This is a solution to the problems posed by conflict theory and Karl Marx. It’s actually my second post conclusively disproving Marx … in a month!
“That’s pretty, Good! HAHA….” …. SMDH
Human conflict is truly bourne from competition over resources. It is sometimes driven by ideological means, but when you dig deep enough, usually you find that ideology is reinforced and propelled as a means of obscuring the true causes of conflict, often inconvenient. This is not to say that your chosen religion is an invention inspired by control of humanity. Regardless, ideologies are often used centuries after their invention as a means to unify regional populations for better or worse.
This isn’t a discussion of the merits and tragedies of religion. This is a strategy to circumvent the factors precipitating conflict in the first place. If acquisition and control over limited resources creates the needs for conflict and the shapes or forms thereof, then what happens as these factors themselves become scarce? What if the reasons for war were themselves scarce?
As humanity externalizes their capacity for resource acquisition, we will undergo major shifts in the driving factors that have seeded conflict across the world from time immemorial. As scarcity for resources is purged from memory for several centuries, humanity will find that the multifaceted basis for conflict itself will be all but eliminated. At that point, any conflict that should emerge may be the result of some artificial system or ideology. Anyone who creates an artificial shelled system to create conflict towards the pursuit of power for the sake of power in a future era which would otherwise contain effervescent peace and placidity is a real asshole, don’t ya think?
Also, nuclear war is for assholes. If you want nukes at this point in history just because you want the political advantage conferred from disarmament et alias, then you are also an asshole. You’re about to fuck it up for everybody. That’s the equivalent of dousing a country in kerosine and dancing around with a match. Go fuck yourself. No one else gets nuclear weapons. We could have peace and prosperity, but nooo you had to have your goddamn nukes. Can we hurry up with fusion so none of these assholes has an excuse to produce plutonium?! Also, fusion tanks Iran’s market for oil. Womp womp. VC lession #1 – sell while the price is high because it ain’t going any higher. Thank you. Cha ching. America can take that to the bank.
The degree to which these benefits from lack of resource constraint are realized depends on the availability of untapped ores and minerals on earth or in space. There are some celestial bodies whence it would be unethical to harvest resources, depending on that body’s capacity for life, but there are a plethora of ores in asteroids, on the moon and on mars.
No one knows truly what we can expect to find there, so we should err on the side of caution. Yet, nations and corporations should assume that our tragic dearth of resources is transitive. At this point, it’s merely momentary in the context of humanity’s history. Further, humanity will find that in the face of technology, the global economy will gradually revert to previous form, where nations are moreso dependent on quantity and variety of resources and they’ll find less demand for finished and/or intermediate products imported from other countries. Instead technology will supplant this demand by replacing manufacturing methods. It is not so simple, but the specific progression that global and national economies will undergo is far from either certain or simple.
However, the lower classes will surely benefit from this transition over the next three decades, driven by development and dissemination of technology. The major concerns during this time will be economic turbulence and uncertainty. If nations do not approach this period with warranted caution and expected foresight, then changes will rivet through existing socioeconomic institutions. Carbon taxing and the solutions to global warming will help provide stablization and it is for this reason that free-market and business-oriented types should support such systems. Barring major disaster and after our technological transformation – around 2030 – there will still be economic disparity, but that should begin to lessen worldwide, whereby we accelerate focus on unity and expansion towards space.
As nano develops, so will our ability to develop space elevators, whence we can exponeniate the harvest of resources for space, whence you can expect wildly fluctuating commodity prices. You can bet on that horse. It might be a commodity crash, since demand should generally outpace supply beforehand.
What fascinates me is understanding how something as trivial as the starting mass of a planet and therefore its gravity stratifies the fates of intelligent life. Too much mass and not even nano is capable of providing a reasonable escape from the fate of overpopulation, life’s common and innate enemy. Too little gravity and IMO there is less restriction and need for common form or structure for life, of which I’m not sure of the implications.
At this time, around 2050, when humanity has built out it’s options for efficiently harnessing the excess of resources available in asteroids and elsewhere, we’ll experience an unprecidented era of peace. If we make it to this point. Think back sixty years to the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Do you remember the devastation of that period? That was that seventy years ago and the pain is still with us. Six million people died.
So, imagine, if you will, the sociocultural implications of a 21st century holocaust or some variety of disasters that eliminate all but two billion people by 2050. This is a topic for another post, but compare that population’s shared social experience and burdened memory against the population of a humanity in 2050 numbering 10 billion. The latter population found ways to work together! Where would we find their energy and economic output invested? In unity. In infrastructure. In prevention. In life itself. What of the former population? They invested in war and destruction. And what is more infuriating than conflict’s capacity to sow the seeds of further conflict.
So what have you, in 2050, if you find yourself amoung the former population? War, destruction, tragedy and more of the same! Furthermore, you now have the shared archetype of technological disaster and ruinous war. What fosters ignorance and foments conflict more than fear? In the context of FDR’s quote, we should understand this horrendous vision of a bizarro future, so that our children can leverage it as indemnity and collateral on an investment of immeasurable return. Imagine the disposition of the former and latter populations: which one is better prepared to handle the future after 2050? The one with the quasi-diluvian, Noahide archetype of global disaster? Or the population who invested in life and infrastructure?
As for this proposed era of peace stemming from the economic resolution to the origins of conflict theory itself: why should this era of peace begin in 2050? If humanity knows that it has what it takes to reach this point, why should we let any transient trauma cause us to veer from the course? If we don’t remain focused, we may find ourselves in a world burdened by sociocultural trauma and bound by hatred arisen from decades of conflict. Instead, we should allow our positive and negative visions of the near future to fuel our transition, so that our destiny reflects our needs and desires. Who wants to live in the world full of strife and ruin? I want a future worth celebrating. So humanity should move forwards together, which means we must first center ourselves and unite the world over. There should be nothing worth impediment to humanity’s progress towards this.
Because the political and economic strategies of entire cultures are shaped by the monetization of resources and the distributions of benefits whereof, then if humanity should shape its actions today upon the certainties of the near future, it may defuse certain tragedy that might prevent us from reaching the stars in the first place. There aren’t many people, old or young, who would disagree with that. Further still, if your nation is planning on holding out on a stockpile of resources to monetize on scarcity between 2020 and 2050, you might find yourself surprised when long-held pricing patterns are broken for specific natural resources, especially rare-earth and other scarce ores. So if you want to adequately monetize those resources, you might like to do so now, not that it’s wise to squander them. And there seem to be many regions that are artificially limiting the monetization of such resources, in anticipation of a global commodity crunch. In reality, we will see supply lead to end of resource-driven conflict for centuries.
On a global scale, it may be better if supply is generally increased until such a time when importation of space-based resources will definitely increase supply and reduce price, albeit in some unknowable way. Space-based resources are going to be huge, but it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how until we can more easily quantify those resources. Fusion, whenever it so happens to arrive, will reduce the demand for fossil fuels, though not completely. Even though fusion itself is cheap energy, it’s not equivalent to cheap energy distribution or responsible energy utilization and requires massive infrastructure changes.
Read, Follow or Get TF Out of the Way… J/K J/K
No, I wasn’t actually going for world conquest.
Past, Present and Futures
Time, history and our understanding of past, present and future can be imagined per analogy with the light cone from special relativity. Via a chain of causality, our understanding of the past can affect events in the present, but so can our past understanding of the future. So, in a wierd way, the future does exert causation in the present, especially if the future is certain or perceived as inevitable.
It’s universally true that those who control the past control the future via the present. Thus, the victors who write history have immense power. Further, it’s also true that those who envision the future guide the present and therefore control the future past. À la recherche du temps perdu, we should motivate ourselves with both positive and negative visions of the world to search the available futures and create the one we want, instead of finding ourselves lost in some post-apocalyptic future. This philosophical approach inevitably leads to the corrosion of individuality, so the challenge is to leverage this so, without letting ourselves forget the importance of individuality to avoid succumbing to nihilism.
In order for a society to reenforce individuality, the individual must rewarded. Otherwise, we risk systemic corrosion to society’s means of behavioral feedback. Or the sociological limbic system, so to speak. Nihilism begets demoralization and a clockwork orange scenario ensues. It’s urgent to recognize and preempt this philosophical problem in the face of our technological revolution, as more societal needs and demands are met by such means whereby the individual is completely excluded. It’s tragic in itself, but hopeless nihilism unrestrained will probably lead to chaotic meaningless behavior from actors who refuse to acknowedge their individual capacity to contribute in a society that treats people as disposable units.
In Which I Apologize For Being an Asshole (Maybe)
Basically what i’m saying is that I should probably have a job or at least some money or something. Instead, I have $3.77. To me, that’s two coffees. Also, it would appear that there is a line of people waiting to kick me in the face while I’m down and each one hopes they have the chance to stab me in the back, like I’m some kind of new age Julius Caesar.
My life savings are invested in Quarters futures and Penny stocks. I diversified with two T-bonds.
I certainly hope that I’m wrong about that. If not, the world has some serious problems because it’s beginning to do exactly what I’m warning about in the preceding paragraph. If so, I’m sorry, but I truly do not understand what I did to deserve this. If I’m wrong, why should someone who understands psychology, sociology and philosophy to the degree that I do feel that the world treats him thusly? That, in itself, is a bit sad. Sorry to whine, but I need three things to improve my life situation: (1) Nutrition and medicine (2) Intellectual stimulation (3) Abundance and variety of social experiences.
If a personal psychological treatment plan disregards my need for a little extra understanding while I pick up the pieces yet again, then it’s unreasonable, poorly thought out, IMO poorly assessed and possibly malicious. In other words, hoping that shocking someone with the pain of “rock bottom” is not something that works for many people and it’s not something that would ever work for me. Ultimately, it’s just a convenient excuse to deprive me of resources and precisely those types of social experiences which I would need to socially develop. It’s a rationalization I fear was pitched to my family that they unfortunately believed. I might also require some extra help with an acquired and intentionally exacerbated attachment disorder. This is the fifth time in the past six years or so that I’ve had to put my life back together and please excuse me, but I don’t know anything else! So in the context of Asperger’s, please afford me little extra space to be able to experience the things required for normal adult development.
Also, did you know that there are like 800,000 people who have a suspended license in Virginia? That’s like 15% of the population in the fucking state! They don’t build roads here, they just take people’s licenses and ruin their lives. Although I can’t say I have much against the state of Virginia itself. Not at all, actually. Life is pretty nice here, in spite of the fact that I need to drive to have a life, but at least when you break Virginia’s laws, they fucking tell you and you go to court and you are very aware of what is happening to you. It’s when the state, it’s laws or some asinine intelligence apparati are leveraged against someone silently that incredible damage can be done to one’s life! And in such a way that few people become aware of it. Even when someone criticizes or reprimands me, I actually appreciate it because if your criticism has merit, then you’re giving me a chance to improve or change.
The most damage has been done to my life from words and actions quietly sprung from malicious intention in a passive aggressive manner. If you want to help me, then by all means, do so. If you want to get in my way or sow the seeds of conflict or smear my personal and/or professional reputation for whatever reason, then please immediately get the fuck out of my life. You’re a horrible miserable excuse for a person because you can’t possibly empathize with someone who truly wants to help others, as evidenced by the post you just read. GET THE !@#$ OUT OF MY LIFE.