Other things to read

Links!

Life is a little bit busy, but I have an an essay that’s starting to take shape, and my usual schedule should return over the next month or so. In the meantime, here are some other things to read.

Of the moment

Tangle logic by Venkatesh Rao: ‘The point is that tangles are the default, and platonic orderliness exceptional. In complex systems, both natural and artificial, you might have spots of order within, due to special circumstances where it order is actually functional, and local degeneracies. But in general living systems, both natural and artificial, are tangles by default, orderly by exception. If the situation looks reversed, there is invariably an authoritarian force at work.’

The heartland by Charles Eisenstein: ‘Kansas is part of the country known as the heartland. I find that an apt reference to the people I met here: unpretentious, open-hearted, friendly, kind, and humble. Because of these qualities, the process some call the awakening of consciousness can happen very quickly here. I was not expecting to see conservative-looking farmers in their sixties and seventies have such ready access to tears. The grief for what has happened to their land, to their way of life, to their place, and in their history is becoming available to them.’

The utopian machine by Susanna Crossman: An account of growing up in a 1970’s intentional community that goes beyond mere description to analyse why such ‘utopias’ tend to be harmful to children.

Human capital and the balance of power by Policy Tensor: ‘We have argued that more sophisticated measures of underlying national capabilities show that the United States has lost its preponderance on the world stage. China has surpassed the US, even as the US continues to enjoy military primacy for the time being.’

Beyond the peak by John Michael Greer: ‘The future we’re facing is not the one that gets shoved at us daily by the corporate mass media. All that pretentious drivel about humanity’s destiny in space passed its pull date a long time ago. Nor are we facing the flipside of those same fantasies, the overnight apocalypse that wipes us all out or plunges us all back to the stone age by next Thursday at the latest. What we’re facing instead might best be called history as usual: the long slow unraveling of a civilization that drew too heavily on its resource base. It’s an old story and, for the historically literate, a familiar one.’

The value of self-contradiction in Zhuangzi by Eric Schwitzgebel: ‘The most charitable way to read Zhuangzi involves rejecting the principle of charity as it is conventionally applied.’

Echoing down the years

Holding back and filling, this is not the same as it stopping.    

Torrents clash and gather, this cannot be long sustained.    

Gold and jade filled rooms, these no-one can keep safe.

Rich, noble, and arrogant: self-neglect condemns them.

Working and yielding self, this is the sky’s way.  

Dào Dé Jīng 9 (following Guodian version)

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Image: On Barbed Wire. by meg_nicol (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)