The ethical issue: Does it scale?
When the wealthy venture capitalist sits down with the bright young tech entrepreneur, the only question is "does it scale?". Is this product or service going to go viral. Can my tiny investment reap exponential rewards?
This is an extreme mindset one very much of today. It could be opposed to its alternative. Not exponential growth but just an expectation of maintaining the world as it has always existed. A venture only needs to be able to cover its own costs and stay in some steady state equilibrium "forever". A no growth society where profit or surplus is limited to that which maintains the existing fabric of life.
So these are the bounding extremes of a society in terms of growth curves. Exponential or flat. At least this can be our start to a more complex discussion. The question of does it scale actually speaks to the more subtle thing of powerlaw growth. A log/log curve which is in fact the "flat balance" of a pair of exponentials. Things go viral because they pair some form of exponential increase with some form of exponential decrease.
Like in semiconductors and their Moore's law growth. More chip for less price as the industry's "forever" promise. A flat balance of two curves, each causally driving the other. The eternalised doubling and halving created by the "virtuous" circle of being able to fit more logic circuits into less physical space.
Tech ventures hitch their star to this fact. Information is always going to be cheaper in the future. And come up with the business proposition that can scale, the market return is equally infinite. If everyone wants to buy, then unit cost can go to zero as consumer take up becomes unlimited.
So much for the tech parallels. Now for the practical political and moral issues. We do live in the exponentialised world that a powerlaw growth describes. But is it actually balanced as a virtuous win-win circle?
For example, are all our machines and practices set up in a way that can double our surpluses while halving our costs? Are we riding the green tech curve where we can use exponentially more energy consuming devices and services as they are also becoming exponentially more efficient and less energy consuming? Where we can in Smil's words harvest the biosphere, our planetary ecosystem, at an exponentially increasing rate because there is also exponentially more biosphere coming down the line to be harvested in the future?
The answer is obvious. Party will be over by 2040. But still, we can pretend we face two scenarios when it comes to the near future. And then get down to how each is a useful test of the more general principle that political or moral ideas as philosophies which hope to organise societies must have virality. They must identify some virtuous feedback loop some ethical algorithm that is the win-win trajectory of growth, which itself is about a choice of some rate between a no-growth maintenance state and an unbridled exponential and pointed to infinity rate.
So that is the challenge. If you agree that the world is into its new era needing a new ethics, a new politics, then what is the algorithm that scales? What key idea drives the idea into every mind?
We have come out of a certain post-WW2 period of US policed "world peace and prosperity". A mindset built around humanism, democracy, safe seas, free trade and globalised political institutions. But a US dollar sovereignty and light constraints on environmental degradation.
There is now a politics/ethics required as the blueprint either to invest in Model A the largely business as usual story of the tech world's green hope of exponentialising the shrinking of the global carbon footprint and resource consumption in a way that can sustain an exponentialising of whatever it is we actually value in terms of goods, services and even just libertarian freedoms.
Does Model A have its political algorithm. Is that what Wokeism is? Or is that not the USP as the recent Pax Americana period delivered all the personal autonomy we would ever be energetically and environmentally able to afford, so the algorithm has to be one strong enough to force society onto whatever is its sustainable green tech track?
Then there is the Model B question. It does all does go quite quickly to shit by 2040. What is the meme to be spreading to prepare for a planet that is crashing and burning? How do we brand that as a suitably universalising social response that can be bought across the entire globe as it by then entropically exists?
Is Model B the Mad Max solution, the bug-out survivalist with guns solution, the home garden and community resilience solution? Or does politics/ethics become no longer the grand totalising project of the Enlightenment and break up once again into its many tiny tribal and geographic identities? Do we need to look around to our own small corner of the world and figure out what will emerge as the way our bit of the greater social and economic collapse could play out? A hard conversation, but pragmatically useful to have well in advance.
So this is a thread about writing some slogan that at least seems to capture the old systems wisdom that societies are win-win balances that can at least maintain their own fabric, and from there can start to form higher aspirations of what "growth" would look like in meaningful human terms.
We've had the Biblical golden rule of Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We've had Marx's "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Ways of organising the world did emerge from these simple algorithms. A basic dialectically-expressed equilbrium equation became a foundational idea infecting many minds.
A philosopher would be someone able to come up with such a seed of universalising growth. A good meme merchant. In a world now in fact moving at the exponentially compounding rate of a "forever" 3 per cent GDP target, what would be a political/ethical idea powerful enough to serve as the central social organisation principle for either Model A or Model B situations?
The answer is hardly expected. Our current reality is just too impossible. But I thought I would lay out the ground for how things work in the real world given @Moliere's recent proddings on the is/ought non-issue and his promotion of Anarcho-Marxism as some kind of brew based on the universalising of "amiability". A politics with as yet no details no driving algorithm that scales as far as I can see.
And everyone ought to be putting their own current ethics/politics to the same stern test in terms of how they stack up against either/both Model A and Model B social futures. This isn't a time to be fluffing about. :grin:
This is an extreme mindset one very much of today. It could be opposed to its alternative. Not exponential growth but just an expectation of maintaining the world as it has always existed. A venture only needs to be able to cover its own costs and stay in some steady state equilibrium "forever". A no growth society where profit or surplus is limited to that which maintains the existing fabric of life.
So these are the bounding extremes of a society in terms of growth curves. Exponential or flat. At least this can be our start to a more complex discussion. The question of does it scale actually speaks to the more subtle thing of powerlaw growth. A log/log curve which is in fact the "flat balance" of a pair of exponentials. Things go viral because they pair some form of exponential increase with some form of exponential decrease.
Like in semiconductors and their Moore's law growth. More chip for less price as the industry's "forever" promise. A flat balance of two curves, each causally driving the other. The eternalised doubling and halving created by the "virtuous" circle of being able to fit more logic circuits into less physical space.
Tech ventures hitch their star to this fact. Information is always going to be cheaper in the future. And come up with the business proposition that can scale, the market return is equally infinite. If everyone wants to buy, then unit cost can go to zero as consumer take up becomes unlimited.
So much for the tech parallels. Now for the practical political and moral issues. We do live in the exponentialised world that a powerlaw growth describes. But is it actually balanced as a virtuous win-win circle?
For example, are all our machines and practices set up in a way that can double our surpluses while halving our costs? Are we riding the green tech curve where we can use exponentially more energy consuming devices and services as they are also becoming exponentially more efficient and less energy consuming? Where we can in Smil's words harvest the biosphere, our planetary ecosystem, at an exponentially increasing rate because there is also exponentially more biosphere coming down the line to be harvested in the future?
The answer is obvious. Party will be over by 2040. But still, we can pretend we face two scenarios when it comes to the near future. And then get down to how each is a useful test of the more general principle that political or moral ideas as philosophies which hope to organise societies must have virality. They must identify some virtuous feedback loop some ethical algorithm that is the win-win trajectory of growth, which itself is about a choice of some rate between a no-growth maintenance state and an unbridled exponential and pointed to infinity rate.
So that is the challenge. If you agree that the world is into its new era needing a new ethics, a new politics, then what is the algorithm that scales? What key idea drives the idea into every mind?
We have come out of a certain post-WW2 period of US policed "world peace and prosperity". A mindset built around humanism, democracy, safe seas, free trade and globalised political institutions. But a US dollar sovereignty and light constraints on environmental degradation.
There is now a politics/ethics required as the blueprint either to invest in Model A the largely business as usual story of the tech world's green hope of exponentialising the shrinking of the global carbon footprint and resource consumption in a way that can sustain an exponentialising of whatever it is we actually value in terms of goods, services and even just libertarian freedoms.
Does Model A have its political algorithm. Is that what Wokeism is? Or is that not the USP as the recent Pax Americana period delivered all the personal autonomy we would ever be energetically and environmentally able to afford, so the algorithm has to be one strong enough to force society onto whatever is its sustainable green tech track?
Then there is the Model B question. It does all does go quite quickly to shit by 2040. What is the meme to be spreading to prepare for a planet that is crashing and burning? How do we brand that as a suitably universalising social response that can be bought across the entire globe as it by then entropically exists?
Is Model B the Mad Max solution, the bug-out survivalist with guns solution, the home garden and community resilience solution? Or does politics/ethics become no longer the grand totalising project of the Enlightenment and break up once again into its many tiny tribal and geographic identities? Do we need to look around to our own small corner of the world and figure out what will emerge as the way our bit of the greater social and economic collapse could play out? A hard conversation, but pragmatically useful to have well in advance.
So this is a thread about writing some slogan that at least seems to capture the old systems wisdom that societies are win-win balances that can at least maintain their own fabric, and from there can start to form higher aspirations of what "growth" would look like in meaningful human terms.
We've had the Biblical golden rule of Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We've had Marx's "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Ways of organising the world did emerge from these simple algorithms. A basic dialectically-expressed equilbrium equation became a foundational idea infecting many minds.
A philosopher would be someone able to come up with such a seed of universalising growth. A good meme merchant. In a world now in fact moving at the exponentially compounding rate of a "forever" 3 per cent GDP target, what would be a political/ethical idea powerful enough to serve as the central social organisation principle for either Model A or Model B situations?
The answer is hardly expected. Our current reality is just too impossible. But I thought I would lay out the ground for how things work in the real world given @Moliere's recent proddings on the is/ought non-issue and his promotion of Anarcho-Marxism as some kind of brew based on the universalising of "amiability". A politics with as yet no details no driving algorithm that scales as far as I can see.
And everyone ought to be putting their own current ethics/politics to the same stern test in terms of how they stack up against either/both Model A and Model B social futures. This isn't a time to be fluffing about. :grin:
Comments (99)
I wonder if an alternative has ever really been articulated. A few years back I did some cursory reading of books like Prosperity Without Growth and The Value of Nothing, among others. I can see the rationale, but I'm also very dubious of green-left politics. (I went to a solitary Australian Greens party meeting about 15 years ago, which I found depressingly awful.)
But in any case, isn't the root problem the underlying idea of ever-increasing 'economic growth'? And that pretty well defines liberal capitalism. I don't know if anyone outside the sustainability movement really takes it seriously, and, apart from the Greens, who stands for that in politics?
And what are the alternatives? I've never seen Marxism as a credible alternative, considering the disasters of the USSR and the Cultural Revolution. I said about 20 years ago, in a workshop setting, that what the world really needs is an alternative to capitalism that isn't communism. But I don't know if there really is any such thing. (Thomas Piketty, anyone? Haven't read it, myself.)
As is well-known, the emerging middle classes of the developing world simpy can't consume like those in the developed nations - there ain't enough to go around. Beef production, for instance, is massively expensive in terms of environmental and resource costs, and the several billion citizens of emerging countries won't be able to consume beef like the West has. Earth Overshoot Day is moving closer to Jan 1 every year (this year it's 1 August :yikes:)
On the other hand, and maybe belatedly, there is a huge global effort towards decarbonisation. Maybe too little and too late, but it's something. Maybe we need an Al Gore for alternative economics. God knows there are those who are trying, but they don't seem to have much of a profile.
OK. That sketches out the failures of the past. None of which were actually failures as all were ideas that scaled in the sense of grabbing some sizeable audience of believers. Can you identify some common thread in that history. What did they all fail to do?
Liberal capitalism at least gained the balance of power long enough to keep the economic growth growing. It delivered on that, even if its equation had the unsaid part about ever-increasing environmental degradation.
But this is about a slogan for the future.
As a data point, the Aussie 2019 election had its slogans like "A fair go for Australians", "Building our economy, securing our future", "Make Australia great", "The guts to say what you're thinking" and even "Making sure South Australia always comes first." :gasp:
The Greens' had the suitably anodyne: "A future for all of us."
So this can be done. Memes can be constructed in the hope of some ethical/political promise being made at least reasonably clear enough that enough voters would want to hold your party to them. An attitude can catch on. Given voters who want to play.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep, the point of this thread is to focus answers to the level of a compelling elevator pitch. Your audience has a very limited tolerance for either philosophical complexity or political vagueness.
You sketched out some past experience, some real world context. Is there really nothing you can put forward as a slogan that works both for yourself in the idealistic sense and could also work for "us all" in a realistic sense?
One of the catchy titles on John Michael Greers site is Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush.
Comedy plays well. But as moral philosophy, we would soon have the anti-natalists hammering on the door. And as lived experience in the moneyed world, our children aren't having children. They are shifting to lifestyles less consumption-celebrating.
So degrowth has entered the chat. It's ethical and political outlines might be less hazy the more we boomers inquire into it. :smile:
However remember my argument is that the slogan would work in the pragmatic sense of putting folk in mind of some win-win complementary balance. Draw attention to the "other" of their own preference as also needing to be scaled to match.
As in "do unto others", or "to each according".
Quoting Wayfarer
Better because it focuses attention on to the collective future. Certainly counts as getting somewhere here.
It's said that the current GenX/Y are the first to experience a less affluent lifestyle than their parents. And in my family's case it is true, sadly. Younger son with two kids and another coming are consigned to the brutal rental market due to the cost of real estate here. Maybe the affluent days are on the wane.
But then, what philosopher under-writes a 'no-growth' economic policy? How to incentivize that, when so much of the economy is geared around greater wealth as the sole yardstick of progress?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-moores-law-in-action-1971-2019/
I had fun briefings on the topic at Intels Portland fab in the mid-1980s, as well as other manufacturers. Gene Amdahl for instance had his own law that predicted the demise of mainframes because they wouldnt scale. IBM was starting to bolt together CPUs and Amdahl reckoned diminishing returns would kick in after six or seven units.
So scaleability was a hot topic at that time. Another example were the military guys making dedicated hardware for the subs and AWACs. It was a rude shock when they realised that Intel microprocessors had just changed their world and put them out of business. Bespoke doesnt scale and off the shelf does.
Im working on it..
Thanks for this thread. Reading in through, I thought of my work history, the companies I have worked for. During those 50 years, I worked for a number of employers, including two wonderful companies - a bookseller and an environmental engineering company. They both started out small with charismatic founders and a close-knit group of his co-founders and then grew to medium-sized companies with about 10 branches and maybe 500 employees each. For both, that was around the point where I jointed the company. Skipping ahead - the bookseller expanded it's number of stores rapidly based on it's strong success. It did not manage the change to a larger company well and then crashed and went out of business. The engineering company grew more slowly and carefully. It opened new offices with managers already working for the company or carefully chosen outsiders. The company treated it's employees well and made sure different offices cooperated with each other rather than competed. But the company was built on the understanding that those there from the beginning who contributed to the start-up would be able to cash out at some point. Eventually that lead to involvement of venture capitalists and finally sale to a large, nation-wide engineering firm.
What's my point? I guess it's that somebody (everybody?) believes that you have to grow to survive.
Quoting apokrisis
Great video. If Murphy is right, growth will be over by around 2040 no matter what we do. We'll have to figure out a way to reach a non-exponential equilibrium, which I guess is the point of your OP. So I'm not really sure if it's an ethical issue at all, rather a logistical one. The ethics comes in when we try to decide how to spread the pain around.
I did have a few questions about his presentation. He didn't really talk about possible changes in energy use per capita. Did he make his calculations based on the assumption that use per capita will not change? Also, did he take issues of capacity into account? Did he assume there would be no capacity issues? As Murphy makes clear, his projections are based on no major changes in the most significant demographic and technological factors. That means it doesn't consider possible changes associated with global warming. None of this is intended as criticism.
Just curiosity, on the graph shown at about 8:30, it shows a dramatic drop in food per capita in the coming years. What would cause that and what does it mean? Mass starvation?
Quoting apokrisis
As you note, if Murphy and the demographers are right, that isn't a real choice at all. No growth is coming whether we like it or not. How will we handle it? I think the political situation here in the US gives us a good idea how at least one large country will handle it - badly.
Quoting apokrisis
Given that the US isn't likely to handle this all that well, isn't continued US hegemony an obstacle to solving the problem rather than a help?
Quoting apokrisis
I can't imagine an answer to this question. Has any human group with more than 1,000 people ever done something like that before, especially without new land to expand into. I'm really afraid for my children.
Possible slogans:
That's all I got.
You have to grow enough to just to stand still as an organism. So as a going concern, an organism has to earn a margin on its entropifying sufficient to maintain the fabric of its body and then replace itself with reproduction of the next generation of owners. From there, in good times the bacteria can grow exponentially to fill their Petrie dish, or find that they are born into bad times where the dish is full to its brim and drastic degrowth follows.
Tribes who live by foraging learn restraint so as to coexist with their environments. It can be done. But does it scale?
Quoting T Clark
The point of the OP is that the philosophically inclined like to preach about ideal societies and what they would look like. A world where technology fixes all problems. A world where we share and share alike. Or whatever.
We now have a crunch coming - scenarios A and B. Unless you think the current global politics has got everything under good control, it is time to be outlining the politics to deal with this imminent future.
And to work, any new political/ethical philosophy will have to scale. It has to appeal because it is plainly a win-win.
Does any such marvel exist?
Quoting T Clark
Murphy is using the latest Limits to Growth data.
More data
Quoting T Clark
OK, we are discussing the Model B future. For sure this is the politics and ethics of starvation and resource scrambling. You can see folk consciously or unconsciously sliding into the required mentality when billions are going under around the globe.
The US is in a happyish position geostrategically. It has the demographics, the geography, the resource wealth, to begin closing in on its own corner of the world and letting the rest of the planet crash as it likes. This retreat from being the sponsor of the current global trade world order had already begun under Trump and Biden only made it quieter and more organised.
If you know Africa and Asia are screwed, much of Europe too, then the plan would rationally become get selfish, let the degrowth and decarbonisation happen to 6 billion others, problem solved.
The MAGA solution. It scales. Are its adherents irrational or just very cunning and forward looking. No matter who is next elected president, will the infrastructure investment in that new world order continue to be made? Fracking, internment camps, trade deals to draw Canada and Mexico in tight, wind farms and solar panels, geoengineering to fix the climate over chosen areas.
Quoting T Clark
But which horse is the US backing? Saviour by green tech or battening down the hatches for when it gets rough for everyone else and the job of the navy is to sink the refugee ships?
Rural America may be looking at its big useless cities and quietly making the same hard calculations.
Humans have to organise collectively to survive. That requires politics and ethics. Investments are already being made in terms of Model A and Model B futures. The mindset fostered in the free trade/world peace era is no longer going to be fit for purpose under Model B. And even Model A is a degrowth story as green tech way undelivers on the tech bro hype.
Quoting T Clark
:razz:
Truly the Boomers slogan, the first.
And if you are building your billionaire bunker somewhere remote, you will need to get onside with the natives. Otherwise we will be coming for you. We know where you live.
A serious point is that if world order breaks down, then every remaining pocket of humanity will need its own politics/ethics suited to its own Mad Max location. Philosophical inventiveness and understanding of rapid morality scaling will be a critical community resource.
This has been demonstrated around the world where what is a natural disaster that tips a low resilience and under resourced community into decades of chaos can be something that instead pushes a wealthy and connected community into a positive step up.
In moral philosophy, we have free choices apparently. Now is a good time to look around and see how things are liable to pan out in your own small corner of the world.
What was I even thinking. Ukraine shows that cheap drones would quickly put paid to inbound refugee ships. Citizen militias could crowd fund their own private enterprise solutions. The US Navy wouldn't even have to consider its ethical position on this new mission.
Smart ideas do scale. Moral scruples can also do so in the good times, and be swapped out just as fast when the community mood changes.
So the answer to does it scale is: No. None of them scale across the globe. That's the problem to be worked upon: How to build [s]social[/s] global social organizations that are able to address these major problems without killing each other along the way?
***
Here what are we able to do, though? I'd say all we have the power to do here is share ideas. Creativity is what's needed, and creative thought is fostered by collective trust and friendship. If we want to win and prove that we're the idea-maker then we'll compete and keep to ourselves and make sure we say nothing until we have our name on it and can say "See! I am the creator of this idea!": But that's exactly the problem. To even make a science of the economy we'd have to agree upon a unit, and have access to financial records of private institutions, which we don't. We'd have to have political control over the economy, and political influence in the first place.
The problem with coming up with different scenarios is that it doesn't matter which we choose since the powers that be will do what they do regardless of our reasonings.
This gets back to the reality of doing politics: There's plenty of propaganda to go about (and in fact I think that's a separate but related problem). But what politics is about is about building relationships with one another. The politicians job is to talk because talking is how we build relationships. And to do that you need trust, which in turn is only earned by being trustworthy, forthright, and caring.
But these aren't programs. These are character traits -- that is, ethical virtues.
For the ideas of anarchy and marxism, though, I point to the obvious with Marxism at marxists.org, and the ironically canonical anarchist faq. -- the important part to me here is that these are just ideas that I'm working through and from. I'm not advocating as much as exploring the ideas, because that's what this space is for, though I also want to be honest in saying hey, duh, I'm attracted to these ideas because I see possible solutions in them to the modern world.
And what I like about pairing these ideas is it gives both a critical problem -- the Marxism -- and a different solution than Marxism-Leninism -- organizing along anarchist lines. Further the "anarchy" makes it to where it's not something I'm going to cook up all on my own: I'm going to explore and share and hope we can come up with something that works, because that's all that's ever worked to address collective problems before anyways.
Yep. So that is what I'm talking about as the tech entrepreneur model. And it became the social entrepreneur model about 20 years ago. It was supposed to be the politics of the Millennial generation.
You start small and dirty and give your idea away. Apps that can do good are set free on the world to see if they will go viral and scale.
Tech makes this form of politics or radicalisation near enough costless enough that there only has to be a micro-return to earn a fortune. But as your venture capital backers also understand, the goal is to lock-in customers to your unique solution and so become the monopoly service. That's when you retire to your billionaire yacht and island.
So politics through the tech entrepreneur route is now a well understood and tested thing. It has done a lot of good but now has also become rather corrupted. The US is full of charitable endeavours that are actually wealth shelters. And yesterday's millennial social entrepreneurs are now today's Tik-Tok influencers.
Moral philosophy or progressive politics has to face these realities as modern hurdles to overcome. You can scale up a good idea to educate and water a village in Africa, or round up the plastic debris floating in the Pacific ocean, but then the wider world may be scaling up something else like a crushing Woke vs Maga social division.
Quoting Moliere
I think you don't understand the power of an organised crowd. Leaders shit their pants if they see an actual mob coming for them. The job is too look tough and appease.
That is why longterm change is killed by short-term electoral preference. Any radical measure gets watered down as soon as it is seen not to fly with the central 5% of swing voters.
Quoting Moliere
Exactly. A dialectical analysis to discover the oppositions that can then become what the ethical algorithm balances.
So Marx vs Bakunin can be seen in systems terms as networks vs hierarchies, or bottom-up construction vs top-down constraint. The systems solution is to point out that hierarchies are just networks of networks society as a scalefree realm of interest groups or institutions freely self-organising within a collective cultural and economic frame.
Social democracy would say it has already delivered that. Anarcho-Marxism would be reinventing this wheel in terms of combining some proper definition of a good community life tied to a economy that can deliver over the long-run.
But now we are into the accelerationism of the tech bro world coupled to the stagnation of the neo-liberal bust. So you are talking about 1800s politics that became the best of the 1900s' solutions and now we are well into the arriving crisis of the 2000s.
That is why I prefer to apply systems science to the task. It is the one that includes ecology and the realities of thermodynamics in its kitset of intellectual tools. The "is" to balance the "ought".
Also, I just like ideas, I don't care when they were made -- I don't even care if the idea is true. Since we don't really know what will work to solve our problems I like to keep an open mind and simply try things out to see where they go. It's not like I really know what I'm talking about anyways ([s]as[/s] the scary part of that is: I'm pretty sure no one does. We're strapped to a rocket without knowing where it's going, when it will stop, or how to control it)
I understand its necessity, but I like to imagine a world without it. In order to do so, though, there'd have to be some agreed upon definition of propaganda which could possibly serve as a basis for law. I mention it as separate because I believe the liberal state is fully capable of combating propaganda. Jason Stanley's How Propaganda Works I read recently that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the topic. (I also read Bernays Propaganda, but I don't recommend it so much because it's basically just propaganda for propaganda)
So in criticizing liberal theory I don't mean to say it's all bad either, and I see possible solutions within the institutions we have.
So, in a way, teaching philosophy and doing philosophy is an anti-propaganda, and thereby useful, insofar that we think propaganda ought not rule our lives.
If this is your belief then in what sense are you interested in a real inquiry into solutions? And you should steer well clear of me as all Ive got nothing but those. :wink:
Quoting Moliere
You mean like the same liberal state that pushes Covid vaccines on you? Or are you meaning you wish for the liberal state that has the balls to squash the conspiracy-mongers?
Ill return to my OP. Histories best ethical ideas have been fair exchanges that scaled. A society by definition has scale. And scale is always hierarchically organised in some form just to self-stabilise. So your political slogan has to promise the best of both worlds. Enough freedom for enough protection. Enough collectivism for enough individualism. Enough rights for enough responsibility. Enough excitement for enough peace. And so on and so forth in terms of Maslows familiar hierarchy of needs.
So just saying you dont want propaganda isnt much of a slogan. I cant see what it is that you do want in terms of some balance that promises a win-win as we ought to want both things in the one social system.
Perhaps something along the lines that anyone should be free to have an opinion and yet everyone ought to be fact-checked?
Quoting Moliere
Sounds a shit notion of philosophy. Sounds exactly like propaganda run wild in feigning reason so as to spread its irrationalism.
Oh, I like the idea of solving some of these problems, I suppose.
Give me your wisdom, o lord! ;) :D
Quoting apokrisis
Why Maslow?
Is it true?
Quoting apokrisis
I'd be on board with that, roughly.
Quoting apokrisis
It may sound that way, but is it that way? What is propaganda?
Its the meme that scaled. Maslow founded positive psychology in the 1950s.
Quoting Moliere
I thought you were going to tell me?
But all communication is propaganda in being a message with a meaning and so coming from a point of view - a message with some intention conveyed from a me to a you.
Are you wanting to split the world into those messages that are particularly annoying to you and those are matchingly pleasing? Your world needs this new message setting.
Do you see this as a pragmatic job for AI browser settings or a case of if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee?
Quoting apokrisis
I believe I did in defining philosophy as an anti-propaganda, at least. Propaganda is a virus, as you say, but philosophy is an anti-virus in that it inhibits the mechanisms of propagation by asking questions and not giving answers, but rather methods of thinking through things.
Even dialectics requires more effort than that. Tacking on not to A to arrive at not-A is the shallow approach of other logics perhaps. But it clearly defines nothing and simply begs the question concerning A.
Quoting Moliere
So now we have a reasonable natural system dichotomy of self and other - the infection vs the immune system.
And sure, the solution normally proposed is to educate a population in critical thinking. Instill the collective rational habit of fact checking. Properly fund and enable unpartisan journalism and other fact checking social institutions.
Implement life as the Enlightenment imagined it? But add planetary limits to human aspirations as part of the political and ethical equation this time around.
Implement life as we imagine it together, which can include some Enlightenment, as a treat :D -- though that'd be the same response to every imaginary of the future. It's not like the imaginary of the Enlightenment is easy to specify, right(and the same for all the other Big Movements)? And it's important to imagine, I believe, though allow others' to do so as well, and share those sorts of things.
Some fact checking....
So in all ways the world I remember growing up in. But then I was lucky with my parents and circumstances. These imaginings were pretty well fully implemented.
But as I say, now it would have to be Enlightenment 2.0, the green reboot as the Model A option. Or the Model B scenario question of how to salvage what's left during the great collapse so as to then start over in a well considered way.
I think it gets along with my speculations
Also gets along with my belief that Kant is the pinnacle of The Enlightenment: both rational and romantic.
I think you ought to consider that there are two distinct types of change, change of form (internal change) and change of place (change in external relations). "Growth" is a change of form. If growth is the primary goal, then going places and doing things is neglected as a goal. It may be time to look at change of place as a primary goal over change of form.
As Murphy points out, now it's us in the Petrie dish. It's we.
Quoting apokrisis
That requires lots of land to move around. I can only forage in my yard to a limited extent. My neighbors squawk if I try to use their property. That leads to agriculture, civilization. I guess we could all be subsistence farmers.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not sure that's possible in a world with population density as great as ours. The possibility, fantasy that technology will be able to solve all our problems is about to get really tested for the first time. No more smokestacks in Missouri sending their acid rain to Massachusetts. This is reinforced by how bad scientists have been in the past predicting the environmental/demographic future. In the 1970s, we were told that over-population would destroy the world. Now we're told that one of the biggest problems will be not enough workers. And we're going to run out of fossil fuels while we keep on finding and developing more. Of course, they've also been predicting that nuclear fusion will be producing power within 20 years at least since I was in school in 1970. This doesn't mean I'm a climate denier, but it is part of the argument deniers use.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Doesn't the first quote contradict the second? What does "scaling" even mean in this context? Scaling requires room to move. Are we talking about some sort of inward growth rather than outward? Is that what technology does? Aren't we skeptical that technology can solve our problems?
Quoting apokrisis
The chart I referenced in the video shows a dramatic reduction in per capita food production starting in about 2050. If that means mass starvation, doesn't that significantly change the future population predictions. The ones in the graph assume that current trends roughly follow current conditions.
Quoting apokrisis
This seems odd to me, given how much of the world sees the US as an unwelcome influence. Do we still think that US lead globalization is the solution we're looking for, or even a good thing in and of itself? Is globalization the scalable solution? I guess in some sense it has to be. One-world government? Continuing the de-Balkanization of the past 150 years. 500 years. 2,500 years.
Quoting apokrisis
I resemble that remark.
But I have three children. I have an interest in what happens in the world after I'm gone. It's looking like I might never have any grand-children and it's also looking like that might not be a bad thing.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't really understand what this means, which I guess is the point.
I'll say it again, I'm not arguing against anything you or Murphy are saying. I'm just trying to figure out the scope of the issue.
I've been shocked over the past 20 years or so how much progress has been made in doing what everyone said was impossible - increasing renewable energy production and distribution. Elon Musk and a relatively few entrepreneurs have changed everything. They took a bet on finding a way to make good environmental sense also make good economic sense. Of course technology had to improve in order for it to work, but no one had even really tried before.
Quoting Moliere
I don't see how this would work. It's not trust and friendship, it's making doing good economically advantageous. That's the only way I can see.
Quoting Moliere
Is this true? The current US administration, Biden, have had a dramatic effect on the direction of technological growth and change by just throwing a few billon, or is it trillion, dollars at it.
Quoting Moliere
Doesn't @apokrisis's scaling require central planning? How can it possibly grow from the anarchist bottom up?
I'm afraid I don't share your optimism with respect to the powers that be.
Hottest day on earth ever recorded happened this week.
And I know that in spite of these various positions that we've only increased fossil fuel expenditure: the green tech future sounds nice, but it all runs on coal and oil at bottom.
Though I have optimism towards people's ability to overcome.
Quoting T Clark
Upon making "doing good" advantageous, the people seeking advantage will start doing good.
But then when "doing good" changes, because the world always changes, they'll insist that the old "doing good" is the new "doing good"
I think trust and friendship are more powerful than these technocratic motives, though certainly more unreliable for the spreadsheet bean counters.
Quoting T Clark
Yes. I'm voting for Trump due to my location, regardless of who I vote for. And "reasonings" don't garner votes.
I know who I prefer, and it's not Trump, but I think what I'm saying is true still.
Quoting T Clark
There are many examples of anarchist organizations, but the one I like to refer to is https://quaker.org/ -- because they aren't strictly anarchist in the sense of ideology, but they are anarchist in that they utilize consent-building techniques to a point that everyone has to agree to something.
It takes time, it takes commitment to your fellow humans, it takes care: but it doesn't take rules or programs. Central planning is one possible path, but not the only one.
You mean you would sign up for Elon's death trip to Mars? Or do you expect warp drive to exist in 20 years? :smile:
I would say "all" is an over-estimate. And here is where we would need to contrast the tech green promises vs the harsh ecological realities.
A few years ago, the agricultural idea that was believed to scale was "vertical farming". Converting city warehousing into racks of food growing under efficient LED lights and sensor-based watering and fertilising. A hyperlocal solution for urban communities.
But then reality bit. The staff to run these grow houses had to be paid double your immigrant farm worker. Disease ran rife as it doesn't respect the sterile rules of an artificial environment that lacks natural biodiversity.
Meanwhile other more ecologically-savvy agricultural practices permaculture and regenerative farming haven't scaled as they too directly challenge the Big Business status quo. But as things crash, they represent the knowledge that would allow the fortunate survivors to begin over from a more sophisticated level. More mouths could be fed in a more sustainable way.
Quoting T Clark
Both things can be true. All the young might be in Africa. But all starving. And all the old might be in clapped out Europe and Asia, and also starving.
Quoting T Clark
This is the issue. What ought the goal be? The Enlightenment seemed so right in humanistic principle, but became a victim of its own success. It gained the monopoly position in a world that had been socially diverse. An ethical monoculture was successfully produced with the US taking over from the UK as its self-interested standard bearer.
The 1992 Kyoto Protocol marked some kind of high point on this humanist project, and then that got overtaken by neo-liberal exhuberance the financialisation of everything. The house was wrecked by the teenagers throwing a block party. The GFC saw Big Money bailed out and the resulting debts serviced by poor. Folk had a look around at where things were at and could predict a coming long stagnation and deglobalisation.
Quoting T Clark
And then this. The US choose to continue growth at all costs. It had only propped up world trade and Middle East oil deliveries to get the world out of its cycles of European and Asian wars. US was its own well-resourced and well-populated continental market. It did not need world trade itself. It is uniquely blessed in its geostrategic position.
So if globalisation was collapsing, let it. The US began its post-GFC move towards a retreat behind its own walls. Funny money could fund the shale fracking and oil sands revolutions so long at the environmental consequences could be kept out of the economic calculus. The US caught everyone out by becoming oil self-sufficient again and so really having no need to protect the world's shipping lanes anymore.
Shift the factories back from China and again a win-win for the US. Domestic jobs bonanza and China left to disappear down its own plughole.
A really big game is being played by the US that no-one ever seems to talk about openly. Under Trump, Biden and whoever is allowed to follow them. The idea is that is scaling is it is time to bunker down as a nation. Canada comes along for its resources, Mexico for its cheap labour. Japan, Taiwan and Korea get to pay to stay in the club. The UK and Australia are useful to a point.
Quoting T Clark
Please don't fall for this horseshit. The Tesla was the final nail in the coffin for any Green hope.
Right at the point where tech seemed to be delivering some kind of liveable future electric bicycles and rideshare apps we get Musk and his bloated dreams of how the future ought be. More cars. But now even faster on the acceleration and more toxic in their lithium mining and full lifecycle economics.
Quoting T Clark
No. Scaling is premised on the opposite. If an idea is "so good" then it will grow organically. It will self-organise its world.
But central planning does have to become some sort of guiding function that emerges as part of the deal.
The evolution of a body requires a devolution of its functions into a set of organs. A department of transport, of sanitation, of energy, of decision making. As things scale, they need to get hierarchically complex.
Planning is generally a good idea in life. And a good idea is what you want your society to be implementing over all its scales. The selling point of liberal democracy was that planning was going to one of those activities taking place over all levels just as the nervous system might have a brain, but also reaches into every corner to allow all parts to contribute to "the plan". Even the gut turns out to be majorly connected to the brain in two-way relation.
No, I think we need to consider this difference between internal change and external change when developing policy. Growth is inherently selfish as internal change. External change, as change in relations with others has moral value. So it might be a question of whether we want to prioritize a selfish policy (based on growth) or a moral policy (based on relations with others).
The "flat" 'equilibrium forever' goal is not a realistic alternative to growth because it does not reflect an organism's true nature as a active being. So if we remove priority from growth, as a goal which inevitably runs into restrictions (nothing grows forever), then we still find the need to be active in some other way. So we can assign priority to doing what is morally good instead, as a goal which begins where growth ends.
But ecologically growth doesnt have to end. The limits to growth are limits in terms of certain unchecked exponentials. Population. Atmospheric carbon. Ecosystem destruction.
Population is enough connected to everyday life that it has been self-correcting. The problem there is we still must add a few billion, and yet we are slowing reproductive rates so fast that a grey unbalance is it own new exponential problem. A coming glut of centenarians to worry about. A double whammy from having to adjust numbers too fast.
Also it is arguable that given time we could run civilisation much as we know it off the solar flux and a big investment in sensible green tech.
And while we were at, reinvent the world of work and community in ways more to our liking.
So somewhere between how we want to live and what a planet can sustain can be a political setting we seek to optimise. But can that be captured as a snappy slogan or ethical algorithm? That is where the work starts. That would be connecting the is and the ought in some meaningful dialectical way.
I don't see how you can say that growth doesn't have to end, then go on to list the restrictions which will necessitate an end to growth.
Quoting apokrisis
Maybe we have your catchy slogan right here: "time to start living off the solar flux". What is the solar flux?
But I am accepting your distinction that there is internal growth and external growth in some useful sense. And one may be prioritised at the expense of the other. That seems the start of an ethical-strength algorithm.
You want "endless" growth. Well what if we stop a minute to let you define that as some sustainable balance over a long enough term. Let's hear what you really want out of "a life".
We all know that our current political settings are unbalanced. Unlimited junk food today in exchange for unlimited health costs tomorrow. Unlimited working hours today in exchange for the eternal death bed lament of "I wish I spent more time with family and friends, especially the kids."
So if everyone wants to vote for a life of high-entropy consumption, the answer has to be, well wait just a bit until green tech catches up with a world in drastic demographic decline.
Or if instead this is the moment to rewrite the script in a way that is rationally believable then let's see what that looks like as a social balancing act. Pragmatically it might mean 90% more time with the family, as you all dig the homestead dirt, and 90% less time consuming stuff so that wealth no longer has that demand side plughole to flush the global ecology down.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your daily dose of sunshine. The energy that spins the wheels of the thin slick of protoplasm that constitutes the Earth's biosphere.
Endless growth is the idea which I said we should give up on. It's like the idea of endless life, impossible and inherently selfish.
Quoting apokrisis
My point was that a "balancing act" is not the appropriate alternative. We still need something with an upside, but with an upside which is other than growth, based on external changes rather then internal changes. And whether something is external or internal is dependent on how we define the fundamental unit.
I guess that's where politics and ethics comes in. We need everyone, or at least enough of us, to agree on what doing good means in this context. And then we're back where we started.
Quoting Moliere
Are there examples of large scale, politically effective anarchist organizations. It seems almost like a contradiction in terms.
Could they scale economically and technologically without that resistance? Could they close those gaps in food production factors you identified previously?
Quoting apokrisis
There's a lot of talk these days about the gap between the very rich and the rest of us. Worker's pay hasn't really risen since the 1970s while the richest gather a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. How much of that has to do with globalization? To what extent does globalization lead to improvement in the standard of living for people in Asia, Africa, and South American at the expense of those in North America and Europe? If the only path to a new golden age is the dilution of the western way of life by spreading it around to the rest of the world, what realistic political strategy will lead us in that direction? As you note, the US has a viable alternative - fuck em all.
Quoting apokrisis
We'll save Australia, wouldn't want to hurt no kangaroos.
Imagine your community if there were no Kentucky Fried outlets or supermarkets selling industrial food. And people just had to start digging up their suburban back gardens and running a few sheep in the nearest park or football grounds.
This wouldn't be impossible with the right knowledge and social licence. Just as your friends and neighbours would all be riding around on solar powered electrical bicycles.
It is a stretch to say that a planet of 10 billion could support itself like this. I think the estimates are more about a billion as, especially with climate change, too many people live in the wrong places.
Phoenix is the fastest-growing US city isn't it? But not going to be liveable without its air-conditioning. Or once other states start asserting their rights to the water extraction that grows all those pecans and pistachios.
So what is theoretically doable is different from what is pragmatically doable. As communities close in on themselves, this re-localisation of food production is going to create a lot more losers than winners across the world.
What I'm saying is that permaculture and regenerative agriculture are the eco-smart answers that you would want to know about now that the tech-smart promises don't look like scaling in the way that would save our current globalising world-system demands.
Quoting T Clark
You have to understand wealth in the context of powerlaw growth. The "fat tail" story. We naturally want to apply a Gaussian bell curve to wealth distribution everyone bunched in the middle. But a powerlaw is a flat line with no mean. The distribution tends towards what we have been seeing. Most people down at the minimum wage end of the spectrum and a handful ending up owning the larger chunk of everything.
This isn't an inequality story in the sense of unbalanced growth. It is just the statistics of any powerlaw growth. It is the fair outcome of a growth based system. The Matthew Effect.
Political solutions of course can be applied to this reality. That is why social security was needed in the past to stop the impoverished mob from storming the parliament. Just enough can be allowed to trickle down to put some kind of minimum wage under the whole deal.
Those who understand this wealth dynamic as a scaling issue have been championing a Universal Basic Income for this reason. But that is predicated on Big Tech creating so much efficiency that the world economic system is more at risk of crashing from deflation.
Big Tech is patting itself on the back that it will make all goods and services so cheap across the whole globe that it is imperative to start pushing money into the hands of consumers so as to keep the historical growth trajectory going.
How large scale are you thinking here? At a certain point I already admitted that the answer is simply no: states are larger than functioning anarchist organizations.
But I'm familiar with some non-state scale success such as: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/10/village-against-world-dan-hancox-review or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation . and the form that I think of as a synthetic blend is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
But, really, what you say here is true regardless of these examples:
Quoting T Clark
If enough people agree then they can pursue it -- I'm not sure if we're back where we started with that, though. Recognizing that agreement is allows collective action makes agreement a worthwhile pursuit, which gets along generally with how I think: It's more about building relationships regardless of the philosophical ideas we might be thinking about in doing politics that orient us when it comes to the doing of politics.
Earlier in this thread, @apokrisis wrote about sustainable agriculture and estimated it might work with a world population of about a billion. It strikes me that the kind of anarchist system you are talking about might work at a similar scale. That means that both are post-apocalyptic scenarios.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, this is the way democratic politics is supposed to work, but is certainly not how it is working now.
As I just commented to @Moliere, the only potentially workable solutions we've come up with are post-apocalyptic. Looking at the choices, the old hunkering down in the US of A and only letting enough immigrants in to keep our economy growing option seems like, not the best choice, but the inevitable one.
How many do you think the present system will support when the oil is gone?
Quoting Migration In Hotter Times: Humanity At Risk
Notice again that understanding what is the case does not tell us what you ought do about it.
And also that the real issue is what can be done about it. Which returns us to the is rather neatly. Our range of views on the oughts is pragmatically constrained by what could be the collectively scaled choice. The futurised is of the situation.
Which, of course, is not the case.
Entering the chat...
Yes, one positive outcome of antinatalism is preventing resource strain.
I said the future is pragmatically constrained. I really dont understand how you keep failing to understand what is simply obvious.
What should Tasmania do when the climate refugee boats come hunting as an unsustainable flux with uncertain intentions? Ought it extend the humanitarian hand or thank goodness if had prepared its counter fleet of sea drones?
The future is open. The question becomes how we can expect the predictable state of the world to reshape our social values at a fundamental level.
The OP indeed was premised on exploring two quite distinct futures so as to elicit sharper thought on how these things work.
If you cant even figure out how this argument has been set out, there is no place here for your belligerent presence.
There are limits on our choices, sure, obviously. But our choices are not fixed. We have options.
My "belligerent presence" is simply pointing out that the despite the physics being settled (if that is indeed the case), there remains the question of what we ought do.
Perhaps is correct, and it's time for humanity to bow out. How do you reply? Why ought we survive?...
...and if you can address that, you might move from physics to ethics.
We have options. The OP says that. Time now to give your answer on the option that scales.
By you.
Are you sure youre feeling quite well this morning? You seem to be in some kind of psychic crisis.
FIne.
If I read this correctly, is asking you to explain what the ethical course would be knowing that our resources might be constrained by a certain impending year.
I am guessing you are laying out Scenario A and B as a choice. Is there one you think is the correct path, and why? If you choose one, what is the reasoning?
I hoped the world would wake up and change. But that moment was already missed in the 1990s if not the 1970s. So Model B is the world as it is likely to be.
And what I argued is that this would look like a deglobalising pluralism. Everyone will locally be inventing whatever way of life seems to work across the scale at which they can hope to construct some fabric of social and economic relations.
So to address the planet at a global ethical scale, we might all have agreed on one common political slogan that could be implemented as a win-win proposal across all of humanity. Then accepting this hope will fail - and might always have been impossible - now is a good time for thought to turn to other options.
If everyone will wind up having to relocalise, then doing that in Sudan is going to be different from doing that in Switzerland or Tasmania. Time to look around your immediate community and see how well it is prepared to make the best of the situation it will likely find itself in.
For the US, does it need to take alway peoples guns or is having those guns the stabilising political choice? Should Elon Musk be stopped in his tracks right now for his silly diversionary stunts or does everyone want to join in scaling his Mars colony so US citizens of even more modest incomes have a new planet to escape too.
I may joke, but really, we need to be aware that the geoengineering response is a live possibility. Why wouldnt a rich nation try to fix climate change by tinkering with the worlds weather patterns when things get desperate. What ethical ought is going to apply even if they shift the rains off their more vulnerable neighbours.
As banjos comments show, moral philosophy has surprisingly little to say about a future that is outside its regular scope of operations. It is locked into the Enlightenment humanisation project as its moralising ought.
One should not kick puppies. Fact! But it is also a fact that my neighbours next door when I was a child had fat little puppies delivered for the weekend barbecue. In a deglobalising world, we will be faced with this human variety again.
So I simply argue for a better understanding of how human societies do pragmatically self-organise according to ethical algorithms. We cant just desire any future as our collective is. Nature falls into its stubborn patterns for perfectly comprehensible and predictable reasons.
What are they?
How is deciding what we ought do algorithmic?
As the OP said. Dialectically. As a rationalising balance of the competition~cooperation dynamic by which all natural systems from ecologies to societies self-organise.
So singalong now .... "flush me one more time baby!"
And these supposedly tell you what you ought to do.
But no detail.
Quoting Banno
Underlying this line of thinking is a determinism already set out "globally" (as you might frame it), even if we can't predict the local variations that lead there. The underlying principle is "entropic heat death", and we are just staving it off on various short or shorter timescales. That is the gist at least, I am getting from apokrisis.
However, is this not descriptive and not prescriptive? For example, a deontologist might believe as a rule that it might be wrong to harm someone unnecessarily, for example. Would you agree that this is an ethical principle worth holding? If not, why not?
I can't see how this is grounded in global determinism, even if it arises from it. There are ethics I am interested in for example. How are ethical dilemmas to be solved and why?
Here's an example I am interested in for example. How would you answer it?
Let's say that several men were fishing off a bridge. That bridge led to the parking lot where my car is so I can leave the park. The men are blocking the bridge, too enraptured with fishing off the side to catch the biggest fish of their life. They don't pay attention to you that you would like to pass to get to your car. They say, "Sorry mate, you gotta wait, fish this big don't just come here all the time".
I frame this dilemma as such:
They have a positive project, (fishing). You have a negative right (not to be blocked to get back to your car to leave the park). I would say in a completely just scenario, someone's positive projects should not interfere with someone's negative rights. In other words, in a fair world, negative rights always have a priority over positive projects when those two things come into conflict. This would be contrary perhaps to a strictly act utilitarian view whereby the most satisfaction brings the most moral outcome. In that line of thinking, the fishermen would have priority because they might have the most satisfaction of catching the fish, even if it is supposedly my "right" to not be blocked access to leave the park.
So here we have a clear (even if very minor) ethical scenario, and a certain heuristic to answer it. I guess, this might be the question here. Not what is happening, but what ought to happen.
That would be the negative framing. The positive one is that as physical creatures, we live off the negentropy we harvest as the free gift of the Cosmic entropy flow. The sun shines, plants grow. Hydrocarbon deposits are laid down by decaying ancient forests and ocean plankton and hundreds of millions of years later, workers turn up with fracking rigs to power proud nations.
Everything we love and value comes from harvesting natures bounty and spending that negentropy wisely. :razz:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Here we go. Morality locked into its old is/ought shibboleth.
A natural philosophy understanding of nature emphasises that global constraints and local degrees of freedom are what go together to constitute the holism of an evolutionary system. At the level of humans as a social organism, that cashes out as the organising dynamic of competition-cooperation. Our actions must achieve a world where there is a global cohesion and yet also a local differentiation.
Over all scales of our lives. Even nation states are meant to be a state of order where a planetary level of competition-cooperation is laid out in an institutional fashion. Nations have rights and responsibilities under international treaties. They can wage wars, but meant to follow the rules.
So it just is the case that everywhere, at every level, we organise in this win-win way where individual striving is set within a collective justice and morality.
The mistake humans make is believing that including the larger natural system that is our environment is a nice optional choice that good-hearted folk might choose to bleat about, but really that is not a central concern of debates over our moral choices. When it comes to the environment and ecosystem, well that is - as you say - merely a great big heat sink of no intrinsic value.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So you have set up the situation as I describe. A demand that society is set up according to some institutionalised understanding about rights and responsibilities. Justice becomes about a proper balance of interests. An algorithm of do unto others as you would have them do unto you might help defuse this your car vs their fishing real world dilemma.
Im sure those involved would love you to arrive as a third party to sit them all down, talk it through this way and see if some new general understanding comes to rule such incidents in the future. Or you could tell them to fight it out and see which one right now is the stronger or more determined.
There are always free choices to make. But natural order arises from just making some damn choice in terms of whether the approach you try is competition or cooperation. Do you seek short term advantage or long term understanding? It is not always clear which is right. Which you ought to do.
But what matters from an evolutionary systems point of view is that you frame your choices with a crisp dialectical counterfactuality. You dont fluff about vaguely, sort of looking imploringly at the blocking anglers and hoping for the best. You choose a path and live by the consequences.
The way it works - as an organism seeking its adaptive balance to its world - is you always should be able to see clearly the two oughts of any social situation. To compete or to collaborate. And most every social situation is already institutionalised to make the balancing of the two imperatives an unthinking habit.
On the tennis court, if I hit a ball on the line it is in. That is the rule we all agreed. If my opponent pretends to see it out, I probably oughtnt pull out a gun and shoot him dead. But that is still an option. It answers to the short term of one line call. However I might want to pause to consider the way it would interrupt the flow of the rest of the game, or even my entire day.
Now your point is that our moral dilemmas are always of the most immediate kind. The fate of the planet does not hang on every line call or traffic obstruction. Thermodynamics seems as remote from morality as you can imagine.
But humans have blown up their world in just 200 years. It all went exponential starting around 1800. And even then, not really until 1850. Thermodynamics was a remote issue for society even in my own childhood. But the planet has gone from 3 billion people to 8b since then.
I think it is time cosy notions - like an is/ought separation of powers - are consigned to the dustbin of academia. The house is burning down around us and folk are looking about in dazed moral confusion. Doing a bit of green tinkering and a lot of hand wringing. Ineffectually looking at those anglers with slightly imploring, yet also insisting eyes. As theres more of them than you. But maybe if you waved your gun
Yes. We have the capacity to make things other than they are. So we must ask how things ought be. That question is not answered by physics.
That's one way to handle it. But this way you speak of reminds me of problem with this thermodynamic way of looking at the world in the mind/body problem as well. That is to say, the morality is equivalent to the terrain. The physics surrounding it, the map. You are stuck in mapland. I need to navigate the actual terrain though. In mapland, guns and getting killed are hypotheticals because you are just entropic energy flowing in various ways. In terrainland I have fears, wants, desires, and values.
Bang on. It is answered by our dialectically-structured interaction with "the physics".
It just helps not to talk like a lumpen realist about the physics and a fluffy idealist about the moral dilemmas. Biosemiosis helps us get our global metaphysics right.
All life and mind is an ecology living off an entropic bounty. Always has been and always will. And that could be the case because "is" and "ought" exists as a two-way feedback relationship that couples the organism to its environment in a pragmatic loop.
Any other way of looking at it is a few lifetimes out of date. There are moral philosophy attitudes we can no longer afford to espouse. In today's world, it counts for wilful blindness.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/921725
Yep.
You assert this. But I don't see the substantiation by way of an argument.
It is plainly wrong that we are stuck in any map if the map is what we are always involved in writing.
Would you follow Google Maps off the edge of a cliff rather than believe your own eyes about the washed out road ahead? And if it were made easy, would you feel a social responsibility to rewrite that tiny bit of Google Maps to alert other road users in your immediate vicinity?
So physics is our map of reality at its broadest possible level. It is a map of the most cosmic scale constraints that frame our minute to minute existence. One might want to fly off the top of the building, but that free choice is a little constrained if we haven't yet evolved wings. Or at least have a jet pack attached to our backs and it is fully fuelled up for our little adventure.
I'm not sure how much more pointing out the bleeding obvious I have in me. I set out an OP in a reasonably developed fashion. This rehashing of old points is very stale.
Quoting Banno
I guess what I'm getting at then is, what would be a justification for an ethical decision? If we said something like, "We are entropic beings with global constraints and local degrees of freedom", that would be some sort of category error, no?
So, looping back to the OP, what would be an ethical stance and what would be its justification towards resource management? What should we do?
If the bridge is private, then the ownership comes it to play. If the owner is fishing, then best find another crossing. If the owner is you, evict the trespassing fishermen.
If the bridge is public, then the fishermen blocking your way is inconsistent with the purpose of the bridge, and they ought let you cross.
If the bridge is public, but the fishermen are participating in the endorsed annual fishing competition that has been well advertised and sign posted, and you ought not have parked your car in an area that was closed off for the purposes of the competition, then your negative right is forfeit.
The force of moral quandaries often depends on their being removed from their context. With more background the difficulties are often resolved.
Ethical problems are embedded in our desires and values, and are often more intractable than physical problems that can be solved simply by looking around.
One does not have to look far to find ethical stances quite divergent from those suggested in the OP. Indigenous ethics for example might involve circular time, self-control, self-reliance, courage, kinship and friendship, empathy, a holistic sense of oneness and interdependence, reverence for land and Country and a responsibility for others. The actions implicit in such a view are very different to those in either of options A or B in the OP. Yet such an approach might be quite conducive towards long-term stability.
Which might serve to show how ethical stances are embedded in what is loosely called a "form of life".
Well given that I say this is all about the correctness of the dialectical view the fact that nature organises itself as a local~global balancing act then the answer should pop out of that presumption for me.
So I then ask, what is "justification" in that scalefree local~global sense? We always will have two poles, two equally justificatory alternatives, that orient our resulting argument. We can justify in terms of rights, or in terms of responsibilities. In terms of a natural inclination towards competition, or towards cooperation. And so on and so forth.
Individuals and communities. Cohesion and differentiation. Constraints and freedoms. Always some balance of justifications a balance that can be struck as vagueness has been excluded by living in a dichotomised world. If we pretend the world is black and white, that is how we can then go on to discriminate all its possible shades of gray.
A map is no use if your roads and landscape are indistinctly marked out as two shades of near-identical gray. You want a map that asserts boldy, here is the ocean and here is where it falls of the cliff into the realm of monsters and dragons. Black lines on white pages.
So justification is always to be organised as this call for a negotiation. "I was travelling over the speed limit, m'lud. But not excessively. It was broad daylight and the road empty. etc." Rules need interpreting. Circumstances can be extenuating. That is to say, our actual justice system is set up on a systems' principle of laws as not the exceptionless judgement of a god but as constraints general behavioural guidelines - that then allow some discretion in terms of an individual's degrees of freedom.
The guilty can plead passion, inattention, good character, reformed intentions, and any other spur of the moment shit to lessen the coming blow.
So the question in the modern era given the same justice would now have to be extended to all the people of the planet, and perhaps all it sentient life as well is what would that look like as a pragmatic intention?
And the usual two choices are possible, along with the third thing of all the balances that they would stand as the measuring poles to.
We could really go overboard and attempt to imagine a future where the whole planet is saved in some pristine sense where all ecosytsems return to as they were, at least in 1800. But we also end up with folk continuing to have as many babies, or houses as big, cars as fast, as has been the historic trend ever since then.
One can see the impracticalities of that. But hey, we start at the ultimate dream why not? And work our way back towards what might be the practical.
Does our utopia have to be so large that it includes the planet itself? Or even the bacterial scale of life which in fact dominates it? Well most will probably say no. We just don't want to flush ourselves down the toilet of history. But if we are gone, well practically speaking, who cares?
God may judge. But He was only ever a social fiction used to constrain human behaviour at a tribal or community scale of moral organisation. We were mature and responsible adults by the time we decided to drive the ecosystem over the edge of the cliff.
And do we owe some ought to the larger world that is the physical Cosmos. The Great Heat Sink in the sky? Well now you are taking the conversation in a really silly direction. If I don't exist, the Cosmos can go screw itself. It never cared for me in any discernible way. Why would I feel a duty of care to it? Or even a sentimental attachment like I might for the ecosystem of the 1800s? I can't stand in the dock accused of messing up "God's creation" like some kid throwing a house party while the parents were out of town.
Even as a collective moral economy the planetary civilisation imagined by the Enlightenment there is no ultimate feedback loop where we humans could destroy the Cosmos in any meaningful sense. The only judgement being passed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics is "did those little shits entropify".
On a finite planet of finite energy and resources, we do have a choice of doing that slowly for a long time, or very quickly all at once. That is a completely free choice from the Cosmic point of view.
But then what use is having a free choice if we are not even claiming that possibility? The Second Law sets up the large scale flow. We get to harvest that with our ingenuity. It is then up to us to ensure we have a morality that scales a system of social justification that adapts to the change that change itself produces.
If you want to focus on resource management, it is a little late in the day of course. Harsh rationing or fewer mouths seem the general dichotomy that composes the immediate future. Given green tech became instead a politically-engineered exercise in corporate greenwashing.
Let's say the context is this one.. You said the answer would then be:
Quoting Banno
So, leaving legality out of this, what would be the answer to the utilitarian that says that the fishermen will get more satisfaction, so have such a moral right, even if it's against common understanding of "public space/commons"? Let's say no one else is affected that day except I, the misfortunate park-goer caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, it seems.
The deontologist would likely point to inherent dignity or rights that is being violated by not letting me pass to my car, despite their pursuing their happiness of fishing.
An ethical egoist might argue that actions are morally right if they promote one's self-interest. The fisherman and I would invoke this, so it would be a continued standoff until someone budges or forces the situation.
A communitarian might emphasize values of the community. However, this too leads to possible stalemates.
A virtue theorist might say that either of our character's are flawed to a degree- perhaps mine cowardice or there's unaccommodatingness.
Mind you, this is not about necessarily goals but values. You can always say, "What is my goal? How do I get there", but then we are stepping away from morality. If my goal is to cross the bridge, I can do any number of things, including using physical force, calling some park service authority, etc. But the issue is what ought to happen, so we cannot misconstrue that point to simply provide a neat hypothetical imperative (If you want to cross the bridge, just push the bastards out of the way!).
Isn't this sort of @apokrisis Model B steady state notion? I guess it's a more explicitly green version of this? Seems to be a variation nonetheless.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Perhaps, but I wouldn't have thought so - his Mad Max Model B involves "bug-out survivalist with guns", and no home garden will feed a family. Indigenous ethics appear to depend on a level of cooperation absent from Model B. But the point I would contend is not just that the only options are Model A or Model B, but that a better response to your question of "what would be an ethical stance" is not various ethical theories so much as whole ways of living. This by way of bringing us back to ethics as about what we should do, not what is the case.
That... is highly doubtful. Definitely not a map I would follow.
Quoting apokrisis
First principle for the mapmaker to acknowledge, as the essential aspect of making a good map for the future, is that the future is in no way predictable. To start with a principle of predictability will not produce a map, but a step toward hell.
I could be way off, so @apokrisis can correct me on his own notions, but it seems like apokrisis mentioned this kind of "indigenous" model (though he didn't use that term) as once in play, but that it would no longer matter as it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle as far as the runaway entropy we've unleashed since the Industrial Revolution. So I think he acknowledges this would have been the way to go, but now the best we can do is maintain since reversing is out of the question (in his notion). So, your theory would be simply performative, but not really working towards fixing anything.
In their details but not in their architecture. As any fool anthropologist kno'.
A religious and conservative community might come up with a grounding dichotomy such as the sacred and profane. God's eye is ever upon thee. The social constraint dial is turned up high. But in a small medieval peasant village, there isn't much mischief one could get up to anyways.
Foraging communities are likewise quite dichotomising. In a tribe, the in-group vs out-group kinship dynamic is very strong. Wrangham writes about this in his The Goodness Paradox. He argues humans are even neurobiology adapted to this way of responding. We became a "self-domesticated" species that could balance the cooperative aspects of a life based on collective hunting, sharing and child rearing with its dialectical other of a species able to engage in cold-blooded and quietly calculated murder.
Apes have reactive aggression. Humans became more polar in terms both of being able to live more closely as a group and to be proactively aggressive against those outside the group. Even an obnoxious or selfish tribe member could find themselves at the wrong end of a hunting party once that bistable switch of empathy~hostility got flipped. A socially-sanctioned assassination to restore the group equanimity.
It is worth understanding this moral reality as that is the one we may be heading back to under a Model B future. We are set up by our genes to revert to this if also forced back into the entropic status of scratching a living foragers.
The Enlightenment felt like it got it right as it drilled down to the dialectical logic of nature in its most universalised description the dichotomous balance of competition~cooperation. But that same scientific mindset, that same application of pure reason, was also in the middle of releasing the Industrial Revolution as the next big thing after foraging and agriculture.
So we did as a species find our way into a morality that could scale. One that enshrine competition and cooperation as the dynamic duo the two halves of the one good, the opposites that produced a unity which could scale all the way to life across a planet.
But that also set us up to ride the techo-fossil fuel train to an exponentialising future. As a political/ethical idea, it could regulate any powerlaw growth regime. And a barrel of oil is as dense and deliverable a jolt of entropification that the Cosmos could possibly offer.
Quoting Banno
But as I've pointed out, you haven't inquired deeply enough into how indigenous lives are actually structured, both as biology and sociology.
My own position here is based on a deep knowledge of all that.
Good to know. :up:
I'm arguing that we don't really want to go all the way back to this kind of foraging future. That would require getting the population back down to the 300 million or so that a pre-climate change and pre-ecosystem-ravaged planet could sustain the world of the Roman empire. Actual foraging sustained a population of about a million indigenous souls crouched around their campfires.
We are what we eat and we now eat fossil fuel. Coal saw world population explode from 0.5 to 2 billion. Fertilizer and oil resulted in a population increase to almost 8 billion by 2020. For a while, until middleclass antinatalism started to kick in, we were going not just exponential but super-exponential.
So Model B says we should expect folk everywhere to seek to organise in whatever way works in their corner of the world. How much industrial capacity does a community retain? How defensible are its borders? What constraints does a different climate put on them? So on and so forth.
But a drastic change in circumstance is the time to be armed with some real insight into the mechanics of social organisation. The past can reveal who we really are as ethical creatures when placed in a survival situation. If we default to something, Wrangham can tell us about the kind of very basic settings which made us the highly-organised social creatures that we have the evolved instinct to be.
We "is" constrained by our genetics unless you happen to want to make the other choice and dial up Elon for a tech solution to our ingrained capacity for a cold-blooded hunter's violence that exists in fine-tuned evolved balance with our propensity for cosy campfire singalongs.
I think you already knew that.
Quoting apokrisis
You are framing things to suit your purpose. There was many factors involved in the population explosion,, medicine, antibiotics, etc..
Quoting apokrisis
Being constrained by genetics is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Interesting how that works. But on a technical note, "antinatalism" as you are using it is not quite how it is used in the philosophical literature in the last 20 years or so. For the most part, "antinatalism" has been associated with prevention of suffering as the primary ethical reason for not procreating. Simply not having kids because of a lifestyle choice, it's too expensive, etc. would simply be considered living out a "childfree" lifestyle. It's a bit spottier when it comes to "antinatalism" and environmental reasons. That is because potentially, people would say it is permissible to have children again when a certain population level has been deemed acceptable again. In that case, you may say it is "limited" or "contingent" antinatalism. However, I think this also does a disservice to the actual term-proper. Rather, I would look at that kind of philosophy as the other way around- as limited natalism instead. That is to say, they believe people can at some point have children, but the bar to meet this is contingent on whether environmental conditions are met.
Yep. I joke when using it as I don't take it as a serious ethical response to the brute fact of existence.
Sure, we might want a politics that can smooth the baby production to a sustainable rate. But who wants to turn off the tap just because of "the inevitable suffering imposed on those who were never asked"?
Prospective parents are turning off that tap as the future can look pretty dire. Another reason to give folk a political roadmap they can believe in. Not simply tell them your kids are screwed and so are you, so just die now please. No point hanging on for the bitter end.
In the meantime, celebrate a world where you get to make your personal choice on procreation. At least until - in the US the Supreme Court gets around to dealing with anomalies like you.
I revised your quote because I think you are right there anyway. Take out the supposes too, because it is no different than desires or intentions or fears, etc.
An account of something physical (like the physical world) is produced by making our words fit the world; while an intentional account is produced by making the world fit my words (my own words, my intentions, desires, myself, etc.).
Words to fit the world of other things besides me and besides my words, but now, accounted for as words - thats a physical account.
Or, words can instead fit something (any else than solely/simply physical), like the world of thinking, where words are made to fit anything at all, where one intends something like not this word but that one, shaping a new world, bent not towards the physical world but to somewhere more specific, in the mind, or for another minds, now made of words in the accounting.
I love the short phrases that say a lot.
:up:
But for dramatic effect, you are of course conflating "individual death" and "species death". So, to use your ubiquitous analogy, the "global constraint" might be species death, but the local-specific cases of each individual will live just fine (without kids).
Yep. You brought out the dialectical structure of the thought very nicely. :ok:
The tie you wear is such a free choice it might as well be random. Unless it is decorated in swastikas or something.
Having children isnt compulsory. Your parents and friends may have views. Financial circumstances may impinge. As may fears for the future. As a decision it is complex because it does add real meaning to most lives but is also your biggest single life commitment.
This would be a reason why antinatalism seems wrong in trying to impose some global ought on the basis of a very false premise about the universality of human suffering.
Making a personal decision based on clear information about the collective future is quite a different thing.
Antinatalism doesn't look so weird now, eh? ANs the next politically persecuted class?? The childfree will be lumped in, so it won't really be AN as much as the "childless"...But is this the new trend? Some nations are trying the carrot approach, are we going to the stick now?
I've stated in previous posts that AN is indeed a political statement to some extent. You are voting "YES" on existence being okay to start for someone else. Even if people (aren't enlightened yet) to be full-fledged ANs, they are at least seeing the material conditions of the present and future to be such that it wouldn't be worth bringing more people into it. It's AN-adjacent, even if not full-AN.
Here is an example of a respectful discussion in the real world between an antinatalist and pro-natalist:
Quoting apokrisis
Interestingly enough, one of the main reasons I am a "pessimist" (a bit different but underlies a lot of some antinatalist thinking), is that humans have such degrees of freedom. As Wittgenstein might phrase it, our degrees of freedom might be part of our very "form of life". But, it's another question of whether it's a good one. The Existentialists are philosophers who delve deeper into this question of freedom, and its burdens. What do we mean here by burdens? Well, how I see it, it is burdens in comparison with other animals (albeit from the perspective of this animal, the one with a certain kind of self-awareness where this can be recognized). That is to say, other forms of life (like dogs, bats, monkeys, etc. etc.) have a form of life whereby this secondary or tertiary form of self-awareness (and its entailed "degrees of freedom") are not a part of it. However, humans must deal with the burdens of counterfactual thinking, that they could always make a different choice (better, worse, or just different). Now, I know your style pretty well by now, and you will start discussing why nature has formed us this way in some therodynamic (symmetry-breaking, triadic semiosis, biosemiosis) way. But that is missing my point of the "What it's like" being an ACTUAL form of life that deals with this way of moving through the world (self-aware, with a high degree of freedom). It is not like the rest of animals in nature, and it is not necessarily GOOD (because of the burdens of these freedoms and ones choices).
Quoting apokrisis
So you proposed a bit of a strawman here. Antinatalism is not a political policy but an ethical one. Most ANs don't advocate for "imposing" not having children anymore than (JD Vance aside?) politicans would be proposing we must have children (to count politically at least). That is to say, there is no "imposing" (politically) going on here, simply an ethical theory by which one can adhere to or not. This can be akin to veganism, let's say. Now,
As far as being a "very false premise of human suffering", I obviously disagree. @Banno for example, asked you to make ethical arguments rather than what appears to be descriptive ones, which usually differ in ways he has explained being one is about nature's workings, and one is our intentional stance. So, if we take that as a starting point, whereby ethics is a subcategory of an axiology (a worldview regarding what is valuable in the world), suffering seems to be a good place to start for a basis of ethics. It can also be said that humans being creatures that can suffer, can be said to have some value and some intrinsic dignity whereby it is best not to cause unnecessary harm to them (as they should not do to you). This can be the basis of a sort of deontological ethics, a "negative ethic" of not being harmed (when it is wasn't necessary to do this). Anyways, that is the beginning of my foundation of ethics. This goes into answering the question of the bridge I outlined earlier as well. That is to say, the fishermen blocking you to get to your car is an example of a positive project (fishing) getting in the way of your negative right. Similarly, parents wanting some sort of meaning (the positive project) is overriding the negative ethic of not causing unnecessary harm to someone. Thus positive projects (human civilization, fishing, your wanting more meaning in your life) shouldn't be the REASON for harming (*unnecessarily) other people.
*Unnecessarily here means not causing harm to another unless it was mitigating a greater harm to that person, like a child already born and some harm is needed to ensure their future safety, like forced education or vaccines.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure, but obviously this is in the same spirit as not wanting an individual to suffer, as it's an aggregated version whereby you do not want future human(s) to suffer more than is necessary. It just doesn't go far enough into what is acceptable as far as causing suffering is concerned.
So a cult? But passive-aggressive?
Quoting schopenhauer1
How could it be a strawman when my OP is about ethical precepts that can scale as political organisation?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Another way of talking about the competition-cooperation dynamic. Except you prefer to see constraints as imposed burdens in this cruel life we are forced to live, etc.
Funny you say this because Ligotti in his book called pro-natalists as part of the "Cult of the Grinning Martyrs". So, this name-calling can go both ways. Also, I know you are probably trying to be cheeky, but why would you misconstrue a reasoned ethic with a cult, whereby people blindly believe unreasoned ideas and charismatic cult leaders? At least be apt with your derisions.
Quoting apokrisis
The straw man was that you implied that antinatalists are trying to (politically) impose policies on people, rather than providing reasoned arguments that you can either find compelling or not.
Quoting apokrisis
This is yet more sidelining the ethical issue into some vague descriptive one. The ethical dilemma is clear, the answer may not be, but it's an ethical axiological one, not a descriptive one.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Err. Contradicting yourself much?
I mean does natalism even feel it must rally around some charismatic leader? Does it even have to explain itself to the general public?
Quoting schopenhauer1
So you agree that you are ignoring the OP as given and simply seizing yet another opportunity to burden me with your personal hobby horse project? I must suffer as you have suffered with this pointless philosophy of committing suicide but only by proxy. Negating life so as to remove that chore from the next generation in advance. Somehow that thought becomes a solace.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Vague? Is that the best youve got? But enough antinatalism unless you can actually make it relevant to the OP as it was set out. Show some self-discipline here.
And again, how is antinatalism "rallying around some charismatic leader"? And if you are misconstruing me referencing an author as the "cult leader", then don't reference anyone ever again in a philosophical debate :lol:. Ridiculous.
Also, the fact that people UNTHINKINGLY do something is EXACTLY what philosophical thinking is contrary to. What kind of thinking is this? I know you don't really believe that (unquestioning traditional norms MUST be the right attitude). And if you say it is, I am sure I can find cases where you DON'T believe it, providing an inconsistency (and simple bias) in your thinking.
Quoting apokrisis
So now you are red herring the point again by evading the fact that you accused me of believing AN should be IMPOSING itself POLITICALLY. That is false, and you have not admitted to the false assumption/accusation. So do you admit that this notion of yours is at least false now?
As far as being an irrelevant point to the OP, actually, it addresses it pretty pointedly, as even you admitted that (limited) AN is one part of a solution to the problem. But in any case, the broader issue with your "case" is that it lacks an axiological underpinning, confusing descriptive and ethical, and pretending AS IF they can be the same thing. You cannot square that circle. Values are a thing. Axiological considerations (aesthetics, ethics, values, etc.) cannot just be described away. They are at the least subjectively "real" to the individual. So, in this way, I am laying out ethical foundations, whilst you are whittling away in the descriptive elements that cannot cross that divide.
ALSO, and perhaps even most important, there is an EXISTENTIAL aspect to discussing "the end of human civilization". It isn't JUST about resources, but what humans are supposed to get out of life (if that question itself belies a certain pro-natalist attitude that deserves to be questioned itself!). So yeah this does have to do with your OP, but it doesn't necessarily ASSUME the same goals, values, etc. that belie your unstated values.
Presumptuous.
That account depends on the just-so stories provided by dialectic. It contrasts cooperation and competition, for instance, without any indication of how much of each ought be present. And in doing so it fails to tell us what to do. Yet again.
So back to the critique of Hegel and dialectic.
Quoting Banno
Given a thesis and a synthesis, anything goes. The juxtaposition of cooperation and competition does not lead of necessity to either Model A or Model B; they are not inevitable.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Perhaps he did. Hard to tell. I wouldn't presume to represent indigenous cultures.
Your presence here augments the point made above, antinatalism being another extreme option outside of the supposedly defining dialectic.
At its core, dialectic is capable of explaining anything, and so ends up explaining nothing.
And the physical "constraints" of our world do not fix what we can and cannot do.
"Mabel! Call the plumber. It's back again!"
You might try acting on your claim to be rational, and actually address the argument I presented above. Your refusal to address that or the is/ought problem shows a shallowness unbecoming. You are a clever fellow, unable to accept and work with criticism; the engineer who thought he would enlighten the poor benighted philosophers, only to discover that he had no idea what philosophy was about. When faced with a philosophical problem you refer to obtuse and irrelevant research papers, or try to befuddle with extended posts not pertinent to the point, and when held to account for these you spit.
Read the story of the Emperor's New Cloths.
Anyway, that's my bit. I've put up with your spit for page after page. If you can't offer something more, there's a point where one shrugs and walks away.
That's your problem, not mine. If you can't even address the simple concerns of an aged retiree, then all that is irrelevant. An appeal to your own authority is still invalid. And if you don't give a shit, don't reply.
...back to the original, from Anscombe, in Intentionality, and as used by Searle and many others. Cheers.