New Kingsnorth Substack Essay - No Paywall

[Hristo Botev]

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/want-is-the-acid

Once again I find myself thinking: "yeah, what he said."

Also, wow: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challeng ... acts/story

[theanimal]

Great read, thanks for sharing. I'm hoping he puts together these essays in some type of book. I'd like to read the whole thing.

One of my favorite sections:

Want is the acid, but the heart is both its provenance and its potential enemy. I often ask myself: Do I want too much? Do I grasp too hard? Do I live too heavily? The answer is always yes, and in spades. Plenty of people don’t have the luxury of asking these questions. I think this gives those of us that do all the more obligation to work them through.

[Hristo Botev]

I'm hoping he puts together these essays in some type of book.

+1. At this point I'd offer to pay to publish the essays as a book myself.

[Lemur]

Kingsnorth is always a great read. I still have The Wake, Beast, and Alexandria on my to read list...One day I'll get to it.

[7Wannabe5]

I think the "plenty of people don't have the luxury of asking those questions" note is key. I'm certainly no Ayn Randian, but this:

The Great Acceleration answers that question simply enough, and the record rates of absolute poverty and inequality seal the deal.

is not entirely true. Global levels of absolute poverty have been reduced in my lifetime and this is likely in some part due to the Great Acceleration. OTOH, economic inequality has increased in more developed realms, but this is in part due to increased global equity of opportunity and the education of females leading to more assortative mating/marriages, which are not necessarily entirely bad trends.

I think all of us will experience moments of our own towards clarity or confoundment as we grapple with The Situation. One of those moments for me occurred when I was working part-time during the spring garden rush at the suburban Home Depot nearest to the poor immigrant part of the city where I was teaching. A couple cute little kids recently from Yemen I knew came into the store with their Dad and his cousin or brother who were purchasing all sorts of stuff to fix up a decrepit house, including rat poison and weed killer in the garden department, and suddenly I sensed this giant wave of Want most of us would justify as Need rising across the world. It's easy to look around at your holiday partying peers at level Orange/Green/Yellow = Those Who Have Already Gained Secure Tenure, and suggest cultural fix. It's more difficult, to offer other example, spend the day working at a very nice, very well-run facility for young adults suffering from severe cognitive deficits, and think about how much the expense of running such a facility adds to the ever-growing waste ticker.

IOW, the math is pretty clear; just cutting out Pleasure from the budget is not going to cut it, much harder cuts will either have to be made or will me made for us, and IMO focusing on Pleasure is almost a distraction, because so many pleasures are actually quite cheap. How much do each of us spend each month on Pleasure vs. Security/Status/Comfort/Belonging/Convenience? Choosing to live in the "bad" part of the town/globe can afford you at least a couple Drive-Thru Double Mochas per day and may offer fresh perspective on enormity of problem.

[Hristo Botev]

@7w5

I take his point--or, at least, what I took from this particular essay, when put in the context of this entire essay project thus far, and coupled with his Beast and Alexandria and his other more recent writings--as not having really anything at all to do with simply cutting Pleasure out of the budget. Rather, it's that in the seemingly noble name of attaining something like "universal prosperity" (which we've not actually attained, despite the concessions we've made in pursuit of that end, which is what the quote you pasted was getting at), we've allowed "the Machine" to completely change our collective value system to remove the very limits that mankind (across all pre-industrial cultures) have ALWAYS known are necessary.

Kingsnorth has said repeatedly--and I think it's the ultimate theme of his most recent essays and fiction--that "The Situation" is at its core a spiritual problem; it's not a math problem. And unless we fix that spiritual problem, it doesn't really matter what other sorts of technological or political or social structural fixes we come up with.

To put it in my own words, the only "fix" that is actually capable of cutting it is something on the level of a global Great Awakening; and that Great Awakening necessarily will have to be religious in nature.

[7Wannabe5]

I don't entirely disagree if you maybe sub in something more like "spiritual" for "religious*." The same suggestion is made in "The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision."

I agree that there is a serious problem with the extent to which Capitalism Based on Verified Super Crappy Math has now become our de facto religion. It's likely that we need better morals and better math.

*I am still too soon out of my midlife Islamic Marriage to go there. However, I am in solidarity with the nuns and ministers I worked with in group trying to prevent dumping of toxic waste near school full of poor kids where I taught.

[Salathor]

OTOH, economic inequality has increased in more developed realms,

I have heard statements like this before but question them. Although the raw dollar differences between Jeff Bezos and I are considerable, I suspect that his lifestyle and mine are significantly closer together than in less-developed societies (see: peasant vs king in the 1200s, or one of the 600 million Chinese living on ~$140/mo vs one of the technorati living in HK/Shenzen/Beijing). Our quality of food, level of personal safety, and health care outcomes are likely indistinguishable. In fact, I would guess that development in the last 75 years has done more to even out the lifestyles of the wealthiest and poorest within developed nations (even if denominated dollar-values spread) than any time throughout history, except possibly for pre-economic tribal days.

[7Wannabe5]

@Salathor:

I don't disagree if you go back that far, but I meant since approximately 1950s. I was born in 1965 and my paternal grandparents were upper-middle-class educated and my maternal grandparents were blue collar working class, and their lifestyles were definitely more akin than they would be today. The corporation my lively Rosie-the Riveter maternal grandmother worked for even provided very nice cottages at a small lake resort for its union assembly employees. There were definite signifiers differentiating class, but there was an overall sense of abundance.

[Hristo Botev]

It's likely that we need better morals and better math.

Ha! I like that. Though I wonder if the morals that we got from natural law (see Aristotle or his parallels in the East) were based on an instinctual understanding of that better math.

[Ego]

I completely agree that people are in a perpetual state of hole-filling. The question he touches on briefly in the essay is whether we as individuals have gone past the point of no return with regard to being changed by the culture and whether as a culture we have collectively changed too much to go back to our previously successful methods of hole-filling. I believe there are too many elements that once seen cannot be unseen and hole-filling has become for a majority of the population a reason to live.

We must exercise self control to return to the previous ways. As he pointed out, our culture conspires in a thousand ways to undermine that self control.

[jacob]

There will be a battle of the vmemes due to existential constraints. These are currently manifesting as doofus culture wars^H^H^Hskirmishes but stakes will eventually go beyond this.

Orange is the Machine, but unfortunately much of the Machine has been designed under the assumption of unlimited growth and corrections to Machine operations would be seen as technocracy. (This is why Orange people tend to look to China for the 21st century.)

Blue is appealing but don't forget that the murder risk during Blue dominance was close to ~10% whereas it's only 0.5% under Orange (in the US) and 0.1% under Green (in Europe). The Samurai had the legal right to kill anyone they wanted for whatever reason. A philosophical/religious/spiritual worldview was built around this. "We are but cherry blossoms flashing in the night something something ..." Due to limited farm space---Blue tech being only able to feed about 1B humans---anyone but the oldest son was dispensed with by shipping them off to wars and conquest. Human potential was stunted: Born a peasant, remain a peasant.

Green, frankly, seems to hate Orange with a vengeance despite being utterly dependent on it having outsourced all the dirty work. Green is the Eloi-burgers fiddling with their wants because their needs are completely taken care off by a system that has become invisible to them to the point of dismissing it as yet another narrative. They love to be on the board of directors and partake in endless meetings. They organize really well but nothing ever seems to get done. Instead everything ends up as a circle jerk on instafacetweettube.

Red is always spoiling for a fight. Literally and figuratively. If red dominates, the casualties will be high. Red will literally kill themselves and figuratively cut of their own nose to spite their face just to make a point or demonstrate commitment to their tribe. Nihilism is their way. Self-destruction becomes easier in proportion to how little one has left to lose. Imagine what Red will do to "others" whom they barely consider human.

Purple has nowhere left to hide. They might prep in bunkers or Alaska but eventually Red raiders or Blue tax collectors will find them insofar they don't cave and seek out Orange battery technology or Green health care. Stashing resources purple may last 6 months longer than everyone else. Trying to produce resources, they'll find their bush craft insufficient in terms of staying alive for very long w/o a functional civilization to bail them out.

It's interesting how various thought leaders seem to be picking/placing their bets...

[Hristo Botev]

I guess its turquoise for the win then

[7Wannabe5]

Green, frankly, seems to hate Orange with a vengeance despite being utterly dependent on it having outsourced all the dirty work.

True-ish, but Orange is also utterly dependent (because otherwise sterile) on either Blue or Green. (Or maybe I have just dated waaaaay too many engineers. )

[jacob]

I guess its turquoise for the win then

Maybe, but how? Tell me if I'm wrong, but I associate religion with the collective, so beige, blue, green, turquoise, etc.?!

Having grown up in an utterly Green welfare-state country, I can definitely verify that "Welfare" is considered sacrament or dogma to the same degree that classical religion is in the Blue parts of the US.

The Turquoise sacrament or dogma would likely be some kind of pattern that is more complex that a Blue pyramid-shaped hierarchy (rests on Kegan3) or a Green egalitarian community club (rests on Kegan4). However, being more on the individualist side (red/orange/yellow/coral is my path) ... it's hard for me to see how/what form this would take.

I appreciate/hope you being willing to entertain this. Consider that the current Pope [Francis] is leaning more Green than Blue (laudato si). Is it possible to speculate on what a Turquoise pope or religion would look like?

[Hristo Botev]

Maybe, but how?

. . .

I appreciate/hope you being willing to entertain this. Consider that the current Pope [Francis] is leaning more Green than Blue (laudato si). Is it possible to speculate on what a Turquoise pope or religion would look like?

I don't follow or think much of the whole color/spiral dynamics stuff; that's probably just sheer ignorance on my part (I had to Google much of what was in your post, because it's Greek to me), but it just strikes me as a whole lot of gibberish/analysis-looking-for-a-problem-to-solve kind of thing. I don't mean any offense with that; it's just not a framework I'm interested in thinking in.

That said, I said a "global Great Awakening"; but perhaps Great Awakening (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening) is the wrong imagery, given that it's scope probably wasn't broad and drastic enough to bring about the wholesale change in mindset (or, as @Ego suggested, a mindset reset) that will be necessary to "fix" what we're calling "The Situation" we find ourselves in.

The Protestant Reformation is probably closer to the mark, in the massive manner in which it fundamentally altered culture in the West.

And perhaps what we're really talking about is something as revolutionary and disruptive as the second-coming of Christ himself. Whether or not you believe that Christ was God incarnate, there can be no dispute that Christ and Christianity fundamentally changed the way we see the world, with slave morality triumphing over master morality (or whatever it was that Nietzche said), with the fundamentally revolutionary philosophy of the Sermon on the Mount, and the introduction of self-sacrifice.

Ultimately, assuming we're not going to see the second coming of Christ in the next 50-100 years, we're going to need a whole lot of prophets and saints (armies of them) to bring about the kind of global cultural transformation that will reinstate the necessary limits on what Kingsnorth refers to as the "acid" of "Want." Everything short of that is just polishing the brass on the Titanic.

But specifically in answer to your question as to what a Turquoise pope or religion might look like, I tend to think that this "Turquoise" stuff is all a bit silly (viewtopic.php?f=9&t=10037&p=243200&hili ... cs#p243200). But as for what humanity-saving religion will look like, ask Kingsnorth--any believing Christian will tell you that it's Christianity; it's only "cultural Christians" that will tell you its anything else.

The ENTIRE point of Kingsnorth's Abbey of Misrule essay writings is Christian evangelization.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Maybe Green towards Turquoise?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3nDjYkhhSM

[Salathor]

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/want-is-the-acid

Thanks for turning me on to this guy. I read the one you linked to before going back to the start of the series (Blanched Sun). A skilled writer, and poignant. Reading things like this always leaves me a little saddened that I can't figure out a way to do more.

[chenda]

but it just strikes me as a whole lot of gibberish/analysis-looking-for-a-problem-to-solve kind of thing. .

Agreed.

[Hristo Botev]

Thanks for turning me on to this guy. I read the one you linked to before going back to the start of the series (Blanched Sun). A skilled writer, and poignant. Reading things like this always leaves me a little saddened that I can't figure out a way to do more.

Credit goes to @Jacob viewtopic.php?p=229242#p229242