Ran Prieur Watch

[candide]

Ran writes:

March 5. Another quote from a book I'm reading, Morris Berman's Wandering God:

| What Woodburn discovered in Tanzania was that the Hadza do not experience any severe
| food shortages and that they are unconcerned about the future. Although all Hadza
| consider themselves to be kin, they have few obligations to each other and are not bound
| by commitments. Everyone has direct access to valued assets, and this provides security
| for all. Dependency, let alone hierarchy, is not part of the Hadza way of life. What is perhaps
| the popular image of hunter-gatherer societies -- close, warm, communities that are
| simultaneously very supportive and very conformist/restrictive -- may be off the mark.
| Instead, what we often find is a great deal of autonomy and independence.

I haven't written about this stuff in a while, but my position hasn't changed. Just as you need an empty container to carry water, the foundation of all freedom is the freedom to do nothing. The fact that this has been achieved by hunter-gatherers, and not by modernity, should not discourage us from technological ambitions.

Here's a fun question. How far can we go with an all-volunteer economy? Can we go to space? There would be plenty of volunteers to build the rockets, not so many to mine the ore.

Related, a classic essay, The Economics of Star Trek.

[xmj]

Earlier yesterday I came across Ran Prieur's "How To Drop Out" article. It's an interesting start, I then went on to read his "The System Works" and some of the other essays. With your post about the updated "About" page and the linked "Urban vs Rural Sustainability" article, his points are really starting to land.

Good stuff!

[zbigi]

I've recently came across interesting interview with Theodore Roszak, who did seminal research on counterculture movements of the sixties and seventies (he even coined the term "counterculture"). The interview, where he summarizes his findings, is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXJOjJAlEDI

Roszak explains how the idea and term of "dropping out" were also coined in those times. As he presents it, young white people in the sixties (in the US) noticed that they live in an extremely wealthy society that has probably even brighter future ahead of it, and decided that they personally don't need to "play the game" (build a career, work hard etc.) to sustain themselves - the society is so rich they can always fall back on it. Many imagined that they can do whatever they want their whole life, and their basic neccesities will be met by the society (i.e. others). These are the notions behind the origins of the concept of "dropping out".

[candide]

@xmj. I hadn't read "The System Works" before. It makes me wonder what other goodies are in the archives that I haven't read. Great piece from the maestro... Ran writes (in 2002, edited 2012):

The system tells us that joining the system is good: It's good for a failed artist, with a small local audience, to become a successful artist whose works are duplicated for millions of strangers through industrial technology to enrich corporations. It's good for a fringe idea, learned with excitement by free explorers, to become a dominant idea forcibly taught to bored inmates of schools. It's good for an enhanced sense of right and wrong to become a new law, enforced by the threat of violent punishment by police and prisons. It's good, as you get older, to own more expensive stuff requiring more reserved behavior, to adjust your tastes so you're easier to bother and harder to satisfy.

Or, even when this path is not good, it's supposed to be inevitable. A capitalist version of this doctrine is "What doesn't grow dies." But it's not true! There are shops and pubs in Europe that have stayed tiny for centuries while proud corporations have bloated and collapsed. Increasing in scale and detachment and centralization and dominance is not the path of survival, but the path of prolonged suicide, and we don't have to follow it.

@zbigi. I am pretty sure that is correct. For example the book "Steal this Book" (what a name!) is paper-thin on philosophy, or even aesthetics, but just collects assorted scams to get things from safety nets. Which in turn dried them up for the poor.

ETA: Hoffman amounted to the sociopath is the Geek > Mop > Sociopath Cycle that is often mentioned here.