There is a curse
April 2007
There is a curse: "May you live in interesting times." Am I the only one who thinks it sounds appealing? I live in one of the safest, most stable, and most comfortable times in history, and I'm bored out of my tree.
I think life is all about trade-offs. Money or time. Career or family. Security or excitement. You can have one of any of those pairs, but you can't have both.
I have another theory: a pretty large proportion of the human lives on this planet look the same. There must be some merit in trying something different.
(Actually, I'd say nearly all the lives on this planet fall into two or three different categories; very few people are outside these broad groups. I'm thinking of these stereotypes: the 40-hour-week westerner, the struggling-but-surviving (and often exploited) third-world dweller, and the starving and malnourished third-world dweller. I suspect that that would cover around 90% of the world's population.)
Anyway, my point being, I'm not sure that these categories cover the sum total of possible human existences, and it's probably worth trying something a little unusual.
Ran Prieur said something pretty fascinating, something about what the people of the year 1000 would have thought of our panic about possibly losing our technology for a day or two due to the Y2K bug, and the years of worry and millions (billions?) of dollars spent avoiding the possibility. I can see how it would look pretty crazy to a society that didn't depend on technology. Maybe we need to re-learn some independence?
Civilisation is all about control: we want control over our day-to-day lives, our food supplies, our shelter. Our governments want control over us.
I think maybe anarchy is the wrong word for my ideal world. What I'd like to see is no centralised government at all (no nation states), just loosely (dis-)connected, self-governed tribal groups and small communities (couple of hundred people max, I think.)
One of the biggest perceived problems about anarchy, or any alternative de-centralised government system, seems to be along the lines of “but X won't be able to function the way it currently does” or “but we won't be able to do Y the way we currently do.” Sure. You can't make an omelette, as they say. But hey, trying new things sounds like fun! Let's start with a localised, depreciating currency.
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