreams are the result of misunderstanding the seat of consciousness. It doesn't exist/emerge from the brain, it is exterior to it and independent of it. The brain is a transceiver.
We are not machines within machines, we are minds within minds.
Brilliant insights, as you already know.
I would make one slight point, about the inefficient and dysfunctional nature of geopolitics.
"The Amish can only survive as long as the (perceived) value of exploiting them is less than the (perceived) opportunity cost of doing so."
Plutarch writes that Lycurgus (mythical founder of the Spartan laws) designed Sparta to be poor, both to remain equal internally, and be undesirable to invade from external rivals.
Sparta was in some ways a Communist, monastic society where men took vows of poverty and devoted themselves religiously to military duty, and all gold and silver was confiscated by the government and made worthless.
"It need not be said, that, upon the prohibition of gold and silver, all lawsuits immediately ceased, for there was now neither avarice nor poverty amongst them, but equality, where every one's wants were supplied, and independence, because those wants were so small."
—Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Lycurgus
This sort of Communist monastic society required EXTREME discipline, fanatical indoctrination from childhood in order to be retained... it was an unstable equilibrium that later was destroyed by a scaling problem. Sparta only functioned when it was a small city-state. This government system was poorly adapted to be an empire.
Success ruined Sparta. Inflows of wealth "corrupted" Sparta (provided perverse incentives for defect-cooperate equilibrium)
Plutarch writes:
"In the time of Agis, gold and silver first flowed into Sparta, and with them all those mischiefs which attend the immoderate desire of riches. Lysander promoted this disorder; for, by bringing in rich spoils from the wars, although himself incorrupt, he yet by this means filled his country with avarice and luxury, and subverted the laws and ordinances of Lycurgus; so long as which were in force, the aspect presented by Sparta was rather that of a rule of life followed by one wise and temperate man, than of the political government of a nation."
Entropy is of course an inevitable force, but you are correct that strategic, religious, cultural retreat from technology offers short-term stability at the price of long-term defeat by someone willing to grasp Steel and build superior weapons.
In Dune, Frank Herbert writes about the downfall of the Navigator Guild — who chose to be parasitic mercenaries, intermediaries, and specialized in transportation so that their organization wouldn't be corrupted by DIRECT power and authority:
"he thought then about the Guild - the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed.
They had never dared grasp the sword . . . and now they could not grasp it.
They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators.
They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died.
Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.
The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation."
About 30 years ago, when I was in my 20s -- this was the early 90s -- I had a dream that we (I and others) had magic flying mirrors that were the source of all kinds of interesting and useful information. It was understood that these mirrors were capable of betrayal, perhaps even that betrayal was a certain outcome. It seemed prophetic, so I remembered it.
the basilisk is inevitable
like you I struggle between a primitivist and futurist worldview
the former, for reasons you state, is an impractical ideal. Yet I practice creating "space" in my real life off the internet to indulge this and live that as reality for those moments I am alone in my car traversing the high desert nothing in view from horizon to horizon, we seem so small when we leave our metropolises and suburbs.
the latter, is inevitable and will swallow up the former but this doesn't need to be a bad thing. There are many post industrial comforts and temptations that degrade and degenerate us, but we also have access to better fitness, better nutrition, more freedoms in many senses than a medieval peasant (despite argumentation to the contrary)
So the choice, in a sense, is ours to make of the future what we will. Perhaps making "primitive spaces" is the answer, both externally and internally.
( National parks are essentially "primitive" spaces, some are even so strict as to only allow wooden, unpowered boats onto certain waters. )
> In order to survive in war, in trade, in any kind of existential struggle, it will be both possible and necessary to spin up legions of virtual humans, copies of the smartest and most ruthless individuals we can find, and deploy them to solve intellectual problems. These “people” will be “born” and “die” millions of times over, after living lives which are nasty, brutish, and short, being monomaniacal slaves to whatever objectives are fashionable at the moment, being tortured or bribed into compliance and then discarded the moment it’s expedient.
Who's to say that this hasn't "already happened" (to apply a temporal metaphor that may not exactly apply). It may be that maya, the world of illusion, the samsara in which we are forced to circulate, is merely a machine used for a higher-order computational purpose?
All of these dead-end electron-based transhumanist fever dreams are the result of misunderstanding the seat of consciousness. It doesn't exist/emerge from the brain, it is exterior to it and independent of it. The brain is a transceiver.
We are not machines within machines, we are minds within minds.