- cross-posted to:
- shitposting@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- shitposting@lemmy.ml
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it feels like a line from the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
Maybe whales know something we don’t. They have land ancestry, so they started as something in the ocean came out for a bit and decided to go back
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Ouff ouchie that hurts.
65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)
Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.
One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics). We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.
Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.
The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.
Obviously we haven’t fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.
We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.
