[PeDAGoG] [REDlistserve] A new article on the RED website - "The path to a just and sustainable society"

Wed Sep 29 17:41:57 CEST 2021

Regarding my second question - is 'prefiguring' the intended
pathway/theory-of-change? (sorry this was an unfamiliar term)

Thanks,

On Wed, 29 Sept 2021 at 20:52, Hari DK <hari.coding at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've always had similar questions about anarchist visions. Even Noam
> Chomsky's book 'on Anarchism' seemed to skirt/avoid these questions for me.
>
> -Who provisions 'public' goods that are too unprofitable for the
> corporations or communities to finance? Include public parks, fire brigade,
> etc. Also defense - unless there is a step change in human consciousness
> (tell me how/which pathway), will we ever stop having the need to protect
> ourselves? Would anarchism without a nationalized defense fund work if
> there were a big, unfriendly country on our borders? or does everyone in
> the world need to give up arms once and for all for anarchic futures to be
> realized?
>
> -Also, as hinted in some of the comments by others - how is this future
> achieved? is it an organic emergent? or is it top down? capitalism in its
> original form is arguably an organic emergent of human settlement (farming
> societies stored seeds for the next harvest. of course I am not talking
> about degenerate, technologically amplified capitalism we might find
> ourselves trapped in.) My point of view: if this future is an organic
> emergent, it has a chance of realization. what are the 'drivers' for this
> systems change (i.e. the loops and archetypes which are driving this
> transition?).
>
> Asking these out of a desire to understand more and factor into my own
> thinking,
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> On Wed, 29 Sept 2021 at 19:45, mp <mp at aktivix.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 29/09/2021 14:14, Tom Abeles wrote:
>> > I would be concerned, living in such a world, if I needed life-saving
>> > medical services from vaccines to heart surgery. Similarly, I would be
>> > concerned without universities, research and technology which has given
>> us
>> > solar panels, broadband internet and similar which is imbedded in much
>> of
>> > what we use on a daily basis. The Buddhist Gross Happiness Index ponders
>> > these issues.
>>
>> You hit the nail right on the head here.
>>
>> Paradigms.
>>
>> It can be difficult to imagine an alternative reality (though sci-fi
>> writers have been pushing the boundaries on that for a century or more)
>> when you are living in a (highly) captive one.
>>
>> Additionally, if you can imagine different paradigms, think in systems
>> terms, and hold multiple versions of reality in mind at once, for the
>> purposes of analysis/evaluation, then you'd still have to choose which
>> one you'd want to move towards...
>>
>> Each paradigm has its own pathways and -dependencies, of course. As
>> Elizabeth Kolbert says in her critical review of climate market hi-tech
>> - in "Under a White Sky" - this is "a book about people trying to solve
>> problems created by people trying to solve problems” - or about a
>> "vicious circle created by its own skewed logic and techno-dependency".
>>
>> The progress myth is one of the phenomena or memes at the heart of our
>> trouble - and by trouble, in brief, I mean:
>>
>> / climate chaos;
>>  medical state of exception;
>>  and the collapse - in tandem - of global civilisation and the human
>> immune system.
>>
>> Hence, vaccines and robotic heart surgery, for instance, are not simply
>> _advances_, but also well understood as short-term plasters on festering
>> wounds that result from the separation of nature/culture, elite/the
>> rest, centres of control/disposable margins and so on. Plasters, that
>> is, which trap dirt and obscure stratification and thus make the wounds
>> deeper, while those swimming in the puss - that'd be us - systematically
>> drown.
>>
>> Rupa and Patel's recent book is essential reading for
>> movements/activists on these matters it seems to me:
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXvIkj7grN8
>>
>> So, I would be concerned if I were living in a world dependent on
>> industrial hospitals, where the value of plant-based medicine and folk
>> knowledge was abandoned entirely and buried alongside common sense. On
>> these issues see also:
>>
>>
>> https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/02/how-sustainable-is-high-tech-health-care.html
>>
>> Finally, on the progress myth - so fundamentally tied up with
>> European/White Man philosophy, racist politics, and colonial extraction
>> - it is worth paying attention to new currents in archaeology:
>>
>> “A profound consideration is underway of the nature of long-term human
>> history. The major turning points we once identified – the invention of
>> farming, the growth of cities, and technological change – were not
>> events, but long term processes, the effects of which were
>> unpredictable. At the heart of the older stories was the idea of
>> progress from small, egalitarian human groups moving in pursuit of wild
>> resources to large, sedentary, hierarchical polities based on mass
>> production and consumption of food and artefacts. Many popular accounts
>> still tell a story of progress. These stories ultimately derive from the
>> 19th century, when the inventors of prehistory assumed progress as a
>> central trait of human history, ranging societies from the primitive to
>> the civilized. A tale told by the so-called civilized about the rise of
>> civilization allowed a calm presumption that history had been creating
>> their personalities and their lifestyle all along. (Gosden 2018: 1)”
>>
>>
>> https://global.oup.com/academic/product/prehistory-a-very-short-introduction-9780198803515
>>
>> Take your health into your own hand? Or as Cicero said, quoted without
>> reference by Kierkegaard:
>>
>> Any person who reaches their 30th year of living should know themself
>> well enough to be their own physician....
>>
>> cheers/mp
>>
>>
>> --
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>>
>
>
> --
> Hari Dilip Kumar
>
> *The Sustainability Problemsolver <http://www.haridk.me> | Initiative for
> Climate Action <https://actionclimate.org/>*
> *LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/hari-dilip-kumar-4b566621/>* |
> *Skype *haridk.skype
>
>

-- 
Hari Dilip Kumar

*The Sustainability Problemsolver <http://www.haridk.me> | Initiative for
Climate Action <https://actionclimate.org/>*
*LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/hari-dilip-kumar-4b566621/>* |
*Skype *haridk.skype
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