Your Attention

Birds, squirrels, deer or other critters who are out in the world are almost always scanning their environment for danger. Their brain is building a model of the world they observe, listen to, and smell that keeps them safe. It's actually really striking when they relax for a minute or two--in those moments they seem really human. In the summer, for example, on really hot days, I've seen squirrels stretch out on the ground and take a break like they're at a person at the beach.

Human beings are, for the most part, in a safe environment. For example, we don't scan the sky for predators that might swoop in from a tree top. Our attention is freed up from survival and with some discipline we can decide what to do with it. We can spend our attention. Our attention basically builds our future life.

Unfortunately, it's really easy to steal attention. Politics and media personalities are adept at it. It's impossible to ignore their antics all the time, but if you can keep the thieves out of your mind most of the time, you'll be able to chart your own course, and set your own priorities.

Creating Consumer Society

Dick Proenneke

I think the easiest way to see our consumer culture society is by comparing it with people who don't live that way, but still live very successfully. One of the templates I go to in my blog time and again are the Amish. Other more relevant examples are Richard Proenneke and any of a number of "homesteader" YouTubers like this guy.

I was going to write a longer essay on this topic, but I think it's actually easier to just show it. Go browse through photos of older versions of the consumer culture, e.g. 1920s America and you can see it.

I think the formula for creating consumer culture is simple: parade royalty around on stage (or some version of royalty) as models, then sell watered down dollar store versions of their lives to the average person on credit. Immerse the whole society in a swamp of credit until it drives all the value out of every single thing: houses, modes of transportation, clothing, etc... et voila you've got a consumer culture.

The antidote to it is to avoid credit, and to be conscious of the value of things.

Cultural Moments

The particulars of day-to-day life are like the silk in the spider web network of memories, experience and ideas that make up culture. These particulars form a unique, fleeting signature. There's no true, living external access into that web. Ex post facto, a person can gaze upon the stale, dead artefacts of a time, and ponder what it might have been like to live at a particular time and to see a particular work of art, or to partake in some event, but they really can never know.

Similarly, the work of an artist or an author or myth maker can be born in a network of associations completely apart from the experience of the viewer. Take Twin Peaks as an example. David Lynch's particular life experience and his generalized technical and artistic knowledge created images and stories that were digested by people who were a generation younger than him. The oddball quirks of the imagery in that show were already out of context for its audience, and now even those experiences are anachronisms.

The 70s childhood that formed my brain is unattainable to young people today: riding around in the back of a Volare station wagon with summer sun blazing in through the windows cooking the vinyl seats, taking dirt roads to the grandparents house while Kenny Rogers drones in the background beneath a conversation about bigfoot.

If there are any egregore, a good place to search for them is in those unique cultural moments. Those moments are almost palpably distinct things. They're entities all their own. 

Cults are the Norm

Catherine (L) and India (R) Oxenberg
Who is Stuck in a Sex Cult NXIVM

People seem made to belong to a tribe, but civilization has blotted out tribal society in the Western world. Any rivals to the power centers in capital cities are subverted, undermined and co-opted. Even the smallest, least significant movements get that treatment. Self-determination or group determination are stymied. You stay on the script and go to work and shop, or reject that life and either live like an Amish person or end up homeless.

Various cons and schemes pop up as substitute tribes. Brand cults, like Apple or Tesla fill that need. Organizations like the Masons, Churches attempt to fill that need. Sports team fandom attempts to fill that need. Gold and Silver salesmen capitalize on that need. Alt-media personalities also capitalize on that need. Lots of apparently intelligent, curious people believe Cliff High can predict the future by looking at internet text.

Social intelligence is the norm. That is, people evaluate what's true, what's real, likely, or what's desirable by their social context. Maybe it's not really possible to do anything different.

Elves and Orcs

There's two visions of the future presented in science fiction. The Star Trek vision is one where human beings have access to virtually limitless energy provided by something like a fusion reactor which enables technology like matter transporters and replicators. Another one is the dystopia, where the systems required to create the Star Trek future go dark, let's call that the Bladerunner future.

There's a sort of similar duality in Lord of the Rings. The elves have techniques and technology and morals that's are in harmony with nature. The orcs are perversions of nature--artificial beings that are almost purely destructive. Presumably the other races in Tolkien's world are somewhere between those two poles.

The Star Trek future is really the City on the Hill model for civilization, where humanity, organized and empowered through technology spreads empire and fights for control and establishing its order in the universe. The Elves are more like the Garden of Eden model, where nature establishes the boundaries and its our task to discover them and live within them.

I see the Star Trek vision as a total fantasy. It ends up in Bladerunner world, or in a world inhabited by Orcs. This fantasy vision is epitomized by the idea of colonizing Mars, which is really basically a project to fabricate an Earth on a different, hostile planet.

Culture and Law

Ohio has a perennial problem with nitrate pollution harming water quality of lakes and rivers, and even groundwater. The pollution is from farm run off and inadequate public and private waste water treatment systems. People would rather spend funds on other things than cleaning up water, and most of the time this type of pollution is invisible. It only becomes obvious when there are toxic algae blooms that close beaches, or in random individual cases, when private well water actually gets polluted and becomes toxic.

Ohio's water problems pale in comparison with third world countries with high population denisty and no treatment of industrial, agricultural, or human waste. The Ganges River, for example, is more polluted than effluent from a typical septic tank in the United States. EPA standards in the United States force beaches to close when e coli. bacteria count exceeds 235 / 100 mL of water. The Ganges has concentrations of 100,000,000 / 100 mL of water!

So here's the question: would people in the United States install septic systems if they didn't have to? (probably not) But the flip side of that question is: when there are laws for public sanitation, and people en masse don't follow them (for example, in India), then what good is the law?

It seems like cultural imperatives are necessary for the legal ones to have any effect. It also seems likely that the cultural imperatives without the force of law will go lax over time, or allow a society to fracture up into regions where different behavior is tolerated.

Social Creatures and Ideology

Famous recluses kept journals about their day-to-day activities, and their philosophical observations. Even in the cases where men fled the city to be with nature, they kept writing to stay in contact with some element of humanity, or just to have an imaginary friend. (As an aside, are there any famous nature women who went off to live in the wilderness?)

People seem to be very attuned to the social context of what they think and say, and ideologies seem to be really wound up with human relationships, rather than stand-alone, divinely ordained doctrines. The 2016 presidential election in the United States demonstrated how the political parties in the US aren't really ideological, but are vast patronage networks.

This also explains cult behavior. Belonging to a group is possibly the most powerful human motive. Otherwise rational people will decide to believe some rando dude's a messiah.