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David B Lauterwasser's avatar

Again, a great piece touching on the most painful truths *and* the most important questions we have to ask ourselves.

At risk of greatly exceeding the scope of a simple comment, here are few thoughts:

Just as people might revert back from the “Tragic Phase” to the “Pre-Tragic Phase” through denial, cognitive dissonance and other psychological defense mechanisms, it is quite common for people to circle back from the “Post-Tragic Phase” to the “Tragic Phase” – and back to “Post-Tragic” again. For me personally, the Post-Tragic Phase is less of a steady state, and more like a temporary refuge from the “Tragic” aspects of our predicament. I find myself cycling through both phases quite regularly, and I believe it is necessary to let the emotions flow & cycle through you. Optimally, the Tragic Phase gets less severe over time, as your actions during the Post-Tragic Phase can have a permanent calming and soothing effect.

In some way, this might be like the “rock-bottom phenomenon,” where people have to let themselves be utterly devastated by grief & tragedy in order to be able to realize that there is something beyond it. Like an addict that can finally see clearer, realize mistakes, take responsibility and break old habits after hitting rock bottom, so people can look at their lives and the world with new eyes after letting despair and hopelessness destroy them.

I know from personal experience and first-hand reports from others close to me that this can have a life-altering effect similar to a brush with death, in that afterwards you ask yourself some serious existential questions, and rearrange priorities for your life. You let go of a lot of things that you thought you knew, and recognize some unquestioned beliefs as the culturally imposed misconceptions they are. You suddenly consider options that you would have never even thought about before.

Pretty much along the lines of “if I accept that my time on this planet is limited, what do I choose to do with the time that remains?” And that’s where the potential for real hope becomes tangible.

As for the whole “liberal democracy” thing: I view the entire “history-as-evolution” idea rather critically, to be honest. A bit like the Myth of Progress, or a manifestation thereof. To me it seems more like history is cyclical, and that after periods of relative stability things can revert back to something far uglier quite fast. All previous iterations of civilization had their own “Golden Age,” which they proclaimed was actually the way things were always meant to be. Fast forward a few decades, and such statements are exposed for the cosmic hubris they are.

But, again, it is important to consider that the collapse of civilization does not mean the end of the world, merely a reduction in complexity of the (mostly artificial) superstructure we’ve added to the real world. In the words of Joseph Tainter, “it may only be among those members of a society who have neither the opportunity nor the ability to produce primary food resources that the collapse of administrative hierarchies is a clear disaster.”

Again, I have the feeling that I’m just sooo far removed from what are some basic common assumptions (and from society at large). And it can be quite lonely – the image of a mountain hermit living in a cave far above the bustle of society comes to mind. To be clear: I’m not saying that I’m as wise and/or knowledgeable as a hermit, just as far removed from “normal life,” and in a position to observe and examine it from the outside. One of the ways this manifests is that I don’t believe in democracy – or at least not at this scale. As teenagers, my friends and I used to say that “democracy is when two wolves and one sheep decide what they’ll have for dinner” – the dictatorship of the majority, so to say.

Usually, the larger the group, the less coherent, the more hierarchical and complex its social organization, and the less “bright” (for lack of a better word) its individual members. As John Gowdy so aptly summarized it, “complex societies require simple individuals.”

I don’t say that there won’t be any democracy, or that the idea democracy is flawed or wrong in and of itself. I’ve just come to believe that, leaning on the ideas of Leopold Kohr (who argued that the problem is “bigness” itself) the biggest problem is that we’re thinking on scales that are simply too large to be functional. Perhaps you’re familiar with the concept of Dunbar’s number?

Most systems (apart from capitalism, perhaps) can function rather well on smaller scales – even more authoritarian modes of social organization can work well if those in authority are within reach of their subjects (and thus can be held accountable).

For me, optimism is not to be found in hopes to revert to the idealized version of the political system of the previous few decades of unprecedented material abundance, although I can understand well why this seems so comforting and thus desirable for so many people. But since the relative stability and prosperity of this system was enabled by us collectively exploiting a vast cache of fossil energy to do the “dirty work” for us, and those resources are getting more and more difficult to obtain and extract, it seems self-evident that this time is now slowly coming to an end – and liberal democracy with it.

My own form of optimism is grounded in the realization that hunter-gatherers are, on average, often just as happy and satisfied with their life as the most successful liberal democracies, or even more so. That they live decent, free, independent, meaningful and immensely fulfilling lives, within the limits of the ecosystems they inhabit, and despite occasional tragedies and hardship (or precisely *because* of said tragedies and the ability to overcome them together, as a tight-knit group of intimate friends & relatives). Yuval Noah Harari made an excellent point in his bestseller Sapiens, in the chapter “And They Lived Happily Ever After”: despite all our alleged “progress,” we haven’t gotten any happier than we used to be. Perhaps even the opposite.

What gives me reason to hope is that we humans have weathered the Ice Ages, megafauna, and countless catastrophes of various severities and scales – and yet here we are. We were immensely successful as a species, and we’ve lived decent, meaningful lives long before anyone ever thought of cultivating a field or building a city. We survived *and thrived* because we cooperated with each other, because we had a tribe/band/community to fall back on and support us, just like we supported those around us.

We did it before, and we can do it again.

(Just not all eight billion of us – aaaand, back to the Tragic Phase!)

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Stuart Smith's avatar

Well I'll be damned...I'm post-tragic...nice to finally have a diagnosis. Thank you 💟

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