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It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and hu

by jmogly 1y ago

It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. The human mind has wandered since. We’ve built systems of belief, technological systems, political systems, every possible system you can imagine. All to deal with the simple fact that our minds feel like they should be doing something, but there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done; surplus. Since our first surplus all those years ago, we have continued to increase our surplus relentlessly. The problem is the more surplus we have, the more the mind idles, the more we try to invent things for the mind to do. That is where I see the cult, the cult consists of faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus, whether it’s through positive means like improving technology or business, or negative means like slavery and exploitation. It’s a hollow existence. There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.

bckr 1y ago
I don’t have a lot of surplus. I hope to, I’m working towards it. I have the privilege, talent, and positioning. But I can’t understand how anyone just below me in the hierarchy making ends meet.
- jmogly 1y ago
  I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution. Rather than build a system that works for everyone in an altruistic manner, we have a system that funnels surplus to our most sycophantic, manipulative, exploitative, brutal members. It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts.
  - keybored 1y ago
    > I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution. This is correct. The surplus was for a few. Agriculture did not even give commoners more free time. Rather it gave them less. Which is a complete heel-turn from the false narrative in your original comment. Well, the narrative can only be true if only the ones with surplus are human beings and the people toiling the field are something else than “we humans”. > It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts. Human nature. The standard refrain of the sociopath enabler.
brokegrammer 1y ago
Well put. Now that we're trying to replace jobs with AI, just like we replaced jobs with software before, it's becoming less clear what "purpose" actually means. Once we have the surplus of resources, but no job, I wonder what life would look like.
lurk2 1y ago
> caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus. > There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones. How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?
- deleted 1y ago
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- jmogly 1y ago
  Religion is not my strong suit, but I don’t think religion as we think of it today was really around like that, it might have been but that is not my current understanding. IE There probably weren’t prehistoric monks and rabbis having epistemological debates about the meaning of life or what a good life is. Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. Not an expert again. On your second point, “there is no meaning”, I’m not sure I exactly prescribe that. I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. And when I say that “there isn’t actually anything that actually needs to be done”, I mean that if you have a surplus of all your needs, say just after harvest, you don’t actually need to do anything. All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. Prior to agriculture, surpluses were not regular. Addressing the spirit of your second point though, even today there is much to be done. As a group we have and produce more surplus than we could ever use, but the distribution is such that many people live in abject poverty, or precariously close to it.
  - lurk2 1y ago
    > Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. It’s impossible to know because we lack written records from the period, but this largely aligns with the earliest religious writings; they are mythical stories, often a sort of folk physics. The point is that the search for meaning is implicit in being able to ask a question. Animals might try to discover an algorithm of behavior to obtain a reward (e.g. press the button, get a biscuit), but it isn’t clear that they can even ask questions (“Why does pressing the button produce a biscuit?”). The question “Why does it rain?” doesn’t ask anything philosophical, but it does imply “I need to know why it rains.” We could reduce this all to purely evolutionary terms (“I need to know why it rains to further propagate my genes”), but my hunch is that something deeper is going on. > I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. I appreciate from the tone of your post that this probably is not your position, but this line of reasoning is the cause of a lot of strife. If there is no universal meaning (or no means by which we can ascertain it, e.g. in moral skepticism), then we can’t really go on to say that there is an ethical imperative to fight injustice; we can’t even really define anything as injustice. > All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment to be in the vein of certain strains of eastern or postmodern thought which take that claim rather literally; we don’t “have” to do anything, and every choice is just as valid as every other choice. Whereas what it sounds like you are saying is that when our physical needs are met, the mind has time to wander, and this leads to the hedonic treadmill that motivates adventure, conquest, philosophizing, and things like that. I think there’s some merit to this idea; I suspect being engaged in satisfying pressing physical needs would correlate with lower levels of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, etc.), though this is only a hunch. The reason I took exception to your comment was that it seemed like it was reducing all of those activities to being merely a product of a flawed mentality resulting from material excess, whereas I would contest that and say that human history is in fact a product of something meaningful - not just personally meaningful, but ultimately meaningful.
deleted 1y ago
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nine_k 1y ago
I think it's deeper. The mind is an optimization tool. It always keeps looking for something better, hence it is always not completely happy with the current state of things. The first noble truth (aka the principle of dukkha) is at least 25 centuries old; it says that sentient existence is inseparable from discontent, and thus from suffering. This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible. On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent. (I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)
- nradov 1y ago
  Optimization seems to be a relatively rare cultural phenomenon. We take continuous optimization and innovation for granted, but the archaeological record shows that many societies went hundreds or even thousands of years with essentially zero progress. The very concept of optimization seems to be a kind of mental or social "technology" that some cultures either never figured out or lost along the way.
antithesizer 1y ago
It's not "faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus" It's "mute compulsion"
smogcutter 1y ago
Have you read “The Accursed Share”? Batailles argues that society is shaped by the ways we squander surplus (eg in war, sacrifice, carnival, art, sex, etc)
jancsika 1y ago
> It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. The article and the book it reviews isn't really about what happened in roughly 9,750 of those years. It's about a narrow band of meaning and apologies that happened during the small slice of most recent time due the vast majority of people falling for Worthington's Law[1]. Coloring the vast majority of the time slice with this idiosyncratic problem seems like the kind of notion that would be covered in the book. It's also confusing-- from those 10,000 years there must still be dozens of mainstream, practical political ideologies and belief systems based on embracing "the positive aspects of our spirit." It seems like you're identify this subset as examples of the problem you're discussing, but also as a potential solution to the same problem. I don't get it. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEFcjT7-I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEFcjT7-I0

by jmogly 1y ago

bckr 1y ago

I don’t have a lot of surplus. I hope to, I’m working towards it. I have the privilege, talent, and positioning. But I can’t understand how anyone just below me in the hierarchy making ends meet.

jmogly 1y ago
I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution. Rather than build a system that works for everyone in an altruistic manner, we have a system that funnels surplus to our most sycophantic, manipulative, exploitative, brutal members. It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts.
- keybored 1y ago
  > I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution. This is correct. The surplus was for a few. Agriculture did not even give commoners more free time. Rather it gave them less. Which is a complete heel-turn from the false narrative in your original comment. Well, the narrative can only be true if only the ones with surplus are human beings and the people toiling the field are something else than “we humans”. > It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts. Human nature. The standard refrain of the sociopath enabler.

brokegrammer 1y ago

Well put. Now that we're trying to replace jobs with AI, just like we replaced jobs with software before, it's becoming less clear what "purpose" actually means. Once we have the surplus of resources, but no job, I wonder what life would look like.

lurk2 1y ago

> caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus. > There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones. How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jmogly 1y ago
Religion is not my strong suit, but I don’t think religion as we think of it today was really around like that, it might have been but that is not my current understanding. IE There probably weren’t prehistoric monks and rabbis having epistemological debates about the meaning of life or what a good life is. Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. Not an expert again. On your second point, “there is no meaning”, I’m not sure I exactly prescribe that. I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. And when I say that “there isn’t actually anything that actually needs to be done”, I mean that if you have a surplus of all your needs, say just after harvest, you don’t actually need to do anything. All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. Prior to agriculture, surpluses were not regular. Addressing the spirit of your second point though, even today there is much to be done. As a group we have and produce more surplus than we could ever use, but the distribution is such that many people live in abject poverty, or precariously close to it.
- lurk2 1y ago
  > Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. It’s impossible to know because we lack written records from the period, but this largely aligns with the earliest religious writings; they are mythical stories, often a sort of folk physics. The point is that the search for meaning is implicit in being able to ask a question. Animals might try to discover an algorithm of behavior to obtain a reward (e.g. press the button, get a biscuit), but it isn’t clear that they can even ask questions (“Why does pressing the button produce a biscuit?”). The question “Why does it rain?” doesn’t ask anything philosophical, but it does imply “I need to know why it rains.” We could reduce this all to purely evolutionary terms (“I need to know why it rains to further propagate my genes”), but my hunch is that something deeper is going on. > I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. I appreciate from the tone of your post that this probably is not your position, but this line of reasoning is the cause of a lot of strife. If there is no universal meaning (or no means by which we can ascertain it, e.g. in moral skepticism), then we can’t really go on to say that there is an ethical imperative to fight injustice; we can’t even really define anything as injustice. > All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment to be in the vein of certain strains of eastern or postmodern thought which take that claim rather literally; we don’t “have” to do anything, and every choice is just as valid as every other choice. Whereas what it sounds like you are saying is that when our physical needs are met, the mind has time to wander, and this leads to the hedonic treadmill that motivates adventure, conquest, philosophizing, and things like that. I think there’s some merit to this idea; I suspect being engaged in satisfying pressing physical needs would correlate with lower levels of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, etc.), though this is only a hunch. The reason I took exception to your comment was that it seemed like it was reducing all of those activities to being merely a product of a flawed mentality resulting from material excess, whereas I would contest that and say that human history is in fact a product of something meaningful - not just personally meaningful, but ultimately meaningful.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

nine_k 1y ago

I think it's deeper. The mind is an optimization tool. It always keeps looking for something better, hence it is always not completely happy with the current state of things. The first noble truth (aka the principle of dukkha) is at least 25 centuries old; it says that sentient existence is inseparable from discontent, and thus from suffering. This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible. On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent. (I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)

nradov 1y ago
Optimization seems to be a relatively rare cultural phenomenon. We take continuous optimization and innovation for granted, but the archaeological record shows that many societies went hundreds or even thousands of years with essentially zero progress. The very concept of optimization seems to be a kind of mental or social "technology" that some cultures either never figured out or lost along the way.

antithesizer 1y ago

It's not "faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus" It's "mute compulsion"

smogcutter 1y ago

Have you read “The Accursed Share”? Batailles argues that society is shaped by the ways we squander surplus (eg in war, sacrifice, carnival, art, sex, etc)

jancsika 1y ago

> It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. The article and the book it reviews isn't really about what happened in roughly 9,750 of those years. It's about a narrow band of meaning and apologies that happened during the small slice of most recent time due the vast majority of people falling for Worthington's Law[1]. Coloring the vast majority of the time slice with this idiosyncratic problem seems like the kind of notion that would be covered in the book. It's also confusing-- from those 10,000 years there must still be dozens of mainstream, practical political ideologies and belief systems based on embracing "the positive aspects of our spirit." It seems like you're identify this subset as examples of the problem you're discussing, but also as a potential solution to the same problem. I don't get it. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEFcjT7-I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEFcjT7-I0