photo taken from wired.com
Recently I received a comment from a reader concerning a link to his site in my post about Avatar. I’m glad David is concerned enough to defend his position, so I’ve included my response:
David,
Thanks for coming and expanding your thoughts and shedding some light on your position.
The Earth is finite, so our success as a species is directly linked to how well we maintain good stewardship of our natural resources. I doubt you would disagree. I think energy is cheap right now, and SHOULD cost much more than 2-3 times the current price considering its preciousness. One of the primary things I’ve learned about money is that price has very little to do with value. The poverty, homelessness, and uncommon sense that you’re referring to is the exact paradigm we’re living right now, where wealth is measured in dollars and cents and not real human qualities. We can all afford it, if we don’t use it. We’ve got a date at the junction of Time and Peak Oil that is going to create far more misery if we don’t start to power down voluntarily.
The real conservatives preached ideas like: no standing armies, limited governmental control, protection of individual rights. That’s pretty much gone now, and the Constitution has been essentially void for decades in favor of thinking by proxy. The two-party system is essentially the one-party system wasting time on meaningless semantics and aren’t even throwing darts at the right board. Let’s end this now.
I’m for free choice, free markets, and limited government. Government’s role is to protect the rights of individuals, so I believe this starts with the source: The Earth. I believe right now this should be the primary incentive of government and is the only way to prevent the “tragedy of the commons.” The problems we’re dealing with now are the direct result of the crossing of corporate and government highways and the evidence is not even debatable.
If you’re on this site, writing on your own site, and defending a position with logic then you are a free-thinker. You’re welcome here anytime, and I hope you continue to challenge anything I have to say. Thank you.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a superb disquisition on stewardship of the earth. Thank you. I am really enjoying your comments, found through JHK’s site.
For my fellow freedom guerrillas… http://freedocumentaries.org/
Unfortunately, we don’t question common paradigms enough. Specific governments do protect the rights of individuals, but from what? The answer to this is “bullying” or “mobs”. However, once the government is bought by the mob through overwhelming concentration of power in the hands of a few, it is no longer the same government which its constitution claims it to be. Then what? Vote on compromised machines? Protest marches?
No. The answer lies in individuals creating new ways to live which ignore the government and corporations. That means localization. The irony is that it is also what the earth needs.
Some will argue,”We can’t feed everyone on that kind of thinking.”
To which, the answer is “Yes, that’s right.”
Everyone should either be a better neighbor or a better shot.
We also need to question ‘government’ and ‘civilization’ to understand where rights come from. It is no coincidence that the ‘conservatives’ are also usually Christians that selectively follow the teaching of Christ. Conservatism (as we know it politically) is about Ego, not conserving. Liberalism is compromised by civilization (city-based living) into the myth of Progress (We MUST bring our fellow citizens up to our level of comfort.) There is no room for freethinking in either place. Freethinking looks around at all of the earth’s species and sees how they ‘fit’ their environment and then asks, “What are PEOPLE for?” The answer should never be “To consume anything they see”, and statistical proof that some Invisible Hand Job is keeping them in check is self-aggrandized fantasy. People need fences to keep them away from the tigers just as tigers need fences to keep them away from people. The winner in a free-market or a ‘democracy’ is always the tiger/bully: until it runs out of food.
So what ARE people for? What are we doing here?
G. said, “So what ARE people for?”
To make the future physical world more sustainably useful than it would be without us.
In other words, we should be using our abilities to understand how things really work and then make improvements, and to work to protect the world from threats. Of all the contributions humans could make, the one big one is probably to stop a giant asteroid from slamming into the planet. Other than that, we should be laying low and letting things be.
“Disquistion.” Funny word. I had to look it up. Thanks, Kate. My first impression of it was that somebody had accidentally stepped on something. I’m not anti-gravity, but as a paraglider pilot I frequently like breaking away from its grip on me. I also like that it brings me back down when I’ve had enough. The saying is: “It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the sky, than being in the sky wishing you were on the ground.” The task that requires 100% of all my mental faculties is plotting invisible lines and angles so that I land safely. What’s most important about this is visualizing and calculating the flight path well in advance of executing the plan. If I wait to the last minute (or even if I don’t), the risk is high enough that I could lose my life. I knowingly make this choice every time I fly and I take responsibility for that. Similarly, we must be on this Earth because we chose to be; we must take responsibility for that choice. So I agree with AuntieGrav. Your answer sounds like a step in the right direction. Perhaps a process of benevolent and useful self-interrogation would look like this: 1. What are my abilities? 2. What specific thing would I most like to understand? 3. What improvements would I like to see? 4. What work can I do to protect the world while simultaneously making it more sustainably useful to me during my life and to others who will follow me after I’m gone? It all depends on who you are. I’m really into free speech. Even in an ecological paradise, the world wouldn’t be useful to me if it were one in which I couldn’t freely express myself. Maybe that’s my part to play in the future physical world… Whatever it is, I really want to get it right.
Guillermo:
Disquisition is a bit squishy, isn’t it? I never thought of that.
I enjoy your comments here very much.
Thanks, Kate. Nice to have you with us. None of us really know who the rest of us are, but the more we communicate the better it is. Let’s all keep talking.