Aesthetic Materialism

    Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 10 Back at the house, Dismas and Gestas talk with the mother of the children. "Come in, come in!  The very least I can do is make thee a fine meal." "I'd be happy to, Ma'am, but we have to get our friend.  He's just over there." "Very well, bring him in as well!" "Ehm," says Dismas, scratching the back of his neck.  "That might be... a little...."  "What?  What is the problem?  Go!  Hie thee hence, collect your friend, and bring him inside!" "Oh.... kay...." says Dismas, clearly uncomfortably. Dismas and Gestas head back to the tall grass where they've left Jesus.   "Mister... Jesus?" says Dismas, quietly, leaning into towards him.  Jesus does not move a muscle.   Dismas and Gestas look at each other.  Gestas shrugs.  They get down to pick him up.   When Dismas touches Jesus's hand, the wound on Dismas's hand closes and is magic...

  I hope we're near the end of the era of the aesthetic of sleekness.  Everything these days is designed to be sleek, simple, smooth.  Everything is frictionless, characterless, blank, boring, nothing.  When, one day, we look back at the aesthetic of this era, when it has become quaint, even retro, how will it look to us?  What will it signify?  What kind of vision of the future did it portend? Nowadays, there are two overriding aesthetics, especially radiating out of the tech world: infantilization and sleekness.  (You see the infantilization in, for instance, the colorful font of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and in many other places.)   I see them as two sides of the same coin.  The implication is clear: you, the consumers, are children- innocent, simple idiots. We, your tech oligarchs, are inscrutable, mysterious, awesome, opaque, dark, very slightly menacing.  Occasionally gray or silver or white, but mostly jet black...

  I'm not saying I agree with them - I think there are probably problems with their ideology.  Frankly, I'm skeptical of any political ideology that focuses on government taxing and spending rather than worker power - whether of the liberal, Georgist, or (pseudo-)Marxist variety. But... well, at least they have something.  They have some kind of goal, some kind of clear policy proposal on how to get there, and some kind of economic analysis about how it would all work.  Which is more than the Marxists have.  Marxists are way less sophisticated on policy.  Marxists, you've got to up your game.  

  Dominating cultures tend to freely appropriate ideas and traditions of the cultures that they dominate.  They just add the gods of the people they have conquered to their already-existing pantheon - even when the mythologies clash and are logically incompatible, dominating cultures shrug.  Thus, for instance, Genghis Khan's descendants were happy to adopt the cultures they dominated.  The Yuan Dynasty took on Chinese customs and beliefs, Berke Khan became a Muslim, and so on - without hesitation.  Often they believed great swirling mixtures of Tengrism, Buddhism, astrology, Christianity, and anything else they came across, all at once, without feeling any cognitive dissonance.  There is always something sweetly naive about conquerors. Dominated cultures, on the other hand, seethe with resentment and hatred.  They remember every infraction and count every penny they've been cheated.  Not only hatred towards those who have dominated them - not eve...

To my mind, the best decision making process would probably have elements of meritocracy, sortition, democracy, subsidiarity, and stability.  Exactly how much of each and how they can be balanced is an open question.  But for the sake of argument, here's one way of incorporating all of them. Society is divided into many small portions, (each containing, perhaps, 15,000 people) each of which has some fairly large degree of relative autonomy, capable of deciding on a wide swath of policies for itself.  (We can call each of these a mini-society.) Within each mini-society, there is a process for decision-making.  This process can, itself, be changed - the Constitution of each mini-society can be amended by the mini-society itself to change the process.  But the default process, as it were, would be as follows: Step 0: The mini-society has laws, in official law books, beginning with that mini-society's constitution.  They also have at least 2 (though probably ma...

  I don't think that conservatives are evil.  Thinking of conservatives as "the bad guys" is totally wrongheaded and ineffective as a strategy, because it misses the point. I think that conservatism is something that happens to most people - probably to everyone, to one degree or another, especially as people get older, although different people become conservative in different ways.  As they age, people become more and more stuck in their ways.  It becomes more and more difficult to change your mind.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," as the saying goes.  People become more and more convinced that they are right, more dogmatic, more authoritarian, less and less open to new ideas.   In much the same way that, if you don't exercise, you will become out of shape, and if you don't exercise your mind, with reading, sudoku, crosswords, or something, your mind will gradually deteriorate as you get older - similarly, most people gradually become c...