Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

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Not to go off topic, but that's one of the most ignorant things I've read in a long time.

He created a computer rendering of a "fractal" pattern, that is, a geometric shape that is "self-similar," meaning the same pattern arises over and over regardless of the scale on which you're viewing it. Not only that, but this "stupid, pointless" shape is an incredibly vibrant area of research in the natural sciences, since fractals (on a finite scale) have been observed in nature and our world, from ferns to cracks in glass.

And considering that purely mathematical fractals maintain self-similarity for infinity at any scale, I would say that they epitomize all that boggles the mind.

Chever, are you a mathematics student?

He knew that of course. He's an expert mathematition.



Computer science / applied mathematics

Unfortunately, my thesis and, if I go further, dissertation, will both probably be about much less glamorous topics.

I would rather destroy the universe and lead a miserable life as a man than a harmonious and content existence as an animal. EOM.

Melodramatic, surely? If you mean it then it's a big argument for the OP's idea that the modern world has sent us insane. If you destroyed the univerese, you'd be a bit more than miserable, quite a few of us would be, frankly, livid

For one, man is not separate from the universe. Destroy it and you destroy us too. Life is a complex web of interractions. We are dependant on plants, animals etc. En mass, human beings live exactly as animals anyway. Only a small minority make great inventions, works of art etc. The rest are born, eat, drink, breed and die more or less as animals do. Which is not to denigrate humans, it is raising the status of animals.

And what exactly have humans got that puts us above animals? Are racing around in metal boxes and shopping at malls so vital to humanity that we would wipe out the whole universe if denied these? We are moving towards spending most of our lives staring at dots on a screen and this is 'progress'? If the dots are sending us insane, how would we know?

Our behaviour could be seen as that of a parasite that carelessly pillages it's host until they kill it...and the parasites will have killed themselves too. And the animals who behave exactly as they are intended, fulfilling their role in the system are inferior to this? A system where life in all it's diverese forms has blossomed for millenia. Until one species that seemed to be developing just fine, then went postal and has caused a huge increase in the extinction rate.

For several decades environmentalists have been warning modern society that ecosystems are getting destroyed - that consumerist lifestyle is not sustainable.

But modern society which was busy chasing progress, growth and development did not listen. It refused to believe there was any environmental crisis or problem. It said science and technology will always find a solution - if earth gets destroyed we will move on to another planet.

Impossible dreams were sold to people in the name of science and technology.

Moving to another planet would probably rank as the most impossible of all impossible things.

One space shuttle exploded during take off - another exploded on the return journey.

So far man has not been able to go beyond the moon. There is no other life sustaining ecosystem/ planet within the solar system. Outside the solar system planets and galaxies are millions of light years away - billions of light years away.

So when are we moving to a new home ?

Next year - or 5 years later ?


sushil_yadav
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Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

Frankly, the expression of these ideas have a bit of the borderline psychotic quality of Timecube or similar ramblings, but there are still nuggets of valid concern, in my opinion, so I'll speak to those:

I disagree with the premise that "fast society" causes "slow emotions to become extinct" in the sense that the thus-induced thinking "destroys emotional circuits" literally although I'd defer to a neurologist or neuroanatomist here. You still may have a nugget of grievance here; the norms of a fast-paced, information-intense society may tend to push people away from taking the time for reflection and introspection. In this sense, the emotions that are better understood through deep reflection are at best understood superficially or left unprocessed altogether. In some cases, the hyper-individualized, moment-focused lifestyle may cause people never to even make the basic connections necessary to feel in any way towards others outside their circumscribed social groups. This is because the individual has become solipsistically focused on enhancing their own achievements, focused on the importance of their narrow social connections.

When the brain has become habituated to a constant high level of stimulus, withdrawal may be experienced as boring and perhaps depressing, similar in some aspects to withdrawal from an addictive drug.

The need for fast, intense everything may be the result of a highly extraverted, sensation-seeking majority (or at least influential minority) who need this constant rapid input of external information; it's almost as if the bulk of society has some form attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

I reject as false the dichotomy between thinking and feeling. Maturity requires the synthesis of both such that thinking informs feeling and feeling guides thinking.

I think this perception is more the result of cultural norms that demand a detached, impersonal professionalism and homogeneity, as if people were replaceable cogs in a machine. The more human aspects of their being are left largely unshared.

A workaholic avoids anxiety by working ceaselessly. Many people cannot stop working for many reasons: perfectionism/workaholism (see obsessive-compulsive (anankastic) personality disorder), fear of losing their job, a desire to "get ahead" of the competition, a workplace culture of overworking, genuine enjoyment of work (more as play than as work).

Utter nonsense.

Actually, I'd say it's population levels that are not sustainable. Contrary to popular belief, preindustrial lifestyles can be extremely environmentally destructive - for example surely slash and burn agriculture (used by primitive jungle tribes) is surely the most destructive form of agriculture imaginable, and far less sustainable, per tonne of food produced, than modern industrialised agriculture. On the topic of food, modern mechanised agriculture has been just about the only thing ever to increase agricultural production other than by clearing wild land.
Chronic famine and plagues keeping the population down in a preindustrial world may be sustainable, but I'd rather have a more modern world and a population kept at sustainable levels by contraception.




Moving to another planet is clearly delusional for the foreseeable future, but it does not follow that modern society is doomed. Actually, the only societies that have collapsed due to man-made ecological catastrophe are primitive ones, like in Easter Island.



Do you honestly think that people in developed countries today really work harder than, say, medieval peasants?

Funnily enough, I recently watched a documentary about feudalism in the UK where they stated that the feudal peasant actually *did* spend less time working than today. Of course it's impossible to compare 'like with like'. The peasant may well have spent less time in the fields working for his master than the 40+ hours a week we do these days. However, cooking, washing etc must have been so much more time consuming and harder work back then.

With hunter/gatherers isn't it more or less accepted as fact that they spend far less time 'working' than we do?

Quality of life must count for something too. They certainly knew how to let their hair down and party (so long as the oppresive misery of organised-religion was avoided) and didn't suffer the levels of psychological problems and depression that we do. What point is there in 'labour saving' when you have no friends, no community and spend every 'saved' second hypnotized by a "glowing rectangle"?

It is not always the case that 'progress' or 'changes' were made due to overwhelming mass opinion and rebellion against the misery of their current position. Often, changes have been forced on the reluctant masses from above, as part of the power and greed games played by the rulers.

This reminds me of that funny scene in -Monty Python: The Life of Brian-. What have the Romans done for us?

ruveyn

Plenty of running water in nature. Water does NOT originate in the tap


Apart from fire, which has been known to have it's uses. Shade and cool breeze is also available free of change direct from the back of the Great Mother.


Instant macrobiotic diet! Many nutrition guides recommend that it is healthier to eat according to the season.


Spear....deer....??? Nah .. I'll go eat twigs instead.


Apart from the thousands of medical compounds found in plants. Still a source of medicines.


Kahlil Gibran wrote: "Trees are a poem written across the sky. Humans destroy the trees to make paper so they can write about their loneliness".

The Epic of Gilgamesh was transmitted orally for over 4,000 years. I have CD's that are f****ed after 3 years. 99.9% of all words written have no real value at all.


Legs? Horses? The archeological record shows that the people have been travelling large distances for millenia.

I'm a huge fan of dysentery too.

Oh the dysentery...


We can thus be reasonably sure you do not live in a humid continental climate.


Meat, for better or worse, accounted for a very low proportion of human calorie intake until recently. There was a reason for this.


Life expectancy comments from previous discussion stand.


Trees are no substitute for actual knowledge.


Slowly.

I am however increasingly convinced that technological society is not making people happier at all, despite. We thus either need to change people, or replace them.

And cancer? Heart disease? Depression? These and many more are the blessings of industrial living. But then the diet of non-stop propoganda from the media is designed to prevent most seeing the mess they live in.


That's a bit daft, isn't it??? Surely knowledge and trees can co-exist peacefully?



That technological is not making people happier is becoming glaringly obvious! Why should we change the people rather than the technology, though? Surely technology exists to serve us. Although I can see that as we get deranged by the impact of excessive technology, we lost sight of this.

All of which exist, but detract a minimum from people's life-years. An agricultural society would be an utter mess for human health such as we in a post-industrial era have no experience with. The only defensible position for health improvement is advocating all out primitivism, and that's only great if you're okay with 1) ignorance and 2) ded bebehs.


Not really. Modern knowledge requires an advanced society to go with it, but maybe we can work out an arrangement for the trees


No it does not. My ideal involves accomplishing bigger things than indulging the banal pleasure of an animal. To reproduce one of those nice sound bites that Mill could produce in spite of himself,

True, in the past smallpox, bubonic plague, leprosy, dysentery, rabies, tuberculosis, etc would very likely would get you before cancer did. Chronic famine ensured that people had low cholesterol levels, somehow that doesn't seem like an ideal way of preventing heart disease. Go to a forest in winter and see how much food you come across. The hard facts of life expectancy and infant mortality rates in modern developed countries versus anywhere else speak for themselves - in fact in terms of these just about all countries now, even Third World ones, are doing much better than primitive societies.
Comparing the health problems of the modern developed world with those of primitive societies is, frankly, pretty ignorant.

With the exception of tuberculosis, these are all diseases of civilisation. Smallpox and leprosy were first recorded in early civilisations, then spread through explorers, soldiers and merchants. The New World did not have a smallpox problem until it was brought to their shores by unhealthy, so-called 'civilised' Europeans.

Dysentry is clearly a result of unsanitary living in civilised conditions where, due to the strict ownership of land enforced by the state, people are not allowed to move to a source of clean water and forced to live in unsanitary conditions.

Bubonic plague is spread by rats. Rats thrive off the waste produced in towns & cities. Then the plagues were spread by trade between civilisations.

Tuberculosis has been around for a long time, so this is a disease that does appear to pre-date civilised living. The others you list all seem to result from the unsanitary conditions of early civilisations, combined with their lack of medical knowledge. Civilisation eventually comes up with cures for it's own diseases, but that doesn't take away the basic point that living in a civilised manner puts unatural physical and psychological stress onto us that results in diseases that didn't occur in pre-civilised people.

I don't think being primitive is some blissful Garden of Eden type state, but I don't think being civilised is blissful, either! Civilisation *does* have it's cost and I believe that our way forward is neither to revert back to primitive, nor continue blindly worshipping technology for technologies sake. I'd like to to see some kind of synthesis of the two as rejecting the environment that created us over x millions years is the root of many of our problems.

And comparing "First" with "Third" world countries is not really what this is about. Third World countries are not uncivilised, they are not exempt from the effects of civilisation, but they have suffered a lot due to the excesses of the "First" world countries.

You need scribes of some sort to write things down - I wouldn't expect accounts of leprosy for instance from illiterate peoples.




True, but it wasn't ended by herbal remedies, or by the supposed wisdom of shamans, or by living more 'natural' lifestyles - it was eradicated by mass vaccination.




'Clean' water from the wild is actually unsafe unless you boil it first. Tap water in most developed countries is safer (and tap water from just about anywhere is safe if you boil it).




And bubonic plague is no longer a threat because it is curable with antibiotics. Again, a disease that once wiped out a third of Europe has been made an irrelevance by modern medicine*, not by folk remedies, not by eating seasonal fruit, not by drinking from mountain streams, not by listening to witch doctors.

*It also helps that there are no famines in Europe anymore. Incidentally industrial societies only experience famines in wars (North Korea is the only industrial society in history to have experienced a famine in peacetime), whereas preindustrial ones suffered them in wartime and peacetime.




Obviously civilisation has many problems, but I'd still rather live in a society in which most children born will live for decades in reasonable health, in which nobody actually starves to death even in winter, etc. Of course it can be improved, but not by going back to conditions that were far worse.



Yes, but even so they have it better than primitive societies, if you look at actual life and death issues - life expectancy and infant mortality.