Biospace wrote: ↑11 Mar 2023, 1:56pm
I see governments planning all sorts of highly complex authoritarian controls in order to try and reduce human harm to the planet and its life, which in many is already prompting many to react in the other direction. Long term change works far better if from ground up than top down, better understanding of what is happening and some famous/fashionable people taking a lead would be a start.
You here allude to another large and pervasive issue with modern societies with their vast hierarchies and fragmentation into a faux individualism that is nothing more than he atomisation of societies into nothing other than divisions of labour (including into the non-labouring and therefore neglected category). A major effect of us all being constructed and used as nothing more than tiny cogs in a vast and complex socio-economic machine is that very few of us have any chance of leading a more authentic life - one in which we construct ourselves within a social and economic framework also constructed, owned and understood by those within in it rather then by those on high.
Most of us are now constructs of mass media notions and instructions composed by tiny and entirely self-interested elites. Only members of the elites have any semblance of understanding and control of "how the world works" (and even that's a poor one) with most of us cogs knowing only how to be a cog. Should a cog get too great a glimpse of the vast machine churning up their lives, that cog is easily distracted and put back to coggery by the various elite-operated controls of the political and media sheep dogs.
The advent of large scale political and media control of populations is a relatively recent thing in human history. Even today, historians, anthropologists and others of their ilk come up with views, through the dark glass of our academic institutions (what's left of them) showing once very different human lifestyles, which may have lacked the sophistication, glamour and the apparent ease of modern life but which were at least lives owned and constructed by those living them, via a much better understanding, manufacture and use of the things involved.
But then the various religious institutions and the nation-building aristocracies began to own us all.
These days, most modern folk "struggle to change a lightbulb". We "need an app for that" (i.e. for everything). In fact, we need mysterious black boxes to make every aspect of our lives function, from transport (bicycles and cars) to understanding "out there" (the mass media) and everything in between. Less and less of us have any skills enabling us to construct, understand and control our own lives. We have to "just buy it".
Yet it is possible to resist. One can acquire various making, understanding and using skills that at least allow some black boxes to be opened and fixed - changed, even. But making our own "boxes of tricks"? It's now very hard indeed to do that; impossible without at the same time having to acquire and use a large range of other black box goods & services we'll never open or understand.
Cugel, off to the workshop in a minute.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes