Introducing a new forum

[jacob]

I created a new subforum for those who are interested in ERE beyond the[ir own] personal benefits. To describe it visually, this is for subjects that fall in the yellow zone.



Previous discussions on this are currently scattered in multiple places, but I'd like to gather them here.

[J_]

Jacob, I have studied your last Stoa-reading on Youtube. Because the use of written summaries in the youtube-pictures while you talk it makes this difficult stuff better to understand.The stuff is about the resolving the Meta Crisis With Emergent Movements and Post-Consumerist Praxis.

You did a great job to outline what/how to come from individual changes to more aggregate movements. And give it the name Emergent Renaissance Ecology.

As I understand it you will use this new Forum to get the help/comments of us and others to translate your outlines and ethics in all kind of practical suggestions to get movements of aligned individuals. So that this Ecology gets implemented.

I have formulated some "carrot vectors" from the starting point that most individuals prefer health to illness, and that most of them prefer a state of well-being over personal misery. I assume that every person want to be fully human rather than that he wants to be sick, pained or dead.
A further requirement is that it must feel as a freedom to choose such changes for such a life, such a society such an Ecology. (see for more "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature" by A.H. Maslow)

The carrots can be grouped about par exemple

1) The why and how to need less money`:

Freedom to choose the amount of working hours and so to release „pressure” to get a more comfortable life.
By choosing your working place near where you live you diminish transport time and fuel. And even if you go walking or biking you gain in health/stamina

When you select your home-space on what you really need, you can in most cases move to a smaller one. With less taxes, less maintenance time and costs. Less utility costs and less use of electricity, water, heating.

Learn to barter, to use ebay for stuff, to buy used stuff, to share equipment, to sell stuff, to buy dry-food in bulk, to buy fresh greens of the saison. Learn to repair your own stuff, learn to maintain your home yourself, learn to make repair your clothes

Learn to use your freedom to live a more simple life than advertorials and what your friends talk about. You are your own master, not slave of the ruling society.


2) The why and how to get and stay healthy:

It is natural to strive to a good health, it enhances pleasure in life, in the agragate it reduces medical costs for all of us.

You can use non-adverterial books to study what to eat to live long without illnesses. And doiing so you will loose excess body-kilo’s which makes life much easier.

If you reduce your „working for money hours”, your traveling hours and limit freely the hours TV /computer/smartphone you will have enough time to sleep and rest.

And you get time for doing all sorts of gymnastics/sports to maintain muscle mass to stay souple and fit. Take sports that you can do without travel, sports which do not make use of machines, eg no Alpine skiing (with lifts) but cross country skiing. Use kettle bells at home or use your own body weight to lift.

And than look for ways ( eg films by well know actors, engaging books by well knows authors) to let people see that they can reach such a relaxed life if they wish, and show that it perhaps can be seen (as a better) alternative for their present way of life.

Is it this what you intend Jacob?

[jacob]

I have formulated some "carrot vectors" from the starting point that most individuals prefer health to illness, and that most of them prefer a state of well-being over personal misery. I assume that every person want to be fully human rather than that he wants to be sick, pained or dead.

...

Is it this what you intend Jacob?

That is what I intend. However, I think that assumption is way too wide to cover all humans. Only a fraction (<20%?) of humans act in their long-term self-interest. As such a complete "why"-carrot must also provide a "why" for those who sacrifice health for other gains, e.g. having a cigarette to relax, a snack for the taste or sugar rush, avoiding sweat, avoiding cognitive dissonance or tribal ejection, ...

Once a complete vector has been described ... whats can be brainstormed until something is found that has overlap.

As it is, it only reaches those for whom health-autonomy is a priority. The fitness and health nerds. That's a small group.

[7Wannabe5]

Okay, I picked up a copy of Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" at a book sale the other day, and I started reading it with the intention to argue with it, but now I am confused and tending a bit more back towards Optimistic Orange. So, my question is whether suggestions/threads made on this forum section are supposed to be post-progress*?And/ Or does Level Yellow pick "progress" up and call it something different?

*Level Orange definition.

[jacob]

So, my question is whether suggestions/threads made on this forum section are supposed to be post-progress*?And/ Or does Level Yellow pick "progress" up and call it something different?

Topics need to at least be at the post-conventional meaning making stage. That means taking the interaction with and within the whole into account. Any kind of *gress is fine. Thus, for example, talking about "promising technology" is fine if it also considers the interaction with the economy, culture, scalable adaption, etc. in terms of resource, producer, consumer, recovery. It would quickly become yet another PopSci article if it's just about how shiny the gadget is.

Ideally from the strategist stage and up. Alternatively, the worldcentric equivalent of WL7. Or as the OP picture shows, the focus needs to be both deep and wide. Most techno-optimists of the Orange kind are deep but not particularly wide focusing on a bunch of technological silos. That's not very interesting/helpful. IOW, it has to be "world-building" to belong here.

For example, https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Flat-Crowded ... 374166854/ would qualify because it doesn't talk about windmills w/o also bringing up storage and distribution systems; and not only that but also their effect on energy prices, government taxes, and the political implications in oil exporting countries. It's quite rare to come across books or people who tie everything together.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Gotcha. I just wish I could find the book(s) that include graphs of EVERYTHING since 1780 and explain how it is Ingenuity and Oil rather than Ingenuity or Oil. I am super bored with finding mention of the Julian Simon/Paul Ehrlich wager in every book I read, and I have read dozens of thick books arguing one perspective or the other.

[Jin+Guice]

I'm still a little confused what the goal of ERE 2.0 is. Based on the graph it is something that attempts to cover/ influence the entire world through several centuries? But what is it trying to accomplish?



My own understand so far is it is trying to save some portion of our current society from what, again in my opinion, is the inevitable decline of our global civilization due to ecological overreach. I can't help but think that it is arrogant, optimistic and technocentric to think that this is possible.

Arrogant because it presumes that the way of life our culture follows is the only, and in some sense the best way. Optimistic, because I see no possible sign that we are doing anything to mitigate ecological overreach. (Anthropological side note: are there any examples of cultures that 1) didn't collapse due to eventual ecological overreach or, more pressing for us, 2) recognized the seeds of their own ecologically driven demise and reversed them?). Technocentric because what is worth saving from our society is almost always seen as some piece of "modern" (fossil fuel era) technology, without which, human life would be much worse.

IMO, a core component of ERE 1.0 was a critique of our fossil fuel/ imperial society. To be sure, there are many benefits to be had from living at the center of a global empire which has mastered the art of extracting resources from pre-history and people/ natural resources across the entire globe. But, to me, ERE 1.0 pointed out that there is also a downside. Absent the limits to growth, crises of over-abundance (obesity/ lifestyle diseases) and meaning (depression/ anxiety) plague our society. For any of the problems we've "solved," another is created. The genius of ERE 1.0, imo, was that it addressed BOTH these problems (and managed to do so with a sales pitch that appeals to our self-serving AND community oriented nature). Act in a way that, at least on an individual level, addresses the problems of our society AND reduces your impact on the environment. Save yourself from a lifetime of meaninglessness accumulation in a way that also aligns with your values.

Expanding this to the societal level is difficult though. This is where ERE 2.0 confuses me. If our society is not the best society, but simply a society, that like most (all?) large scale human civilizations will eventually be ecologically/ socially/ economically undone by the very strength that first defined it, then are we not trying to save something which is almost certainly doomed and not necessarily worth saving?

This is not to say I think the solution is to do nothing. In March and April of 2020, I stayed inside, only going on walks where I knew I wouldn't come within 15 feet of another person (and wearing an N-95, just in case), going to the grocery store once (N-95, plus alcohol swabbing all the food/ packages before they came inside), all in hopes of contributing to what I saw as the potential eradication of a global pandemic. By May it was clear to me that all hopes of containment were gone. Covid-19 was here to stay, and our reaction to it, not our triumph over it, would be a permanent fixture in our day-to-day lives. I did not abandoned mask wearing and start throwing large parties. But my strategy refocused from the global to the local and I tried to continue to live and do as I wished while still attempting not to hurt people at the margin. I abandoned my place in a large scale collective goal, but did not abandon all thoughts of others/ the collective.

My understanding of the climate/ peak oil crises is that we are in a position much more similar to how I perceived the Covid crisis in May 2020 than how I perceived it in March/ April of 2020.

Perhaps all of this is irrelevant because I am lacking some key insight or just missing the overall goal of ERE 2.0. What is the goal of ERE 2.0? What is ERE beyond each individuals own personal benefit?

[daylen]

I see it more as like a dynamical system that is figuring itself out with a many such goals that cannot be easily contained (i.e. metacrisis). Not entirely open nor closed. In the process of cultural mixing as it is not fixated on just an individuals path in time or how a collective is distributed in space. On any level, damned if you do and damned if you don't. Something must be done and nothing done thus far seems to be it. A bleeding edge movement is just that, subject to experimentation and adaptation.

Confusion and uncertainty is the norm on edges. Of which, there are many.

[Jin+Guice]

@daylen: That is maybe the general abstract summary of what I was trying to say?

But in more actionable/ pragmatic terms it seems like the answer to "What is the problem/ metacrisis?" and "What the fuck are we even trying to do?" is "everything" and "whatever you want." I'm wondering if someone else has different/ better answers to those questions.

[jacob]

Perhaps all of this is irrelevant because I am lacking some key insight or just missing the overall goal of ERE 2.0. What is the goal of ERE 2.0? What is ERE beyond each individuals own personal benefit?

The short answer would be that ERE1 and ERE2 are but two perspectives (egocentric and worldcentric) on the same [Jain] elephant.

Humanity as an "going concern" is currently in overshot-mode. The goal of ERE2 is to find solutions to preserve humanity through the overshot-era. Humanity is [much] more than the raw sum of individuals pursuing personal benefit. (Recovering libertarian raises his hand.) ERE1 only works insofar the environment/domain is stable. Once the foundation of society becomes chaotic, it requires more than what ERE1 can deliver. Hence ERE2.

TL;DR - There are limits to self-reliance. Even highly skilled individually venturing into the wilderness are only good for maybe 6-12 months. That's why ostracization was considered such a big deal historically, whereas today skilled individuals would just go "pffft whatever". This danger is currently dismissed due to a strong belief that "insofar that those who know the trick can just move elsewhere", like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2VtoYYQis ... but humanity has already run out of elsewhere... it's just not universally apparent.

[daylen]

@J&G I would say it both is and isn't an abstract summary.

There need not be a distinction between abstraction and pragmatism. Doing everything is not feasible given the apparent rules of the locality we occupy. A house probably isn't going to start floating up in the air and a car isn't likely to run long without maintenance. Thus it is actionable to maintain cars and to not worry about floating houses. Such can be abstracted into simple rules like gravitation and entropy. Then all references to such abstractions link all sorts of particulars. Otherwise it gets bit challenging to hold particulars in mind when the conditions around you dive into chaos. Reaching for simple answers to complex problems will require more frequent updating to such answers, especially as the problems multiply. It may be practical/economical to abstract your particulars just enough to reach further in time or space where answers are readily apparent to most questions people commonly fret about.

[Hristo Botev]

TL;DR - There are limits to self-reliance. Even highly skilled individually venturing into the wilderness are only good for maybe 6-12 months. That's why ostracization was considered such a big deal historically, whereas today skilled individuals would just go "pffft whatever". This danger is currently dismissed due to a strong belief that "insofar that those who know the trick can just move elsewhere", like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2VtoYYQis ... but humanity has already run out of elsewhere... it's just not universally apparent.

For the more religiously minded, Rod Dreher already wrote a book about this, called The Benedict Option, which is a community-minded attempt at preservation. He was of course talking culturally/religiously; but I see it all linked. And it's not necessarily forming a commune out in the sticks (assuming you can find some "sticks"); it's really more about defining your "tribe," even if that tribe is living in a heavily populated urban environment surrounded by lots of non-tribe members.

But . . . , there's got to be something more serving as the glue to hold that ERE2 tribe together other than sheer survival, when at some level that survival is going to be at the expense of someone else.

Dark days ahead indeed.

[Jin+Guice]

@jacob:

Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you're still in the formulation stage of ERE2? I've watched both stoa talks but I'm still unclear on what ERE2 actually is in terms actionable personal/ collective practice. This might be bc you are still figuring it out or maybe bc it does not have actionable practice?

Assuming it's the former and assuming you want to have a dialogue about what it might be, I find it so far lacking in some of the things ERE1 had (this is an observation of the work in progress, not a criticism of the "you are doing this all wrong" variety).

My summary of salient points of ERE1 to this discussion are:

(1) ERE1 was constructed to reduce personal impact on the environment.
(2) ERE1 accomplished this by encouraging followers to reduce personal consumption, which almost perfectly correlates to environmental impact.
(3) ERE1 encouraged followers to reduce personal consumption by pointing out how hollow/ shallow an existence based on consumption of manufactured goods is. It then provided detailed yet simple instructions on how to remove oneself from the work->consume cycle that any modern day consumer was sure to be familiar with and able (if not willing) to execute.

Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you personally came up with this in the reverse order that I listed it. I think it's unfortunately pretty hard to put it in the order I listed it, even if that ended up being the top down goal structure.

In my mind, the absolute brilliance of this is that it simultaneously solved my (/its followers) problems of today while incorporating my (/ some of its followers) values and thus solving my (/ some of its followers) perceived problems of the future. This creates a perfect hedge, where my life today is improved as I prepare for what I believe will happen tomorrow, but even if I am wrong, I am almost certainly better off tomorrow. So even if we are wrong and solar/ nuclear/ whatever immediately solves the energy crisis and somehow the climate crisis is false, your followers are STILL better off bc you have actually addressed the problems of BOTH systems and defined a singular solution. Furthermore, it effectively tricks non-believers in the higher order (1) and (2) to doing them with (3), thus making its scope extend beyond those who share you belief structure.

To make the list for ERE2 as I understand it so far:

ERE2 will be constructed to help ease the decline of current industrialized society through hitting the limits to growth and the economic decline this by definition necessitates.





No idea how you get the next two points beyond the individual level. All I can say is so far if you've done it, I don't understand how, which is what I was trying to ask. Uh, I'll let you know if I figure it out (probably I'm going to wait for you to figure it out and then create my own semi-ERE2).


Something else to consider is that moving from the individual to the global ignores the familial, social, neighborhood, city, region, and national (grouping somewhat arbitrary, but I think you know what I mean, nested model thing I'm pretty sure is used in 'Limits to Growth'). What are the solutions at each of these levels and are some of them the same?


I'm really not sure I'm not missing some foundational point that would make this all irrelevant though?

[Hristo Botev]

Something else to consider is that moving from the individual to the global ignores the familial, social, neighborhood, city, region, and national (grouping somewhat arbitrary, but I think you know what I mean, nested model thing I'm pretty sure is used in 'Limits to Growth'). What are the solutions at each of these levels and are some of them the same?

Perfect, this is what I was trying to say about "tribe." In CS Lewis's 4 Loves he explains pretty clearly (it's not rocket science) how "love" in the abstract, global sense just doesn't work. It's the familial bonds that matter, and then extend those out to cousins, second cousins, "blood of my blood" and so forth.

IIRC, it was JMG who said, basically, the best way to prepare for what's coming is to have lots of kids. Actually, on second thought, that may have been Kaczkinsky.

[jacob]

But . . . , there's got to be something more serving as the glue to hold that ERE2 tribe together other than sheer survival, when at some level that survival is going to be at the expense of someone else.

Indeed, this is why humankind's ethnocentric/tribal days are almost over whether by natural or moral means. With humanity comprising 30% of mammalian biomass and our food habits constituting 60% more, we're almost out of room and life-support. (30+60 is very close to 100). Everything we do as individuals is now at the expense of other humans or the food habits of other humans.

Insofar humanity is/should not be driven by survival (fighting it out), we have to incorporate a more far reaching empathy: For starters, the willingness to think of all humans in the same way one normally thinks of friends and family; the willingness to think of the environment (non-human life) that supports humans (and vice versa) in exactly the same way. Unfortunately, I don't think humanity is capable of this understanding as of yet.

[AxelHeyst]

JnG, it sounds like you're asking "How does ERE2 address the multiple crises?" when in fact it ERE2 is actually aimed at addressing "the metacrisis", which is a different thing (meta to the multiple crises).

In other words, it's maybe (?) not *quite* right to say that ERE2 is aimed at solving for global overshoot (climate change, peak oil, etc).

It might be more productive to say that ERE2 is aimed at solving for the kinds of thinking and social organization that got humanity into a circumstance of global overshoot.

Hence Jacob's Stoa2 talk: 1) The problem is specialization leading to silo-ization and an inability for deep fields to talk to each other productively, so 2) The (a) solution is transdisciplinarity.

--

And to the points about scale of community, ERE2 shouldn't be thought of as separate from ERE1. ERE1 covers individual through at least family scale, and arguably up to local community scale, or at least it can. ERE2 is aiming at global scale. And they overlap... or at least they can.

Also, the notion of emergence is key to "covering" multiple scales of people. The aim is a global impact, but that impact *emerges* from lower-scale action (transdisiplinarity), which percolates through multiple scales. The emphasis of "global" on the graph in OP is to indicate the ultimate aim of ERE2 practice, not the only domain in which ERE2 actions participate in.

[Hristo Botev]

Insofar humanity is/should not be driven by survival (fighting it out), we have to incorporate a more far reaching empathy: For starters, the willingness to think of all humans in the same way one normally thinks of friends and family

Ha! I was about to respond to this with a "you've got to be kidding me!".

But then I saw that you then added this:

Unfortunately, I don't think humanity is capable of this understanding as of yet.

Yeah, I tend to agree. I'm someone who believes that God literally came to Earth and took on human form to bring about this "far reaching empathy" end; 2,000 years out it looks like we still have a LOT of work to do.

[jacob]

Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you're still in the formulation stage of ERE2? I've watched both stoa talks but I'm still unclear on what ERE2 actually is in terms actionable personal/ collective practice. This might be bc you are still figuring it out or maybe bc it does not have actionable practice?

I think that's a fair assessment. I'm still [in the process of] constructing the/that ERE2 framework. Figuring out the right questions to ask. WL8.5. I don't have actionable tips or tricks or prescriptions to present yet. I'm still exploring the territory, figuring out how to map it before it's too late.

My summary of salient points of ERE1 to this discussion are:

(1) ERE1 was constructed to reduce personal impact on the environment.
(2) ERE1 accomplished this by encouraging followers to reduce personal consumption, which almost perfectly correlates to environmental impact.
(3) ERE1 encouraged followers to reduce personal consumption by pointing out how hollow/ shallow an existence based on consumption of manufactured goods is. It then provided detailed yet simple instructions on how to remove oneself from the work->consume cycle that any modern day consumer was sure to be familiar with and able (if not willing) to execute.

In retrospect, ERE1 was mainly about reducing the personal and societal damage from personal actions. ERE2 is about adding actual value and solutions. There's a difference between "not being part of the problem" and "being part of the solution".

ERE2 will be constructed to help ease the decline of current industrialized society through hitting the limits to growth and the economic decline this by definition necessitates.

No... the standard vernacular is something like mitigation, adaption, and survival. That presumes decline, attempts to slowing it down, failing to do so, and making do. I think ERE1 already does that. ERE2 is an adaptive attempt to avoid survival-mode.

Something else to consider is that moving from the individual to the global ignores the familial, social, neighborhood, city, region, and national (grouping somewhat arbitrary, but I think you know what I mean, nested model thing I'm pretty sure is used in 'Limits to Growth'). What are the solutions at each of these levels and are some of them the same?

Getting humanity out of Kegan3 is THE problem due to physical space-limitations. Currently throwing mud at the wall ...

I'm really not sure I'm not missing some foundational point that would make this all irrelevant though?

Hopefully such a point exists ... so once it's found ...

[Hristo Botev]

No... the standard vernacular is something like mitigation, adaption, and survival. That presumes decline, attempts to slowing it down, failing to do so, and making do. I think ERE1 already does that. ERE2 is an adaptive attempt to avoid survival-mode.

In a post-liberal world, I for one am banking on/hoping for (praying for) a Catholic monarchy who will enforce a distributist/localist model along the lines of GK Chesterton/Rerum Novarum/Wendell Berry. Because it seems to me that, short of that, the only way we avoid "survival-mode" is with all of our brains "safely" sucked up to the Machine.*

Perhaps we're in need of some present-day Dorothy Days.

*(I know, I read too much Kingsnorth.)

[Jin+Guice]

No... the standard vernacular is something like mitigation, adaption, and survival. That presumes decline, attempts to slowing it down, failing to do so, and making do. I think ERE1 already does that. ERE2 is an adaptive attempt to avoid survival-mode.

So is it:

ERE2 will be constructed to help actively stop the decline of society caused by hitting the limits to growth?


I still think you need a new form of lines (2) and (3) from my ERE1 model to get this to work.


The goal will be really hard if not impossible. Are there any examples of a civilization saving itself from self-imposed ecological overshoot? Are there any examples of intentional grassroots movements in any field that have accomplished this?

To me, the next step is to try to build small geographically close communities of loosely allied people who are poised to react/ lead when the consequences of overshoot start to happen. This will necessarily include some sort of prediction of how and when the decline of industrialization unfolds, which strikes me as not that much different than well-informed active investing. This takes ERE up the individual -> family -> etc... scale by one rung. In other words, I don't feel like ERE1 does this. I don't think ERE1 makes it to the social group/ neighborhood level. In order for this to happen I think these communities need the added benefit of enhancing the lives of their members today and if somehow ecological decline doesn't happen (to broaden the sales pitch). I realize this will be too little to halt the decline of industrialized civilization due to overshoot, which in my mind is inevitable (good luck though, I really mean it!).

It might be more productive to say that ERE2 is aimed at solving for the kinds of thinking and social organization that got humanity into a circumstance of global overshoot.

Thanks for clarifying, I didn't think of it that way. Is there any example of a person or small movement that existed at the personal/ family level that was then extrapolated to change thinking and social organization on this scale? It seems to me that the human thinking and social organization we see today happened by evolution, not design, so it will be impossible/ very difficult to change by design.

The only way I can think of this working is to 'Shock Doctrine' it and wait until an inflection point where something like the price of oil quintupling (or a global pandemic) momentarily disrupts the current order of things and somehow be poised to enact a plan that changes current ways of thinking and social organization.


Anyway, I don't mean to discourage anyone from trying to solve these hard problems. It's interesting to me, just with my current thinking I think what y'all are trying to do is impossible, and I would focus my efforts elsewhere. Thanks for answering my questions as I try to figure out what exactly it is y'all are trying to do (still not sure I totally get it).