Reply to no neutral ground in the burning world

Reply to the "No Neutral Ground in a Burning World" lecture

Awesome and amazing the talk by Ela & Quinn was, I am eager to push this topic even further, by offering you three statements that I did not have time to formulate on the mike:

• it is important to remember not only history, but PREhistory too
• "at what price?" (did we built the network that connected millions of people in the last 30 years...)
• chemical weapons vs fertilizers -- only on the very short term is the later "a good thing" compared to the former

Pre-History

I am glad that you have been looking back into the human history, in order to learn from previous examples/mistakes, and use that knowledge to understand present and even predict the future.

However, "the recorded history" is a very short time period in the human existence. We somehow tend to "forget" that fact. Daniel Quinn, in "The Story of B", names this "the great forgetting", and, like you, calls for "great remembering".

"State" is a very recent form of organization of society in the human cultures. First states developed few thousand years BC. There was 100's of thousands of years of human societies and cultures before that. Admittedly, on the short term it looks like "the state" is a very successful model of organisation, that won over all the other models. However, it is successful only on the relatively short term of 10.000 years.

Comparatively much longer period of human existence WITHOUT STATES also offers valuable knowledge about our past and present, and possibly gives us insight into, and alternatives for, the future.

Further reading

• "Against His-Story, Against Leviathan" Fredy Perlman
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_His-Story,_Against_Leviathan
  • http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/perlman-fredy/1977/revolutionary-leaders/index.htm
  • the whole book, chapter by chapter: http://noblesavagery.blogspot.nl/2007/03/fredy-perlmans-against-his-story.html

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_B
  • http://www.davidsheen.com/b/

1) The Great Forgetting 2) The Boiling Frog 3) The Collapse of Values 4) Population: A Systems Approach 5) The Great Remembering

At what price?

You have stated that "we" have built this amazing network in the last 30 years, that have connected millions and billions of people around the world and offered them possibilities unknown to them before...

... and the question that was burning within me when I heard you say that was "AT WHAT COST?" ??

And was it worth it??

My gut feeling is to say NO! It was not worth it, and the cost is too hight, the cost is unacceptably high!

While building the Internet, we have continued the "growth and progress" myth of the (Western) civilization, and the price we pay is the destruction of environment, destruction of our home planet, while we are needing more and more energy, and more and more resources, for more and more gadgets, more bandwidth, more people...

However...

I personally do not know what to do about it.

You other statement also powerfully resonates within me: "You don't get to choose in what era do you live in".

But I do get to choose what do I learn about the world about me, and my place in it.

And your lecture brings more clarity and more insight into the worlds of those close to me, and myself, and for that I thank you.

Addressing the next 1000 years

Two most important statements from your talk for me were:

• how do YOU want the world to look like in 100 years?

and

• "... in a Burning World".

However, I find that thinking in the time frame of 100 years ahead is too short; and I find that the Burning World requires even more attention, since the fundamental needs of all life on Earth -- including humans -- might disappear in less then 100 years, and certainly in the next 1000 years, unless we learn from our history & pregistory and take reponsibility over the culture we are living in, which governs the technologies we are deploying and to what end.