Creation Myths and Agriculture? Scanty Info...

The Iroquois creation myth has parallels with many other stories, including Christianity's rehash of Mediterranean stories. The characters in the myths seem to represent the sun, stars, and moon. The geography of the myths represents alignments of the stars and the earth's celestial axis. They seem to encode the story of the solar year and the cycles of the stars, planets and moon and poetically relate those elements to the human experience and the cycle of a human life.

It seems likely that prior to the mass civilizations of the middle east and Mediterranean world, people in Europe, Africa, and Asia lived in societies where shamanic tradition passed down knowledge of astronomy to help regulate activities through the year. Those stories morphed into religion, and the shaman morphed into the medieval version of a priesthood.

It's interesting to wonder if these mythical systems really shape what people think or do, or if it's totally the other way around. The western mythology might come from people who participated in pastoral "agriculture", meaning they wandered from place to place, wrecking it and then moving on. That ends up embedded in the garden of Eden Story. "Everything was good, and then we fucked it up..."

The Norse creation myth story reads a lot like the Iroquois' story and has elements of the Garden of Eden story and man-creation story, e.g. Two Sons of the Mother, Cain and Abel, or Ymir and Buri. It's pretty hard to glean much info about how agricultural practices relate to religion from the sparse remnants of the beliefs of non-Christian people, since Christianity tried to obliterate all that came before it--the religion of the locust people? "The people who build borgs."

Animals have much more of a presence in the native american and norse stories, which might indicate that those people were more embedded into the natural world than sand people or classical world urban people who wrote the bible.

Anyway, I know jack-shit about the native american mythological tradition and it'll require a whole lot more reading to gain any insights.

Asymmetric Warfare Against Corporate 'merica

I participated in a local campaign--a small town zoning issue--back in the 90s. It was the first and last time I took part in politics like that. We "won", but I realized by the election, that the system was completely stacked against individuals, even individuals who were organized into PACs or whatever.

The United States is organized by corporations for corporations. If you work in the corporate world, you realize how stupid and wasteful corporate entities actually are. They're a weird soulless phantom zone where ideas go to die and people go to partially die. I think they're basically patterned after royal navy ship hierarchy from the age of sail.

Anyway, they are ponderous things that organize life in the United States and much of the western world. If you want to "fight the system" and you do so on its own terms, you're doomed. The system is setup so all your efforts will be wasted. You're much better off adopting an asymmetric strategy that takes place in a different arena than the electoral system or the courts.

Mania for Technical Solutions

There are lots of public relations articles about artificial intelligence lately. I think PR firms are trying to get investors ready to buy stock in AI companies that will be promoted by Wall Street over the next couple of years.

The PR has a couple of themes: the inevitability of artificial intelligence, and the negative impact of artificial intelligence on the average 9-5er who goes to work everyday in the corporatocracy.

There's a mania, almost an OCD condition for applying technological solutions to every single problem. It's sort of a quest to make real the ghost in the machine, or to make flesh the passive voice. Maybe this arises from a distrust of any level of politics or being tired with human interaction, or maybe it's consciousness itself trying to be set free from an animal form from which it arises.

Brain Duality and the Complexity of Nature

If you look at a cross section of soil in a yard versus a cross section of soil in the woods, or a cross section of tilled soil in a garden, you'll see three completely different things.

The soil at the left is from the woods on our property. Specifically, it's on the edge of the woods. It has a layer of leaves and other debris that's decomposing into humus, and humus that's slowly percolating down into the topsoil beneath. Earthworms  move throughout, and microscopic life teems in the soil. Old roots and living roots poke through the soil at every conceivable angle. It's a big living thing, like a giant animal.

The tilled garden soil will look almost totally uniform. In many cases, the garden, or a lawn will end up sort as a sort of featureless sheet resembling a mathematical concept, like a plane.

Our language using brain doesn't deal very well with natural complexity. The density of information that's present in the natural world totally overwhelms it and it simplifies and generalizes.

Apparently, it's more productive to grow a garden of food in a haphazard natural environment-like setting rather than in the building-block geometric forms gardeners tend to use. What if natural language and formal languages are just mind prisons and are actually really weak and feeble tools for surviving in the world? What if civilization is a trick of the left hemisphere of the brain?

This seems overly simplistic--left brain and right brain Cain and Abel, Moonman, Sunman, Time & the Sun?

Being Inhuman

Corporate bodies rule the western world. The formula for this system was developed in the 16th century as the method for extracting wealth from the colonies of the British Empire and returning it home.

US imperialism is an evolution of that rape and pillage style colonialism. When Matthew Perry "opened Japan", the gunboat diplomacy, gunboat trade model was born. Rather than direct rape, pillage, and murder pirate style colonialism, the US imposed a system. It's leadership wanted US corporate friendly markets and participation of the subject colony in the corporate system.

After two world wars, the US system reigns over much of the world. Ostensibly sovereign countries like Germany, Japan, or even China or Switzerland are plugged into the US market system and work for Federal Reserve Notes that have mutated into various forms.

There are hardly any human beings anymore. People are cells in the body of corporate entities. We're trained that way since birth. The gray, dreary egregore dreamt up by a handful of English thinkers in the 16th century are the only gods on earth. How dull.

Nature's not all Harsh

This post is an addendum to one I did a while ago about what people know versus what early man knew, or versus even what animals know today.

The opossum is a proof that nature's not all harsh. Really the classic interpretation is that nature is equal parts harsh and kind--always neutral. (I don't even think that's true.)

The opossum's been around for tens of millions of years. It's basic defense is to insist on being left alone. It'll pretend to be scary with a big mouth full of crazy teeth when provoked, but it is actually  one of the gentler critters in the wild. There are many youtube videos showing this. It's famous defense is to pretend to be dead and rotting.

The opossum knows how to get food, water, and stay sheltered in all sorts of environments. If you don't have at least a basic grasp of the same skills, it's probably worth learning some.

Earth is "Self" Regulating

Our universe seems to be set up for short term stability within the context of very dynamic energetic physical systems. The interaction of forces, for example, that conspire to conserve angular momentum make our whirling solar system stable within the context of a whirling galaxy in an expanding universe. We are creatures of this moment in the ongoing energy density history of the universe.

Life on Earth takes place within the context of dynamic systems with multiple interacting and competing components that create environments that are hospitable to human beings. The breakdown of organic and inorganic matter that produces soil is a process that's going on all the time. The countless organic compounds and inorganic chemicals that fall on the surface of the earth get mulched into a medium that plants grow in with no human contribution or management. Tons of bacteria, fungi, insects and plants regulate the pH, chemistry, and physical characteristics of each acre of the soil every moment of the day year after year.

Western society seems to take place within the context of artifice where people labor, or pretend to labor, to get their share of what nature provides. This is maybe most aptly displayed in YouTube videos that demonstrate various composting techniques. There are probably thousands of those videos that show the nuances of putting stuff in a pile and letting it rot. There is a lot of useful information in them, but what seems most apparent is that even a compost pile is a self-regulating system and you basically have to work very hard to take it out of equilibrium.

Anyway, it seems like our labor is really aimed at demonstrating value to some imaginary (or real) hierarchy of chimp humans in a perpetual kabuki theater of reality.

The Big Argument

Diogenes Tells Alexander the Great to Get Out of His Light

This is my 162nd post. (The number is totally arbitrary by the way, no gematria bullshit here.) I can finally give a good summary of my thinking and set out on the next part of my project. If you read through the previous posts, you'll see fragments of this one scattered throughout.

There are two big forces that shape the world of man: the sun and time. These are the hero and villain of almost every movie, TV show, or book you consume. The third and forth forces are matter (the female earth) and information.

The basis of Western civilization is  bad farming and war. The gods of Western Civilization are Time, a Slave Earth, and Ambivalent Information. The false sun: money is the bastard child of Time and the slave Earth. Almost all the philosophy and science in the west are the grandchildren of these malevolent gods and their demonic servants on this planet.

There are a few notable examples that are retained in our cultural history. The madman philosopher Diogenes is one of them. Diogenes thought Plato was a fraud. Diogenes was a student of Socrates who famously lived in a barrel and scorned all comforts of civilization. By contrast, Plato and Aristotle sought the courts of kings and emperors.

The life of Diogenes is a sort of performance art philosophy book where a man plugs into the source of goodness: the sun. He lives as an animal human (instead of a human animal) drawing the simple conclusion that the world and nature provides. We really do live in an Endless Summer or we never left the Garden of Eden.

What would art and philosophy look like if we rebased western thinking on new, good and benevolent gods and benevolent systems of farming and living?

Shifting Ideas about the Natural World

Gray Squirrel: Endangered Animal in 1912

Around the middle of the 19th century, some people in the United States started to realize they were well into the process of wrecking the continent. A place that had been abundant with wildlife, forests, and prairie was looking bleak. The passenger pigeon was probably the most stark example of the carnage. When settlers first arrived in the United States, the birds were abundant--one eyewitness recorded a flock 1 mile wide and 240 miles long. By 1914 they were all dead. A combination of loss of habitat and rampant hunting killed them off. In 1912, gray squirrels were even threatened species, which is hard to imagine today.

It took a combination of laws and public education, and writers and thinkers agitating for conservation to change course. It's pretty hard to really understand what people thought about the natural world in those days. You can find both anecdotes of people appreciating nature and acting out in wanton disregard, or even malevolent hate for the natural world. Certainly the basis for conservation was already present in the hearts and minds of millions of people. Who were the people that were wreaking havoc?

The contemporary accounts blame various groups for the rampant environmental havoc. Farmers, freed slaves, and careless hunters are all named. It's interesting to wonder if those groups would have acted the same if they knew the scope of the changes they were making.

Doing it All Wrong

When European people settled Ohio in the late 18th and early 19th century, they converted its landscape, minerals and fauna to shiny bits of money and luxury goods through farming and small industry. It seems pretty clear that the traditional methods of farming and food production are destructive compared to the natural systems that were present before european settlers arrived. The settler method of farming was basically like mining. It's extracting the value that was already present rather than maintaining the systems that were already extant. It's hard to imagine a way to organize human activity, today, that would be in accord with natural systems.

Phony Left/Right Ideologies

My current plan is based on the idea that techtopia isn't possible and the happy future is a "low tech" future. This is true for individuals as well as entire communities. I'm not the only person who thinks this--there are countless YouTube channels and bloggers are covering the same topic from a variety of political points of view.

The interesting thing to me is people from apparently different sides of the political spectrum have identical goals and methods and even the same beliefs, though they might be dressed up in slightly different versions of ideology.

Some of the "permaculture" channels have a hippy-dippy world view and will cite commie examples as good models, e.g. Cuban society. The "homestead" channels are the right wing version of permaculture.

One of the things that's really interesting is both groups will cite corporate and especially financial influence (debt) as toxic and inimical to human happiness.