Thread by @homemadeguitars

I acknowledge the sins of my fathers, and regret them.
However, on a day to day basis I am more interested in finding ways to move forward appropriately, than of detailing the evils we have done.

2. All of it - the genocide, the slavery, the ecocide - was done to build global 2021, the practices, the technology, the value system.
You can't build a good system out of ceaseless evil.
We do not live in a good system.

3. I find the idea that we can somehow tweak the outcome of slavery, genocide, and ecocide, and get a fair and equitable society, to be unpersuasive. I appear to be in the minority.

4. Are you familiar with the localization movement, if such a term is accurate? Helena Norberg-Hodge @HelenaNHodge

5. Not that it follows from where I was, but...
It's all one thing, you know. Everything. Climate change and mass shootings and Donald 🤮 and his whole fam damily, and racism and sexism - it's all rooted in our value system. Who we look up to, what we think we need, value.

6. A modern society's value system is not expressed in words, it is expressed in actions.
If we valued life we would not be causing mass extinction. It's not caused by our human-ness, it's caused by what we do with it.
What we do is, we obtain what we value.
If that means plastic

7. "has to" fill up all the oceans - 🤷
That is monumentally an expression of value.
If everyone took all their plastic trash back to Walmart even that would make some difference.
Walmart made a profit and stuck us with the plastic. Now we're supposed to recycle it, except

8. recycling is fiction.
The reasons we make plastic and the reasons to recycle it are opposite. They exist in two different universes. If we had a value system that would reward recycling we wouldn't have the plastic to recycle.
It is part of the system.

9. In essence, all the resources of planet Earth are of no value except to the extent which they can satisfy our whims and desires.
This is not the only way to be human.
Where does everyone get the things they require to live?
Through handling a medium called money.
No other way

10. Where does money come from?
It is created out of thin air in the form of debt.
The money creating entity, say Goldman-Sachs, says, "OK, here's a half a billion dollars. You have to pay it back to me next year with interest."
Where did Goldman-Sachs get it?
Faith. Magic. Poof.

11. Now. A few people lay claim to all the food, all the water, all the lodging, and everybody else trades money for them. Where do they get the money?
They do things which society values, like organizing the shipment of half a forest by board feet halfway across the continent.

12. If society chose to, we could organize around activities to regenerate photosynthesis and complex ecosystems (made mostly out of formerly atmospheric carbon) in order to slow and stop mass extinctions and climate change.
We could reward that with access to resources.

13. There is no inherent reason that it is better to get 100% of your resources through the medium of money.
Money is handy, but everyone has to eat every day, drink water, and find shelter from the elements. All those things come directly from Earth. There is no other source.

14. Human societies over all the Earth over all of time until a hundred years ago gathered food from their local area, working together in communities, and stored it within walking distance of every single person on Earth.
We chose to have fast travel instead.
A hundred years.

15. The reason we have to have the plastic is to facilitate shipping everything we make all over the face of Earth. In "developed" countries we also have to have it because we eliminated all the humans in retail, and the plastic makes it harder to steal.

16. Why did people "have to have" slaves?
Because there were natural limits to how much land one man could grab for himself and hog if he had to do it with his own labor.
Ergo, slaves.
Wrong answer.

17. Why should one man / woman / person / family / community grab and hog more land than they can productively manage with their own effort? I have made ethical provision, I believe, for including animal labor, but... While we all wring our hands about there being too many people

18. we place number one top priority value on things which make humans redundant and useless in the production paradigm.

19. If we took all these many, many people, and said, here, we will magically make enough money appear for you to live if you and your family will garden this woodland and savanna, if you will herd cattle across this prairie, if you will make this Earth more able to suck carbon,

20. Because ultimately money is just something society makes up to grease the wheels of getting what we value.
Who said going a mile a minute and watching football on TV was the ideal life?
I would hate it. I do hate it when I have to get out in it. It's a monumental pain in the

21. There is no reason on the face of this world that every square foot has to be owned and fenced.
There is no scientific excuse possible to not restore beavers to 100% of their natural habitat.
Every bird her own nest, but no bird owns the forest. We're just parts of Earth.

22. The sins of my white ancestors were done for the specific purpose of building the world we live in today, jet planes, Interstate Highways, big box retail and the whole giant mess.

23. Still today those sins are being committed, still mostly by white or light colored men, for the express purpose of enriching a few thousand people, no more, and of making about a half a dozen men, about six or maybe 8, worldwide, richer than all the rest of us put together.

24. It is my objective to be as detached from that system of social organization as is possible while still living in the midst of it.
It is a lot more voluntary than most people comfort themselves by thinking.

25. America's Amish are living proof that this level of energy consumption is 100% voluntary.
People live among us in apparent reasonable comfort on vastly lower energy budgets.
At one level of this conversation the Republicans tell the truth and the Democrats lie. The jets 🚫

26. It's difficult to live without the accustomed tools. Every person lives within human society, and there's no denying that America's system is totally high speed centric, with long distances, no provision for slow traffic, and assumption that slow traffic is just *wrong*.

27. We are asocialized. Americans. Each person is in her own steel box, a couple tons of metal and plastic. We pass one another on the road anonymously. This has never been before, since we stood upright and walked out into the savanna millions of years ago.
Each one alone.

28. When I go out on the country roads driving my donkeys it is as if I were the only human left.
All the separate farms are gone. The houses too. Big fields. Then, here and there, where somebody could be farming 4 acres of food trees and annual patches with a couple donks, is

29. A McMansion behind a solar-powered radio controlled gate, and the 4 acres is blacktop and lawn grass.
There's a camper trailer in the driveway for when he wants to - what, go to the country?
Another one next door.
Then more grass full of cows.
No people.
Asocialized.

30. I don't think we're making any progress, myself, but that's just me.