the end of the world - and how to avoid it

So if Trump wins, is that it for climate mitigation?

Some people would say that nothing he might do compares to the importance of what China does, or to how much (if at all) developed nations help developing nations address shit that was mostly imposed on them by colonialism. Mind you, if he's elected he'll definitely make that second thing worse.

You can never know the consequence of a seemingly bad outcome, or a seemingly good outcome, I cling to that kind of thought when things get tough.

We might end up accelerating climate mitigation over the next decade if Trump gets in... he really could swing the pendulum back based on the bullshit he's promising.

I really wouldn't cite that book as proof of anything, although cognitive science is one of the very few subjects in the book he knows a lot about. It's a speculative exploration of ideas based on some things he has observed in those topics he knows well, extended into areas he knows much less about. Even he wouldn't say it's proof of anything.

I never purported to offer proof; seeking proof of awareness is obviously a mug's game. Hofstadter offers many a compelling insight, though. That awareness and intelligence is built on countless nested self-referential feedback loops, is a notion which appears fairly self-evident once you've got your head around it, I'd have thought.

I don't cite anything but my own existence as an absolute fact (which, incidentally, I don't expect anyone else to accept as an absolute fact). The rest is guesswork, with certainty ranging all the way from 'perhaps' to 'I will die on this hill'.

Before agriculture, our mythology served to keep us in harmony with our environment, but once we started amassing a surplus, a culture of dominance emerged to control it for the benefit of a minority; colonialism and capitalism have descended from that dominion.

Or not. Now go and read The Dawn of Everything.

Nit-picking. It's more or less immaterial, at what point the turd was laid in the punchbowl; at some point after the prerequisites were in place, a dominator culture came along and dominated. Whether the final nail in the coffin was Sargon of Akkad, or the East India Company, the problem is the same.

What is the recipe for preventing a dominator culture from getting its genocide on, without opposition from a similar culture?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tx9ZY04991Q&pp=ygUZRnV0dXJhbWEgdGhlb3J5IGV2b2x1dGlvbg%3D%3D

I am trying to make a serious recommendation.

The historiography you are describing (an arc of history that progresses from egalitarian hunter-gather bands through the agrarian, feudal, industrial and information revolutions to ineluctable dominance and hierarchy) is painstakingly debunked by Graeber and Wengrow. They persuasively argue that this historiography is an invention of the enlightenment, arising from the indigenous critique when Europeans encountered the people of the Americas.

You would get a lot out of Graeber if you took the time. The exciting thing about his message is that there is nothing preordained about our social relations and we are free to reinvent them, as people have done throughout history.

He's the bullshit jobs guy, if I remember right. I probably would dig him quite a bit.

I'm aware my thumbnail sketch of the last 20,000 years or whatever is severely lacking from a historian's perspective, but I'm not sure why it needs fleshing out at all to serve its purpose of making the point that for the vast majority of our past, we were cooperative by necessity. And that agriculture removed that necessity, and enabled many further technological developments which magnified any advantage gained from dominance.

Do Graeber & Wengrow have anything to say about any means of preventing brutal authoritarians from getting a toehold? Or how to get from here to a level playing field? That's what concerns me.

Seems to me, we require a culture of militant egalitarianism, where anyone who seeks to subjugate others is considered as a cancer cell in the superorganism of society. To reach that point, I think the only halfway plausible path is to create a corporation designed to do it, which can eventually swallow all the other corporations and ultimately render governments irrelevant.

superorganism of society

Do you know of authors who have explored this in depth? It’s certainly an analogy I’ve seen fits well.

authors

Haven't read that many this century, I'm afraid... The internet broke my will to read books. Now I'm like, just give me the summary - there's too much information!

Sometimes I can get past it when the book is as compelling as Capital in the Twenty-First Century, or Three-Body Problem...

Power is the only thing which power understands

https://youtu.be/6dBy4-6pn1M