Old Word Repurposed: Warrior

Warrior is an ambiguous term to most people.
But then so is adult. People become adults by trudging through time one second at a time, and accumulate additional privileges through no achievement or effort in most cases (earning a driver's license and graduating high school are the most arduous things that people must do to acquire the traditional trappings of adulthood).
You can become an adult in the modern world so easily that term is meaningless. Warrior is something that you become by doing something. Like being an athlete or a writer or a scientist or a scholar; being a warrior implies a doing in the word itself. If you claim to be an athlete, but look like Homer Simpson people will rightly question your claim. But to claim to be an adult, one need merely get older and have a piece of ID if you wish to enter a bar.
We use Warrior not to mean one who is violent, but one who is ready to face the world: capable of critical thought, able to be self-sufficient, and able to defend their self against opposing forces.

Monday Meditations: On Pacifism

I would only have to write this to a domesticated populace. Attack a bear at your peril- it WILL retaliate. Watch small children, if one transgresses the other- the injured party will inevitably respond. Watch the social life of wolves or chicken, the pecking order is not a metaphor.

Only the modern human is so domesticated, self-defense having become so alien, that not fighting back in the face of violence could be touted as a virtue.

Even the loyal and humble dog will snap at an abuser. Humans have domesticated animals precisely by breeding for docility, and in doing so the effectively breed out the ability for these animals to survive without human intervention.

What then, does that say about us and how those in power have shaped our modern domesticated human tendencies? If upset, we protest. That is to say, we beg those who have wronged us and ask that they make things better.

Violence is power, and the threat of violence is power. The rightness of the ability to meet oncoming violence with defensive violence is what underlies the laws allowing self-defense. Likewise the rightness of meeting oncoming violence with violence is what anyone who intervenes in an assault or a rape invokes. This is why they are lauded as heroes.

What does it say about us, when we vilify all uses of violence- including righteous ones? What does it say about the imbalance of power when we live in a society where the right violence is implicitly or explicitly granted to one group and not another? What do these things tell us about society?

Virtually every aristocracy in history has tried to limit the underclasses access to the means of violence. Swords or spears may only be wielded by certain groups. Certain elite are explicitly allowed to kill underclass members for any perceived slight. This imbalance is not an accident.

Some readers may be put off by my use of the word violence in a positive manner, rather than using a more polite and acceptable word like self-defense. Violence is a means of self-defense, as is charm, as is running, as is psychology and bribery, and so on. Self-defense is safely vague and politely allows the meek to talk around or about violence without ever having to address the honest nature of violence. This choice of words, unless used to include the whole array of self-defense possibilities, is cowardly.

And of course cowardice is good, meekness in the flock makes the sheep dog's duties easier- those chosen few allowed to wield the sword. But you only need a few sheepdogs. After all, you don't want sheep with sharp teeth in your flock.

Addiction

Have you ever thought about civilizations caffeine addiction? Have you ever considered the implications inherent in the fact that as a culture we must drug ourselves daily with stimulants in order to convince ourselves to participate in the collective game we all agree to play? One fifth of all Americans admit to dreading Mondays. 10 to 15% of people admit to having a episode of clinical depression in their lifetime. Just over 9% admit to using illicit drugs. Alcohol and Marijuana remain the most abused illicit drugs in the USA. One would almost think that we were trying to hide from the reality of our situation. I suspect the feeling is one of helplessness. Attempting to medicate our pain is not the approach of somebody who believes that their situation can be solved. By attempting to medicate our collective depression, anxiety, angst, malaise and more away; we are saying that we cannot remove the factoring that are causing or contributing to those feelings.

Something Missing

There is something missing from your life. A hole at the center of your being. You are less than you should be. You want more.

You are not crazy. The world around you is crazy. And you are awake. And so it's up to you.

There are Rules

Humans are bags of meat dancing a crazy dance due to the electric current running through them. They dance to a beat and a rhythm derived from their genes and their neural pathways and modified by experience and social pressures.

If you wish to imagine an immortal soul on top of this, be my guest. But any immortal soul present seems not to intervene with the working of the human body as described above, even including the workings of the human brain. If you wish to imagine that such a hypothetical soul does intervene in the workings of the human body including the brain, then again be my guest. However, you will be correct in guessing how people behave less often than those who do not make that assumption.

With all of that sobering information in hand, let's look at how humans interact.

The Breeding Instinct

All animals exist to survive long enough to breed. This is not a hypothesis, this is a provable fact. Humans are created and derived from their genetic code, they are servants to their genetic code and strongly limited by that genetic code. That genetic code is derived from the parents of any individual human. Humans that do not breed, remove their genetic code from the human experiment, as with all other animals. And so, the imperative to breed is wired into human beings more securely than anything else. You can argue against such assertions, but adultery, Playboy magazine, polygamy, Spring Break, the film industry, pretty much every major religion, the existence concubines, and more will prove you wrong.

We can argue, if we wish, than this genetic urge should be resisted, or controlled, reined in, or transmuted (to steal a phrase from Napoleon Hill). But this only proves the existence of the genetic imperative further. Humans, and in fact all animals and plants and fungi and so forth exist to breed. If they did not, they would not continue to the next generation, because breeding is a profoundly dangerous activity that actively impedes the success of the parent organisms. At the very least parents must spend calories producing the necessary extraneous parts, and the female must devote a certain amount of time to gestating the offspring, and many animals must devote significant time and energy to new creatures that cannot contribute to the welfare of the parents. Parenthood is a profoundly losing proposition, until you take into account that we are genetically wired to find it valuable and fulfilling. We are wired to get hormonal happiness hits for meeting these genetically wired breeding milestones. And we must account for this genetic influence if are to accurately account for, anticipate and structure human behavior.

The Tribal Mind

Humans are neurologically wired to be swayed by peer pressure. You can argue against this, but decades of psychological experimentation will prove you wrong. From Stanley Milgram to Dan Ariely to Philip Zimbardo; study after study and test after test have explained that the human mind is designed to work as part of a group, not as a lone individual. Humans are apes. Most apes are social beings. Whether for prey species or predator species, social behavior is a useful adaptation. Sociability is so useful it even arises in lions, members of the usually solitary feline species. Social species develop neural pathways that are optimized for social behavior. Compare the behvior of a pet cat to that of a pet dog. Dogs are naturally social animals, cats are not. And the need for social acceptance that dogs have is so well observed its practically an accepted punch line to jokes.

Humans have the same social punchline. We are easily influenced, easily coerced, because the cost of losing in-group status is frequently death by exile. And as such we need to take our easily duped neural programming into account if we are to accomplish things that are unpopular or unknown.

Humans are wired neurologically to think socially, and we are amongst the most intensely social species in history, with brains designed to memorize faces and to notice and retain friendship and relationship statuses for the group of which we are part. But our social instincts are still bounded by biological instincts. The law of 150 is a documented general limit of the human mind to retain between 100 and 200 (generally 150) people and their related social connections clearly in mind. Beyond that number, people become strangers by biological necessity. And if you are a stranger, then the brain sees you as an other. And in the world of the tribe, the other is less than human.

If this sounds xenophobic, that's because it is. Nothing competes against an individual animal so strongly as a member of its own species, because no other species wants the same types of food, the same types of territory and dens, the same types of mates. And for social species, the only members of the species that are generally safe are those of the in group, the tribe. And so when the human brain hits its biolgical limit of 150 in this new global village it begins to strain under the new requirements of universal cooperation expected of it. two hundred throusand years of human evolution and millions of years of evolution before that has shaped the human mind to see those not in the in-group as less than human. There is a reason so many tribal people's names for their tribe translates directly as "the People". They are people, other humans are not. This isn't evil, although it may feel that way at first blush. Tribes that didn't operate this way may have existed, but they couldn't compete effectively for resources and so they no longer exist.

For the first one hundred and ninety thousand years of human evolution, the tribe engaged in social adaptation and refinement to optimize how the tribe worked related to how the human brain thought. For the last ten thousand years however, we have engaged in a massive social experiment that is unlike anything we encoutered in the previous 2 million years before, and our minds are not adapted to this new social experiment. We have attempted to mandate a change in social behvior, but the human brain has limits and unless we take those into account we will continue to get results other than what we want.

Humans, as we previously noted, compete most strongly with other humans. And in order to breed, humans must survive to maturity. Further, in order for an individual human's genes to survive in the body of their offspring, the offspring must survive. As such, humans and human groups that are better at surviving in the long term tend to continue passing their genes from generation to generation longer than those that do not look at survival as a group activity.

As such, the instinct for survival is deeply rooted in humans, but so too (in an apparent paradox) is the instinct for cooperation. prior to this modern experiment, huamn social groups balanced these instincts well and made humans one of the most broadly successful species on the planet, existing in nearly every avaiable ecosytem and on every continent save Antarctica.

Conclusions

Humans are the sum of their biological systems, their personal experience, and their social environment. And for nearly two hundred thousand years our social sturcture was built to work with and optimize our biological inheritance.

If we are to maximize what we can accomplish, we must do this again.

The Future

I want to talk to you today and I want to let you know that you are the most important generation in history. And that because of that, history will remember people like you and me as history's greatest villains. The world is in danger on multiple levels.

The evidence has been obvious for years. But only now are people starting to accept the evidence in large numbers. As a result, this generation- you and I will be blamed for the collapse that is likely coming. This is not fair, but this is how it is.

The previous generation- your parents and mine- will claim ignorance. They will say that the signs weren't clear. They are lying, of course, to save their guilty souls. The signs were clear. Our parents simply stuck their heads into the sand and passed the buck to us.  Well, unfortunately for us- the buck seems to have stopped here. Our parents are busy playing denial or pass the blame or both. So we are all that's left.

And based on our performance so far- history will remember us as villains and cowards- as world breakers. In the time it has taken to say this. Another species is likely extinct, 15 will be extinct by the end of this hour, over 300 by the end of the day. Between 300 and 600 acres of rain forest will have been deforested permanently. Almost 300 people will have been born, onto a planet whose population has gone from 1.5 billion to 6.7 billion is roughly 100 years.

Species extinction, deforestation and associated ecosystem destruction, overpopulation.

Why do we allow this?

Because its too big? Because we need to make a living? Because we have bills to pay and assignments to hand in? Because time spent saving the world means an F in biology or not paying the cable bill?

How dare we.

"Of Course, these are critical services, but energy's role in our lives is actually more fundamental, essential, and subtle. We extract energy from our environment to create order out of disorder and complexity out of simplicity. Put simply, societies with access to lots of energy are generally more adaptive, resilient, and better at solving problems."

(The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon, page 37)

A Formal Objection


The paragraph above exemplifies nearly everything destructive and self-defeating about our civilization. It articulates near perfectly almost the whole of the Industrialized Nation's philosophy.

"We extract energy from our environment to create order out of disorder..."

Let us start with this passage. It is, just to start, patently untrue. This statement implies that the natural world lies in disorder without us civilized humans. That the water cycle, and erosion and plate tectonics are disordered and without pattern. That natural selection and macro-evolution are just random events. That ecosystems are simply random collections of animals and plants. The ignorance in this statement is simply astounding.

The second half of the sentence is even worse however.

"...and complexity out of simplicity."

Tribal cultures have an incredible level of order- just to limit ourselves to humans for the moment. Pretending that there is a higher level of complexity in civilized society fails to take into account all the myriad of nuances of tribal society.

Beyond human affairs however, the passage says implicitly and explicitly that what civilized humans make is more complex than a leaf of lettuce or a grain of millet and the accompanying plant that produced it, and the accompanying ecosystem, food web/food chain that made that plant possible- tying together thousands of species and even more apparently inanimate forces such as the wind and the nitrogen cycle.

The arrogance in this statement, arrogance that is left as a premise and not even examined by its author, is almost beyond belief. Or at least, the arrogance would be beyond belief if it did not come from a culture with a ten thousand year history of such arrogance.

The next sentence is not as bad, but it has within it one of the key miss-assumptions of civilized humanity.

"We often use this order and complexity, in turn, to help us solve the problems we face- for instance, to shelter ourselves from our harsh environment and to protect ourselves from attack."

By assuming that the world is harsh, everything becomes an enemy or an attack. This basic belief in a hostile wilderness (the wilderness itself being an invention of civilized humanity) is what allows us to drive all species before us and destroy them whenever they resist or simply stand in the way of our expansion.

"Put simply, societies with access to lots of energy are generally more adaptive, resilient, and better at solving problems."

This statement is partially true on the surface. Such societies are rarely more adaptive and just as rarely better at solving problems. They don't need to be either, because they can simply pour energy into the problem. Much in the way a rich person can simply spend money to make most problems go away.

And this does not make the rich person more adaptive. They pay other people to be adaptive. All of this does make the society more resilient however- at least temporarily. The weakness of this statement is that such societies are thus dependent upon a mass of cheap and readily available energy.

In other words, such societies are addicted to energy. They are slaves to cheap fuel and act like junkies when they need another 'hit' of cheap energy to keep their economies and the accompanying systems running.

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.

-Edmund Burke

Another Path?

Instead of looking at the world around us as both a dangerous wild place and also as a giant piggy bank we can take as much from as we like, we should instead look at the world as a partner.

The world is not alien. We have made ourselves very alien, but the earth is not alien at all. The earth is our home and our parent and our partner in our continued existence.

We need to treat it like an equal. Take what we need, but never again become so gluttonously greedy. Give back to the earth when we take from it. Treat it, and by association ourselves and our children, with respect.

This lifestyle will necessitate adaptive cultures, and resilient cultures, because your become more capable and adaptive and resilient when you cannot simply throw money/energy at a problem and attempt to over power it. In such cases you must be creative and capable and - obviously- better at solving problems.

Our problem is that all that -very limited- high energy fuel has made us very lazy; and wealth has taken the place of ingenuity. We need to regain our ingenuity and our resilience. And that starts with changing our premises.

The earth is not a wilderness, full of disorder and dangers. It is our home and our workshop and out school. We do not need more energy to be more adaptive and resilient. We need more ingenuity, more mental flexibility and more competence to be adaptive and resilient.

We need to seek enough, not more. We need to work with our partners on this planet- the animals, the green plants, the fungi, the bacteria. We have been at war with 1.5 million species, as well as the ecosystem that makes our continued survival possible, and it is a war we cannot win.

We need a whole new world view, and we need it now.

New Term: Year Zero

Year Zero is the time and process of becoming intersufficient. Named after the tradition in DC Comics of giving heroes a new back story by writing retrospective revisionist origin stories (retcons) and titling them 'Year One'; most famously 'Batman: Year One' by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. Grant Morrison pitched a reboot effort for the Batman movie franchise after the disaster that was 'Batman and Robin', by proposing a Batman origin story called 'Batman: Year Zero' that would focus on how Bruce Wayne became Batman rather than his early time as Batman. The title has recently been coopted for a new Batman story arc with similar aims.

And so with this pedigree, we coopt the idea of Year Zero as the period of becoming who we were meant to be, the period in which we become the heroes that the world needs.

It is tempting to use Matrix inspired terminology like the 'red pill', however simply waking up to what must be done is only a very small part. Bruce Wayne's training and discovery process that is inherent in the term Year Zero is far more accurate and more empowering.

Monday Meditations: The Path of life

The path of the free human, the path of the wild human is thus: from dependence to independence to Interdependence. To stop early is to never learn how to be human, and never learn how to properly be an animal, and how to properly live upon the earth. 

Dependence

You were born a child, helpless, in need of protection, instruction and nourishment. You were cared for and taught and fed and sheltered. This is the way of the child, and those of us who still cannot make our own way without the resources of others are here still, and thus still children.

Independence

Your mission, your task, your purpose as a child is to learn. You must learn to be an adult. To be an adult you must know how to think for yourself- to spot deceptions, to reason things through, to ponder, and think creatively. These are the marks of an adult- an active intellectual life. To be an adult you must be able provide for yourself, food, and shelter and clothing and tools that you will need. The mark of an adult it the ability to make or find what one needs to live alone.  To be an adult you must also be able defend yourself and your home. What good is the ability to grow food, if a man with a sword shows up each day to take your food from you and eat it himself? What good is the ability to think great thoughts if a man with a sword can force you to turn you mind to making him a more effective conqueror? Thus you must defend.

Interdependence

As essential as those three things are, they do not make you fully an adult yet. Until you have used your skills to contribute to your community and connect into that web of interdependence- teaching and providing willingly to continue the community into tomorrow, you are only an adolescent. The skills are essential, giving those skills back is what completes the transformation from child to adult.

Caveman Science Fiction

Caveman Science Fiction

Also by Aaron Diaz, from his webcommic Dresden Codak, this comic shows a strong counter argument to blind fear of the future. That does not make the comic's own arguments immune to a solid examination from somebody unafraid of bringing critical thinking to bear. Give it a read and think about what assumptions the author himself is making.

Stolen Word: Resillionaire

A Resillionaire: and individual with the ability to rebound despite the stress and adversity. This is something that we should all seek to be. But our willpower, our internal Mana, is a fungible and finite resource that we must manage in order to do this. In order to be able to remain resilient in times of adversity, we need to be confident in our abilities- to assess the chaotic world around us causing our adversity, to provide for ourselves despite the adversity without skillset, and the protect ourselves from those people who would take advantage of the adversity to take from others less able.

To be a resillionaire, you have to build up your internal assets rather than your financial assets.

New Word: Intersufficiency

Intersufficiency or intersufficient is a word built from the words interdependeny and self-sufficient. The word means to be self sufficient in order to be part of a healthy interdependent group. The premise is that you cannot contribute properly to the group and the group cannot function in a healthy manner unless all members are able to contribute sufficiently to make everyone feel as though the arrangement is fair. Intersufficiency can be seen a trait of both a group and an individual. An interusfficient group is one where the members are all self-sufficient enough without the group that all members are able to contribute without coercion. An intersufficient individual is one who is able to provide for themselves, but who is also able to apply those self-sufficiency skills for the benefit of the group.

On Being Buried Alive (Not like that!)

-From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"An earth lodge is a semi-subterranean building covered partially or completely with earth, best known from the Native American cultures of the Great Plains and Eastern Woodlands. Most earth lodges are circular in construction with a dome-like roof, often with a central or slightly-offset smoke hole at the apex of the dome.[1] Earth lodges are well-known from the more-sedentary tribes of the Plains such as the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara, but they have also been identified archaeologically among sites of the Mississippian culture in the Eastern United States."

  

If we look throughout the world, we see a lot of people digging themselves into the ground, despite the potential problems of dampness and water and (without electricity) a distinct lack of light. 

Plains Indians of the United States did this, as did tribes of the Mississippi, and the British Columbian Interior region. Germanic tribes and Scottish and Hebridean peoples used the Black House which was a similar double stone walled design. Early humans in South East Asia took refuge in caves, and earth mounds in England may possibly have been used to living quarters as much as burial grounds.

Why? After all, it is a lot of work to dig into the ground, and that ground is wet and damp. What benefit is derived from such buildings?

Quite a lot in fact.

• http://www.galfromdownunder.com/dan-price/
• http://www.surfersjournal.com/journal_entry/dan-price-and-his-hobbit-hole

The traditional dome shape of most earth lodges and black houses resists the cold brought by freezing wind through its low profile and resists earthquakes well due to its strong shape. Being built with thick walls and submerged in the earth keeps an earth lodge cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter without any added on the part of the occupant, due to the strong ambient temperature of the earth. The impact up the landscape if strong only in the early stages, after construction the land moves back in and re-greens the earth lodge quite nicely.

The primary challenge on the earth lodge is water. Water call enter and pool in the lodge if proper steps are not taken. Water can wear away at many standard building materials, such as wood (logs and beams) and thatch or similar. And all of this can render an earth lodge more temporary than a modern house might be. 

Additionally, being underground can lead to ventilation problems and poor air quality if the problems are not addressed. And finally, as previously mentioned, light can be an issue in an underground building, that may or may not have electricity.

The use of stone in the outer walls, preferably the double stone with a gravel inter lay that is commonly used in the Hebridean black houses would improve both the drainage and the longevity of the standard wooden framed earth lodge.

Adding a similar stone floor would reduce water that could collect there and would also allow for cob to be used on the inner walls. Cob, a natural earth type cement that is tremendously strong when dry, but susceptible to water damage would not be suited to the outer walls of a partially submerged home, but its strong load bearing ability and longevity when dry could be safely used as inner walls, with stone at the base and the top to act as a water barrier.

This leaves the roof as the point of contention. If modern waterproofing with plastic or another impermeable substance in unavailable, then the roof will likely be the most temporary part of the dwelling, and will need to be replaced on a semi-regular basis. The thickness of the roof will be a critical factor in keeping dry with materials that are not waterproof. Although the Scandanavians used birchbark underneath a grass covered sod roof to achieve impressive water proofing with a 30 year lifespan on the roof.

To deal with the ventilation and air quality a builder can add a solar chimney or similar passive heat exchange system that uses temperature change to drive air flow. This would also allow for more traditional materials to be used, since electricity or other active energy would not need to be added to the system for the system to function. 

Finally, how to address the lighting problem? South facing windows will catch the most natural light. White walls will defuse the light more evenly throughout the room. Reflective surfaces will bounce the light, allowing for more defusion at other points in the room. Light tubes can be added to good effect. After that the best option is going to be some sort of lantern variation.

Clothing design for Homesteads and Small Tribes

Material

Leather will likely be the word of the day. Sturdy and workable  into both clothing and armor, leather is easily available through  hunting most wild game in British Columbia. Plant fibers are significantly more difficult to cultivate and  most, like cotton, need warmer climates than we can provide.  Cedar bark can be woven into certain garments, such as hats in  the style of the Haida and Salish tribes.

  Animal fibers are more easily cultivated in this climate, but  sheep generally only provide wool and no other essentials of life  besides meat when they are finally butchered. Sheep produce milk,  but this is rarely drunk, although it makes excellent cheese.  Goats can produce cashmere- which is labor intensive and low  yield although very soft- and angora with grows quickly and is  easily harvested. Goats can also be used for dairy purposes and  for meat at the end of life, and also for land clearing purposes.  Angora rabbits will also produce angora fibers, but in smaller  amounts than angora goats and they do not provide dairy and have  no land clearing ability.

 

Thus the plan for clothing materials is as follows:

• Leather and fur from hunted game ranging from deer, elk and  moose to rabbits, hares, beavers and similar.
• Goatskin and Angora fiber from Goats. We will keep a mix of  fiber and dairy goats.
• Cedar bark strips from Cedar trees, spruce roots- and  Cattails  can also be used. These are used for hat weaving,
• Scavenged metal and hard plastic, these will be used for body  armor.
• Greenery and dry vegetation will be used for Ghillie cloaks.
• Wax to waterproof hats and shoulder pads will come from bees  kept by tribe.

Fashion Sense

Hats: We suggest stealing the hat design from the Haida, bark woven  conical hats that will shed water well in the Rainy coastal  weather, probably coated in beeswax to enhance the waterproofing. You may also employ a helmet version crafted out of water hardened  leather as well.

Cloaks: We also suggest using cloaks, probably shoulder pads made of leather  or fur to help shed water in the rain. In addition to a simple  cloak for protection from cold and rain, we recommend using a  Ghillie cloak covered in local flora as a hunting and war  camoflage

Pants: Leather pants, probably wrap pants held in place with a leather  thong, or native america style chaps will be the common type of  leg covering.

Shirts: Shirt should be loose leather tops with water hardened leather  plate brigandine over them in the summer, and angora and fur over  shirts in the winter.

Shoes: Mocassins ought be the most common footwear, with furs added for winter wear.

Coats: Overcoats can be made of various materials based on needs and availability.

Kilts and Skirts and Dresses: Kilts and Skirts and Dresses are possible during warmer summer months for cooling purposes. Various materials will be used for these.

Denial of Death - Denial of Consequences

We are in denial of death. We measure success by how much we get bigger, every year, without end. We declare war on disease and old age and mortality. We are appalled every time anybody dies.

We need to welcome death. Death is the creator of life. Dying, silently, painfully, violently, peacefully- however- is what generates momentum that creates energy, space, resources and opportunity for the next generation.

Karl Marx famously declared on his death bed that last words were for those who hadn't said enough in life. I would argue that fear of death is for those amongst us who haven't done enough in life. If I am right in my assertion, then this speaks volumes for our culture. 

Death creates life. Decomposition is fuel for the next bloom of life cycle. Everything has its turn in the sun, and everything must surrender to death eventually.  If we do not admit that we must die, and take this truth into account, we will fill the world with so much life that there is no longer enough death to feed our next generation. And then, like the locusts who clear the plains of Africa with their hunger and die in a blaze of glory to feed the next generation- we will learn the hard way that death will not be denied.

Monday Meditations: Rotting Life and Decomposition Phobia

The domesticated human is afraid of death and more precisely- afraid of decomposition. Dead human bodies are sealed in boxes before they are allowed to enter the earth, safe now from every remixing with the land that birthed and sustained them, safe now from ever returning and being part of the next cycle of life. The domesticated human removes themselves from the landscape, from the eco-system. They take food, they take air and they take in minerals and nutrients, but never return them- as is the bargain life makes with itself. 

The domesticated human is a thief and a parasite. The domesticated humans takes and takes and does not give back. So the question arises- why not?

The domesticated human is afraid to die, afraid to rot, afraid to give back, afraid to return. Do they fear retribution, angry vengeance from the rest of the earthy community if they allow their body and perhaps their spirit to rejoin the earth from which it was composed? 

Do they fear something else?

Do they fear many other things?

A Quick Peak at a Grubenhaus

-From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

A Grubenhaus (pl. Grubenhäuser compounded from the German Grube [pit or cavity] and Haus [house]) is a type of sunken floored building built in many parts of northern Europe between the 5th and 12th centuries AD. In the United Kingdom, they are sometimes also known as 'grubhuts' or 'grubhouses'.

Yet another earth sheltered home design used by people elsewhere in the world. A design this popular must have something going for it.

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Quick Photo Bomb: Homestead Ideas

A Simple Question

"Do you think rules made of paper will protect you?"

Idea: The Inverse Motte and Bailey Castle

The traditional Motte and Bailey castle is basically just a hill of earth (the motte) and a wooden castle surrounded by a timber wall around the castle (the bailey). The weakness of this design is that invaders can literally just run up the hill. And additionally, the bailey is the highest point on the landscape and therefore a tempting target to anyone who is looking for a target.

My suggestion as an alternative idea is what I call, the inverse Motte and Bailey.

The motte is a ring around the bailey, with a sharp vertical edge on the outside wall with large stones to support the motte. The inside edge of the motte should taper gently down so the defenders could easily run up the hill to defend the walls. Additionally, a trench or moat could easily be added and filled with thorn bushes such as blackberries, and surrounded by quick growing trees to hide the settlement from outside view.

The bailey, instead of being the focus of the whole setup, disappears in the Inverse Motte and Bailey. Instead of a tall bailey rising up above the rest of the landscape, the settlement should be low profile with sod roofing so that even from the air, the settlement disappears into the landscape.

Whereas the original Motte and Bailey was designed to be a tenth century stronghold for a warlord who intended it to command respect. The Inverse Motte and Bailey is intended to vanish from view and disappear into the landscape. The original is a statement of domination and power. The inverse is a whisper on the land designed to meld with the land and vanish into the place itself.

With the intended goal of disappearing, access to settlement creates a challenge, allowing for easy access to the settlement for those with permission to enter and access for those goods and services brought in from outside the settlement. Can a moose or bear brought down in a hunt be brought into the settlement? If larger goods are being brought in, logs and rock for construction as an example, can these be brought easily into the settlement.

Large doors invite attack. Is there a way to hide them, perhaps behind hanging moss or some other camouflage, or perhaps behind an antechamber of earth walls much like the curve in a public washroom that hides the room without closing access? Perhaps creating a tunnel through the wall that can be more easily blocked and hidden than a large set of castle style walls.

If there is trade taking place, can that trade be redirected to a trading post that is not near the settlement? Do food or crops needs to be brought in from outside the the wall? Can these crops be moved so that they are planted within the walls?

Can access be achieved covertly, perhaps through a concealed water access way? Can access be achieved easily without sacrificing security? Can defense be achieved without drawing attention to the settlement?

Since the settlement will be using earth sheltering, can the motte itself be uses as a building, perhaps barracks or cold cellars or other public buildings? The idea of building rooms into the walls that defend the people suggests symbolic meaning in whatever purpose the rooms in the motte are used.

Also important to consider is drainage, because the motte creates a basin. Without proper drainage, the bailey will drown in the center of the motte after heavy rain. These small technical problems must be addressed, otherwise the grand idea doesn't stand for much. The devil's in the details.

Death Throes

Would be prophets step onto dangerous ground when they point to signs of the end. I hope I am wrong, but I see signs everywhere that our culture, our global empire is a wooly mammoth slowly drowning in the famous tar pits. 

 

Everywhere I look, I see a system designed for and predicated on the idea of limitless ongoing growth struggling to manage now that growth has slowed or stopped. A system with no wiggle room is now trying to cha-cha at the edge of a very steep cliff.

Our civilization is living beyond our means. We are spending more than our pay check brings in each month and are constantly borrowing from our children's college fund.

To break the  metaphor into real concrete data, the earth has biological capital that all of the species on the planet can use. This biological capital is composed of all the living things on the planet. The capital replenishes itself by breeding new life. We use the capital by ending life in order to turn that life into energy.

The system is okay so long as there is enough life available to replace the lost capital. When a species no longer is able to replenish itself, that species goes extinct. When an ecosystem no longer has enough species in the ecosystem to allow the other species to replenish themselves, that ecosystem collapses and all species there risk extinction.

When we use more of the biological capital in the ecosystem than the ecosystem can replace, we diminish the system. That is to say we cause whole species to disappear and we make the whole system more brittle.

We currently use roughly 150% of the available biological capital. In other words. Our biological salary is $1000 per week, but we spend $1500 per week. We are in the hole week after week, and we are increasing our spending.

I said that we are spending our children's college fund, but we are actually spending our children's water fund, and food fund, and energy fund and oxygen fund and life fund.

The inheritance that we are leaving to our children is devastation. And we are doing it so fast, that we will be there to explain to them what we left them when that devastation arrives. I hope you look forward to your child asking you this...

"Mom? Dad? Why did you destroy my future?"

And I hope you realize that they will be right to blame you.

Olduvai Theory Shows its Age

"The Olduvai theory states that industrial civilization (as defined by per capita energy production) will have a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years (1930-2030). The theory provides a quantitative basis of the transient-pulse theory of modern civilization. The name is a reference to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania." - From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

2030 is getting closer, and the question of whether Olduvai theory will go the way of Mathusian Theory as another discredited doomsday theory is becoming increasingly important.

I would argue however, that these doomsday scenarios should not be so easily discounted. I would argue that both Malthusian Theory and Olduvai theory are sound in the premise. As critics have noted, they did not account to technological improvements, but the technological improvements have not changed the basic premises and problems of these theories. Technological marvels have succeeded only in buying us a little more time to dig our graves a little bit deeper.

Malthus wasn't wrong that food production and population growth are at odds with each other, biologists see this tension in ecosystems everywhere. That Malthus did not foresee how fossil fuels could temporarily super-charge agriculture does not render his concerns unimportant.

That Olduvai Theory seems to have set the death knell of industrial civilization a little to early does not mean that finite resources will not run out. So pretend that a miscalculation invalidates the premise is juvenile and indicates a fear of the premise being attacked.

Why do we dismiss these theories so easily? Is it because we believe that they are wrong? Or is it because we are terrified that they are right?

On the Dangers of Complexity

Parallel processing, meaning the ability of a computer (or a human brain) to perform multiple actions at the same time, is the litmus test of a processor's power. This draws attention to a major danger. Increasing complexity requires increasing processing power- and currently the human brain is not upgradable.

This means that the capabilities of our tools is now vastly superior to our ability to keep them all straight in our minds. We are leaving broken fossils of our virtual selves all across the Internet and in a multitude of company records. Our own personal virtual network of programs and sub-routines engaged on our behalf is beyond the ability of brains to manage.

We carry notes books full of passwords, because we aren't supposed to reuse them. Everyone needs a filing cabinet now, because the age of paper just keeps stacking up.

We are disappearing within our own abstract organizational structures.

To quote Tyler Dirden, "The things you own, end up owning you."

We end up over stimulated and in need of mind numbing entertainment in order to function. Stimulate and then sedate, rinse then lather and repeat.

Transhumanism tells us we need to upgrade ourselves in order to keep up. The Amish suggest a slower response. The rest of us are caught somewhere in the middle, with the bleeding edge driving complexity forward as we flounder to keep on top of all the changes.

Every time a new petition appears complaining about the new Facebook layout is a cry for help. People like to understand the world that they live in. Every time the ground moves under their feet, the become novices, helpless against the world once more. The increasing complexity coupled with arbitrary change and supposed progress is destroying our ability to cope with the world we live in. And so we post impotent Facebook petitions and rant on blogs nobody reads.

We need to walk away and re-take the real world, the one we can effect with our hands. We need to get dirty again. The real world can be learned over a life time, and changes in that real world follow understandable rules. The concept of a 'game changer' is very rare in the real world. 

The horse and buggy still works just fine.

Saturday Thoughts: Professional Fighting VS. Actual Fighting

I was reading the paper recently, something that I do only occasionally, and I stumbled upon an article arguing the pros and cons of different scoring systems for mixed martial arts sporting competitions. This struck me as reaching to a central problem in our culture- we want somebody else to decide.

Of the mixed martial arts competitions out there, the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) is arguably the biggest. It uses a complicated judge run scoring system to determine what happens whenever there is no clear winner- which is often in recent years. This, however, was not always the case.

In the first several UFC competitions, there were no judges and- in fact- the competition trumpeted this as a positive thing. A doctor was at ringside and could stop the fight to prevent permanent injury. A refereee was in the ring to prevent illegal blows. A corner could throw in the towel for the fighter if they feared for his ability to defend himself. That was it. The fight went until a fighter was knocked out, tapped out, or the fight was stopped by one of the afformentioned officials for safety's sake.

The argument for judges, derives from the desire by TV producers to put a time limit on fights so as to prevent a fight from running outside the time alloted for the television slot. Once a time limit is added, there seems to be no way to avoid judges. And once judges are added, fighters can begin to work the clock and act aggressive rather than fight effectively in order to please the judges.

A simple solution would be to add the time limit; and then score both fights with a loss on their record if the fight goes the distance without a clear winner. The problem with this is that, domesticated culture wants a winner and doesn't like systems that are self-running. Domesticated culture needs to see oversight and managers and judges- these things validate our view that world needs to be managed and ruled.

Because after all, if things can manage themselves, "Oh my gosh, what will our Kings and Priests do?"

Word of the Day: Steward

Domesticated humans are told that they need to be good stewards of the earth and the land. In modern parlance, the word steward is used to mean a caretaker. And under this usage of the word, being a steward of the earth would mean being a caretaker for the earth, protecting it for harm and making sure everything is as it should be.

Under the older usage of the word, a steward is a servant who is charged with acting on behalf of the rightful ruler, either for day to day affairs or during an absence or because the ruler is too young or to infirm to make decisions on their own. In other words, the steward is a place holder until the proper ruler once again is making decisions.

The newer usage of the word is ridiculous when applied to the earth and domesticated humans. Asking domesticated humans to care for the earth and protect it and keep things as they should be, is analogous to charging an abusive husband with the task of acting as caretaker for his battered wife. A better analogy would be that of an abusive adult child put in charge of  being caretaker for his aging abused parents.

The older usage suggests something more interesting, because it points to the illegitimacy of domesticated human rule. The older definition of steward suggests that domesticated humans do not own the earth, do not rightfully rule it as their propaganda would suggest. They are not the rightful heirs to the throne, but pretenders to that position.

This of course begs the question, to whom then does the earth belong? There are many answers here, but the Free Path suggests that the earth belongs to itself.

No True Barter?

I read recently that there has never been a true barter economy where money did not exist. The argument was put forward that there was always a medium of exchange used to measure value of the items being exchanged.
Currencies range from cigarettes, to yak dung, to carved sticks, to coins of precious metal, to paper money. Some currencies have inherent value- yak dung can be burned as fuel, cigarettes can smoked. Others do not, such as paper money, and their value is entirely symbolic and based only upon the survival of the system that uses that currency.

The dangers of currency are many.

If a currency does not decompose or otherwise expire in some way, then that currency will tend to accumulate into the hands of a few. Since money can be used to acquire more money, those with money will tend to use their money to get more money.

And thus an elite will form. An entirely symbolic or fiat currency is susceptible to shocks and panics since it exists only because the people believe that it does.

The primary danger of currency is that there is always a danger in a currency economy that people will transform from a citizen mindset to a consumer mindset.

I don't not know if I believe that there has never been a true barter economy, but whether or not this is the case a community planner looking to avoid the pitfalls of currency must assume that this assertion is so. A community planner who is designing an intentional community must do so assuming that currency will appear within the community, whether official or unofficial.

One method of controlling the form currency takes is the state sanctioned currency. Tally Sticks and Spartan coins are both excellent examples of this. By requiring that taxes be paid in the official currency, Lycurgus of Sparta and King Henry of England, forced the use of unpopular currencies.

Usury- that is the charging of interest on loans (or in modern terms, the charging of unfair interest) is something that civilizations throughout history have fought against. The Ancient Hebrews viewed any usury as criminal, since it allowed a man to profit without doing work himself. This allows for money to accumulate and for the rise of the banking and credit card systems. If a community planner wishes to curb these impulses, they must find a way to address the need that creates money-lending and loan sharking.

Loan sharking and money lending appear when people cannot get the basics that they need to make a living or improve their condition on their own and by their own labor. Mortgages are necessary in the first world, because almost nobody can afford to buy a home outright. Loan sharking in Bangladesh was noted to be a problem for the very poor, because they could not get raw materials for their craftwork without access to currency.

People without access to the tools they need, will turn to any other viable means of getting them. Therefore you need to be sure people have access to the proper tools needed. Members of your community must be able to craft a life from nothing, in the sense that they must step out into the world and be able to craft a life from the natural world around them, requiring nothing from your society if they choose.

Taxes as a weapon are another problem that must be addressed. The original South African diamond minds were reported worked by local African tribesmen, who worked just long enough to buy pots and rifles and the few modern conveniences they wanted before returning to the tribe. To secure a more reliable source of labour, the Diamond minds convinced the governments to institute taxes that must be paid in the official currency (a strategy that work for Lycurgus and Henry as mentioned above), therefore requiring the tribesman to seek employment to pay taxes created for the purpose of forcing them to work.

It is worth noting here that solving one problem may cause others, and one technique may work in one situation, but cause all manner of disruption in another. A planner must examine the situation carefully and likely also be willing to admit error and change when the situation isn't working.

Wealth and elitism are another notable problem that currency can create. The consequences of elitism is the marginalization and misuse of whole segments of the community.

Nations and communities throughout history have used different tools to combat this problem. 
Lycurgus of Rome cast heavy iron coins that he had quenched in vinegar to make them impossible to reforge. In doing so he made made money an arduous heavy burden, rather than something a person would wish to flaunt. The Haida prevented accumulation of wealth by having pot latches where people competed to prove their greater generosity, but still suffered from elitism based upon said generosity.

The important point here, is that currency is useful to facilitate trade and exchange between individuals. The danger here, is that currency can be used as a weapon by those who have it against those who do not. A smart community planner needs to craft a system of exchange (including either an planned "unofficial" currency, or an official currency) that allows for the exchange while protecting against the dangers.

Book Review: "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, Part Two (Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Jared Diamond argues in his book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", that the locations where agriculture- and (by his assertions) civilization- arose is largely determined by geographic placement. Implicit in his argument is the assertion that those cultures that could become agriculturalists, did become agriculturalists. This assumption is ambient in the language that Diamond uses, even as he denies it directly in the text. his language screams of the idea that civilization is chapter two in the story of humanity.

This addresses one of the central arguments that Daniel Quinn makes in his novel "Ishmael"- which is that civilization is not chapter two in a story to which hunter-gatherer tribes were chapter one.

Diamond asks, several times in the text- what stopped cultures with the same intelligence as other cultures from developing agriculture. Diamond further feels the need to prove that these non-agricultural cultures were in fact intelligent. What Diamond does not ask, is whether these people were happy with their way of life as hunter-gatherers and tribalists. Implicit in the questions Diamond asks and the questions he does not ask is the assumption that hunter-gatherers must subconsciously want to become agriculturalists.

This assumption runs counter to the historical primary records. Virtually wherever tribal peoples were encountered by civilized people, the tribal people resisted to the last ditch against becoming assimilated/conquered into a civilized way of life. Even those that were agriculturalists to a lesser or greater extent resisted the way of life on offer by civilized people.

And in fact, civilized people found themselves having to fight a rear guard action against defectors from their ranks joining the ranks of the tribalists. This phenomenon became so common that a name for it entered popular culture- going native.

In his novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn points out that animals in captivity are naturally more inquisitive than those in the wild, because they can tell to a greater or lesser extent that something is wrong. And like a dog trying to scratch an itch, they begin to work at solving the problem. Quinn's argument is that progress is not some inevitable thing that humans should do or were meant to do, but something that the social inequality of civilization drove them to do, in an effort to ease the suffering their own way of life was causing them. Civilized cultures expanded and conquered the world using the tools their agriculture gave them in a desperate attempt to ease their own psychic suffering.

If you have not bought and read Ishmael yet, do so now.

Book Review: 'Ishmael' by Daniel Quinn Part One

I have worked at many jobs in my life, in large part due to my outright malice towards domesticated culture. Amongst the jobs that I have held is the job of book seller. Amongst the list of accomplishments from this job of which I am proud there is this: I have personally sold roughly 650 copies of Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael in my three years as a book seller.

This book is the seed from which many open minds have sprouted, it is brilliant and life changing. So rather than give a single review of it, I am going to examine it in detail and extrapolate from it my conclusions and how this book relates to the Free Path.

let us begin.

Teacher seeks Pupil

Must have an earnest desire to

save the world. Apply in person

That is the ad that begins the novel. That is where everything starts and where we shall start. This quote is on the back cover of the book, as well as on the second page of the first chapter. What does this say to you? Does it seem trite? Do you think the writer must be a charlatan? Are you intrigued? Are you daring to hope? The narrator is all of these things and more.

The ad explains several key things to us. The ad is not a fancy advertisment full of images and flashy type, just a simply classified ad. The ad is asking the reader to think big "earnest desire to save the world". The ad is about understanding something "Teacher seeks Pupil".

The sense of the ad is one of an outsider with a special knowledge, and strangely a knowledge that is not easy to give away. After all the teacher is advertising in the classifieds not in a full page ad, there is no heavy advertising budget behind this project.

It is an interesting idea- knowledge of how to save the world that is hard to give away. In James Redfield's "Celestine Prophecy", a shadowy vaguely governmental group is after the secret to stifle it. Here the secret is being given away and the teacher is evidently having difficulty doing so at all.

Why would it be hard to give away information on how to save the world? Perhaps for the same reason that is hard to give away information on how to lose weight- because the truth is unpopular and people will more readily buy an appealing lie rather than a stark truth?

And this is where Ishmael begins.

If you have not read and bought Ishmael you should do so now.