Why Think? > Why Think?

Notes From BEYOND CIVILIZATION (thread-in-itself)

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Mic True Son:
I want to place some notes here for posterity. I don't have time to migrate too much ...

1.
Lock and Key

It's easy to pick out the people who belong to "our" culture. If you go somewhere - anywhere in the world - where the food is under lock and key, you'll know you're among people of our culture.

When it comes to the most fundamental thing of all, getting the food they need to stay alive, the food in these places is all owned by someone, and if you want some, you have to buy it.

No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key, who would work?

2.
Our cultural excuse for failure is that humans are just "naturally" flawed - greedy, selfish, short-sighted, violent, and so on, which means anything you do will fail. In order to validate that excuse, people want tribalism to be a failure. For this reason, to people who want to uphold our cultural mythology, any suggestion tribalism was successful is perceived as a threat.

3.
The Maya, the Olmec, and the people of Teotihuacan became rigidly stratified into wealthy, all-powerful, elites and impoverished, powerless masses, who naturally did all the grunt work that made these civilizations magnificant.

The masses will put up with this miserable life - we know that! - but they inevitibly begin to get restless. We know that too.

4.
When the underclass becomes restless

Our history is full of underclass insurrections, revolts, rebellions, riots, and revolutions, but not a single one has ever ended with people just walking away. This is because our citizens "know" that civilization must continue and not be abandoned under any circumstance.

So they will go berserk, will destroy everything in sight, will slaughter all of the elite they can get their hands on, will burn, ****, and pillage - they they will never just walk away.

This is why the behavior of the Maya, the Olmec, and the rest is so unfathomably mysterious to our historians. For them, it seems self-evident that civilization must continue at any cost and never be abandoned under any circumstance. How, then, could the Olmec, the Maya, and the others not have known it?

This [meme] is exactly what was missing from the minds of these peoples. When they no longer liked what they were building, they were able to walk away from it.

5.
No special control is needed to make people into pyramid builders - if they see themselves as having no choice but to build pyramids. They'll build whatever they're told to build, whether it's pyramids, parking garages, or computer programs.

6.
Something BETTER than civilization is waiting for us.

7.
Religion is a barbiturate, dulling the pain and putting you to sleep. Revolution is an amphetamine, revving you up and making you feel powerful.

And in what is supposedly the happiest, most prosperous nation in human history, more and more antigovernment terrorist groups attract more and more members every year.

8.
As everyone knows (especially revolutionaries), hierarchy maintains formidable defenses against attack from the lower orders. It has none, however, against abandonment. Hierarchy cannot defend itself against abandonment because abandonment is not an attack - it's just a discontinuance of support.

It's almost impossible to prevent people from doing nothing (which is what discontinuing support amounts to).

But won't the powers that be try to prevent people from doing nothing? I can imagine them trying but not succeeding.

9.
The unspoken agreement among businesses to limit their obligation to issuing a paycheck is precisely what gives our society its prison ambience. Workers have "no way out". Whether they move from company to company or from nation to nation, their employers' obligation ends with a paycheck (an agreement that suits employers very well).

Prisons are always arranged to suit the wardens. No one thinks that prisons are built to suit the needs of prisoners or that businesses are built to suit the needs of workers.

Stepping into a tribe means stepping out of the prison.

10.
In hierarchal societies, it's always a good idea to make poverty sound like a blessing.

11.
At the present time, the United States represents the high point of maximus affluence that our civilization has reached. There's no place on earth where people have more, use more, or waste more than the United States. Though other nations haven't as yet reached this high point, they yearn to reach it. They have no other goal.

Everyone in the world should have a house, a car, a computer, a television set, a telephone, and so on. This is "the culture of maximum harm".

12.
Once the Taker mythology has been exposed for what it is - a collection of poisonous delusions - it will no longer be capable of exercising the power it has exercised over us for the past 10,000 years.

But won't the last pharaohs in their maddened wrath turn their nuclear arsenal at us?

Perhaps they would if they could, but where are they going to find us except living right beside them in their own cities?

Is the president, seeing his/her power slip away, going to bomb Washington D.C. to destroy the tribal people living there? Is the governor of the New York going to bomb Manhattan?

13.
Because all 6,000,000,000 members of the culture of maximum harm are striving to maximize their affluence, we shouldn't be alarmed solely by the one percent who live like lords of the universe. We must be equally alarmed by the other ninety-nine percent who are hoping to live like lords of the universe.

It's probably not going to be the billionaire pop stars, sports heroes, and deal makers who are going to lead us out of the prison we share with them.

It's the rest of us who must find the way out, who must discover something better to hope for than inhabiting a sable-lined cell next to Barbara Streisand, Michael Jordan, or Donald Trump.

[We need another story to be in!]

14.
Civilization isn't a geographical territory, it's a social and economic territory where pharaohs reign and pyramids are built by the masses.

Similarly, "beyond civilization" isn't a geographical territory, it's a social and economic territory where people in open tribes pursue goals that may or may not be recognizably "civilized".

You don't have to "go somewhere" to get beyond civilization. You have to make your living a different way.

15.
RELUCTANT VOLUNTEERS

By conservative estimates, at any one time there are about half a million people in the United States who have been thrust beyond civilization into a social and economic limbo that nowadays is identified as homelessness.

Homelessness is slightly more than a euphemism for poverty, since it draws attention to the special form poverty takes in hypermodern cities, which might be defined as cities in which space is so valuable that none of it can be spared for the poor. With the complete disappearance of low-cost housing, there's just no room "indoors" for the poor in such cities.

Several distinct streams come together in the homeless flood. One consists of the mentally ill, turned out into the streets when deinstitutionalization became the rage in the 1970's. Another consists of semi- or unskilled workers whose jobs have been exported to countries where labor is cheaper or made superfluous by downsizing or automation. Another consists of abandoned women and children, victims of racial or ethnic prejudice, undereducated, unskilled, unskilled, and chronically unemployed. Others in the homeless flood are runaways, drug addicts, bums, winos, transients, and vagabonds, who, because they apparently "choose" to be homeless, are the "undeserving poor".

16.
Making the homeless disappear

Public officials (reflecting the unspoken desires of their constituents) naturally want the homeless to disappear: to get jobs, to find homes, to resume a "normal" life. The role of officialdom is therefore to assist, prompt, and encourage the homeless to get about the business of resuming that normal life.

Above all, nothing must be done that would encourage the homeless to remain homeless. In short, homelessness must be made as unremittingly difficult, degrading, and painful as possible, and you may be sure that our public guardians know well how to accomplish this.

Naturally, the public wants homeless shelters, but these are hardly to be hospitable; no one should want to "stay" in one. If the homeless began to "stay" in shelters, this would defeat the purpose, which is to entice them out of homelessness.

Avoiding officially sanctioned shelters at all costs, the homeless take refuge almost anywhere else - in alleys, parks, tunnels, and abandoned buildings, under bridges, and so on. The police have to roust them from these areas regularly, because if the homeless become comfortable anywhere, what motive have they for stop being homeless?

Making and keeping the homeless as miserable as possible is cherished as sort of tough love - the very best and kindest thing we can do for them.

The only trouble is that it doesn't work worth a damn.

17.
Every year we pass more laws, hire more police, build more prisons, and sentence more offenders for longer periods - all without moving one inch closer to "ending" crime.

Every year we spend more money on our schools hoping to fix whatever's wrong with them, and every year the schools remain stubbornly unfixed. Every year we try to make the homeless go away, and every year the homeless remain with us. We couldn't shoehorn them back into "the mainstream" last year or the year before that, but you can be sure we'll try again this year, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won't work this year either.

Note to self: find notes 18 through 29 : see notebook #82 p10-19

Daniel Quinn teaches that no single person is going to save the world. Rather (if it is saved at all), it will be saved by millions (and ultimately billions) of us LIVING A NEW WAY.

One thousand living a new way won’t cause the dominant world order to topple. But that 1,000 will inspire 100,000, who will inspire 1,000,000, who will inspire 1,000,000,000 – and then that world order will begin to look shaky!

30.
The members of the tribe are not employees of the tribe, they are the tribe. Indeed, that’s the whole difference. Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be – nothing more and nothing less.

A tribe is a group of people making a living together, and there’s no one right way for this to be done. Be inventive.

31.
The tribe is just a wonderfully efficient social organization that renders making a living easy for all – unlike civilization, which renders it easy for a privileged few and hard for the rest.

32.
[The civilized hate and fear tribal people]

The civilized want people to be dependent on the prevalent hierarchy, not on each other. There’s something inherently evil about people making themselves self-sufficient in small groups. This is why the homeless must be rousted wherever they collect.

This is why the Branch Davidian community at Waco had to be destroyed; they’d never been charged with any crime, much less convicted – but they had to be doing something very, very nasty in there.

The civilized want people to make their living individually, and they want them to live separately, behind locked doors – one family to a house, each house fully stacked with refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, and so on. That’s the way decent folks live. Decent folks don’t live in tribes, they live in communities.

33.
[A SYSTEMIC CHANGE]

A New Tribal Revolution is an escape route from the prison of our culture. The walls of that prison are economic. That is, the need to make a living keeps us inside, because there’s no way to make a living on the other side. We can’t employ the Mayan Solution – we can’t disappear into a life of ethnic tribalism. But we can disappear into a life of occupational tribalism.

Will this leave our civilization a smokey ruin? Certainly not. It will diminish it. As more and more people see that GOING OVER THE WALL means getting something better (not “giving up” something), more and more people will abandon the culture of maximum harm – and the more this culture is abandoned, the better. The escape route leads beyond civilization, beyond the thing that, according to our cultural mythology, is humanity’s very last invention.

The escape route leads to humanity’s next invention.

But even so, will this next invention give us a sustainable lifestyle? Here’s how I access this. Humans living in tribes was as ecologically stable as lions living in prides or baboons living in troops.

The tribal life wasn’t something humans sat down and figured out. It was the gift of natural selection, a proven success – not perfection, but hard to improve on. Hierarchalism, on the other hand, has proven to be not merely imperfect but ultimately catastrophic for the earth and for us. When the plane is going down and someone offers you a parachute, you don’t demand to see the warranty.

34.
Listen to the children

Listen to the stories they tell with their gestures of profound alienation and despair, the stories of pandemic suicide, of drug us among younger and younger children every year, of mind boggling acts of violence committed by round-faced teens against their families and friends. Listen to their words as well, of course, but never forget that they’ve been schooled to say what people want to hear; the mass murderers are almost always remembered as nice, polite youngsters.

35.
Listen to the monsters

It’s estimated that, since the days of [Quinn’s] youth, depression among children has increased by 1000% and teen suicide by 300%. Since 1997, classroom assassins have killed 2 in Mississippi, 3 in Kentucky, 5 in Arkansas, and 13 in Colorado.

Make a graph of these numbers and watch them go exponential in the years to come – unless we start giving our kids a new way to go and some real hope for the future.

36.
People who are reluctant to spend their lives building some pharaoh’s pyramid all have a common need, but the need is felt most acutely by the young, who are the real pack-animals of the operation.

Sixty years ago raw graduates took jobs in factories, where they could at least expect to climb the same ladder of advancement as their parents. In the postindustrial age young people are becoming increasingly ghettoized in retail and service sectors, where they endlessly lift and carry, stock shelves, push brooms, bag groceries, and flip burgers, gaining no skills and seeing no path of advancement ahead of them.

For them and for us, it isn’t geographical space we want. It’s cultural space. Carlos, who made his home under a grate in Riverside Park, knew that a certain kind of freedom comes with living in a hole. But he also knew it isn’t “real freedom” if you have to live in a hole to get it.

He wanted the kind of freedom people have when they live where they please and don’t have to resort to a hole, even in “the scenic Ozarks” or “the foothills of Kentucky”. He wanted a whole world’s worth of freedom – and so do most of us, I think. To get that, we’ll have to take the world back from the pharaohs.

This won’t be hard.

They’re not expecting it – but even if they were, they’d be helpless to stop it.

37.
Why things didn’t end up a-changin’

Lots of songs about revolution came out during the hippie era of the 1960’s and 1970’s, but the revolution itself never materialized, because it didn’t occur to the revolutionaries that they had to come up with a revolutionary way to make a living. Their signature contribution was starting communes.

When the money ran out and parents got fed up, the kids looked around and saw nothing to do but line up for jobs at the quarries. Before long, they were dragging stones up to the same pyramids their parents and grandparents and great grandparents had been working on for centuries.

This time it’ll be different. It’d better be.

38.
http://www.newtribalventures.com

Beyond Civilization
P.O. Box 66627
Houston, Texas 77266-6627

- Daniel Quinn

Silenus:
Saved to a text document; thanks!

Silenus:
"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." - Alfred Renyi

Mic True Son:
Some Local News That Is Quite Dramatic


--- Quote ---Toms River mayor to Ocean County: If you put homeless warming center in my town, we'll sue
--- End quote ---

1.
https://www.app.com/story/news/local/toms-river-area/toms-river/2024/09/13/toms-river-mayor-would-sue-ocean-county-nj-over-homeless-warming-center/75208181007/

2. Toms River homeless advocates fear mayor is trying to squeeze out warming center, camps

If the people need the federal government to get involved with correcting the dangerous conditions to inmates and staff on Rikers Island Prison Facility in New York FuckKing City, then they will surely require at least the federal government,  if not the United Nation's, to correcf the municipal government of Ocean County New Jersey's treatment of its undercooked and voiceless homeless untouchables!

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