Cheap oil, globalization, etc & the Neanderthal Theory

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The government is working on taking our guns away. They will take us away next.

Why over-complicate the problem?
An aggressor comes to me my goal is to STOP them.
I have nothing against the MAD scenario since it works.

That has happened to every revolution since the French Revolution.

The French Revolution started off with Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and ended up with decapitation and Napoleon.

ruveyn

The widest and shallowest are bottom up organizations. Let natural emergence prevail!

ruveyn

I was referring to relationships between people, not organizational structures. Neurotypicals know lots of people, but know no one well, my guess is not even mates really. Neurodiverse people are the opposite (if they are lucky to know anyone well in NT-dominated society). There may be weird exceptions, but in general it holds.

Flattening the pyramids is not enough, we need to shrink them in the opposite direction as well.

I will have to take time to ponder. I have never thought about oil and its relation to prejudice against aspies. However, I will say that the internet (and other technology) has made our lives (friendship, career etc) more virtual then real (larger but less deep,like a shadow). "Reality" TV pretends to be real. Relationships have become acts (like bears riding tricycles at the circus). Once we were close to what we made. The movement from barter to money to checks (a symbol of a symbol that symbolizes value) and now electronic money drags us farther from the value we create. We are alienated from relationships and alienated from our labor. In short, we are alienated from reality. Symbols have replaced reality.

Puhleeze. A society in which barter could work well would be primitive. It would live on nuts and berries.

ruveyn

I am not suggesting that we go to a barter economy. I am showing how we are getting farther and farther from experiencing reality.

Where is your evidence for even THAT?

Actually you might be on to the right thing, but for the wrong reason.

I think there is some reason to believe the spectrumites stand out more in modern times than in pre modern times.

The reason is compulsory education.

Traditional societies either had no formal education, or very little.

In the 18th centurey america you went to grammer school, and then when you became a teen you became an aprentice to a skilled tradesmen. You lived in their home and learned their trade. But in the 20th centurey you have to go to school until mid to late teens atleast.

Even today, in nomadic tribal societies, or in peasant societies, and other traditional societies adolescents rarely meet other people their own age. They are employed babysitting younger kids, or in learning trades from adults.

But today teenagers are stored in big warehouses together by the thousands in middle and in highschools, and are thus forced to interact with each other with an intensity unprecedented in human history.

In a traditional society an aspie would not standout and be ridiculed by classmates because he wouldnt have any classmates. And there would be no prom to worry about getting a date too, and no social competition between teens about clothes and cars, because there would be no teen society.

So compulsory education throughout the western world (from the mid nineteenth centurey to now) can be 'blamed". That in turn can be blamed upon employers wanting employees who can read and write and do arithmatic. And that in turn can be blamed on the delayed effects of Gutenberg inventing movable type back in the 1560. But blaming it on oil? I dont see the connection.

we might even go past a barter economy
we might even see post scarcity in our lifetime when automaton breaks 60%

Another big problem -- very unnatural environment.



According to RDOS, NTs tend to socialize with peers of the same age and gender. Compulsory indoctrination brings them together and no doubt fuels NT behaviors so they become extreme.



Not that much real learning goes on.

You learn (check out what the detractors of compulsory "education" have to say):
Learning isn't really interesting, it is busy work, etc.
You don't know what you want and what to do, and learn to rely on others to tell you (to be obedient children of authority for life).
Be punctual (if you can, if not don't expect constructive help if it is even possible for some to do this, so if you can't you are screwed).
To feel bad when you don't "measure up."
Indoctrination
Learn to be willing to go to war to fight for your peers -- the biggest reason.

But I still think compulsory indoctrination isn't the only major problem .

The discirimination of neurodiverse is related to globalization and international trade. In earlier times, more neurodiverse people were required because exchange of ideas was not so well developped, and neither was exchange of products. People produced most that they needed at home. In today's global society there is only a need for a few software people writing major components of operating systems, and producing software and hardware products. Because of this, fewer neurodiverse people can do these tasks, and instead needs to work with selling products or similar things they are less well suited for.

It is important to note that it would be very hard to go back to a less global system, because the neurodiverse people needed no longer exist (or have labels and severe problems). That's why a crash might be inevitable when transportation of goods all over the globe no longer can be sustained.

Obviously exchange of products great distances will take a hit. There is the question of exchange of ideas. We have a global network of computers. If it becomes too costly to ship electronics great distances they have to be produced more locally. There is the question of whether the fabrication technology can be scaled down or made more flexible as only so many plants that cost billions of dollars can be built.

An economic crash will happen because as the price of fossil fuel becomes prohibitive, the economy will need to structurally adjust. We have supposedly at least 10% of the population that is neurodiverse, probably much more. Only a few are diagnosed with autism spectrum conditions, although perhaps 50% or more have enough problems to be diagnosed with something (particularly ADD and depression). It seems to me that there must be a large minority that are good at coping (and probably a few that were just fortunate). I wonder if these people are different from those having problems. Perhaps those with the problems are those with the predispositions / innate traits that are will be most needed. This could lengthen the recovery period greatly as it will take raising another generation (at least) to get the required functioning neurodiverse people.

Another part of today's problem is that we are way beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth, which just about guarantees us population crash. Obviously something exotic like zero-point energy would be a quick and easy fix. Short of that, what we need are good practical ideas for improved efficiency and alternatives, and perhaps we can muddle by. Instead we have greed, a toxic social environment and groupthink on almost all subjects of any importance.

Hybrid and electric vehicles helps, but it seems to me that personal rapid transit (PRT) is a must if we are to have a chance of getting the requirements transportation down to reasonable levels (especially liquid fuel use). Superinsulation and "geothermal" heating or perhaps giving up on the single family home is necessary. We need practical solar power, and I doubt that can be done if you need rigid solar panels. It seems to me that if thin film technology can be developed perhaps tethered aerostats can be used as a power source. Most of the ideas I usually hear about don't actually impress me.

Unfortunately the environment for innovative ideas doesn't appear very good, especially if it requires a lot of capital up front, like PRT, despite the fact that there is a lot of capital with no place to go and negative interest rates as a result.

From Aspie Quiz I estimate the prevalence of neurodiverse people (very likely Aspie) at about 10-15% (in Eurasia, lower in Southern Asia, and possibly very low in Africa). The prevalence of the mixed type might be something like 10%. That would mean about 75% NTs.

So, yes, that is much larger than today's diagnostic rate. OTOH, the rate of diagnosis is still rising (and prevalence of neurodiversity is not, possibly even decreasing), so we have not seen the worst yet.

Also, I'd like to mention that globalization doesn't just impact the neurodiverse negatively. I'll bet that many African-Americans are worse off, at least economically than they were decades ago. Africa is probably worse off than a hundred years ago. Part of this may be the population densities, as western medicine has been used to combat disease. Wealth from natural resources doesn't seem to go to productive use but rather conflicts. An interesting exception seems to be Botswana though which is doing pretty well, except for the second-highest rate of AIDS in Africa.

In fact, things are getting worse for a large minority everywhere, as the distribution of wealth is getting very skewed.

It seems that although neurotypicals may get mad, I doubt they get depressed or suffer from post traumatic stress injury (the only two real mental "illnesses"). They are more likely to go rob someone at gunpoint or something. Many remain optimistic no matter what happens to them. In fact most people are optimistic about their own future but quite pessimistic about the nation / world as a whole. If you rob a bank, at least you have due process. If you get a mental "illness" (mental injury), you don't. Globalization hasn't negatively impacted the rights of neurotypicals, at least to the extent it has impacted the rights of the neurodiverse. There are other forces "war on drugs", "war on terror", etc. at work though.

In fact, I suspect that nationalization freed neurotypicals, at least in America. The federal government became big at the end of the civil war and outlawed slavery and indentured servitude. It took several more decades to put some teeth into those bans. It was federal regulation that went a long way to put a serious dent in discriminatory practices. For example, it was decided that a restaurant that has significant out-of-state customers engages in interstate commerce and therefore can not refuse to serve customers based on race contrary to federal law.

Last edited by DemocraticSocialistHun on 29 Jul 2013, 8:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think you have two separate discussions here really.

However I simply don't buy rdos hypothesis ( it is a hypothesis not a theory), reading his work is a good example of assumption chaining, as it you haven't confirmed one bit of information before you move on to the next assumption, this is repeated. It is very easy to prove yourself right through this method, so it lacks falsifiability.