Nice post :-) I can agree with a lot, in principle. However, I would like to ask you how you feel about the reality or unreality of the climate crisis, and how we should act or not act upon it. You state, correctly, that it's useless to, as an individual, try to grasp the world; that's just impossible. But that's why we've developed institutions of education, research, science and so on. That means that collectively we are able to understand the world, and indeed the universe to a rather significant degree. Same goes for the questions posed about freedom. I hold the view that individual freedom is an illusion; all individuals only have as much freedom as the society of people they are part of grants them; this starts at home when growing up under the rules set by your parents. I say that if you "need at least a bit of culture in my life", as we all do, the amount of culture you get is always dependent upon the society that provides that culture. Now we can always take examples to their extremes, which is effective and good to make a principled point, but I do have to place question marks on your use of an immediate calamity, like the tsunami, in comparison to a slowly developing one, like an infectuous disease; that's why I asked your opinion on the climate crisis. Our evolution has blessed us with a set of cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival, but make it difficult to deal with long-term or distant threats. That results in us overestimating simple, but not very likely to occur, like terrorism, but underestimate more complex threats like climate change and covid-19. And about the laws; laws are for a large part codified morality, and codified mores for the remainder, all for the purpose of providing what we call "civil order" to society. I dream about a world where all these unwritten rules can remain just that: unwritten. But since we're a long way removed from communism, that's just unrealistic and will never happen in my lifetime. I understand anyone who is uncomfortable with or even hostile towards the rules and regulations descending down upon us from up-high, especially when these rules and regulations are created in response to a calamity or threat of a calamity; I've raged against all the freedoms we lost as a consequence of anti-terrorism laws after the 9/11 attacks. And I regularly rage against the elite who live by the rule to "never let a good crisis go to waste." I understand. But I also understand that we all stop at a red light. We all got vaccinated as kids. Some rules are simply there to keep intact a functional society (although there's much room to debate the functioning or disfunctioning of modern society).
Okay, I'll stop ranting now :-) I really do like the post and would like to thank you for directing me here.
Thanks for following my invitation. I am afraid, this will be a long response. I split it therefore into three comments. I hope, you'll take your time.
In my former response I have asked you:
You said
To the degree of knowledge about the universe, I answered you in your other post.
I find it impossible to think of a collective as some sort of intelligent entity, for the individuals within this collective, never think, feel and explain things in the same way, but differently. So you have always different minds and different groups of interest within a collective.
Take thousand people. Do you think they act upon a hive mind to the advantage of everyone involved? I don't think so for a minute :) Then just increase the number and take a million, or all people on earth?
Why I don't think so, is not only my personal view but also a view I imagine other humans share. You've got to exclude or quieting (or worse, eliminating) those people in order to make this a collective view. You could use a killer argument like: "You just don't know that you belong to the collective mind and that in this mind everything is being taken care of for you. That you perceive it as bad is just a negative imagination of yours."
I am certain you would not speak to me in this way. And I wouldn't either. The problem here is that once you've come up with a certain notion and you put it into the world through words and political and social actions, something what could be accepted - because unmentioned - lightly into something experienced as heavy and horrific.
You may have the notion that what humans have "evolved into", can be seen as a linear cause and effect pattern, which results into more and more advancements = betterment of earthly live. But chances are, that this might not be the case. For the more advanced "we" think "we" are, the more tendency can take place to reduce the complexity of all living things into a simplistic, reduced form of understanding. We might develop in circles, neither backwards nor forwards, and from what I think, it's nothing, you and I, or a collective can directly answer. A collective does not exist in this way (like a bee hive or an ant colony). We imagine it, that's right.
It's a lot to respond to indeed, and I wish I had more time to do all of it justice... I believe I've responded to a lot of this in my response on my posts, but I will make an addendum here.
Here you strike the essential point where we've seen communism fail and succeed throughout history. It only ever succeeded in the small communities you describe here, like it did in prehistorical tribes, which were communist if we were to give them a label. And I don't know how to expand the community of human beings to the scales needed for levels of production that would make "modern communism," for lack of better words, possible. All institutions we've known so far have always become corrupt. Not even always intentionally, but simply because at some point the institution does thing for its own survival and its own power, rather than for the people it was intended for. Frank Herbert, the writer of the Dune book series once said something like this: "It's not that power corrupts, it's that power attracts the corruptible." This is the tension between my dream of communism and all the ways we've devised to organize large groups of people into a functional whole; such organization has never worked without the use of power and hierarchies. Take the nation; a nation is built around fabricated unity and loyalties, and fits within fabricated lines on a map that's not the real place, but merely a representation of it. Flags, national anthems, national sports, they're all thought up by those in power to foment cohesion between people who sometimes, or even most of the time have very little in common.
Still I believe it's possible. Call me a dreamer. But I do believe it's possible to teach ourselves to see in each other the ways in which we're the same (which is a lot), instead of always hammering on how we're different from each other. Our individual uniqueness is at the same time something that makes us all the same: we're all equally unique, are we not?
Your point about science is well taken and understood. However, I blame the fact that scientists stray away from their true calling and compete with each other to, as you say, "make a difference in the world," on the turbo-boosted individualism ingrained in us by more than two centuries of capitalism. And I know we can do better than that...
I agree fully. And I have the same realism here. Though I would take a different term, but when I make my own definition of "communism" it means only to be embedded in a community I can grasp locally and physically, so I can feel I have an influence and can be seen and heard, so I can see and hear the rest of the community.
How I perceive life is, that I don't think that all what we call a crisis, is a crisis indeed. We may betray ourselves for reasons of fear and the taboo of death. One may sound benevolent and caring to worry about health and the climate but I don't see it confirmed overall. If you care for one thing, even burn for it and put all your efforts and genius in it, you very well can fall ignorant for the needs of humans who oppose the glorification of science and modern art of life.
Once I read a newspaper article, over a hundred years old, I found the exact same worries about climate. It could have been a text from the present time. The author mentioned the melted seas in the very northern part of the earth. And indeed, you could go back in time and watch the people being in agony and fear all the times. If worry becomes the most important thing, people forget to live and feel joy. If I must stay in the state of sorrow and I can't help myself to come out of it, I may realize thirty years later that death still didn't catch me and for all what I've suffered, it was worthless, for I am still alive - I could have spent my life more relaxed. People went and are crazy with aids, cancer and all what modern medicine is not tired to come up with. Instead of decreasing illnesses the Pschyrembel gets fuller and fuller and we add fears on top of each other.
Though I fully agree that people in general are not evil, they tend to overestimate the evilness of others. And so, a destructive circle of distrust and hatred begins to spin. Terrorism is a rare act and does not happen on a regular basis. It's shocking, thats true. But to make a world terror-free, sickness-free, free of the unpredictable you will inevidably become a terrorist yourself. You cause what you claim to pacify. ("you" in the common sense).
Better not speak and scream about it, is what I think oftentimes. Neither a collective plays a role for me, nor if or if I have not free will. I use my will every day and I decide on things undecidable anyways.
I like modernity in many ways. But I hugely disagree on what is called "science" nowadays, or is used for.
You see, I long started to change my lifestyle, I stopped using planes, I gave up my car, I reduced my life to a minimum of objects and consumption. That was freely chosen by me. But I have no right to expect this from anybody else, let alone from all earthlings. It was a choice I made. Seeing free choices being turned into demands and even punishments, I feel, is utterly wrong. Funnily enough, since 2020, I avoid public transportation, use again a car and drive more often and spend many more hours in front of a screen, for I lack social gatherings which have come to a halt on a massive scale.
The main question for each of us remains how we face our own death and that of those we love. If we cannot accept it, if we make it a taboo, this causes as much damage as we think we prevent ourselves from.
You can book a flight for 39 Euro to a distant island, these offers are online. To soothe ones consciousness, you can give part of this money to a fund, where it is claimed that compensation for the damage being done, will take place.
This reminds me of the indulgences of the Catholic Church, where you received an absolution for your sins by donation and they were thereby redeemed. The thing is, these claims that damage caused by me would be compensated are not very credible.
People who are really serious about this have not exactly made themselves popular. For example, an insecticide manufacturer has discovered his conscience and is making efforts to compensate for everything he sells. He makes sure that there are biospheres for insects and that insect hotels are built. In his industry, he was metaphorically stoned for this and was no longer invited to any congresses, as he was henceforth regarded as a defiler of the nest.
But the fact is, and reality will remain, that humans are not able to exactly compensate for what they consume or damage. The modern world cannot be so easily deconstructed and redesigned, certainly not if one pushes it. The idea of voluntariness shocks people because, firstly, they recognise this and, secondly, they cannot stand that it is so. Those who do not feel responsible and would rather have others decide for them will probably find a totalitarian community acceptable and see it as well-meaning.
Nevertheless, the need to use insecticides is there, as much as it pains us to admit it. But the mass production and monoculture on which modern man depends does not allow for anything else. If it were the case that efforts were being made to get people back to some self-sufficiency on their properties, to spend their time tending gardens, keeping small animals and preserving food, there would be government-wide campaigns to support and encourage this. None of this is the case. People are supposed to go to work for others, not take care of themselves.
Contrary to what we might think, there is no solution to the current challenges. Such things are sometimes interpreted to me as fatalism, which I clearly disagree with. I look at the countless houses and front gardens and no one really has any knowledge or would make any effort to turn the dust-sucked garden into a biotope.
So, it seems people really don't want that, are not interested in the slightest to put effort into gardens and perma culture. But if you ask them, they fear climate change, fear nature being destroyed, while their own garden is as lifeless as lifeless it can be. I don't hate those people. They either come to terms on a free basis or they won't. It's more than obvious that if you are interested in this, you could find all the knowledge you need for making your property into a more sustainable piece of ground. And actually, if you give enough time and not rush this, this might be a lifestyle again. But the pressure lies in the expression "we could lose on this race" - for how many decades, if not more, is this expression actually circulating?