MONDAY, OCT 15, 2018
Call Me Ishmael Too
An adventure in insight and understanding
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: ABANDONING INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, FROM THE WIRES, TAKERS, LEAVERS
Abstract: I came across mention of a book, Ishmael 1992, something of a cult classic, and read it. It was about a gorilla that placed an ad seeking students. As a pupil I decided it made sense to place an ad for a teacher with a little help from Google Ads. I thereby became better educated. But maybe I was miseducated as usual, so teachers may still apply.
TUCSON (A-P) —To date I've had 426 responses to the online ad placed in as many places as a mere ten thousand dollars allowed. Perhaps predictably, 425 did not merit a reply. Responses are limited to 512 characters. The one I replied to read:
Saving the world implies delivering it from humans, specifically industrial society humans who know what money is, value it, and likely have some. You are all products of a remorseless dynamic that thwarts all attempts to foundationally change it. To understand something is to be delivered from it. You must understand the dynamic to be delivered from it. You and your environment are that dynamic. Know then thyself as system. Know that your mental images of self and others, of the world, are illusions.
I'm an elite. I've never been hungry in my life. I've been taught from early childhood to mistake the condition of being able to eat more as hunger. If I could eat more, I was "hungry." I later realized that I'd never come close to experiencing a bodily deficit with respect to calories as my body easily shifts from glycolysis to ketosis and weeks of not eating (apart from some electrolyte replacement) can pass without running out of body fat among people like me among whom 70 percent are overweight and 34 percent are clinically obese. That not eating for weeks does not result in "hunger" is a proven fact I have repeatedly verified, one that 99.999+ percent of other humans and 100% of those with PhD after their name (all consumers serving industrial society) would deny, would be utterly unable to believe. I did not know what hunger was, still don't, and neither do you. I don't "know" anything. So I sought a teacher. I replied:
I am a denizen of industrial society. I serve the SYSTEM. It gives me money. I spend it. I eat, sleep, play, and consume stuff. I live the purpose-driven life of the consumer. I find "better" ways to serve the SYSTEM so it will give me more money and stuff. Sometimes I just take things and use people. Like everyone else I know or know of, I'm a Taker. I don't know why. More is better I'm told. As an E.O. Wilson fanboy I like to watch ants who take resources when they can. But I don't even know what I don't know. All I know is that I don't know enough to have an opinion. But maybe I'm teachable.
So 425 teachers offered to give me something I wanted or, per promises, would want. One offered to take something away: my errors, ignorance, and illusions—my sense of self. But he or she didn't seem to be a Taker. Over the years I've offered money, but my teacher was indifferent, ignoring such offers. Maybe some humans are Givers. Maybe my teacher wasn't human. Whatever might replace error, ignorance, and illusion would not come from a teacher who gave by taking away. No one could deliver me from my purpose-driven life, from my Self, but maybe understanding would entail deliverance. If it did, it would only be because I had no choice. Whenever I have a choice I always choose self interest as I seem to have no other choice.
I could give everything that's "mine" away to the poor. I could steal everything not nailed down and give it away, or I could kill myself by forcing others to nail me to a cross..., but why? There would be some "gain" to my personhood, to my imagined Self. Hitler killed himself to preserve his illusions (his sense of Self) that were at risk of being disconfirmed. Or maybe I really do have other "choices" and merely have yet to observe a single exception in myself or others to serving self interest, apparent or not. Take away my errors, my ignorance, my illusions, and what would be left? Would I be a hollow man? Would I have even a story to tell?
"Mistah Kurtz — he dead. A penny for the Old Guy". Between the prattle and the whimper falls the shadow. Kurtz was the gifted servant of empire, eloquent beyond belief, who epitomizes intelligentsia wordsmith's, "the hollow men" who live in death's dream kingdom, justifiers of policy or would-be progenitors of new policy. Kurtz's insight into his life of service to a cancerous industrial society, "The horror! The horror!" was an achievement, but it came too late. Kurtz's final words were a pronouncement on Expansionist Man's 50k years of omniscient conquest of a planet for the taking.
Likely “we shall not cease from exploration [and taking], and the end of all our exploring [and taking] will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" [T.S. Eliot]. Knowing the place, our mess of fine messes we call our modern lives, will involve knowing how we got there for the first time. Understanding the dynamic that automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it, you know, the one that if we don’t put time and energy into understanding it, the one we are doomed to go with it, right to the final curtain (a funeral pall, that comes down with the rush of a storm). To understand our predicament/dynamic may be our deliverance from it (idea: Spinoza).
Guy Fawkes was going to blow up ground zero of the British Empire, Parliament with the King and servants in it, but failed. Some would give him his two cents worth, or at least one, for having the idea, even though success would have merely effected a changing of the guard, the installing of a new cast of empire serving characters whose religious preference would not matter. I give Theodore Kaczynski a penny too, even though he had no viable alternative to industrial society to offer.
Perhaps the best one can do is tell the truth to power, beginning with oneself as potentate, if only the truth about one's own pathetic human of NIMH, empire serving, purpose-driven hollow life. Some may be more hollow than others, but we products of techno-industrial society are living in a dreamtime. "Those who dream of the banquet, wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow wake to join the hunt. While they dream, they do not know that they are dreaming." —Zhuangzi.
I added:
I am a human and I wish to be delivered from the collective that is destroying the world, delivered from the SYSTEM (short for the social, political, religious, educational, legal and economic control system I am of and serve as a specialist) so I am no longer part of the hegemon that is taking the planet, consuming its primary productivity, its biomass to turn into humans, livestock, and pets. I want to understand how to destroy the SYSTEM I am of. I live in a world of pathologies, of fellow pathogens. I am a pathogen. I live as in a tumor, as a cell of that metastasizing mass. What was once "a world of wounds" is now a world of pathologies facing multiple system failures.
I received a reply:
Know then thyself. I can only help you by creating doubt. With doubt comes inquiry. With inquiry comes insight. The secret awaits for the insight that comes one mind at a time to the collective. What insight I may have is a conjecture. Assume nothing. Believe nothing I say. Question everything. Rethink everything.
Sometimes days would pass before I replied. Sometimes days passed before he, she, it replied. I have the complete transcript, so memory is not involved. I have 1,636 pages of typing, but I'll boil it down. I'll be "me," "myself," and "I." The other, whom I have no image of (but for some reason cannot see as human), I'll call "Tee" for teacher.
Tee, like Socrates, helped to create doubt by asking me questions, by questioning everything. Tee asked me to tell stories about myself and my kind, about life, the universe and everything. How did we come to be on this planet? What are we doing on it and to it?
Well, I typed, in the beginning, about 13.8 billion years ago, was the singularity. The universe began with a bang. After the inflation there was light. Hydrogen and helium formed. Galaxies of stars formed—upwards of two trillion galaxies. Star dust formed from the death of the first stars. New stars formed that included their dust. Our solar system formed about five billion years ago. Planets formed. Earth was one of eight we know of, third from Sol. Soon, nearly four billion years ago, life formed somehow. Prokaryotes formed into eukaryotes, and over a billion years ago some started having sex—exchanging genes. Forms diversified and left fossil remains, especially after they became multicellular. An asteroid hit the planet and the dinosaurs had a bad day. It was bad for mammals too, but some survived. Some feathered dinosaurs did too, but mammals came to dominate, to rule the world. And then man appeared. We now rule the world. We grow. Only four percent of mammalian biomass left on the planet is "wild." We came to know freedom and dignity, human rights, a free market and democracy. We were blessed above all animals by our Maker. Great was our Progress and prosperity. We will conquer cancer, overcome aging, disease, death, and go forth to assume our proper place in the Cosmos. It took awhile, there are details, we're not finished, but that's the story of Lord Man.
Tee asked about "our solar system," about who it belonged to. I tried everything from "me" to "all life," but no answer seemed "right." Tee merely seemed bemused by my attempts to answer. And why was the passing of most dinosaurs "bad?" I had to admit that it was actually a good day for mammals as if most of the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, mammals wouldn't have had any niches to fill and humans wouldn't have appeared to turn 99% of mammalian biomass into livestock, pets, and humans. More questions about freedom, dignity, the Rights of Man, and market freedom to do what? We have and are had by democracy that serves to decide what?... I had to admit our non-appearance could have been a good thing. But what if humans learn to live properly with the planet and evolve into "forms most beautiful and most wonderful" as all of our ancestors, and those organisms who were not our ancestors, had? I yelled in all capitals, THAT WOULD BE BAD! Tee didn't reply.
Finally I typed that the loss of information, both genetic and memetic, that humans manifest phenotypically and transmit culturally (and by having sex) would never be recreated, would be lost, would be a loss. Tee agreed that while evolution might select for another bipedal mammalian form, that it would not be human. All convergent evolution giving rise to forms resembling extinct forms were not those forms. If humans were to go extinct, information would be lost, as would the potential for them to evolve into other phenotypic forms. If any species goes extinct, ditto. Weeks passed and I finally asked in frustration if there was nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so? As usual Tee didn't offer an answer, but asked if I had read much Shakespeare.
Months went by as I tried to explain what "rule the world" meant. Had dinosaurs ever "ruled" the world? I couldn't come up with any claim that did not appear incoherent even to me almost as I typed it. The best I could come up with was readily called into question by Tee. I came to realize I hadn't the slightest idea what it might mean to "rule" anything. The only bit left was the notion (well, the feeling) that ruling was a "good" thing. That it was "better" to rule than be ruled. That surely any civilized being had to be "for" ruling and "against" being ruled. Actually this went on for over a year. There was a lot of typing about "like" and "don't like," about "for" and "against," about "good" and "bad," "pick" and "choose," "believe" and "don't believe," "cling" and "reject," "assert" and "deny...." I came to see the struggle between "for" and "against" as the mind's worst disease. Nature doesn't care what I like or dislike, what I want or don't want.... Why should I?
I came to realize that my scientistic story of 13.8 billion years and so on to "and then man appeared" was indeed a myth, but I insisted that every claim was a fact, and I spent days referencing every statement. Tee accepted each was a fair "best guess" about the past, at least up to the "civilization" claim, and I accepted that there was uncertainty at every turn. I removed the "our," "bad" and "rule" bits, and while Tee accepted the rest, Tee insisted that my story was a fiction, even though every dot in it was "true," as the way I had connected the "true" dots was my mythology of human origins and attainment to implied supremacy.
The end point was humans, and that was the myth. It was the humancentric mythology of human supremacists—'For Thine is the Kingdom'. Evolution did not end when humans "appeared." Okay, I didn't end the story with jellyfish since I'm not a jellyfish. And I'm not a cabbage, apart from sharing half my genes in common, so evolution didn't end when cabbage "appeared."
Tee asked what my story would be without the human centrism. So I came up with: About 13.8 billion years ago the universe began with a bang as distinct from a whimper. After the inflation there was light. Hydrogen and helium formed. Galaxies of stars formed—upwards of two trillion galaxies in a universe, perhaps one of a multiverse, currently 93 billion light-years in visible diameter. Billions of solar systems formed within each and many had planets. Most second generation stars had planets that had moons and some moons had moonmoons. Some moons and planets had weather, and some having weather were energetic enough to develop life, likely numbering in the billions of worlds. Some life forms came to tell stories and all told of how they had become the potentates of their own lives and were the center of all that mattered.
Okay, I had to not claim that "all told of" since "all" is almost always wrong. "Some" did since the only storytelling animal we know of did. I ended up realizing that "I" had no story that mattered, but that understanding the story of the collective I was part of mattered. So I came to try and to look at the mythology of industrial society humans. I had read Joseph Campbell and as a member of the Literati Club had led a weekly viewing and discussion of his "The Transformations of Myth Through Time" series. I knew he was open to we denizens of industrial society developing a mythology, noted that Lucas' Star Wars was mythological storytelling, but he failed to consider the mythology we are unconscious of, as if we of industrial society alone didn't have one yet. We have one, surely, but we think it is "true" and not a myth, just like all others before us who didn't have mythologies either.
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Like Socrates and Meno's slave boy who discovered how to find twice the area of a square with a bit of directed inquiry, I came to make explicit the implied mythology of industrial society that hides in plain sight with a bit of questioning by Tee. Once I stopped caring what "my" story was, I could tell the story I swam in, had taken in with my mother's milk, as a fish in the vast ocean of water which it never thought to take note of. I came to type without being distracted by "agree" or "disagree."
The story (likely or not, sciency or feel-good delusional) about the time before the "humans appeared" part is really of little interest (to humans). There is no "the story" but only stories as we storytelling animals deign to tell:
- Humans appeared, maybe 6,000,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago when we proudly walked upright or made art, somewhere in that range when hubris arose. Maybe we were created. Maybe we evolved. The story is the same: we appeared in the universe (as untold billions have, but...).
- We differ in kind from animals—we may differ among ourselves as to the "something" that is exceptional, but all who tell stories that other humans retell agree there is a something that sets us apart.
- Per some, we alone have intention, or a theory of mind, or think strategically, or are ensouled, or have rights, or can truly make love....
- Some of us are more exceptional than others. There have been many peoples, many languages, but in each we had different sounding names that meant the same, that meant "people" as in "we the people." Each called themselves "the people."
- Some humans, who soon became Takers, came to plant plants or protect game from other predators, and became agriculturalists. They became farmers or herders not by choice, but because, like all systems, they obey the fourth law of open thermodynamic systems, the maximum empower principle. They told stories of why they were superior to the mere Leavers forced to hunt and gather.
- They produced more food and their increased population depended on farming and/or herding to convert more of the planet's primary productivity into humans and their mutualists. Despite the toil, the commoner's lot was deemed "good" and God blessed.
- Taking evermore is what worked (for a time), they couldn't "go back" to being Leavers (who leave as much as they take, who leave room for Nature, but not by choice) without rapid depopulation first. None "chose" to go back. Polynesian farmers who reached the Chatham Islands did become hunter-gatherers again, but their crops wouldn't grow on these islands, so they, a fewer number than if their crops had grown, came to live prosperous lives of enough but without the toil. The agriculture empowered empire-building Māori who toiled conquered them as being superior, they had to.
- Tribal identity size varies from the 5 to 85 of our hunter-gatherer bands of Leaver ancestors who may regard closely related bands as part of their tribe, to collectives of Takers numbering in the billions that religious and political ideology enables. Takers take more than they give, unsustainably for a time, as short-term contingencies select for [apparent] "success." Takers imagine they have "decoupled" from Nature, a feel-good delusion, an illusion that is believed in, adding another layer of error on top of ignorance.
- Leavers were forced to live within Nature, subject to natural laws that determine who lives and who dies. They could not control other bands/tribes or destroy them, and so [apparently] allowed them to live. They were forced to leave them mostly alone to do their thing, since they had no alternative but to "choose" to do so.
- Takers, empowered by agriculture and later by fossil fuels, could and did live in groups of over a hundred, or over a thousand, or over ten thousand, or over one hundred thousand, or over one million, or in cities of tens of millions and in nation-states, some numbering over one billion, whose economies have coalesced, forming a single global empire early in their third millennium. Takers are humans who came to live in complex societies they have yet to learn how to make work long-term. Early Leavers did not, could not prosper without limit, and that is why there came to be two kinds of people in the world who tell different stories.
- To live in societies of more than 150 people will take more than human biological proclivities. A social control SYSTEM is needed that actually works to maintain "a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources." But no Taker tells this story.
- Takers "rule," first in permanently settled villages, then chiefdoms, then city-states, then nation-states, then as a global extractive mercantile empire (for a time). The Takers were empowered by food reserves to build armies, monuments, support priests and chiefs, temples and palaces, then priesthoods and aristocracies. With the empowerment that fossil fuels provided, elites (served by specialists) enabled the commoners to enthusiastically grow the economy unto overshoot. All who got richer were enthusiastic participants, from those who tried to figure out how to spend the billions they "earned" (another myth) to serve as benefactors of mankind (e.g. to perhaps find a cure for malaria to unintentionally enable faster cattle and human population growth) to those who made enough money this year selling bush-meat to buy a pair of shoes, who hoped that next year they could buy shoes for their sons..., then someday a bicycle..., surely everyone has a "right" to a washing machine and a car (human rights, another level of mythology).
- Leavers will "inherit" (more mythos) the earth, if any humans do. Takers, like cancer cells, enthusiastically embrace growth. Takers and simple Leavers cannot impose limits upon themselves. They cannot not exploit a resource as is true for all organisms. The cancer's mandate is to take, to convert body mass into more of itself. The pathology is the failure of the cancer cell to behave as the co-dependent somatic cell it is. The cancer and its body dies, is selected against, even though the cancer grew prosperously for a time. A cancer cell that just said, "No!" to growth would mutate back into a normal cell. If you could lecture and shame 97% of cancer cells, with appeals to conscience and common sense, into voting to not grow, the outcome would be the same, just slightly delayed.
- If humans come to live within limits, they will have acquired a control SYSTEM that works. They would be Leavers, but not simple Leavers who would grow if they could. Foresight intelligence (Sapience) is the needed mutation, obtainable for the price of an effort to know thyself as system. Complex Leavers will live in complex societies (if they can define rules of the game that work by listening to Nature), as only then can they resist assimilation by Takers. A viable SYSTEM, an OS for spaceship Earth that works, will have to be envisioned first. Humans having enough foresight intelligence to vote with their feet will have a life-driven purpose to make a new OS work, a guess then test proposal.
The less enthusiastic servants of the current business-as-usual SYSTEM are not as well rewarded with the spoils of conquest. It was a planet for the taking and those who took prospered (for a time). Those who live by what Nature provided were displaced, enslaved, slaughtered, or became Takers. No one decided they didn't want to be Leavers anymore. No one knowingly choose to become Takers. Taking was selected for when those inclined, with or without reason, to be Takers were empowered to do what their ancestors were not empowered to do. Power as in energy over time. It takes energy. "Choice" is incidental to the story. Variation is not a choice. There was never a smoke-filled hut where someone says, "Hey guys, let's become farmers and herders, then build empires." There was never a smoke-filled room where rich white men decided to have an Industrial Revolution, colonize the world, and create a global empire.
There are smoke filled rooms where some socio-politico-economic leaders sit, alone or perhaps with a few others, who can foresee hitting the coming wall of biophysical limits. They listen to experts who tell them what they need to do. They writhe uncomfortably in their seats, eyes roll, and sometimes they openly admit to their expert would-be educators that they can do nothing, that if they tried to actually implement the least of the "real solutions" they were being informed of, that they'd not merely be out of office or the boardroom when the next election came, they'd be removed within a month one way or another. All, from the bush-meat hunter to the Lyft driver, to the President of _______ to the highest paid CEO..., and their experts serve the SYSTEM no one asked for or to be part of. That someone (somewhere, physically or metaphysically) is running the show is a myth.
The details of modern mythology are a distraction. For that story, most any SYSTEM serving public intelligentsia type will do (e.g. Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Noam Chomsky, Sam Harris), the cream of our SYSTEM serving educational subSYSTEM, whose narrative tells of a motley drama of, for, and by "Anthropocene enthusiasts" as E.O. Wilson calls them. For the "real deal" look no further than the ecomodernists, not to be confused with their wordsmith predecessors, the obfuscating postmodernists, who want you to have "a good Anthropocene."
For those having a silo science background, your best hope to get right with Nature is to get system science literate ASAP. For you literati types, allegory may be your only hope. Think Moby Dick, a tale any self-respecting intelligentsia type has read. Captain Ahab and crew, together on the Pequod, are a microcosm of industrial society at its starkest. It's not just a story of stripping whales of their blubber to fuel lamps for fun and profit, it is a foundational tale of the human condition, of Man against red-in-tooth-and-claw Nature, the way it has been since the first couple left Eden to become Takers who have been promised the power, and the glory, for ever.
The founding Taker myth is that Man isn't just another animal. Nature is to be subdued, dominated, conquered by indomitable Man. There are setbacks, captains can be lost to the Abyss. Nature may have her moments, but other humans will take heart and redouble their efforts. The Anthropocene rolls on. Man has been decoupled from the Beast who will submit forevermore, or for as long as the myth of human supremacy can be believed in. So, Ahab or Moby? "Villian" or pathogen? A life of service on the Pequod or other entity (e.g. corporation) blobbing about the globe consuming a planet for the taking? Or a life in Nature serving the geobiophysical life-support system that one is and is of as "not-two?" Choose wisely, endeavor to be sapient.
Tee had concerns for humanity and the biosphere. Tee told of sitting quietly along a stream in the woods, amid life in a paradise of diversity: fish feeding, birds singing, mayflies flying (for a day), fruit ripening, trees speaking wisdom.... Then a family of humans came along, led by a five-year-old girl protesting loudly that "there's nothing to do here!". The wailing and bemoaning was without pause. The parents had thought the novelty of an outing in Nature would be diverting, but even without the child along, the internal narratives of their own unmindful prattle would have been equally without pause. It seems they had told the child she could not bring her iPhone, a 'mistake' they are unlikely to repeat. Humanity has "met the enemy and...". All "them" for/against "us" narratives are delusional.
We Takers, true believers in growth for its own sake, are each a malignant subSYSTEM of socio-physical interactions within our global Empire of MORE! (for a time) within the planetary control system of Nature without permanent nor separate existence, hence our sense of Self, individual and collective, is based on error, ignorance, and illusion. Know then thy "true nature" as coexistent with the world system. Love thy system as "not-two," apart from which, not a thing is.
Eventually I started typing not to Tee, but to posterity (who of course has yet to read a word) of existential concerns. Years passed. I hear from Tee occasionally. We exchange and correct memes until mutually agreed upon. Any limits to loving and learning are asymptotic. I spend more time in Nature now, listening to Mother, to learn of love, and less time listening to other humans prattle, including my prattle.
I wish to love that well, which all must leave ere long. We are Leavers all, if only in our individual or collective end—the wages of taking from posterity are perhaps their extinction, as we who are posterity blind benefit in the short term. We could be Leavers in life if we were to leave room for Nature, but we cannot do so by choice. We can endeavor to love this world and the things of it if avarice (growth) is not selected for by the "rules of the game." Continued existence would follow. Understanding is an act of love. Love and understanding may "save the world" by ending our taking of it if we can change the rules of the game to select for a viable civilization.
A new SYSTEM is possible. "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing." Informed by love and understanding, the rules of the game can be changed, and some can vote with their feet to be selected for or against by the new SYSTEM that self-organizes.
I recently realized I had never asked Tee if he/she/it had a name. I heard back. He (I'll infer) typed, "Call me Ishmael."
I asked, "What is telling the truth to power?" Ishmael replied: "The neverending endeavor to tell likely stories that iterate towards being likely. All other endeavors to tell stories are much adieu narratives full of sound and fury merely, conceptual systems of tautologies signifying nothing."
I AM MY WORLD.
Understand or die.
Don't think, but look!
Only describe, don't explain.
Language disguises thought.
Ethics and aesthetics are one.
What can be shown, cannot be said.
Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote.
If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.
There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.
Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.
What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and
opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather
than push.
For a large class of cases ― though not for all ― in which we employ the word
meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The
laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.
People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to
give
them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them.
The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe
that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is
delusion, along
with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about
scientific knowledge
and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that
this is not how things are.
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951
Vastness.
No holiness.
Trees speak wisdom.
Birds cry truth; we prattle.
Our asserted claims cry Truth!
We are the storytelling animal.
All of our stories are as imagined.
The narrative is never the what-is told of.
Tales told by believing minds imply an 'is true'.
We swim in a sea of error, ignorance, and illusion.
Inquiry lives within the mind for whom all stories are untrue.
That Earth is flat with stellar objects circling it was once a given.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to believe!
That Earth is an oblate spheroid is a more recent story that some believe.
All stories are social constructions, but some stories are more adaptive than others.
That humans differ in kind from other life forms is a fact known to all Anthropocene enthusiasts.
Limiting Lord Man's rightful prosperity and progress is only thinkable by misanthropic ecofascists.
My grandfather's prosperity was greater than his father's and mine is greater than mine, and so thus be it.
For ours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, as we have dominion over every creeping thing.
But some are without belief or faith in certitudes, and believe only that they know nothing apart from tautologies.
What is true by definition is surely true, but verities tell us nothing about what lies all undiscovered before us.
We listen to our voice and to the voices of other heads, but listening to Nature may
be more adaptive.
Nature has all the answers and determines what works, so perhaps we should listen. Listen.
Our thoughts may come to resonate with the what-is, apart from which not a thing is.
Technology enables us to maximize empower unsustainably.
To live long and prosper requires limits.
Understand then thy subsystem.
System over self.
Stand down.
No more.
Enough
Now!
