KaiserJeep wrote:I'm not seeing a lot of relevence to the topic of Capitalism in this discussion.
Ibon wrote:
Edward Abbey's words are as salient today as they were 40 years ago when I read them the first time and resonated with them. Midnight, this is no longer relevant today. The great vast majority because they never knew anything different, choose to stay deeply embedded in the malaise Edward Abbey writes about. They have no interest to go beyond the superficial experience of motoring down a black asphalt road looking at arches and scenery out their window. They are unfamiliar with a Canyon Wren calling in the acoustics of a slot canyon with the percussion of water dropping down from a seep on the canyon walls.
I have zero interest these days in educating the masses to be more sensitive to the natural world. I prefer the vast ignorance that affords me more solitude in wilderness places. We have built an infrastructure here at Mount Totumas that limits the number of guests and this is by design. There is no adrenalized zip lines through the forest, no Disneyland nature experience here. This is all by design. Just 40km of trails through the Cloud Forest. I get inquiries from folks asking me what are the activities they can do when they come. I send them on to Boquete nearby where they can wait in long lines to zipline through the canopy like fools. Fortunately we still have enough folks who do want to merge with the hum of wilderness, who come here to enter into habitat dominated by the ecosystem with no signs of man outside a trail hardly bigger than a game trail. These are the guests we serve. But again, why try to educate the masses differently? To what end?
Leave the masses to their mediocrity. It opens up plenty of cracks and space for those of us who know better to create our own separate reality.
Edward Abbey was well embedded back then in the 70's that there was still hope to implant in the shallow suburbanites a deeper wilderness ethic. His books were well read and he did succeed as a writer to put prose to these deeper wilderness spaces.
Sorry Edward, we have moved way beyond where you left off. We have a vast sea of shallow fools who have no interest any longer in your prose. A vast sea of humanity where nature is such an abstraction that Edward's words no longer have a hook on to where they can tether. These references are gone among the vast population today.
I like the masses ignorant. They cluster together in places with no future, with values that have no future, with aspirations that remain shallow and indolent. They are not adaptive to the changes coming our way.
Since we have to get back down to a billion or so anyway why not just write them off. Why attempt to educate?
Damn, am I feeling cynical today as I watch the clouds drifting up the valley and enshrouding us in a blanket of mist.
Ibon wrote:
35 years ago I was pretty hard core into wilderness trips and expeditions. We didn't even go into national parks which we regarded as parks. We were pretty intense about this, getting a back country permit in a national park meant we were being monitored and controlled of where we had to camp each night etc. We choose not to visit most national parks for this reason.
In the desert southwest we did a lot of back packing trips for 7-10 days into slot canyons on BLM land. Some of those magic spots have become upgraded to national parks or monuments in the meantime. Escalante Canyons and Great Staircase are now monuments, back then in the 70's this was all still BLM land were a few of us knew the access points to some wilderness canyon areas that were completely unknown by the general public. We considered these spots secrets and very few knew about these spots. It was word of mouth and hand drawn maps back then, nothing published. This added to the allure of these places.
I worked back then for several years as a therapeutic wilderness counselor working with problem kids and all our spare time me and my buddies were off on crazy expeditions, back packs, one time 600 km canoeing the Churchhill River in northern Saskatchewan for the whole month of September.
We were hard core. Looking back now as a 60 year old I admit we were kind of arrogant and cocky but at the same time wilderness flowed through our veins and nothing less than unregulated huge wilderness areas off the map would excite us. As I said National Parks were just parks for us.
I am still the same in many ways, I still hold myself somewhat exclusive over most of my fellow humans. This all started back then. Like KJ I have physical limitations but our 400 acres that borders 1.5 million acres still provides me that sense of wilderness, walking our trails that touch directly a vast upland wilderness where tapirs and jaguars still roam.
I am grateful to wilderness for exposing me to a deeper sensibility to the natural world and yes I admit that this perspective makes me consider most humans as having quite diminished lives. Call me elitist if you like, I am just being honest. I consider most of humanity to be shallow & superficial, cowardly, indolent, lazy, mostly trash actually. Takers not givers. Wanting the good life which means big cars and houses and all the works.
This is related to why I support the growing disparity of wealth. Most of humanity makes bad use of wealth. Given the chance they consume away as much as possible, even more than they should as you can see by the debt levels. That's not to say I support the 1%. They are mostly trash as well. I support the growing disparity of wealth in order to restrict wealth to the 99% not because I am aligned with the 1% which I am not. I just know that in aggregate we would be consuming a lot more if we more evenly distributed the wealth. Humans don't handle opulence well, better to restrict access.
I am an elitist.....yep. definitely.
Ibon wrote:
One thing to keep in mind is that civilization came along just 9000 years ago or so and in our species time line this is like about a second ago. In other words, civilization is a novel arrangement for our species and still being honed and tested. It is no surprise that civilizations have been so tumultuous because they represent this punctuated inflection point as a novel social arrangement departing from our tribal hunter gatherer past. Natural selection of our species basically occurred during a long stable period of equilibrium when our social arrangement was HG tribal culture. Civilization is something still very new and it is hard to tell in these short 9000 years to what degree it has acted as a force of natural selection. Probably insignificant.
I make this point because capitalism as an economic and social system does not represent an end point. It is an economic system that is part of this still novel arrangement of civilization, still part of this punctuated tumultuous inflection point in our species history. Part of a novel continuum that is still very much volatile. If you want an example of that volatility then just consider 7.5 billion humans on the planet.
Most likely capitalism as we know it will morph into something totally different as an economic system in the future especially when we consider the obvious external consequences coming our way. We are in severe human overshoot. We have only witnessed capitalism relatively unbridled and unregulated when resources were unlimited and when the environment was integrated and healthy.
The consequences of human overshoot with a tightening resource base and increasingly unstable environment represents an external wedge into growth based capitalism. It will change and adapt just like cultural values will as well. I think stability and security will increase as cultural values and individual consumption as status will decrease. Increased regulation would seem unavoidable but this may be embraced more willingly from a population valuing stability and security in an increasingly unstable environment. Capitalism will enter a phase certainly of increased regulation. Collectivism will rise as a result of increased regulation. How can this not happen?
This should give pause to many out there who yearn for going back to the good old days when government was less obtrusive. I think we can also pretty much forget about wealth and opulence remaining options for a broad based middle class. Our economic system will adapt to constraints and the fat will be trimmed and the low hanging fruit where this can be easiest achieved should be obvious. The middle class is not part of the power structure but this demographic in aggregate is like the fat underbelly of a salmon. It will be trimmed way back. This is more ecological than ideological.
But we can only identify with a broad brush the forces that will act as the agents of change to our economic system. We really don't have much of a clue.
I have always found that those most rigid and adamant about a certain outcome usually are those trying to drag unsustainable ideologies along with them into an uncertain future. This applies to the entitlement you see from the political left that we can somehow preserve justice and egalitarian outcomes for all 7.5 billion kudzu apes just as much as it apples to the entitlement we see from the political right that we can get through the bottle neck of human overshoot without government regulation of capitalism and without constricting the freedom of the individual. Less justice for all and less unregulated freedoms. Our politics are polarized because both sides are hopelessly entitled.
Not to single any one out but if you take two of our posters like Cid and Cog and watch them fighting it out on these boards you can see how these two positions are both hopelessly unprepared for the external forces that will drive change moving forward.
Personally I look forward to external consequences stamping out mediocrity.
I never saw a mediocre cheetah or a mediocre gazelle.
I do see however billions of mediocre Kudzu Apes currently living shallow indolent lives ripe for culling.... by natural forces of course.
Midnight Oil wrote:Sure Ibon real protection for those wilderness lands (sarcasm)... Yep, I think you failed, not passed....
Midnight Oil wrote:Thanks Ibon for being a good sport....OK think we made our point about the losing battle against the onslaught of Capitalism so called progress and development.
evilgenius wrote:I believe there is an element of nostalgia involved in romanticizing the wilderness. You don't have to be John Muir half-way up some big tree in a snowstorm in order to connect with the wilderness. And connecting with the wilderness is important to modifying human behavior. Nostalgia may block that somewhat, reinforcing the barrier of the large bonfire and fear of what's within the trees. We could quite easily grow everything in vats, you know, and cover the earth with a Borg-like exterior. It's only our real understanding, not the nostalgic, of nature that will save it. That takes use, sometimes by people who aren't like us.
onlooker wrote:Not just Capitalism but facets of the Western world view
Outcast_Searcher wrote:So, it's capitalism's fault for all the problems with failing to protect resources?
So overpopulation, people wanting to maximize their own spending and borrowing without regard for the planet, war, corruption, stupidity, and on and on have NOTHING to do with that?
So if we had another system like socialism, people could breed and consume endlessly and there would be no negative consequences?
If you believe that, get help.
If that's not the gist, then what does all this have to do with "The Capitalism Thread"?
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