Capitalism's Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance was "a North American Indian religious cult of the second half of the 19th century, based on the performance of a ritual dance that, it was believed, would drive away white people and restore the traditional lands and way of life."

So; a religious insistence that the bad thing is magically not going to happen.

The bad thing is going to happen. The seas will rise and agriculture will fail.

Even from a purely empirical "was this a desirable result?" perspective, capitalism has failed.  No accumulation of money excuses making your species extinct.  Rather than face this, admit error, and seek to make restitution, what we're seeing is a whole bunch of effort to create religious movements able to forcibly prevent anyone from mentioning the fact of the failure.

(Fascism is the trivial cowardice of supposing will can prevent change if only you will be violent enough.  But much as you can't practically tell a fandom from a religion, you can't empirically distinguish fascism from a religion, either.  It's the same broad category of not dealing with things as they are.)

Is this going to work?

Well, probably, in as much as there isn't much sign anyone is going to be able to shut down the system of social organisation around the accumulation of money in time.  ("In time" would have been by about 1980.)  There remains some hope people will figure out that the diverse justifications offered for going on with organising society around the increase of wealth are all nonsense.

People seem generally to have the climate backwards

I think a lot of this is the fault of the official projections.

It's not "we've got twelve years to save the planet" or "twelve years to save civilisation" or something like that.

If you go look at the available science, we're right solidly into "everybody dies".  Every available indicator says "the Arctic Amplification Hypothesis is correct, it's happening, it's been happening for awhile"; that means we get between 8 and 12 degrees (Celsius degrees; 14.5 to ~22  Fahrenheit degrees) of warming and it doesn't take all that long.  Remember that we're into "agriculture is busted" by 2050 per the conservative IPCC projections, and the immediate meaning for the arctic amplification hypothesis is that those projections are massively optimistic.

The best present understanding is that the Arctic tipped in 2005 or so.  It's absolutely not reversible unless the Culture shows up in a benevolent mood.  Sequestration and geoengineering aren't materially feasible options.  Regenerative agriculture and planting deep-rooted prairie biomes and reforestation aren't all that feasible; we know how to plant trees but we don't actually know how to restart a biome.  People have been trying with a short grass prairie since not too long after it got ploughed and haven't succeeded.  They've conserved some species but they haven't make the prairie live again.  In the time of angry weather, this is a much harder problem.  It won't hurt to try but it's not anything you could call a solution even should it succeed perfectly.

I do not (oddly enough) counsel giving up.  There are things we can do.

Stop fossil carbon extraction, completely, without exception, by 2025.  If people die, this is better than everybody dying.

Get an every-nerve-and-sinew effort going to produce an industrial toolkit that can make a boat, a greenhouse, and a heat pump (refrigerator, freezer, A/C; all the same thing with different design objectives) with zero fossil carbon inputs, which can power those things somehow, and which doesn't need more than a million people to run.  (Wireless communications and anaesthetised dentistry would be nice, too; that's the absolute floor of stuff we have to keep.)

Replace the housing stock; it needs to be more than 50 metres above sea level, it needs to shrug off tornadoes, and it needs to have drainage for a metre of rain in an hour.  A surprising amount of this is doable with hand-work, but the parts that aren't (sanitary sewers! potable water pipes! windows!) are part of the every-nerve-and-sinew effort.

Every bio-accumulating (= gets into the food chain in increasing concentrations) or persistent (it doesn't go away) thing being dumped today stops being dumped.  That includes most pesticides and it includes anything in the way of packaging or plastic or shoes or whatever that doesn't rot or recycle.  ("reduce" is not a bad idea, but in practice this is an argument that it's OK to have your testicles in a vise so long as whoever turns the crank turns it more slowly.)  We're part of the food ecology; we need to remember that.

But, anyway; it's not "save the planet"; it's "save us".  We're well into "everybody dies" and if we work real hard we can maybe get into "not everybody will be accounted an excess death."

Not all the ideas in your head are on your side

So there's this thread where Blair Braverman talks about how having multiple dogs to care for made "everybody's different" emotionally real.

Somewhere down in that thread, someone talks about how they are getting that their body is part of a diversity but it's still hard to think of it[0] as good.

Thing is, good is always and in all things and in all times and all places contextual.  (Got the job? you might think that's good, if you wanted that job; all the other applicants who need and don't have jobs likely don't think it's good.  Maybe you really wanted the job, but it's in the antipodes; your parents don't think this is good, they won't see you from one year to the next.  And so on.)

Someone trying to impose a context on you so they can say good or bad is not your friend.  An internalized axiom about what constitutes good or bad is not your friend.  The social system that insists there must be a good and there must be a bad absolutely is not your friend; it's a tool of control exercised by whomever gets to make up the definitions for good and bad.  (Because of the way people learn axioms, it's quite possible whoever that was is dead this long while and the world has changed.)

(You can try Zhuangzi if you want a philosophical pedigree for this.)

"Does this serve my present purposes?", "Is this annoying enough to alter?", "What purpose does this serve?", "Is this consistent with the Settled Peace?", "Is this consistent with (my understanding of) my duty?" (that is, will future-me find it easier or harder to like themselves if I do/don't do this?); those can be useful questions.

"Good" and "bad" are not useful questions.  They're a control mechanism, and when trained into it at a young age, you wind up controlling yourself on the basis of objectives maybe no one living still has.  And which are never yours of your own will.  It's a really effective and horridly persistent way to produce social power (directly) and material power (indirectly), but it isn't a system in which you are obliged to participate.  (It will try to hurt you until you agree that you do.  Highly likely it already has.)

There has to be a system; living together in groups creates necessity about having a social system.  It need not be one built on "good" and "bad" and the imposition of context.

[0] you are the meat; the notion of mind-body duality is not obviously helpful, either.

Science and Authority

There's a certain "why the hell would anyone do that?" around cuts to education or children's programs.

We know with great confidence that relatively teeny social investments in child care and education have big valuable consequences; more education, greater economic success, mass escapes from poverty.  Even awful rich people ought to want a larger economy; that's more for them.

Universal education is inherently inimical to the rich.  The "harder to control the vote" part is something of a red herring.  It's really really easy for the rich to control who there is to vote for, even when you can't control the vote at all.

What isn't easy is the fundamental issue with education, which is that you're going to wind up teaching science.  The idea of falsification is everywhere; history, modern languages, the study of any of the classical antiquities, all of these have acquired notions about falsification and statistical methods.  Once you've got falsification you get the Hard Part, which is the idea that anything you think you know can be wrong.  It's not very likely something like quantum (where we've got a lot of decimal places and many many working machines) is wrong, but you can't actually assert that something is Correct.  It's 'our best understanding'.

This is indeed the Hard Part; it's not easy to do, it's interesting historically in the notable failures more than the notable successes, it's just generally a struggle.

It's a hugely productive struggle; it's a philosophical position worth striving for.  It's also utterly corrosive to the authoritarian "because I said so!", and the rich are all authoritarian.  (Certainly in the statistical mass.  If you're seriously rich, you make decisions outside your competence as a consequence of your wealth, so to a statistical first approximation to be very wealthy is to be incompetent and to need protecting from the consequences of that incompetence.)  They just can't allow a productive, powerful idea that, no, no, not because you said so, and not even; all knowledge is provisional, subject to falsification and revision and the increase of knowledge.

"Coming for the right to vote" is just the start; they're coming for anesthetized dentistry.  Because you can either have the idea of falsification -- facts are what you arrive at by a multi-person public process -- or you can have personal authority.  And the very rich must have the personal authority.