we obviously can't take a step back in our mobility.
Why not?
Why not?
We need big carrots and big sticks in order to achieve things like less flying - that means government regulation, huge material incentives for not flying/driving/etc.
Also, yeah, maybe it's too late now. If only one could reload from a savegame and learn from experience next time around.
Amazingly now a lot of the "Western world" would prefer those other human beings die rather than suffer a downgrade of their comfortable lives...
Of course, it would have been better to phase in the taxes decades ago since some solutions (mass transit, for example) can take a decade or more to build.
Greed and lazyness are so innate that you could probably trace them back to lobsters.
Lobsters are a slave to their instincts, humans are not.
They are but just occasionally and briefly.
Superficial customs have changed. Not how underlying perceptions of interests are governed.
Sure we can still understand thinkers of old in a limited capacity, but that's not due to us thinking like them or even experiencing the world like them as our experience is coloured by the concepts we use. We can understand them because of the continuity of society, the constant translation of the old into the new.
Capitalism can only exist now because of how much those underlying assumptions have changed.
As for Shakespeare, his plays still speak to fundamental, understandable human drama.
When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
I don’t think it’s merely cultural continuation. We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
Perhaps I missed something?
I dispute the very concept of "human nature", it implies a platonic "human", a base which we can only uncover the details of. While in reality there doesn't appear to be such a thing.
> I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies.
It kind of does, changes in the "public consciousness" are more often subversive than radical, a lot of concepts Shakespeare popularised or came up with are still in common use, however it's not because he's unlayering the onion of "the human" concept, but because these concepts are useful and haven't been subverted or forgotten.
> When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
They of course still have practical value, when I say "in a limited capacity" I mean it in a more "glass-half full" way, a lot of context for these works has been lost forever and how a person reading a text understands a word relies more on his entire lifetime of experience than it does on the authors intent, good authors can generally bridge the gap easily, dead authors can't. So information is lost.
> We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
Unless you've brushed up on your ancient Chinese that's not really true, the cultural continuity here is the translator.
Don't go by the dictionary definition of machiavellian. He really wasn't saying things that are hard to believe. He was really just pointing out the sorts of manifestations of human nature that surround us if we don't blind ourselves and refuse to see it.
And if it is let's continue and end it all because it's just plain sad. What a way to go !
Let them carry on. Perhaps our exction will be exactly what saves the planet! Our archeological records will serve only as a warning for whatever "intelligent" life evolves in the future ;-)
It seems like a flippant attitude, but it seems to be the way many people are treating climate change (probably because the worst effects won't hit for decades, when many of the people responsible (i.e. voters) will be dead.)
We're leaving an unsustainable mess for our children, I'd like to see some action in their lawsuit:
https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
Since they are the ones that will be paying the full price of climate change.
At the same time, you're right -- the 2 missing pieces are believing the threat is real, and thinking that you can get by if lots of other people change their behavior instead. Which they won't any more than you will, but that leads us back to human nature again.
So let's put self-regulation aside, you will never see it happen on a policy level because it won't be popular.
Same for emissions trading schemes, they're actually great things, but they aren't popular with the masses.
Anyway, let's drop The War on Terror and The war on Drugs and begin the War on Climate Change?
I'm not entirely saying I agree with people just flying around for the sake of it, but let's be honest, putting an end to most transport doesn't exactly seem like progress, let's also think of it this way, the problem is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, not traveling.
"companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons."
If you're a Doctor, truck driver, pilot, builder, fisherman etc, then how do you work remotely? The majority of the workforce can't just work remotely because knowledge workers can. Besides, data-centers also have a large environmental cost, remote work creates it's own mess.
I'm also a knowledge worker, but I just choose to live in the city close to my office and ride to work so I have a very small / no carboon footprint from transport.
I've also worked remote full-time, it wasn't for me, I think it has it's own set of issues.
We got used to it but it doesn't mean it's the way to go. We're acting like spoiled kids discovering that no, you can't have it all, all the time, for free.
- We have built our society around the assumption of mobility so it could be difficult to just switch overnight.
- Remote work doesn't work for many people and/or many situations.
- Opportunities are not evenly distributed across the country.
- Tolerance of alternative lifestyles is not evenly distributed.
- Access to hobbies, cultural institutions, etc. is not evenly distributed.
Driving cars is just an example, the other ones being flying less, procreating less, eating less meat.
The same is with cutting back on comfort of living. If I cut my comfort, but my neighbor don't and payoff is equal for us both, why should I suffer more than him? This is our basic species morality which we found even in apes [0].
[0] https://www.theemotionmachine.com/what-great-apes-teach-us-a...
Seriously? You mean Bill Gates works because otherwise he'd starve to death?
More seriously, I challenge you to hold a poll among your friends - given $x per month where x is enough to survive, would they stop working?
Everyone I speak to about this says that he/she personally would not, but the "other people" certainly will.
Not working means that you reclaim 50%+ of your awake time, and not any 50%, the 50% during which you spend most of your energy. I'm already living on ~70% of the min wage of my country, and I don't feel like I'm restraining myself at all so it wouldn't be such a big deal.
One might argue that this is all work.
2. You and your friends are probably not like the average person.
3. You were probably raised with the idea that it's very important, both financially and socially, to have a job. It might be a lot harder to raise your kids with these values if they grow up in a world where working or not working has no financial impact.
A farmer might still plant, but decide to plant flowers instead of food. Or maybe they would plant exotic fruits instead of staple foods.
A programmer might still program, but they might decide to play with algorithm problems instead of developing medical software.