Tonight’s subject is DEATH. I am not talking nice Peaceful Death quietly in your own bed at night from Old Age, nor even more willfull forms of hastening your own death through Suicide or just bad habits like Smoking, Drinking or doing Drugs. Nor even death that comes from the vicissitudes of Nature, such as an Earthquake bringing the roof of your hut down on your head or naturally occurring diseases that run around the environment and periodically take out large numbers of the population. No, the type of DEATH that I am going to address here is the WILLFULLY CAUSED DEATH of OTHERS. This includes Death caused by War directly, Death caused by Abortion directly, and Death caused indirectly by controlling and making scarce the resources other people need to live. All these subjects have been topics of heated debate here lately, so I thought I would bring them all together and put in my usual 3000 word opinion on the disk. It is sure to be a highly popular opinion. NOT! Actually, this one may make the Top 10 of All Time Most HATED RE Posts, which is saying a lot for me 
Or it could be one of the Top 10 All Time Most LOVED RE Posts among some readers. Either way I am pretty sure the reactions will be extreme to one side or the other.
For all these forms of Death creation mentioned above, they get nearly universal opprobrium. The Moral Group Think tends to be that War is Evil, Abortion is Evil and Starving People is Evil. In the situation where there really is enough resource to go round, all these Death Creation mechanisms ARE Evil, but once resources are thin for the population as a whole, any one of them can be less Evil than the alternative.
The simple example would be the case of the Small Tribe barely ekeing out an existence. There is only enough resource for say 10 people to live. A woman in the tribe gets pregnant. What are your REAL choices? One choice would be to Abort the child. Then you will not have another mouth to feed. Another choice would be to allow the child to be born, and ask or have “volunteer” an Elderly person in the tribe to Walk into the Great Beyond. Take that last Kayak trip out to Sea, give himself up to the Bear, climb to the top of Denali and Freeze to Death, whatever the choice. Given a Healthy Infant, the better choice is probably for the elderly person to Die, but of course until Born and demonstrating healthy and robust traits, you just don’t know if that life is more worthwhile for the survival of the Tribe than the Elderly person, who might still have a few good years left to pass on some knowledge. In this kind of scenario, you have to consider Exposure as another alternative instead of Abortion. Allow the child to be born, see how robust that child is, and if not sufficiently robust expose it on a mountaintop and leave it for the wolves. These ARE the kinds of choices that had to be made in the past, and all of you come from people who made those choices. As I see it, these choices are coming again to Homo Sapiens. They won’t be taken on willingly or easily, but they WILL happen.
Moral questions which are paramount in times of Surplus do not have the same meaning as they do in times of Deprivation. When the PURE SURVIVAL of the Tribe is in question, life or death of the individual is subsidiary to the survival of the TRIBE, which is the smallest economic unit possible for Homo Sapiens. We are Pack Animals basically, like Wolves that run in small groups. The transition to Agriculture socially changed most of us more to Herd animals like Sheep, though Packs of Wolves still move about among the Sheeple in our society. It’s the juxtaposition of these two basic forms of living among mammals in one species that is at the root of our social dilemma.
As we move forward through the Collapse of our society these two basic forms of mammalian social behavior will assert themselves, and for the most part the Sheeple will be slaughtered by the Wolves. Difference from the rest of Nature is that at any point Sheeple can BECOME Wolves, we aren’t specifically determined by nature to be one or the other as REAL Sheep and Wolves are, it is socially inculcated behavior in our case. Homo Sapiens “sheeple” DO become “wolves” when the society devolves. Gangs form up of former Sheeple, and the deep nature of Homo Sapiens as a Pack Animal reasserts itself. A Failed State like Somalia turns into a bunch of Pack Animal Pirates; a Failed State like Mexico turns into a bunch of Pack Animal Drug Cartels, a bunch of Towel Head farmers in Afghanistan turn into Al-Quaeda Terrorists, etc. In none of these cases do these folks hold onto the same kinds of Moral Restrictions that Sheeple do. Nor of course do the top of the food chain Wolves of Banksters hold onto the same set of moral restrictions or laws that their prey among the Sheeple do.
As a Sheeple, at any point you can become a Wolf. Some are already becoming Lone Wolves. Joe Stack was a Lone Wolf, so was Jared. Lone Wolves don’t last long, but Pack Wolves do, as long as there are Sheeple around to prey on. You have 3 basic choices, which are to be one of the Sheeple, to be a Lone Wolf, or to be a part of a Pack of Wolves. Only one of those 3 choices will allow your survival.
Once you revert to Tribes of Pack Animals, the same type of moral dilemmas that are faced by Sheeple in War are not relevant. It no longer is a question of Wolves slaughtering Sheep, but of Wolves fighting with Wolves. This is the stage we are moving into here now. For a long time it has been Sheep being slaughtered, but now the Sheep are starting to Pack Up and become Wolves, at least in places like Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mexico.
Once you understand that your only REAL choice is whether to get slaughtered as Sheeple or become a Wolf yourself, if you want to LIVE then you become a Wolf. I am reminded here of that scene in Terminator II where Arnold reaches out his hand and says to Linda Hamilton “Come with me if you want to LIVE!”. You are in a fight for survival, and you have to Pack Up with some other wolves to have any chance at all. Once you do, you TAKE NO PRISONERS.
The Wars we are pursuing in Afghanistan and Iraq are a manifestation of this phenomenon on the aggregate level of the Nation State. As a Culture, it is Kill or Be Killed between our society and the one controlling the resource of Oil that we need as a culture to survive. Morality isn’t a question in this war, as long as it is perceived that we MUST have OIL to survive. ANYTHING goes. Killing civilian children is nothing more really than exposing them on a mountain top because your society needs the resources those children would use, just it is done on a mass scale as is the nature of war in the industrial era. From this point of view, its not morally wrong, and that would be the Bryzhinski/Kissinger/Cheney model of morality. Its just a Geopolitical Chess Game.
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Where the Moral Flaw really exists is in the inequity of power distribution between the Packs of Wolves. In fact it’s not so much a moral flaw or problem as it is one of homeostasis. When there is relatively equal power distribution between packs of wolves, they tend to kill each other off in equal numbers when fighting over a given territory. When one group of wolves comes up with Industrialization, the whole power distribution setup goes out of whack and the Wars are not even in casualties. I remember those Numbers from Vietnam that used to be published each night on the Network TV Newz programs. 2000 Vietcong DEAD, 20 US Marines Dead. No Balance there, and so the whole shebang goes out of Homeostasis.
This is why the pictures JimQ puts up of Dead and Mutilated Children are so disturbing, because people sense the inherent inequity here in the battle. A Big High Tech War Machine going in and Dropping Death from Above on a bunch of simple Villagers in Afghanistan is not a very fair fight. Same bizness in Vietnam. Who was not disturbed by the image in Platoon of the grunts torching the little Vietnamese Village, which of course was the cinematic version of the Me Lai Massacre? No matter how you feel about Commies or Towel Heads, your basic sense of fairness makes such slaughter seem quite immoral, which of course it is in this situation.
Its not the same moral dilemma when a couple of relatively evenly matched Tribes decide to Duke it Out over a Watering Hole. In this case one of them might sneak up in the middle of the night on the other one, and kill off everyone from the opposing tribe, women and children included, although more often just the men are killed and the women and children are taken as slaves. While this is a rather gruesome process, its not inherently unfair and doesn’t have the same kind of moral stink about it.
Abortion has similar inequities in the modern world, because it is inequitably distributed among the poor. Like Military Power, Economic power is inequitably distributed here, so MOST of the growing organisms being vacuumed up from mommy’s tummy are of course the potential progeny of poor people, likely to be poor themselves and in a social welfare state members of the dependent class, respectfully referred to on the pages of TBP as the Free Shit Army. LOL.
All sorts of Eugenics arguments have been put forth to justify this type of inequitable distribution of abortion, which basically comes from the faulty assumption that because people are poor, they also are Feeble Minded. This is much more likely to be the EFFECT of being poor rather than the CAUSE of it. Poor diet, poor educational opportunities and a poor nurturing environment is a more likely culprit than genetic differences for creating feeble minded people in this demographic. In any event, George Bush is living PROOF that rich people can be just as Feeble Minded as any Poor Person. LOL.
In our current Global society, in truth there is still quite a bit of surplus, and if a means could be found for equitable distribution of the remaining resources, neither Abortion nor War would be necessary. Unfortunately for a whole host of reasons setting up an economic system which can do such a job of equitable distribution is an exceedingly difficult problem, one which has never been solved for large societies at the Nation State level. It probably is an insoluble problem at this level, which means that both War and Abortion are inevitable, along with the slower form of death distribution of the powerful over the less powerful, which is resource starvation.
The main mitigating factor here is that due to the deterioration of complex systems, which I call the Conduits, power distribution is going to be leveled as these Conduits fail. As that happens, more of the Sheeple all over the world will morph into Wolves. Its going to become a fight of Pack Animals against each other with more or less the same tools for making that fight once the Oil resource drops below a critical mass. We are still a ways away from that though, so in the intitial stages here of this spin down there will be a lot of very unfair fights and asymmetric types of warfare engaged in. Techno War simply breeds more Terrorists, because you cannot fight a Drone Aircraft with Guided Missiles with Homemade Bombs. So you have to carry the homemade bombs to hotels and buses and marketplaces where the people who are supporting the Techno Army are engaged in their daily toils, bringing the War to their shores and their lives. This type of asymmetric battle is in full flower in the Middle East already, and of course, its Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You also. It already has in small scale with events like Joe Stack and Jared, along with numerous College Campus Postals over the last couple of years.
In the great Moral Question here of whether any of this Death is necessary, the fault mainly lies in the fact that there is inequitable power and wealth distribution, and so those who support continuation of such inequity are most at fault, and so most morally corrupt. However, people immersed in a society dependent on the automobile and industrialization don’t see that as corruption, and they aren’t willing to give it up either. It “enhances” their lives. It will only be given up when it is no longer possible to run the War Machine which makes such an asymmetry possible. No individual can fight this, it’s a pointless and unwinnable battle. This is why the Back to the Land Hippy movement of the 1960s and 1970s failed to gain traction. Only when the Conduits truly FAIL will it be possible to fight and WIN this battle, and that day is coming, if not in this generation then almost certainly in the next one.
So, for the foreseeable future, for the rest of your natural life walking the earth, what you can expect to see are many more revoltingly immoral applications of Death by the Powerful on the Less Powerful, punctuated by instances of equally revolting Terrorist bombings of Malls, Train Stations and of course inevitably Elementary Schools or Day Care Centers by the Less Powerful on the Powerful. Besides the gruesome Abortion Mills, there will be more instances of newborns left in garbage bags in dumpsters. Neil Young wrote about this back as far as 1980 in “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World”.
For myself, I see what is coming down the pipe here, and I report what I see. I don’t like the immoral wars of the powerful on the less powerful when in truth there is still plenty to go round. I don’t like the many dead babies that poverty creates in a world where there is still plenty. To be sure, real deprivation is coming when the Oil resource can no longer keep the Industrial Ag model producing copious amounts of food, but that day is not here YET. Right NOW, the reason people are Starving in Tunisia is because of poor wealth distribution and financial speculation in the Commodities market by people seeking to make a Profit on the misery of others. This is immoral and unjust, but it is an effect of Capitalism, where resources are privatized and artificial scarcity is induced to sieve wealth from one group of people to another. This is why I am so vehemently anti-Capitalist and find the whole system to be unjust and immoral. As someone who believes in Justice, I support the idea of Punishment and Retribution, and I understand why Marie Antoinette’s head went rolling like a Bowling Ball out in front of the Bastille. She was GUILTY, and she deserved what she got, as all people do who live in luxury while others starve.
Nobody should be forced to give away EVERYTHING they ever worked for, but there is a limit to what any individual really needs to keep for himself for some safety and security In any society, having a couple of years worth of food is a prudent measure and not unreasonable for an individual. In our economics here in Amerika, I wouldn’t even begrudge someone who had $100K worth of Gold Coins in his basement safe that measure of security. More than this though here in Amerika? To me sequestering that much wealth is socially destabilizing, and besides that you are likely to lose most if not all of it anyhow when the fiat goes south and most paper assets like stocks and bonds lose their monetary value. Better to give it away and help some friends and family who are hurting while the money is still good for something. That is what I have done. Nobody, not even Bill Gates can Save them ALL. You are also free to choose exactly WHO you would like to Save here, and most of us will choose Friends and Family rather than Strangers. Only AFTER you have helped all your friends and family and your own life is reasonably secured if you STILL have surplus does Noblesse Oblige come into play. It behooves you then to help Strangers also, because doing so will stabilize the society as a whole. If all people lived by these principles, then the Wars and the Abortions could be postponed, and the necessary die off could be spread out over a generation or more. Not gonna happen of course, but because it IS in theory possible, it makes the other choice of hoarding the wealth to be immoral.
To be truly Just, a Society must be based on GIVING rather than TAKING. This is possible, though only demonstrated in much smaller societies than those we have developed at the Nation State level over the last 5000 years. This is why some folks will maintain “It has ALWAYS been like this, and it ALWAYS will be like this.” Not true. Potlatch WAS a viable system, and it will be again, though likely not at population levels and with social structures we currently have extant. That is a failure of the complex system model more than anything else, not a failure of inherent human corruption. It will take the utter and complete destruction of this complex system for the inherent traits of Generosity of Spirit and Giving and Cooperation to once again reassert themselves as the governing behaviors in human society. That this destruction will involve pain beyond all measure is without question. Those who do survive this though must remember what CAUSED it, and never permit this Evil to spread again amongst the race of Homo Sapiens. The Greedy must be Exterminated with Extreme Predjudice. Bring in the Orkin Man, Exterminate the Cockroaches. With a Clean Kitchen, we can cook up a Better Tomorrow.
RE
Dave says:
Will you die for me?
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22nd January 2011 at 5:38 pm
cahuitabeachbound says:
It finally came to me; RE is like Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” and Smokey is like Telly Savalas in “Capricorn One”. Administrator is like Capt. Miller in “Saving Private Ryan”.
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22nd January 2011 at 5:46 pm
Kill Bill says:
Earth is like a spaceship.
A crazy virus has gotten into the ventilation system.
The ants have started ripping the ship apart and hoarding the pieces.
Each ant wants to become Queen and can only do so by acquiring more and more pieces.
Pieces can by acquired thru treachery, thievery, enslaving and or killing other ants in order to rule.
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22nd January 2011 at 6:54 pm
Nonanonymous says:
Oops, clicked on the article before seeing the tag line. There’s a reason why people move to Alaska and live in a cabin. Can’t say it doesn’t sound great, but then, when I can earn a living working remotely, maybe I will.
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22nd January 2011 at 8:20 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
no doubt, the numero uno issue with heading for the hills is finding a way to make a living. that generally takes being flexible and able to do things valuable in a small community.
RE
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22nd January 2011 at 10:06 pm
ASIG says:
Before one can be giving, they have to first produce something to give.
In your truly just and giving society what do you do with those that have no intention of putting forth any effort to help themselves much less produce anything to give to anyone else?
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22nd January 2011 at 11:27 pm
Old Silverttp says:
In spite of the accuracy, or not, of your projection, I believe Billy Budd was correct. No matter the gutless captain, nor the evil Mr. Ryan (both were morally flawed) Billy saw deeper. There must be honor and principle. Otherwise life is not worth living.
So, if we’re in a slo mo Donner party, take me out first, not last. I would prefer that. Others may choose as they will.
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22nd January 2011 at 11:34 pm
Novista says:
ASIG
The answer to your question is from the early days of colonial America. The Plymouth colony started in a communal way and before long, the strong said, “Why should I work as hard as the weak?” The young men said, “Why should I work for another man’s wife and children?”
Before long, not many were working, and stealing what they could at night. The problem was solved when Governor Bradford apportioned the land and the seeds, and said, in effect, “You’re on your own.” The outcome was good crops and surplus to be traded for other skills. Everybody won.
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22nd January 2011 at 6:47 am
StuckInNJ says:
In the 3rd paragraph, where you talk about a young child, old person, and limited resources … you suggest it makes the most sense for the old person to “voluteer” going to the Great Beyond. It is you who put the quotes around volunteer. So, it really is NOT voluntary, is it? And if it is not voluntary, then it is Murder .. plain and simple. So be it, if that’s what floats your boat, but don’t sugercoat it with nice little euphenisms. Just say it. “My potluck system requires the murder of its weakest citizens.”
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You also said, “To be truly Just, a Society must be based on GIVING rather than TAKING.”
Do you really mean “must”? Are you now going to force the act of giving? Good luck with that.
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You also said, — “Those who do survive this though must remember what CAUSED it, and never permit this Evil to spread again amongst the race of Homo Sapiens.”
Again, exactly HOW will you prevent the human brain from being the human brain? You only want the GOOD brain … peace, love, and sharing. Yet, you make the same mistake over and over again — somehow in your fantasy world humans have self-lobotomized the bad half of their brains. You so want the Garden of Eden to make a comeback. But we humans were evicted … the ultimate foreclosure … and the Angel with the Flaming Sword never left.
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22nd January 2011 at 10:20 am
BiggyTmofo says:
Interesting points but the problem is PRODUCTIVITY. Lots of people in the West are not productive workers and are overpaid relative to market conditions. The blue collar guys and gals are losing to the Far east. The middle east and africa are examples of over reproduction and under production. They produce no food, no industry and when the oil runs out most of them are fucked. It’s beyond obvious that the most of word today is a demographic, economic and ecological disaster where our modern living standards will come to and end. Obviously lots of you know about everything so how could I add more here.
BTW Maybe God will give me a Jets victory today as the thought of the well playing Steelers in the SUper Bowls rubs this Browns fan raw. I give props though that is how you run a franchise and coach a franchise and that is how a frachise in the NFL is to play on the fields game after game year in and year out. Peace Yuns
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22nd January 2011 at 4:54 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@ Old Silverttp
I didn’t really cover Suicide in much detail, because it didn’t really fit the definition of the type of Death I was looking at, which was Death unwillingly forced on one person by another. However, if you look at the type of suicide you are talking about which is actually caused as a reaction to the behavior of others, kind of a deprivation of Spiritual Resources if you will, then it does fit the definition, so it should have been included. I’ll make an addendum to the post here to cover this.
When you say “take me out first” rather than last and reference the Donner Party, I am looking at that as a form of Suicide rather than Murder, since you basically are giving up your life without a fight, even though the actual taking of your life might come at the hand of another. You are “voluntarily” quitting the game, so to speak. In the case of the Donner Party, at least according to the legend anyhow, your self-sacrifice also is going to physically help feed the remaining members of the party via Cannibalism.
I put “voluntary” in quotations because its only voluntary in the sense that given the parameters you are faced with, you would choose death rather than live in a world of Wolf Packs and become one of the Wolves. However, the fact that the world did become that way forces you to make this choice on a philosophical level, so its not truly voluntary.
In point of fact, many people are already taking the Suicide Option Out. I’m not going to try to Google them all up, but in the last 3 years I have read stories about increasing Seppuku over in Japan around some traditional Mountain where people go to Walk themselves into the Great Beyond, and quite recently a story about increasing Suicide among FSofA War Veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan Theatres. Add to that the occasional individual suicide which has some facet that attracts the MSM to report it, like the Tunisian fellow who sparked the riots and collapsed Da Goobermint by Self-Immolation when his Fruit Stand was confiscated because he didn’t have a Goobermint Permit.
Suicide Bombers and Postals fall into a slightly different category, since in the course of quitting the game such a person takes a few others with him into the Great Beyond. So here you are both voluntarily ending your own life while also engaging in involuntarily ending the lives of some other folks. That puts you more in the Lone Wolf category. At least in this country so far, the Lone Wolves are still pretty rare, and individual Suicides are more common. However, over in the Middle East, Suicide Bombings occur on such a regular basis these days they may be approaching the numbers of individual Suicides in those countries. Hard to say since you never get any kind of valid statistics on any of these things, you just have to extrapolate based on anecdotal stories and consider what is likely to occur in such environments.
Another type of event is the Mass Suicide, which recently was reported over in India as many small farmers (the number exceeded 10,000 as I recall) facing ruin from debt problems committed suicide, I think that was in 2009. Going back to a prior era when there were vast problems in the society, you had Jim Jones Walking a whole bunch of his followers into the Great Beyond via Mass Suicide, and I would not be at all surprised to see a similar Cult Mass Suicide occur here as we spin down further, in fact I will be surprised if such a scenario does not occur.
The result here is that the “take me first” personal solution is bound to increase amongst those people who neither wish to fight nor have the means by which to further support themselves. This happens even among people who thought they had the means, when they lose all they had suddenly as a result of being defrauded or in a stock market crash, etc. That is the Falling Stockbrokers Syndrome. I catalogued a few of those back on Peak Oil back in 2008, a German Banker and an heir to a fortune predating the French Revolution among them. Over here, there was a corporate executive in VA who either committed suicide or was offed by a squad of cleaners, and there was another Oil Sheik whose Glider mysteriously crashed. You always have to view some of those “suicides” with a jaundiced eye, because they might be clandestine murders.
Is Suicide a more Moral Choice than becoming a Wolf? I think that depends on the situation. In a hopeless situation where there are no external enemies to fight such as was the case for the Donner Party, Suicide is clearly the more moral choice than taking the life of another unwillingly in the party so that you yourself could live. However, in a case where your Tribe (at minimum Loved Ones, Family and Friends) might be Saved by taking the fight to the Enemy rather than committing Suicide, becoming a Wolf is the more Moral choice. If you succeed in doing that and give up your life to save loved ones and they do survive, you go out as a HERO. Everlasting Glory in the Kingdom of Heaven is your reward for that one.
For most people here in the FSofA, most of us as of yet are not really faced with the same kind of deprivation and choices that folks in the Middle East are making on a daily basis. However, increasing numbers of people here are falling off the economic cliff as their 99 Week UE bennies expire, and while they might be able to survive on a SNAP Card in a Homeless Shelter, Suicide might seem to them a better choice than becoming a member of the FSA. This is a good question to ask yourself about what you would do if you lost everything and your only choices were to commit Suicide, become a Lone Wolf or accept Goobermint Aid and become a member of the FSA? I wonder how many people here would answer that question Honestly?
For myself, as long as it is functioning, my choice would be to become a member of the FSA. I don’t see a need to commit Suicide when there is still really plenty of food to go round here in the FSofA, and I don’t see the point in fighting an unwinnable battle as a Lone Wolf as long as the Conduits are still functioning, which they must be for SNAP cards to still be available. In my community, it would have to go even further, to the point I could not fish up enough to survive, or find some means to trade for what we harvest up here for my sustenance. Only at that point, once all other means have been exhausted would I make the choice between Suicide or becoming either a Pack Wolf or a Lone Wolf. I don’t know which one of those I would choose, its such an extreme situation that I do not know what my mind set would be at that point. To know what you would do when you have reached the End of your Rope, you really have to BE at the end of your rope.
In any event, like all the other forms of DEATH we are faced with here like Abortion, War and Starvation, Suicide is yet another one that will increase in its frequency during the spin down, regardless of whether we think suicide is a moral choice or not. In some Religious belief, Suicide is a Mortal Sin, and under no circumstances should you do it as it would condemn your Soul to Everlasting Damnation Burning in the Fires of Hell. I do not subscribe to that idea. In certain situations, Suicide is a very valid choice, and in those situations if you choose it, you will not be Damned, you will go to Everlasting Glory in the Kingdom of Heaven.
See You on the Other Side.
RE
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22nd January 2011 at 7:44 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@ ASIG
I think people here are inordinately obsessed with the idea that the society is overrun with lazy good for nothings who will suck at the Goobermint Teat, or in the case of a projected Potlatch Economy of the future, not themselves contribute anything worthwhile and merely live off of the generosity of others.
There are in fact whole classes of people now who live this way, but this is more a manifestation of lack of opportunity on a statistical level in a complex system than it is of the inherent laziness of any individual or group of people. I have known MANY poor people in my travels, boys from the Favelas in Rio in my boyhood to White Trash living in my neighborhood in NYC in my teens, and even my own sister spent a few years on the Welfare roles as an abused spouse with two young children. NONE of these poor folks including my sister was all too happy about the existence they were living, and most of them would jump at the chance of real opportunity. My sister was fortunate, she had some support from family and of course she was White also, and she escaped the trap after a couple of years. She also did not come from the community of the long term underclass, she fell into poverty from the upper middle class of both of our childhoods, resulting from the divorce of my parents and poor choices she made before ever graduating from HS. She eloped with the husband who abused her when she was 17, in her senior year of HS. I was only 10 years old then, and I could not help her but I witnessed it all.
We do most certainly have a whole class of people now who live by means of the Social Welfare State. However, most if not all of those people in a just society would not CHOOSE to live that way. The problem here is that because the society is not just, because there is inequity of opportunity and wealth distribution and because these problems feed on themselves over generations, we end up with a class of people that are in a perpetual state of dependency. It’s a manifestation of inequities that develop over time resulting from the Property Ownership system and social and educational opportunity inequities that develop in tandem with that. I will try to explain how this occurs with a counter example, using myself as the subject.
Unlike my sister, despite the same issues that took me out of the upper middle class in childhood into the world of the Working Poor, I never fell into Poverty myself, at least not such deep poverty that I had to fall back on the social welfare system. Reason for that should be obvious. I’m a very smart guy, and so I just dodged around the system using my smarts to avoid falling off the cliff. Still I found the whole system to be revolting, so I quit the Pigman thing on Wall Street even though most of you would consider that NUTS. I cannot STAND the inequity involved in making a lot of money just because you can juggle a lot of numbers in your head as I can while other people who work much harder make only pennies. It made me feel sick about myself. I had to stop doing it because I was becoming corrupted by it. It was immoral. Most of you can’t understand that, but you did not walk a mile in my shoes, you did not grow up seeing the inequities so vividly as I did. Or if you did, you just did not react to it in the same way that I did, for whatever reason that might be.
Most people are more like my sister, and when confronted with the results of some bad events they had no control over (the Divorce) along with bad choices they made (Eloping), they get trapped into the dependency situation. However again, most of those people if given a real opportunity will JUMP at the chance to be a contributor. My sister eventually got a job as a Frame Worker for the Telephone Company, and after that moved herself out of the Hell Hole that is NYC and got a job with the Better Business Bureau in Springfield, MO and eventually became a Goobermint Employee for a Vocational Rehabilitation program that finds Employment for people with disabilities. She gets people OFF the Welfare roles, that is her Job as a Goobermint Employee. Most of THEM want to work, they want to contribute, but the opportunities just have not been there for many in the long term underclass. Let me ask you, is my sister a Leechfuck as a Goobermint Worker who does this type of work? Should her Goobermint department be cut? Would the Private Sector REALLY do a better job at finding work for the folks it is her job to help? No it would not. It would simply let them twist in the wind, to become paupers begging on the streets at best, and violent criminals attacking your homes in as many cases. Your life would not be better, it would be WORSE. Blowback is a Bitch.
I do not believe that in a true Potlatch Economy that very many people would choose to live merely as the Gift Recipients of others. Most people do desire to contribute, but there must be opportunity in the society for that contribution. In a complex society such as the one that we have developed under industrialization, those opportunities are not always there, and even if they are, they are more often than not in Slave Wage positions in Dead End Jobs. It is hardly motivating to go to Work if your Job is punching holes in the top of shower curtains at minimum wage ( a summer job I actually had for 1 month in the garment district of NY before I handed it off to a friend and moved over to the Shipping Dept, where I had a slightly more interesting job putting the Shower Curtains into Boxes to ship out).
The counter example to this idea is the Plymouth Colony, which is often used to show that communal systems don’t work. There are any number of reasons why it didn’t work, first off people who grew up under a monetary based system don’t have a culture of giving inculcated into them from childhood, so they will not understand its values and so tend to take advantage of the system. The second issue is that there was not put in place a series of progressive punishments for being a non-contributing lazy good-for-nothing. In a real Potlatch economy, such a person would be progressively Shunned, until they simply cease to exist and the people no longer even see this person as a person, but as an evil spirit wandering the community. People who are shunned to this level in a community do not last long.
People need Work that is Valued, and they need to feel good about the work they do to want to do it. A Potlatch Economy can do that, and it has in the past, but industrialization took away many of those types of work that people could do to help others. Oil did the work, and a few people took home the profit from that, creating a vast inequity and a sense of Hopelessness in generations of the underclass.
When I read the vitriole heaped upon the FSA here on the pages of TBP, I am disgusted most of the time. People who write this stuff simply do not understand the nature of work and the nature of remuneration for work; nor do they understand how inequities of opportunity feed on themselves through generations as a result of the property ownership system. It does not have to be this way. However, to change it BACK now cannot happen without a massive dislocation, which is Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You. It is sad that people do not understand this. Much unnecessary death and destruction will result from this lack of understanding. That is just the way it is though, and so a few very difficult lessons will have to be learned the hard way by people who do not grasp these principles. So be it.
RE
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22nd January 2011 at 7:46 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@ Stuck
Stuck, on one keyboard hand you argue that I am advocating for a return to the Garden of Eden, but then on the other keyboard hand you argue that I advocate for a system which legitimizes Murder, which clearly is not Garden of Eden living. So which one is it here? You cannot argue both at the same time.
In my response to OS, I covered some of the inherent conflicts that come from Suicide in a resource constrained environment. Essentially, some people are FORCED into committing suicide, so you can turn this around and say that they did not truly commit Suicide, but were in fact Murdered by the society around them. Who do you pin the Murder on though? The entire population still alive after the person offs himself?
Tribal living in a resource constrained environment is clearly NOT the Garden of Eden. In fact it is quite a tough environment overall, but for the most part a more fair system with a more equitable distribution of power. People will still be people, there will still be arguments, there will still be violence. These things will not disappear, so it is not the Garden of Eden.
The two most difficult Moral Questions to resolve in this type of system come at the beginning and end stages of life. At the beginning stage of life, the Death comes from Abortion and/or Exposure. At the end stage of life, the Death comes from Suicide or Exposure also. Just like infants are sometimes left on a mountaintop to die and be consumed by Wolves, so also will the tribe sometimes pack up in the middle of the night and leave behind sleeping one of their Elderly members who slows them down on the trail and no longer can contribute hunting or gathering. Given I accept both of these as inevitable consequences of living in a resource constrained environment, I hardly see how you can argue that I am either “sugar coating” this or advocating for a return to the Garden of Eden. I am doing neither.
My hope would be that after a period of time passes and the population gets knocked down to whatever minima the resource constraints demand, the environment will begin to heal, there will be fewer resource constraints, and then the population begins to grow again. At this point the two most difficult Moral Questions of Infanticide and Elderly Suicide can be removed from the mix, to be substituted for by more careful reproductive control of some form, and not allowing the growth of the population to exceed the growth of the resource base on a Pay-as-you-Go basis. Given where we are at NOW however, with a population well into Overshoot resulting from the exploitation of the one-time “Gift” of the Thermodynamic Energy of Fossil Fuels and the fact that those fuels are in a depleting state relative to the size of the population, we are a long ways away from being able to convert to such a relatively benign form of maintaining a steady state population in balance with the available resources. This is why I maintain that we will not get from here to there without a considerable amount of pain.
We will likely never be returning to the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden came some 70,000 years ago for the 10,000 Human Souls or 1000 Breeding Pairs that survived the cataclysmic bottleneck of the population of Homo Sapiens in the aftermath of the Toba Supervolcanic Eruption. Once the atmosphere cleared and the environment surrounding them healed itself, that Tribe had the entire surface of the Earth to expand onto, to “Go Forth and Multiply”, and they sure did that, to the tune of around 6.3B people living here now. There were no wars then, because if you were dissatisfied in your community and sought Freedom you could just walk a few miles to the next valley over and start your own little community. Then do it again, and again and again, until all these communities started bumping up against each other with nowhere left to go for the Freedom Seekers. The Garden of Eden lasted for quite some time, to around 5000 years ago when Agriculture began to suck resource out of the land faster than it could be replenished. Then of course and right up until today, all HELL broke loose with the endless War of the Haves and the Have Nots.
The general paradigm of Warfare amongst conflicting Tribes and incipient Civilizations developing from Agriculture began 5000 years ago as most of the surface of the Earth was populated by Homo Sapiens, but the End for Freedom Seekers did not come really until about 1000 years ago, when a few Polynesian Navigators plying the Pacific Ocean in Sail Rigged Canoes came upon the Big Island of Hawaii. That was the very LAST vestige of the Garden of Eden, a place with sufficient food resources devoid of any prior population of Homo Sapiens living there that had to be displaced by Warfare. Once that last space was taken up, the last 1000 years has been all about consolidation and one group of people becoming powerful enough to displace another group of people. Accessing the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels gave one set of people vast advantage, and asymmetry developed in the aftermath of that. Industrial living VERY quickly became the only way to live anywhere, it really only took 200 or so years for this paradigm to overrun the earth. About ALL Hunter Gatherers disappeared through this period, and Agriculture itself became Industrialized. Thing is here, once the Fossil Fuels are unavailable, this 200 year experiment in Industrial Civilization will collapse in a Heartbeat in the grand scheme of 70,000 years since the Garden of Eden. It will not even take a Century for this collapse to occur. That is about 0.3% of the entire timeline since the Toba Bottleneck.
To return to the Garden of Eden, we literally would have to shrink back down in population size to 10,000 Human Souls and give Gaia 10,000 years to heal herself, and even I do not project that as likely. In the absence of a cataclysm on the order of Toba, Natural or Man Made, I do not see it likely that even with a massive Undershoot of population we would shrink down past 100M or so. There will be remaining tribes everywhere there is sufficient water and arable land or access to a fecund fisherie. Those tribes will bump up against each other and there will be border wars. There will be no place for Freedom Seekers to go that both provide enough food in the environment and also are vacant of people. It is how those populations steward their environment and the principles upon which they base their community which will determine how Just they are and how successful. I maintain that the best means of doing that is to base the economy on Giving rather than Taking.
On the question of how you prevent those nasty Human Traits like Greed and Avarice from taking root and flourishing, the answer is Education. In childhood, these traits manifest themselves in children all the time. 3 year olds will grab a toy from another and say “MINE!”. Do not allow that behavior, Punish it quickly, it does not take much when a child is 3 years old to punish such behavior. Reward the child for Sharing and being generous. Do not reward Adults for Greedy behaviors, because children witness this and inculcate it into their developing brains as the way to be. Punish adults who take more than they need, Shun them, do not put them up on a Pedestal on the pages of People Magazine or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. You will never entirely wipe Greed out of course, but you can Squash it down through the Culture and the Education of children. This is a cultural decision it is within our power to make.
In our lifetimes, and in the lifetimes of generations yet unborn, it will not be possible to escape the consequences of Overshoot, and the pain that is to come as the population must shrink in size to come back into Balance with what Nature provides on a Pay-as-you-Go basis. The tough Moral Questions of Abortion, Suicide, Murder and War will all be a part of our collective lives. Death comes in many ways, and the Grim Reaper will have the Greatest Harvest of all time in this go round. Your only choices in this revolve around where you will park your butt and whether you will be a Sheeple or a Wolf when the Big Show Comes to a Theatre Near You. If you Run Away NOW, run away FAR, you might avoid the worst of these choices for the rest of your natural life. I am as far out as you can GET and still have a connection to the Internet. I HOPE to live out what is left of my life in relative Peace, but as it stands at the moment, unless I die relatively quickly, the Big Show will Come to my Theatre and force me to make my choice. I do not know right now what that choice will be, Suicide, Lone Wolf or Pack Wolf? I won’t go to the Great Beyond as a Sheeple though. I won’t know the answer to this question until I am at the End of my Rope, and I am not there yet.
So Stuck, did I “Sugar Coat” this? Did I propose a Garden of Eden? I don’t think so, but you can disabuse me of the notion I did at any time here. I am just reporting what I see coming down the pipe. If you want to vilify me for being the Messenger of Death, you are free to do that also. It does not change the analysis though to vilify me. To do that, you have to present an argument which is better than my own, for the future YOU see as coming down the pipe. Instead of trying to pick apart what I say, present your own view of the future here to counter my own. Or is that too difficult for you? Can’t keep up with my keyboarding speed? Sorry, this is YOUR problem, not MY problem.
See You on the Other Side.
RE
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22nd January 2011 at 7:47 pm
StuckInNJ says:
Why would I abuse you? I luv you, man. Thanks for the reply. And, no, I don’t type as fast as you so, my response will be considerably shorter.
We have a HUGE failure to communicate regarding the Garden of Eden … the fault is most likely mine. I was ONLY speaking in reference to this; “never permit this Evil to spread again amongst the race of Homo Sapiens.”. That can only happen by returning to the Garden. Even then, I am not so sure, as some say that the Garden was ruled by a Tyrant.
You did address that concern by saying the solution is Education. You are just plain wrong. To test your theory one only need to look at the most educated in society, and then test whether or not evil exists in this group. Of course, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”. Education only results in an Educated Evil Bastard … as opposed to a Dumbass Evil Bastard (like, Obama).
No one is ever forced into suicide. Do not exonerate the guilty … the person pulling the trigger, so to say. Blaming “society” or a lack of resources or anything else is pure bullshit. Sure, the conditions might be so awful they FEEL they have no other choice — think Concentration Camps — but many have suffered such horrors and did not pull the trigger. There is always a way out, if you believe.
I do agree with running away far and running away now if at all possible. I am sick and tired of the shithole this country is becoming.
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22nd January 2011 at 12:18 pm
Kill Bill says:
My reading speed is faster than your typing speed.
Not sure why that matters, but there it is.
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22nd January 2011 at 12:57 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Just a few thoughts here before this thread drops off the map.
The biggest consequence of Peak Oil is the Die Off that will come as a result of ever decreasing supply of Available Energy progressively works its way through all markets dependent on it. The choices that need to be made with respect to Die Off are all Moral Ones, and very difficult choices at every level. Its easy to talk about Nuke Energy or Green Cars that will save the day, but that talk is just that, TALK. In all realistic scenarios right now, none of these solutions will work to resolve the Die Off problem or the poor economics of a society based on ever depleting oil resource.
The fundamental problem we must confront is DEATH. How to manage it, how to achieve some sort of Equity in the vast numbers the Grim Reaper will Harvest here. Leave it to the Market to decide, the Death will come as it always has, in the form of War, Pestilence and Famine. We can just let the Four Horsemen run Herd here across Humanity, or we can try to rein them in some. We can allow Fascists to build Death Camps and herd the Poor into them, or we can try to redistribute what is left so that the Death is spread out over a longer period of time. We will not escape the Death no matter what we do, and on a social level we can confront the Death in only a few ways. Mad Max, or total Anarchy is one way. Fascism, or the imposition of Death on the Many at the hands of the Few is another. Communism, or the imposition of Death of the Few at the hands of the Many is another. On the Aggregate level of the Nation State, these are the ONLY choices available. NONE of these is an acceptable solution of course, and so none of them will truly work in the long term. The Society will fracture before any one of these solutions takes a permanent hold, although 1 of them will be the intermediary in all societies as we move toward a Better Tomorrow. When the society does Fracture, when the Conduits fail, then the Tribal model will rise again, like a Phoenix from the Ashes of any one of these intermediary models.
Understanding this and seeing in my Crystal Ball what is coming down the pipe here, what do I support as an intermediary model? From my POV here on the Last Great Frontier, it would be Anarchy 1st, Communism 2nd, Fascism 3rd. I support Anarchy first because it would more rapidly lead to the Tribal model. I support Communism second because it would punish first the Greedy. I support Fascism the least because it rewards the Greedy. None of them are long term workable models however, but there is no way to fracture up the society to the tribal model from the nation state model without passing through one of them.
Different places will pass through each of these models in different ways. Fascism is most likely in the historical center of the Industrial economy, in Europe and in most of the lower 48 of the FSofA. A return to Communism is likely for later entries into Industrialization like China and India. Anarchy is likely in peripheral states and small geographic areas removed from the center of modern civilization.
I do not believe that any of the intermediary models will last long. Anarchy is self limiting, it is too disorganized to have much long term success. Communism can last longer, but eventually decays from lack of incentive. Fascism dies as a result of self Cannibalism of the Oligarchs in charge.
Anyhow, whichever system gets dropped down here in the medium term, all of them will be dealing with Death of unimaginable proportions. In the Anarchy situation, that death willnot be attributable to one person, or an Oligarchy. In the Communist and Fascist solutions, it will be attributable. As those solutions devolve, the people who ran them will be held accountable. Choosing to be a Political Leader through this period will be a dangerous choice indeed, Fascist or Communist.
Should be a lively few years here coming up. Break out the Popcorn.
RE
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22nd January 2011 at 2:40 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
“You did address that concern by saying the solution is Education. You are just plain wrong. To test your theory one only need to look at the most educated in society, and then test whether or not evil exists in this group. Of course, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”. Education only results in an Educated Evil Bastard … as opposed to a Dumbass Evil Bastard (like, Obama).”-Stuck
You interpret “education” as an Academic education. Not the type of education I am talking about. I am talking about Moral Education, which type about NOBODY in our society gets a good one, because this society educates people morally that Greed is Good.
“No one is ever forced into suicide. Do not exonerate the guilty … the person pulling the trigger, so to say. Blaming “society” or a lack of resources or anything else is pure bullshit. Sure, the conditions might be so awful they FEEL they have no other choice — think Concentration Camps — but many have suffered such horrors and did not pull the trigger. There is always a way out, if you believe.”
Many of the survivors of the Holocaust only survived because somebody else decided to walk themselves into the Great Beyond. Many a soldier has been saved by a Buddy who threw himself onto a live grenade. Many terminal cancer patients living in horrible pain choose to Walk into the Great Beyond, sometimes with the help of an Angel like Jack Kevorkian. Lots of reasons for this, and many of them quite sound as personal choices.
RE
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22nd January 2011 at 3:04 pm