We're going through cultural disintegration. Societal norms are being destroyed, you can see it in all facets; driving, bureaucratic corruption, and social interactions. The most vile and disturbed are being celebrated and empowered (and are literally in power). Nations with authoritarian regimes throughout history have all experienced this.

Roger sends this article, The Latest Wealth Flex: Big Trees, and comments: "The old saying about wise old men who plant trees whose shade or fruit they will never enjoy. Completely turned on its head by these bastards."

A scientific article, Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. The complete abstract:

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals' unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

A solution, common in the more enlightened Bronze Age, would be mass cancellation of debts. A 2002 article by economist Michael Hudson, It Shall Be a Jubilee Unto You. The final paragraph:

Rome was the first society not to cancel its debts. And we all know what happened to it. Classical historians such as Plutarch, Livy, and Diodorus attributed Rome's decline and fall to the fact that creditors got the entire economy in their debt, expropriated the land and public domain, and strangled the economy.

Finally, right below the archived post I linked to the other day, is a post where I said this:

It occurs to me that the words "growth" and "progress" and "complexity" and "civilization" and "evolution" are all blurring together the same two things. One of those things could be called adaptation or experimentation or exploration or adjustment or learning. And the other thing is just ever-increasing numbers.

We're confused because in the last age of history, adaptation and increasing numbers have gone together. Techies are afraid to stop the numbers increasing because they think that will make us stagnant. Primitivists think when the numbers stop increasing, we'll go back to how we were before the explosion. But I think the increasing numbers are just a wave that our adaptation has been surfing, and when that wave crashes, we're likely to find ourselves on new shores.

I've been digesting the Sorenson essay, and now I'm seeing a whole different framework for civilized vs primitive. Sorenson's "preconquest consciousness", or "noble savage", is what I want to call core primitive. In the most remote places, you really do find Eden -- humans with barely a trace of negative emotion. But the core primitive is fragile. Just a little disturbance will break it down into Sorenson's "savage savage". This happens at the edges of the primitive regions, where primitive culture is thrown into turmoil by destabilizing factors, so I call it edge primitive. And because these are the kind of primitives that civilized people usually deal with, we are tempted to think they're all like that.

But it's the same with civilization! Primitivists point to the edges, the interface of conquest, Columbus hacking up Arawak children. But when you get through the edge civilized, to the core civilized, you find people like us, peaceful, cooperative, with fun and interesting and relatively easy lives.

Of course the core civilized is a long way from perfect, while the core primitive is only a short way from perfect. But we've had a million years to work on the core primitive, and the core civilized is still in the testing stage.

Waldheimkehr: The forest was here first. Before the clearing, before the axes and the fire and the field boundaries, this ground carried oak and beech and had done for thousands of years, and the village was an interruption in it, a few centuries long, which is nothing. Heimkehr is the word for a soldier walking back up his own road, for a child returning to the house they grew up in. It carries the sense that the returning thing belongs where it is going. So Waldheimkehr says the woodland did not invade and did not conquer; it came back to ground that had been its own, and found the interruption over.

For Labor Day, a full repost of this 2019 post on meritocracy, and an archive of the linked article:

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition. I completely agree with the author's general idea, but I don't quite like the way he frames it. He centers his argument on the word meritocracy, which he defines in terms of "talent and effort." But the crisis he describes is not at all about talent, but about the overvaluing of effort.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a society that still describes itself as a meritocracy, but in its definition of merit, it completely factors out the quantity of work you've done. So college admission might be determined by a series of tests, with a generous time limit, and designed so that studying gives you almost no advantage. Then, when you're applying for a job, you could be tested by doing the actual stuff you'll be doing in the job, and your score is simply the quality of your work.

I think that society would be a lot better than this one. Nobody would be in a hurry and everything would be done well. Some kind of balance would be even better. But we're all the way at the opposite extreme. We don't have even one college, or one job, that rewards the quality of your work and doesn't care about quantity.

I've seen some buzz lately about the male-female pay gap. But at least men and women are in the same ballpark. I'd like to close the much wider pay gap between hard workers and lazy people. I'm completely serious. Nobody really wants to do nothing all day. "Laziness" means holding out for activities that you find intrinsically enjoyable.

Another thought experiment. Imagine if the unconditional basic income, and the maximum income, were the same. If there were no connection between how much money you get, and what you do all day, then we'd find out what we really want to do all day. That's how I view the UBI, not as a way to soften the robot takeover of human work, but as a way to rebuild the world of human work, out of what we actually like doing.

They found that the plastic in some soil samples was pocked with tiny holes that happened to exactly match the size of a specific bacteria that was much more abundant in these samples. This suggests that certain bacteria have plastic-eating enzymes attached to their surface and challenges a widely held assumption that bacteria simply ‘disperse’ enzymes and wait for them to break down materials.

Two fun Ask Reddit threads. What is your favorite foreign word that doesn't have a word in English? And What is the cringiest midlife crisis you've witnessed?

From the Spirituality subreddit, Does God exist? If Yes Why he dosnt speak to anyone or visits anybody? The answers include a wide range of options for thinking about "God" other than a man in the sky. It's funny, when I was a kid, God the father totally made sense, and the Holy Spirit made no sense at all. Now it's exactly the opposite.

And some music. The band Green Lung has made a new Spotify playlist, Black Magick Radio, a tight 82 minute collection of "Occult bangers of the 60s and 70s". One of the songs, A Witch's Guide To The Underground by Carolanne Pegg, I have just added to my Psychedelic Folk playlist.