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Ahmed
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by Ahmed » 07/01/14, 20:44

How to explain this original and primitive human reflex to always look for global opulence, endless growth, and excess?

Do you ask yourself, O Grelinette. This can not be explained for the simple reason that this statement is completely false!
It is a simple rear projection of the "spirit of the times" on a standardized and unreal past.
Not that pre-capitalist societies did not know greed or other similar faults, but their operations are essentially different from ours and were not aimed at accumulating for accumulation.
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Grelinette
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by Grelinette » 08/01/14, 10:26

Ahmed wrote:
How to explain this original and primitive human reflex to always look for global opulence, endless growth, and excess?

Do you ask yourself, O Grelinette. This can not be explained for the simple reason that this statement is completely false!
It is a simple rear projection of the "spirit of the times" on a standardized and unreal past.
Not that pre-capitalist societies did not know greed or other similar faults, but their operations are essentially different from ours and were not aimed at accumulating for accumulation.

Yeah .... Ahmed, what annoys me in your answer is that it apprehends the problem in a very general way and from a very distant point of view, by considering the human behavior not at the level of the individual but of the group.

When I ask the question "How to explain this original and primitive human reflex", I reason at the level of the individual, of a gesture or a behavior which should be reflected with a minimum of reflection, or at least by asking at least this question: “Do I really need this or do this?”, “Will this gesture improve my quality of life?”.

In many cases the answer is simply no. And yet this useless gesture will be committed, without the knowledge of the will of its author, and often asking him more effort: when the baker fetch bleach to pay conscientiously on his unsold, it is more restrictive than simply throw them away or put them within reach of those who need them. (Sorry for the bakers reading this debate, there's nothing against you, it's just a metaphor! :? )

Of course, the Individual exists only by reference to the Group to which he belongs, but all the same ... We can legitimately ask the question of "why "a being said to be" intelligent "will hide his faculties of reflection to commit an act of" self-destruction "for his group, and therefore for himself.

I still see a very human paradox: in the depths of the origins of human reflexes, there is the reflex of individual survival, and that of the destruction of its neighbor !

There is also the reflex of look for the presence of the group, so create the group, in opposition with that of weakening the group.

In fact it is not fundamentally human because most living beings operate according to this principle: "I need others but I will act to dominate, weaken and destroy them"!

Life is a paradox.
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Ahmed
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by Ahmed » 08/01/14, 18:58

We can legitimately ask this question: "why" a being said to be "intelligent" will obscure his faculties of reflection to commit an act of "self-destruction" for his group, and therefore for himself.

It is indeed a good question!
Yet there is no need for this intelligent being to proceed with this obliteration.
If we consider that all goods have a dual reality that are in contradiction: the value of use and the value of exchange, the attitude of your baker is logical, since he chooses to give preference to the second rather than at the first.
In reality, it is not he who chooses freely, he only acts as an economic agent determined by the value ... as, as he wrote Marx, about PLC (It's an oxymoron very much!)
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sen-no-sen
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by sen-no-sen » 15/01/14, 13:21

Grelinette wrote:How to explain this original and primitive human reflex to always look for global opulence, endless growth, and excess?


There is no genetic trend towards opulence, endless growth, excess ....
This is not reflex, but a causal chain of thermodynamic origin.
The human being has an associative cortex allowing him to record information through his memory.
These are then shared within the group because the human is a social animal.
Then, "cognitive pooling" allows an acceleration of the capacities of information processing: what is not discovered by one, does not take long to be discovered by the other.
When a discovery is made it quickly ends up being shared and improved ...
Once this knowledge is acquired, it ends up becoming cultural and its transmitted and improved from generation to generation.
The intergenerational cognitive feedback back ends up creating a collective brain fixed in time (past and present knowledge), it follows an increase of the knowledge which becomes very quickly exponential!
This increase in knowledge quickly translates into an energy dissipation which is also exponential!

Beyond a certain threshold (called critical threshold), human societies begin to agglomerate (tribe, village, city, nation, globalization) which considerably increases their impacts on their environments, and it has happened to this point. let things spoil, because the more we modify our environment, the more we have to adapt to it ... by dissipating even more energy ... to the "limit": this is our current situation!
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