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The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.

Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 13:43:38

& move along singing tralala til the death of the sun? Kidding right?

Ibon is a little more nuanced than that methinks. Who is doing the Convicting? WHO? NWO? No the aren't, it's not about capital C conviction, it's about re-emergent nature. If humanity survives the downfall of the modern era, whenever that happens, there's still going to be nastiness, pretending otherwise is a fantasy. Sorry for popping your bubble.

(There won't be a NWO, because such a thing requires organisation on a scale that hasn't been reached even with abundant, virtually free energy. There will be a return to form for us & the rest of nature. Which means not One Convicted World, but a return to enclaves, some of which will be of the Ayahuasca enlightenment style, some of the cannibalistic, somewhat less enlightenment variety. Prophesy was made a crime a very long time ago for very sound reasons, it's risky. So i shut up now).
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby Ibon » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 13:45:39

GHung wrote:"So maybe it looks and seems a lot worse than it is."

Or maybe not. I see a lot of people who are clearly disillusioned and are simply going through the motions because they have no choice. In spirit, they are dropping out, even as pretense is the necessary order of the day. Trump's election is merely an artifact of this. When people don't see viable solutions, they throw shit at walls hoping something will stick.


I get about 400 people coming through our resort in a year. Some renting humble rooms with limited budgets, some who opt for more luxurious accommodations. I look at all the locals with whom we employ and contract out work with.

Honestly, all in all I am not witnessing so much disenchantment and disillusionment. Not a whole lot of appetite to discuss politicians beside an almost universal consensus that their are crooks and parasites.

A general pessimism regarding the future is definitely there but for most people their lives seem quite content. The trends are recognized as leaning downward toward decline but I am not seeing depression or anger or rage.

I want to keep it that way in terms of where I invest my social time.

There is an American a couple valleys over marketing doomsteads in a piece of land. We met the owner, he rambled on and on touching on all the tipping points we discuss here at po.com. Trying to intice expats coming down here that his little piece of land offers a security in increasing volatile times.

I told my wife, "Could you imagine living in a community of like minded pessimists and doomers". Talk about a dysfunctional community! Definitely to dark and to invested in discussing all the negative tipping points.

Think about how much time you invest everyday pondering the downfall of modern civilization?
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby Ibon » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 13:50:18

SeaGypsy wrote:Which means not One Convicted World, but a return to enclaves, some of which will be of the Ayahuasca enlightenment style, some of the cannibalistic, somewhat less enlightenment variety. Prophesy was made a crime a very long time ago for very sound reasons, it's risky. So i shut up now).


A diversity of living arrangements vs one global hive mind seems most adaptive going forward.
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby GHung » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 13:55:56

" I can imagine a future society where this concept holds a position at the pinnacle of what the survivors hold as necessary and sacred."

It takes quite the upheaval to embed these concepts deeply into a society's mythology and memory. And, historically, they tend to get discarded when growth kicks in during better times. How many flood stories have we written? How many cultures have proceeded to ignore those stories?

Ten Commandments? Really? Likely written from experience as to what begets a less-than-optimal society, and largely ignored by those who loudly proclaim we should live by those rules.

We adapt to what is. Not to what was.
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby onlooker » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 13:57:26

Good points Sea in rebuttal to what I stated and Ibon's assessment. Certainly it is a mixed bag as it always has been with Humanity. However, taking the optimistic side, I think the ordeals will be such that they will sear into the survivors if nothing more a healthy respect for boundaries. Also, in keeping with an assessment that I have reached related to various matters, people ultimately do better by working together than individually or in small groups. In unity they're is strength. Unity combines the different talents and skills of many and pools them into a homegenous group oriented to common goals. Plus, fighting among each other drains human and other resources better utilized for survival and thriving. Ultimately and perhaps Ibon with his expertise can verify this, Cooperation ie. Unity is a natural selection advantage.
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:00:38

Ibon wrote:
SeaGypsy wrote:Which means not One Convicted World, but a return to enclaves, some of which will be of the Ayahuasca enlightenment style, some of the cannibalistic, somewhat less enlightenment variety. Prophesy was made a crime a very long time ago for very sound reasons, it's risky. So i shut up now).


A diversity of living arrangements vs one global hive mind seems most adaptive going forward.


Obviously. Funny how it's the NWO Conspiracy guy prophesying some kind of Global Conviction. I know what he's on about with them, it's hardly a secret, but it is 'their' fantasy & it's based on a fundamental unreality.

'They' have been dreaming this way for many thousands of years, it's what gives them their drive & their structure. But 'they' don't get it that 'they' have not actually got the final word on anything.)
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby GHung » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:03:10

Ibon wrote:
GHung wrote:"So maybe it looks and seems a lot worse than it is."

Or maybe not. I see a lot of people who are clearly disillusioned and are simply going through the motions because they have no choice. In spirit, they are dropping out, even as pretense is the necessary order of the day. Trump's election is merely an artifact of this. When people don't see viable solutions, they throw shit at walls hoping something will stick.


I get about 400 people coming through our resort in a year. Some renting humble rooms with limited budgets, some who opt for more luxurious accommodations. I look at all the locals with whom we employ and contract out work with.

Honestly, all in all I am not witnessing so much disenchantment and disillusionment. Not a whole lot of appetite to discuss politicians beside an almost universal consensus that their are crooks and parasites.

A general pessimism regarding the future is definitely there but for most people their lives seem quite content. The trends are recognized as leaning downward toward decline but I am not seeing depression or anger or rage.

I want to keep it that way in terms of where I invest my social time.

There is an American a couple valleys over marketing doomsteads in a piece of land. We met the owner, he rambled on and on touching on all the tipping points we discuss here at po.com. Trying to intice expats coming down here that his little piece of land offers a security in increasing volatile times.

I told my wife, "Could you imagine living in a community of like minded pessimists and doomers". Talk about a dysfunctional community! Definitely to dark and to invested in discussing all the negative tipping points.

Think about how much time you invest everyday pondering the downfall of modern civilization?


Pondering these things is my job as 'clan leader', as is pondering possible responses. In a sense, it helps free my other clan members to go about their business. Every group needs an elder to keep them grounded as they live their lives, eh? Maybe that's The Wisdom of the Dark Emotions.
Last edited by GHung on Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:04:32, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby evilgenius » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:04:24

I think it might be helpful to understand the view of one's self as a self, and how that can reflect upon other's as selves. Not every person recognizes other's as selves. It's one of the things about psychopathy that those people view others as objects to be manipulated, for instance. But, if you aren't a psychopath, can you still view others in a fashion where you limit them? I think it's obvious that other people are not carbon copies of me. Other people aren't going to think or feel like I do. They aren't going to want all of the same things I want. Largely, that's a good thing. But it constricts the role that empathy, where I use how I would feel in response to what I see them going through, can play in my understanding of them. Instead, I have to use compassion, which is much more open ended.

This realization has something to do with another thing I have mentioned a time or two on this site, the importance of right-of-way in human dealings. Something like the law given at Sinai is functionally an in-group self identifying thing. It takes a group of people and makes them alike enough such that empathy works in understanding other people in the group. In secular society, before the age of information, there had always been a similar kind of experience. Americans, for instance, had a sense of Americana.

Now, however, various groups who always perceived themselves as downtrodden have risen up, claiming the very 'rights' that the old order gave to its members. To have rights, though, isn't the same thing as for it to be your turn. Right-of-way is fundamentally about whose turn it is. When you can't recognize everything about an other and they seem so very different from you, you can still, at least, recognize it is their turn. In that way rights becomes something about establishing who can take a turn, not something about sacrosanct static versions of other selves.

The real challenge becomes figuring out the rules for taking turns. Who does that? I believe society does that. It's a collective thing. It gets embedded in the law, but the law is responsive to society. It changes as society's norms change. Everything else is a kind of conversation. It's a conversation that is constructed of both people acting upon exercising the right-of-way and/or yielding it, and how we feel about what that means to us as we experience that every day. Along the way we discover that we do belong, even though sometimes only loosely, to small groups within the greater construct of the society at large. Not unlike the law at Sinai, the things that tie us into those groups can seem sacrosanct themselves. Trouble arises for us when those similarities become so important that they threaten to infringe upon the very idea that there are others. When that happens they invite the same kind of thinking as that of the psychopath. It works that way for any group we identify with, whether it is a born condition or some privileged set we run with.

What we really need, I think, are assurances that, if we yield the right-of-way, it will be our turn again. That there can be a system where if we are just ourselves, and don't have to conform to being like some other ideal, we can go along and get to where we are going without having to either incessantly yield to those who make outrageous demands of us, using a sort of infinity of those to prevent us in real ways from ever getting there, or that we fail to see how others really can step in front of us because of both their desires and their position relative to us. And there is the inner challenge inherent to that of realizing that an other can be weak as well as strong, and that we can be tempted to treat them differently for that. Also, that we can change as we go along. We don't have to always be the same person. We can learn from others. They can learn from us.

The problems we are currently arguing most about in society seem to relate to that central issue. The things we are discussing have mostly to do with concentration of power and whether that concentration ought to remain or dissolve. We've yet to come to the point of designing how that power can revolve, can go away and come back again. Right now, it's still a sort of winner take all mentality at play, the literal survival of the fittest when this is purely a human minded and not an evolutionary game, like we can stuff all of our winnings into barns and store them forever.
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:11:15

Onlooker, there isn't any Unity on the level you ascribe. Humans are intensely tribal, ritualistic, fanciful. That isn't about to change. Moving forward is really not about humanity becoming something it never was, it's about editing the story of life now in preparation for what will be (as best as able).

Edit- Evil, spot on.
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby onlooker » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:42:03

SeaGypsy wrote:Onlooker, there isn't any Unity on the level you ascribe. Humans are intensely tribal, ritualistic, fanciful. That isn't about to change. Moving forward is really not about humanity becoming something it never was, it's about editing the story of life now in preparation for what will be (as best as able).

Edit- Evil, spot on.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 2207014996
Okay, I found this article which summarizes the science as it relates to the advantages gained in cooperative altruistic behavior over the long course of evolution. Also, it has been well documented that in Primate behavior one sees altruistic cooperative behavior. Oh and Evil you made some great points. Now, let me reference what Ghung said, which caught my attention. We adapt to the here and now not to the past. And certainly the here and now in the coming times will be supremely challenging. As individuals recognize the nature of the challeges, they will have the choice of either competing ie. fighting with each other for basic necessities or social status etc. or Cooperating. In the course of time, which of these strategies will prove more adaptive? I believe the Cooperation. And so in the natural order of things via Natural and Cultural Selection, I think we can collectively reach a point whereby harmonious behavior among each other and a healthy type of veneration for Nature will win out as humans conform to as has been said here not to other humans but to the exigencies of our existence on this planet.
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Re: The Wisdom Of The Dark Emotions

Unread postby Ibon » Fri 10 Nov 2017, 14:54:15

GHung wrote:
Pondering these things is my job as 'clan leader', as is pondering possible responses. In a sense, it helps free my other clan members to go about their business. Every group needs an elder to keep them grounded as they live their lives, eh? Maybe that's The Wisdom of the Dark Emotions.


When I am discussing these topics with millennials I feel I am acting as a clan leader, walking the tight rope between being honest and specific about the harrowing upcoming consequences of human overshoot and at the same time emphasizing the silver linings.

A clan leader needs to move beyond tired old threads of re hashing all the many tipping points and how awful they will be and move on to the adaptation, the challenges, the integrity that this will provide those who are strong enough to persevere. There truly are silver linings.

Hell is truly in many ways what we will leave behind..... Indolence and narcissism recedes, personal integrity, hard work, community can flourish. Service to others rather than self indulgence.

Imagine if instead of grasping and holding on to a dwindling paradigm you position yourself like a hospice worker.

A hospice worker for a species in severe overshoot.

There is truly spiritual rewards and opportunities to grow spines.
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