How do we escape the Rat Utopia while keeping the good parts of modern life?

[glad vlad]

There's a great short/readable book, Tribe, by Sebastian Junger.

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.”

On an individual level, we don't like hardship. It feels bad. But it's also what we evolved to do - to survive. So our soft lives, ironically, feel awful, directionless, disconnected. Think about how happy men are when they do stuff like leave their comfortable suburban homes to go live in a deer hide and freeze their asses off for a while.

Humans love missions. For a long time you had various wars, the sheer stress of physical survival, and then you had various frontiers, literal and then metaphorical ones. Now I think people have hit the edge of the habitat. For most people, there's no tribe, no mission, no war, nothing left to discover.

The good news/bad news is that nothing lasts forever. Birth rates are collapsing everywhere that is industrialized, so...

 

[instant]

Where is the line for "the good parts of modern life" drawn? Running water? Internet? Electricity? Heating?

Almost everything is built on several generations and economies of scale. Something as mundane as the standardized screw would take a shitton of effort to make again from scratch.

 

[Kürtzl]

"...while keeping the good parts of modern life?"
Not getting to keep them is the whole point retard.
Rat Utopia:
You get to have all the shit you want and you will feel like shit.
Non Rat Utopia:
You have to continously make good things happen by yourself and you will not feel like shit.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

Folks who dismiss the Rat Utopia experiment outright are doing themselves a disservice. Sure they aren't as intelligent as humans but they still formed some semblances of what can be considered a society. I argue it is our intelligence and ancestral instinct that will ultimately doom us to be nothing more than rats. I trade stocks and commodities based on correlated markets; mean reversion and divergences. However, just because one of those markets diverges does not necessarily mean the other correlated market will follow; yet it still holds significance.

Do I think we can have wealth and live prosperously at the same time, no. If everyone has wealth, that means your neighbor is just as wealthy as you thus destroying competitive motivation. Humans, in my opinion, are driven by conquest. It's in our nature, it was a key to survival 300 million years ago and it hasn't gone away. We inherently want dominion over all things because we perceive our intelligence as the great divider between us and animal. In reality we're no different. We commit war with one another, just as pack animals do over territorial disputes. We also have, at the micro level, individual needs of conquest; beating our fellow employee for that District Manager position among other things. However, we also have a parental instinct in society, if we didn't Pedophiles would be common place and worst of all accepted by the greater majority; it would be innate. Obviously I'm only speaking on Western civilizations as I am ignorant to the intricacies of most foreign societies like the Middle East. I hypothesize that if the Middle East became as wealthy and influential as the USA, we would be seeing the same general signs just from the perspective of a different culture.

TLDR
No, we can't have both because our collective instincts simply will not allow it. What can we do, instead of taking a bath in the river nihil? We focus on our micro-ecosystems (family, friends, local community) and you try your darndest to be kind and supportive of those who you care for. Just as animals, we are capable of using our intelligence to heal one another. We also have complicated killing machines that are our teeth that bites the prey. The pull away from individualism as a virtue, in my opinion, will be the downfall. Kill the individual, kill society.

 

[Hyperbola]

Everyone always comes to this bizarre conclusion that the Rat Utopia drove the rats mad because of the ease of their existence. The Rat Utopia experiment drove the rats mad because of severe overcrowding, and the resulting crazy-making psychological stress. (If I'm remembering correctly): The largest alpha rats that could keep one of the tiny defensible cul-de-sacs or corners to themselves lasted longer. The rest were crowded into indefensible spaces where they couldn't get away from each other.

To avoid the Rat Utopia problem, people need a space that is *theirs*. Their own home (fuck the rentier/usury rat-race), their own territory (fuck overcrowded megacities and brutalist architecture that eliminates private space), their own office/workspace (fuck open offices and the sadists who designed them with malice aforethought). We are also a territorial species that needs to control some small slice of our world. Sadists have designed our society to deliberately deny these psychological needs.


There may be problems caused by an extreme level of wealth, to the point where there are no consequences for anything you do. But I think they are very distinct problems from those facing most people. Most people aren't incredibly secure, they're a slight shove away from disaster, and they've grown up in a "civilization" that tells them in every possible way that they are 'surplus', are replaceable, and that nothing will ever be theirs. (I imagine the Hikkikomori and "lie-flat" behaviors comes from that psychological/physical environment eventually breaking people.) People will work towards a life (a life is more than being handed bread in a commie-queue, at the "sufferance" of some other agency) - they won't work for what they cannot have.

 

[Hyperbola]

It really *shouldn't* have to do with technology exactly at all.

There's no reason we can't, with all our modern material wealth, build buildings that look like this:

instead of like this:

We have materials the Romans couldn't dream of. How we construct our cities and spaces are, at least in part, *deliberate artistic choices*. And the choices being made by the people who own those spaces, and the architects, are increasingly malevolent ones.

A city built *by and for* the people who actually live there:

 

[Otterly]

but your terms are too broad. "Humanity" and "strict rules" what does that even mean?

Ok I mean the immediate community around you, and then the country and society you live in.
Trannyism and sexual degeneracy for example. Fifty years ago, anyone touching kids or wanting access to kids in a village would be beaten senseless by the men of the village. Older relatives of mine have repeatedly said this. If it was bad enough, they’d disappear and nobody would have seen anything. There would have intense societal shaming for anyone being a sexual degenerate. Even in my lifetime this has gone. It used to be one MP a month caught with an orange up their arse and earring stockings and it was a career ended. Now we’ve got kink tolerance and MPs cross dressing and if you point out that’s dodgy you’re the problem.
We’ve gone from seeing the same people daily, and not seeing the outside world to the opposite. That has a massive effect on what society can shame us for. Shame is very powerful. Now we’ve got people openly advocating at UNESCO for exactly what PIE wanted in the seventies.
You would never get away with that in a small community of normal people - it’s only when we hit this density and size issue.
Think as well about how density and size affects our ability to reality test.
1. You live in a town of ten thousand and know people indirectly or directly. The news tells you there’s a terrible plague and you need to surrender all your freedoms but you don’t know anyone who died and neither does your wider network. You realise you’re being lied to
2. You live in a mega hive of ten million. The news tells you there’s a terrible plague and you must surrender your freedoms. You don’t know anyone who died but you see a lot of morgue trucks and the nightly news is really scary. You go along with it.
Density and size of population is not healthy. It removes the ‘directness’ of interaction. The scale of it is inhuman

 

[Trump's Chosen]

You didn’t read the rest of that sentence. I outright said humanity needed some sort of shepherd or leadership that could direct our energies so we wouldn’t be lost in instant gratification.

I read it, I just think it's dumb.

Who leads the leaders?

 

[Ishtar]

I read it, I just think it's dumb.
Who leads the leaders?

 

[SpergioLeonne]

Disperse, homestead some vacant lot in Alaska and become ungovernable from sheer logistics

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

It really *shouldn't* have to do with technology exactly at all.

There's no reason we can't, with all our modern material wealth, build buildings that look like this:
View attachment 5106378

instead of like this:
View attachment 5106380

We have materials the Romans couldn't dream of. How we construct our cities and spaces are, at least in part, *deliberate artistic choices*. And the choices being made by the people who own those spaces, and the architects, are increasingly malevolent ones.

A city built *by and for* the people who actually live there:
View attachment 5106399

We used to, and that's where Art Deco came from. But our politicians are absolutely cheap and want the cheapest architects to design the most blandly functional buildings imaginable, therefore we get glass boxes. But maybe that's a good thing, because when they step outside of the box we get the globohomo monstrosities such as many 21st century skyscrapers in London.

 

[SphinxItOver]

The Rat Utopia experiment drove the rats mad because of severe overcrowding,

Every person that repeats this did not read the studies or watch the documentaries.

The '62 Behavioral Sink Rat experiment was set up for a capacity of 60 rats. Rats were actively removed from the experiment for tests/control for each generation and not returned. The experiment also suffered from other issues that were speculated as potential contamination. These issues lead to the switch from rats to mice for the next experiment. Universe 25 was set up for capacity between 3840 (nesting shelter availability) and 9500 (food availability) and only ever hit a peak pop of 2200 with only about 150 mice removed for other studies around day 1000 after many generations of mice.

Think as well about how density and size affects our ability to reality test.
1. You live in a town of ten thousand and know people indirectly or directly. The news tells you there’s a terrible plague and you need to surrender all your freedoms but you don’t know anyone who died and neither does your wider network. You realise you’re being lied to
2. You live in a mega hive of ten million. The news tells you there’s a terrible plague and you must surrender your freedoms. You don’t know anyone who died but you see a lot of morgue trucks and the nightly news is really scary. You go along with it.

Be careful with conflating 'group think' for resistance to psychological warfare. Discernment of reality is not based on population density but individual intelligence and education and your argument is based on conflict management behaviors.

I over thunk this entire debate and there's several paragraphs of sperging I'll post later.

 

[Ishtar]

I read it, I just think it's dumb.

Who leads the leaders?

I couldn’t reply earlier. Sorry. Obviously the leaders would not be regular humans. They would be a caste of shepherds, whether they be genetically engineered or some sort of benevolent AI or some combination of both.

Without such an over class humanity will flounder in comfort and comfortable ennui till it slowly perishes.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

I couldn’t reply earlier. Sorry. Obviously the leaders would not be regular humans. They would be a caste of shepherds, whether they be genetically engineered or some sort of benevolent AI or some combination of both.

Without such an over class humanity will flounder in comfort and comfortable ennui till it slowly perishes.

Why do you think discipline is arrived at only externally?

 

[Ishtar]

Why do you think discipline is arrived at only externally?

Because most of this ugly breed of creature we call humans are incapable of mastering themselves without someone holding a whip to their back.