measure of uncertainty

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by songbird, Mar 27, 2014.

  1. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    in ponderings lately, thinking about greed and what would be a cause for it. if you are one of the people who thinks that we came from bands of primates roaming in the jungles of Africa, then what would that be like? certainly there seems to be little need for greed in a place that provides food pretty much all the time as long as your local population doesn't get too large.

    then there came the time, for whatever reasons, that we started to move out of the jungle to the savannahs... suddenly food is no longer so certain, nor is there as much security, fewer trees to hide behind or to climb. the band must work closer together (with all the social pressures that entails it also means communication must be much more precise and planning must be much more ahead).

    move forwards a few hundred thousand to a few million more years. to bands and societies that now live in multiple locations, some with more degree of predictability than others. what does that change?

    that some groups would have better and more efficient societies that would fit within their local area and not exploit the resources too heavily... except, mobility and with that mobility also means wars, wars mean bands of people who largely do nothing other than fight, which is great for reducing population counts, but it doesn't necessarily help anything else (the disruptions may mix genetics and perhaps bring some plants and other bugs along, but it certainly disrupts local knowledge and trading networks. the people who know the plants and animals and the patterns of the weather... gone. so it is easy to see that with transport animals or the wheel we also get disruption and destruction. some of that can be replaced in time, but that also needs a certain type of system to retain the viability of the land... and clearly, almost all of the old empires were only concerned with looting, shipping the slaves and other goodies "back home". often that meant animals and food (grain aka corn) ).

    which leads me to thinking that to support an army and to feed it involves the taxes and that also means money of the sort that can be circulated and traded and not the kinds that would come from a local network of mutually dependent people. instead it comes from the outside imposition of authority that does not care about local degrees of sustainable production. "Don't give us enough grain, animals or gold and we'll take over your land and give it to someone that will."

    greed thus comes naturally along with this disruption and destruction. if you don't know that your next year is going to be good, that your taxes will be reasonable (or better yet, non-existant), that the weather will be predictable, then it does stand quite easily to reason that you won't feel like sharing your food or other goodies around nearly as much as you might otherwise.

    and to bring this back to a more permaculture ideal, to work within a local community to support and share with each other so that the land is not exploited beyond the capacity for it to sustain wildlife and people living there. the challenge for any local group is how to generate enough income to pay taxes, to obtain things that are not a part of the local groups domain. trading networks are nice and all, but some opportunities for barter are not enough. what then? how do you get that set up and functional in a way that does not involve the central control of some form of wealth (be it food, materials, animals or gold/currency)?

    that is, how do you avoid greed?
     
  2. Unmutual

    Unmutual Junior Member

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    I'm not sure what causes greed. If you put a plate full of beignets in front of me, I might gorge myself and that would be greed. Why would I stuff my face with deep fried dough covered with powdered sugar? Outside of them tasting good, I have no reason. I couldn't even begin to explain my greed. I also tend to buy lots of plants. I can tell myself that each plant is for a reason, and that the plants I buy usually languish on the shelf anyway(purple coneflowers for pollinators and milkweed for monarch butterflies), but is that not just another form of greed?

    I make enough money to support 2 families at poverty level in the US. I didn't have much of a choice in the matter, and there is no mechanism to refuse a pay raise(silly governments). So while I may not be one of the "1%", I'm still part of the problem. Which makes me look at theft slightly differently. Theft might be an overlooked method of wealth redistribution. Maybe it's nature's way of righting a wrong, and just like other things in nature, it may not behave exactly how we expect it to behave...not to anthropomorphize either nature or theft...

    Too much weird thinking for me.
     
  3. 9anda1f

    9anda1f Administrator Staff Member

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    Nice Essay Songbird.

    Personally I believe it requires a general state of heightened awareness of one's relationship to the earth and it's inhabitants and the conscious shunning of our existing societal norm. While as you state, greed has been around for a long time, we as a species need to transcend our more basal urges and strive towards a more altruistic basis for conducting our individual lives ... kind of like the three Permaculture ethics!

    This will require the conscious education of our children, for those "primitive" urges like greed are a part of "automatic living" and the evolutionary goal is to instill the practice of conscious/aware living on a global scale.
     
  4. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

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    You need to read The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond. He looks at this in depth. It's information dense but readable.
     
  5. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    i'll see if i can get it. ah, looks like i can. should be an interesting read. thanks. : )

    have you read _1491_ or _1493_ by Charles Mann? they were both good reads too.
     
  6. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    thanks! i think that more conscious understanding of what is going on is very much desired and needed. i'm not sure it reaches people who can make the most difference quickly enough.

    i also don't agree that greed is a primitive urge. i think some large part of it is a rational response to uncertainty. some of that uncertainty is from natural processes (like the changes in weather). there are other aspects though which could encourage people to respond much more quickly if different approaches were taken.

    like, in some ways i think the rhetoric around greed is self-perpetuating in that the more some people can make others feel threatened or uncertain then the more likely those others are also going to not want to freely share or trade.
     
  7. 9anda1f

    9anda1f Administrator Staff Member

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    Excellent, and thank you!
    I speak of greed as a "primitive urge" based on the Buddhist idea of ego, and greed as an ego-based "reaction" to outside influence, possibly fear.
     
  8. Pete Faraway

    Pete Faraway Junior Member

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    Thanks for posting this! I think your historical story is basically correct. David Graeber also covers some of this ground in Debt—The First 5000 Years, which IMHO is essential reading as part of gleaning the Big Picture.

    As to what to do about it…

    Greed, although we all know it when we see it, is quite a hazy concept, difficult to define, and with judgemental/biblical connotations. And generalizing "greed" to apply to everyone obscures the political division between the ruling elites, driven to ever greater accumulation of wealth/power, and the rest of us, mostly content to satisfy our basic needs—unless unreasonable desires are provoked by advertising and consumerist propaganda.

    Most people most of the time are highly influenced by the surrounding context. Change the context and people's behavior changes accordingly—at least within the limits of normality that we all recognize. I don't think that a widespread change of consciousness can come first—we can't afford to wait that long! Rather that we (the concerned "we") must work on transforming the (social/political/economic) context, which is a product of the expansionary dynamic driving military-industrial capitalism. So it's this motivating dynamic that must be replaced.

    I'd like to reformulate the question this way: How might we fulfill people's needs equitably and rationally, and perhaps as a society also sanction certain wants, while remaining within nature's ecological limits? How might we create a macro-perma-economy? And just how can we distinguish between needs and wants anyway?

    Rather than be a bore and post the same links all over the forum, I encourage you instead to please check my profile to discover one possible way (not invented by me) of answering these questions!

    (…Although I could say more if you're interested!)
     
  9. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

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    Sounds glib, but you do it ethically. Follow your ethics, and try not succumb to a "lower self."
     
  10. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    Pete, thank you, yes, i have read _Debt_ and consider it an excellent addition to the current conversation on many topics.

    another good book in the whole realm of civilization, permaculture and the effects upon the earth is called _Dirt_ by Montgomery and it gives many additional references to useful books for further readings.
     
  11. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

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    No - will add that to the reading list.

    There's a difference between how I avoid being greedy and how society can avoid greed. I can't cope with dealing with anything bigger than my own area of responsibility so - for me it is about being honest about what I NEED and what I WANT and letting go of the wants.
     
  12. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    yes, i simplified many years ago, before the dot.com crash and the following real-estate bubble bust, i well understood that my own life preferred simplicity, like if i didn't need an expensive car then i could quit work full time and still get by, if i didn't need fancy housing i could pay cash or rent a tiny place in a less expensive neighborhood and still be happy. that i didn't need cable tv or a cell phone or a snow-mobile or a lawn tractor or a plow or ...

    [continuing comments from my own recent ponderings on greed and permaculture...]

    but when it comes to greed on the larger scale, my own simplicity is a small statement in protest. when i consider permaculture principles or even the ideas of paying-it-forwards, well, i've been pretty dismayed by some of the pricing issues that come along. i want to give people a different message which will actually help spread the ideas, but also to leverage what my own resources are providing towards the wider efforts.

    some folks say that organic produce is too expensive, that the premium pricing keeps poorer people from having it more available. to me the idea of growing veggies and fruits for local consumption raised in very minimal input manner would be to be able to sell them for as little as possible. most of what i grow here that is extra i give away or trade for as little as possible. to start actively working against the high price greed aspect that is built into too many modern agricultural systems with the high input costs, *cides and transport costs. to me a farmer's market with high-priced produce is yet another statement about greed and wealth that doesn't appeal to me or make me think of "permaculture" as much as it makes me think of priviledge and exploitation.

    then i run into the idea that if i can make a large enough profit from a permaculture venture/selling produce at a profit then i can take those extra funds and invest in more land or design improvements in the existing place.

    the quandary becomes even tougher when it comes to the idea of selling a place and hoping to find permaculture oriented people to take over when there isn't anyone in the current family very inclined towards these ideas/methods/practices... i would much rather sell a place to people who will understand what i've been doing and will keep improving it and not using *cides even if that means i might sell at a lower price (to give them encouragement and make it easier for them to succeed) than if i were selling to a rich city folk who were just seeing it as a garden paradise out in the country away from the violence and noise. one poorly considered or misunderstood change in a permaculture system/design can have profound effects because of the way functions are stacked, if they just happen to pick the wrong lever... yes, i know designs are supposed to be more resilient, but not all designs are complete when passed along to someone else. [some ideas of a site owners manual, or a design manual that stays with the site is probably a good idea. drawings of key features, water flows and design elements, what needs to be done for certain areas when, etc. all very good to have, but that is a bit far from the ideas of greed, so...]

    ok [wandering back towards the topic] so would anyone here consider selling their property for less than market rates if it was clear you were helping other permaculture people obtain a nice place that would be much easier for them to live in (less expense, means perhaps they can put more resources towards other projects -- leveraging your investment into many more results than just a single site).

    me, i could be pretty good in a very small place, this house is actually too large and too poorly set up for me alone, but if it were sold to me at a decent price i could improve the solar gain and passive features to reduce running costs. it all would be a pretty nice project. perhaps about what i could actually manage too. except, i keep thinking that i could do a lot more for wildlife and not have so many issues of retrofitting if i were to go find some other land and start over again from the ground up. that once a site has reached some level of permacultural productivity and improvement that it makes no sense to stay there, that the point is to make a larger difference and that means to keep on working new areas as much as possible. to bring the ideas to as many people as possible.

    and thus in a roundabout manner i return to a different form of greed, that is greed for permaculture lands to keep expanding. : )
     

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