TUESDAY, FEB 7, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
In starkest madness:
'Tis the Majority
In all prevail
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: TO CONSIDER, FROM THE WIRES, THE LIMITS TO CHANGE
Abstract: So, you are a product of and serve a form of civilization that arose in Africa to expand within and out of Africa about 50k to 60k years ago as an invasive species specialist. Our defining narrative is that growth (expansion) is good... more is better. Such is the majority view. Changing it may be challenging.
COOS BAY (A-P) — For over six million years our hominin ancestors lived in complex societies, aka bands of typically less than 50 trusted-with-your-life others each depended on and helped to persist, even at risk of individual death. And as exogamy is a need (not merely a want), other bands are needed and individuals often do not remain in the same band for life, and as our ancestors evolved high levels of eusociality, male competion was selected against and bands became matrilocal or bilocal, meaning the women decided to remain with their mothers (the choice as usual) who provided grandmothering services along with fathers who provided grandfathering services while gathering without young children in tow, or she may become a member of another band provided they accept her, her mate and offspring. The expansionist form of human society, however, selected for alpha-maleism and patriarchy, anthropological atavisms that had been selected against for millions of years.
When all hominins lived in bands of 50 or less, one that could live in groups of up to 150 would tend to prevail. The expansionist culture would merely have to agree, form a consensus narrative, that they had a right to displace other groups of hominins or, should the hominins be of the same species or subspecies (e.g. non-expansionist H. sapiens sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans), then displacing the males and breeding the females was the best thing ever. Should scarcity arise, no problem. Just over the horizon, beyond current domain boundaries, was more for the taking. Hunting megafauna to extinction in one valley maximized prosperity. If the taking isn't so good anymore, just move on. Our expanisionist form of civilization prospered for over 50k years.
With the taking of North and South America, the Man the Hunter expansionists had to settle down a bit as they had to elsewhere after the taking. One group could expand into another group's territory, but there was always a price to pay. Gone were the good-old days of rapid expansion, conquest of inferior hominins, and rapacious hunting as everywhere seemed to be claimed by prior expansionists with much the same weapons and willingness to use them. As the centuries and millennia pass, the expansionist culture was forced to renormalize enough to persist, e.g. the Polynesian expansionists who displaced the first expansionists who arrived on Tikopia.
But it seems to take more than the passing of a few millennia to renormalize expansionist humans as evidenced by their enthusiasum for expansion when the opportunity to expand arises. A renormalized human would foresee the outcome of expansion. Expansionist must lack foresight intelligence as a precondition for expanding (normal humans who may possess it are displaced).
But good times came again when agriculture emerged to empower even larger groups, groups so large that some members could specialize in rapacious taking and others could specialize in telling them why expansionist taking was so right and glorious. The domesticators of cattle used them to pull plows on the northern margins of the formerly Fertile Crescent before expanding to the steppes of Central Asia to invent large-wheeled cattle-drawn carts to haul their amassing possessions. About 5k years ago they domesticated the horse to ride down upon the prior expansionist Man the Hunter cultures to subsume them (mostly the women).
They gloriously expanded to dominate the planet. Those who did not come to speak their language, persisted by becoming like them, e.g. the Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, and Afroasiatic speakers. By the 21st century, all but a few remnant populations had been subsumed into the glorious Euro-Sino Empire and its monetary culture.
With the final fossil-fueled global expansion, Modern Techno-Industrial supremists, Lord Man, had taken the planet. The taking was good. The and then what question was not asked as asking it was a threat to their Anthropocene enthusiasm. The non-enthusiast did not prosper and were viewed as failed humans.
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay. Of that Planetary Wreck.
To be clear, those who meet in Davos, the UN, or who meet in local markets to sell or buy bushmeat are Anthropocene enthusiasts all, part of the same remoresless dynamic that none of them understand as to do so would deliver them from their prosperity (aka short-term self interest). Our success as modern humans depends on not understanding our past, present, or future, on knowing ourselves not.
If the many, the majority, have no viable future, if the endeavor to renormalize as viable K-strategists is the starkest madness, then what is the minority to do? Change the majority of humans into former expansionists who force the minority to stand down? Or recognize that the majority will go down, and not by choice or intent. There is no need to make them go down, to work to destroy them or save them.
The expansionist form of civilization has a Use By date. The Great Selection, post Great Acceleration, is a foreseeable future, and those who foresee it may not go gently into that good night. Some with a discerning eye of insight may see a viable pathway to a viable form of civilization that selects for a renormalizing of humans who can love and understand the planet, the World System and its subsystems, and can thereby live with it properly as the millennia pass.
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called." —R. Buckminster Fuller
Proposed: create at least 30 potentially viable models of a viable form of civilization (aka complex society) and test our best guesses as to what might world.
