What happened to man vs. nature? Why is it always man vs. man these days? Natural order is fucking horrible. It’s a literal world of terror, suffering and death.
We live in the most peaceful time in human history. We just also live in the most informationally accessable time, so you get a constant stream about new violence and inhumanity happening hundreds or thousands of miles from you.
Join an intentional community and trade your smartphone in for a dumb phone. You’ll have some disagreements with people, and once in a while there may be a fight with violence, but by and large this is a peaceful time. You won’t have the state threatening violence against you for keeping to yourselves. You won’t be taken over by a competing state unless you already lived in an unstable region of the globe.
By and large things are great. The corporatized internet has done a number on the minds of the global population, keeping everyone scared, where now someone letting their 10 year old walk to school in a decent neighborhood is reason enough for multiple calls to the police. Shooting someone for ringing their doorbell. Having family-breaking arguments over people’s private lives.
Everyone’s afraid and there’s largely nothing to fear. Far less than a couple decades ago, yet we’re far more terrified of everything, we’re the least connected in the ways that matter and the most connected in the ways that ultimately don’t matter at all. On the internet, toxicity has become the rule, not the exception. That carries over to real-world interactions.
Fun fact, under a strictly functionalist interpretation of the system suicide is a perfectly valid and reasonable alternative to integrating into society. If you like functionalism, you should probably sit down and give that a think over.
and, ironically, humans are specifically evolved to be cooperative to a fault. It’s the entire reason we’re so successful and there’s even a pretty credible theory that we managed to domesticate ourselves.
if you really want to follow the natural order as a human, you should be an anarchist hippie.
I think of the same thing when people talk about “life isn’t fair” or “the world” generally or whatever. Like sure we don’t live in a just universe (whatever the fuck that’d look like) but it’s not life causing a lot of the problems that people respond to with these platitudes, it’s fucking people… And the people responsible are sometimes the same ones dropping the platitudes.
Also, a groups banding together to collectively overthrow a stronger opponent is natural. There’s a rule of never getting between a mother and her baby with many animals for a reason, even though most of us could probably take that baby.
There’s personal benefit to dealing with those who abuse their powers (physical, social, or technological), even if those powers aren’t being directed at you.
Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.
Basically, there’s a finite number of people our brains evolved to be able to consider as part of ‘our group’, and once you go beyond that number you tend to run into issues ‘humanizing’ those people and seeing them as complex personalities.
Exactly. I didn’t know that term but about all primitive communities consisted of about 100 to 150 individuals and trading with other communities. Kingdoms are something really new in evolutionary timespans, far newer than clothes, to which we already have slight adjustments in skin hair.
See also: single-family zoning. “Everybody wants” to live in detached houses, yet they need the law to prohibit property owners from building multifamily…
I get the meme and your response, but you could easily flip this one on its side: “Everybody wants clean air to breathe, yet they need laws to prohibit pollution”
If anything, single-family has worse externalities than high density does. Single-family homes have to be subsidized because they don’t generate enough tax revenue per acre to pay for the amount of infrastructure they require. (Concrete example: if you have a single-family lot with 100’ of street frontage, that one family basically needs to pay enough taxes to maintain 100’ of road. But if you have a 10-plex on the same lot, each household only has to pay enough taxes to maintain 10’ of road.) Single-family is also inherently the least sustainable in terms of both HVAC costs (because every side of the habitable unit is exposed to the environment) and transportation costs (because low density minimizes walkability).
nimbys: nobody wants multifamily homes
home developers: i got a bunch of people who would pay me $ to build cheap multi family ho-
nimbys: I SAID n̶̨̊o̵͍͑b̴͚̾ǫ̸̍ḓ̷͌y̷͇͊ ̸͇͛w̸͖̓a̵͇̋n̸̘͠t̸͍͗s̸͚̒ ̸̠̕m̷̼͊ü̵̟l̴̜͛t̶̯͊i̷̭͠f̶͎͗ä̵̭́m̸̨̕i̵̫͊l̷͛ͅẙ̷̩ ̷͈̎h̷̘͂ơ̴̗m̴̱̊ȅ̵̙s̴̥̕
please 😭 i am speaking in the simple economic sense of supply and demand. i would adore to live in a sprawling european castle, but i don’t participate in demand for that housing situation because i can’t afford it.
plsplspls 🫠 with peace and love get over your need to pick a fight and stop trying to “uhm actually” me; i do in fact know what i am talking about here.
Yeah I mean it’s not that I contributed to demand for a Honda Civic, but I did contribute to the demand for an affordable car, which is why I didn’t buy a Lambo. Don’t you think it’s splitting hairs to say that there isn’t demand for Civics, but for cars cheaper than Lambos? Seems like a distinction without a difference.
True conservatives would never be caught with the modern clothes and tools of the Amish. The real kool kids klub lives Buck naked in caves and huts made of broken sticks.
“True conservatives” aren’t people who don’t want change; that’s just a lie they tell to make their ideology seem less unhinged. True conservatives are, and always have been, people who crave hierarchy and autocratic rule.
In other words, “true conservatives” have absolutely no problems with change or new technology, as long as it’s used to enforce their privilege rather than elevate the people below them.
This. Its about preserving power structures and that’s it, they deserve power and others don’t, that’s what they believe. So many times you see people try to gotcha conservatives by pointing out how their ideology is inconsistent when in reality its very consistent just not in the way they advertise it as.
It is certainly hard to swallow as an individual, but consistently rejecting natural selection through technological intervention does eventually create significantly greater crisis. It’s a very difficult problem with modern medicine, where we can always keep more people alive, but the resources required to do so increase exponentially without limit. Death is ultimately one way that the natural world self regulates when any particular species outgrows it’s environment.
Ants build large, elaborate and engineered structures and shape their environment to suit their needs by moving large quantities of earth, therefore ants are unnatural for not following the rules of nature and actively working to give themselves an evolutionary edge.
Counterpoint: everything humans do is just an extreme version of other behaviors in the animal kingdom, therefore nothing we do is unnatural. The “natural order” is just doing whatever and following the laws of physics.
Certainly, and the consequences of such are also a part of the natural order. Unless you want to argue that free will is a myth, you ought to seriously consider working towards making better decisions rather than complaining about how things are.
That’s a very interesting subject to explore. If you want my personal opinion on it, free will is an artifact of our limited nature and the resulting inability to consciously perceive how everything fits together in the big picture. It may not necessarily be true, but we also have no other way to live than to assume we can make decisions about what is a good and a bad idea, such as deciding that jumping off a cliff is a very bad idea which will likely result in our death.
You’re confused. ‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean physical strength, it means those who fill their niche in the world and live to reproduce. A lion that kills a million deer but dies without reproducing is an evolutionary failure.
Our environmental niche is to invent and experiment. Back in the day, people thought that cities had reached their natural limit because you couldn’t have too many horses in one place. They thought people would never have heart transplants or IVF.
And I also don’t think the earlier person realises that evolutionary pressures still apply despite medicine and tech removing some of things that limited us before.
That is to say that because we don’t need to worry about certain things which used to be important, the pool of people now “competing” is larger, meaning that competition between needed traits is higher, making for “more fit” individuals.
In the sense that we don’t need to worry about being physically strong anymore, so we can focus on cognition, and looking at history, the speed at which our intellect (or at least level of tech) has grown — as a species — is pretty fucking insane.
we’re a few steps away from genetic manipulation on a wide scale
That actually happens to be within my specific area of study, and you may be overstating things. We’ve only just scratched the surface of genetic manipulation, and nobody really knows how long it will take before we can design effective genetic code deliberately. So far we have determined the nucleotides which build the basic structure of DNA, and found correlation between certain blocks and traits exhibited, but it’s not quite as simple as cutting and pasting those blocks like you’re writing computer code. We have also found further layers of ‘information storage’ within DNA which relates to how those nucleotides are arranged, called epigenetics, which we barely know anything about at all. As things stand with our current level of knowledge, we have established an extremely extensive testing regime for any novel genetic product which takes decades to complete, and which nearly every product tested so far has failed to complete, often due to unexpectedly resulting in sterility and death. It’s a very exciting science, and I have great hopes for what it can accomplish if we don’t kill ourselves first, but it’s a stretch to suggest that it’s just around the corner.
I didn’t mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard’s first rocket to Man on the Moon.
If humans aren’t separate from nature, then anything humans create falls within “nature”. Humans aren’t the first species to create tools and create farms. Even art have been observed in other species.
As far a “paying attention to the nature order”, I do have my concerns, but it has more to do with putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere that we cause runaway climate change. Not showing basic empathy to other humans is a departure from the “natural order”.
The part of the brain that governs “Empathy” has been narrowed down to a region called “mirror neurons”. It causes us to see ourselves in people we’re observing. It’s also directly responsible for how we learn tool use. Monkey 1 sees Monkey 2 put stick into anthill to get food, so Monkey 1 also puts stick into anthill.
I think people are getting their wires crossed by bringing prior bias into this discussion here. While I do agree with what you have said here, my personal understanding of the argument for respecting the natural order comes from seeing people make decisions which will naturally lead to their own inability to survive/procreate, then getting mad at others for failing to respect those decisions.
Define “Natural Order”. It’s often used to justify being shitty to other people by Social Darwinists/Libertarians/Manosphere types. If you use that term without elaborating exactly what you mean, you’ll get slotted into one of those types because that’s exactly what they do.
which will naturally lead to their own inability to survive/procreate
how so? you seem to have a lot of experience seeing these admittedly horrific sounding situations play out. i think we all would benefit from hearing what is going on so that we can save ourselves from a similar scenario!
if you refuse to name one example of your so called “consequences of disrespecting the natural order” we must assume that you are behaving as a homophobic bigot. (on the off chance you don’t know, just a heads up, because that’s a common anti lgbt dog whistle.)
if you are here in good faith, give one material example of what you are saying.
Edit: And just to note, I actually did engage with someone else who replied to my initial comment, who wasn’t just blatantly fishing for an argument like you. Go look there if you want to see discussion over an example.
I’ll give you a little piece of advice, your argument is unconvincing without evidence.
Any claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And I’m seeing a lot of complaining about other people asking for evidence and not a lot of evidence actually being produced.
Huh, who would have thought that asking questions to get people to clarify their arguments and defend their positions and not to derail the conversation was sealioning? Ya learn something new every day!
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