Ran Prieur

September 13.

2017-09-13T13:50:30Z

September 13. A reader sends this timely article from two years ago, Walker Percy's Theory of Hurricanes. It's the same idea as Rebecca Solnit's book A Paradise Built in Hell, that people become happier in disasters.

I'm skipping straight to the hard question: how can we make this permanent? How can we build a society where the loose, friendly, engaged social vibe that now emerges in disasters, is how we feel all the time? Or at least more often?

Just having one catastrophe after another won't work -- they tried that in Haiti. I don't think there's any simple or easy answer. It's just going to take hundreds of years of walking there, one step in law, one step in culture, until we have a set of laws built on trust and improvisation, instead of fear and predictability, and a culture where people don't take advantage of that, or feel traumatized.

Sometimes I think all lawmakers should start as game designers, because game designers have to understand the thin line between trauma and adventure, between safety as a padded cell and safety as a platform for launching.

On another tangent, I'm wondering about psychedelics, and if they transform the brain the same way a good disaster transforms a city.

September 11.

2017-09-11T23:30:03Z

September 11. Interesting subreddit post: On the Demonic and Virtual Reality. The idea is that we could think of "demons" not as magical beings, but the way we think about human social constructions like fascism and religion.

If the demonic names a type of oppressive virtual reality, then demon possession can be approached as the subjective inscription of these systems of injustice into an individual's consciousness. The demonic is the system of injustice that influences the material actions of all those in a society, while demon possession is where an individual becomes the actual mouthpiece of that injustice.

I believe something a little weirder. I've noticed that most human behavior comes from levels of the mind that we're not consciously aware of, and I think our individual subconscious minds are connected with each other in ways we haven't discovered yet, in highly complex networks. And these hidden subconscious civilizations can behave like primal gods, or like the paranoid myth of evil elites. But ultimately, the enemy is within.

Another link from the subreddit: The Satori Generation:

In Japan, they've come to be known as satori sedai -- the "enlightened generation". In Buddhist terms: free from material desires, focused on self-awareness, finding essential truths. But another translation is grimmer: "generation resignation", or those without ideals, ambition or hope.

They were born in the late 1980s on up, when their nation's economic juggernaut, with its promises of lifetime employment and conspicuous celebrations of consumption, was already a spent historical force. They don't believe the future will get better -- so they make do with what they have. In one respect, they're arch-realists. And they're freaking their elders out.

My take: as more of humanity climbs out of desperate poverty, our world becomes more and more like a set of games. These games compete for our participation, like religions. During the age of economic growth, the most popular game was to get more and more money. That game is dying, and I'm trying to play a different game with money: to arrange my life so that I have to think about money as little as possible.

September 8.

2017-09-08T20:00:07Z

September 8. So I'm all moved to Pullman. After throwing away 20 garbage bags full of stuff with no resale value, having a yard sale, taking 15 boxes to Goodwill, and gradually selling 30 things for $1200 on Craigslist, I still had to move four carloads, and I'm eventually going to have to cut it down even more. When you're decluttering, every garbage day is like Christmas.

Pullman is where I came into this world 50 years ago, and it's an unlikely accident that I'm here again, just because my girlfriend from Florida happened to go back to school here. The best thing about a small town is the traffic. In Seattle it takes half an hour to drive anywhere, and here it takes five minutes.

Our apartment is well-located, relatively cheap, and about the same size as the part of the house that we actually lived in. We expect to be here through June of 2020, and after that, no one knows.

September 5.

2017-09-05T17:30:08Z

September 5. Lots of action yesterday on the subreddit, including this thoughtful discussion about "personal responsibility" and why certain categories of people have been more or less successful at certain things.

My thought is, yes, we all have to take responsibility for our own well-being, but that means different things to different people. I'm starting to view this whole world as a bunch of competing games, and what we call "success" is a very specific game. The dominant culture looks at marginalized communities and says, "Why aren't they succeeding on our terms?" Maybe it's because they don't like your terms.

I look at conventionally successful people and think, "They're making so much money -- why don't they live super-frugally for a few years, and then retire to a place with cheap housing, and spend the rest of their lives doing creative work or just getting high and listening to music?" Come on, people, the opportunities are there.

Every time someone tells a story about a panhandler who was offered a job and didn't take it, I want to say, "It works both ways. You have the option to become a panhandler and you're not taking it."

September 4.

2017-09-04T16:20:28Z

September 4. A thought experiment for Labor Day. Imagine you live in a world where money is completely disconnected from work. Not only is there an unconditional minimum income, there's also a maximum income -- and they're the same! Corporate executives, sled dog racers, insurance agents, and people who just watch TV all day, all make the same amount of money.

In that world, what would you do with your time?

And how similar is that to what you actually do with your time?

To the extent that those things are the same, you're successful -- even if you're poor. To the extent that they're different, your quality of life is being constrained by cultural assumptions and economic rules that tie activity to money.

You've all seen that political grid, where one axis is social freedom and the other is economic freedom. That's always rubbed me the wrong way, and now I can say why: because it has "freedom" exactly backwards, defining it as the right to trade your labor for money, even if it's something you wouldn't do if it weren't for the money, and then turn around and trade your money for the labor of others, even if they're only doing it for the money. That's not people being free -- it's money being free to control us.

In a value system that puts quality of life first, economic freedom is not freedom of money but freedom from money, and the more disconnected money is from activity, the more free we are.

There are three problems here. The easiest is just to understand that anything less than a 100% volunteer workforce is inadequate. The hardest problem is getting there from here as an entire society. That's going to take hundreds of years and reforms that haven't been imagined yet. And the medium sized problem is moving in that direction in your own life.

Now someone might say, "What if what I love to do is make money?" That's silly, because money is supposed to be a means for the end of living well, not the end in itself. And if you just enjoy the process of accumulating abstract tokens, then you can get that pleasure from games. And if you say, "I enjoy accumulating abstract tokens that have real world value," then be careful, because you might be asking for a power that no one should have: to make people do stuff that they wouldn't do if they didn't need the money.