[pf] binary thinking. Among other Positive Future points.

· I've been checking through some old e-mails of mine (looking for my
comments on binary, dichotomous thinking rather than multi-faceted,
continuous-range thinking), and thought a few of them were good enough to
bring to your attention. They're from June 1999 when Eric Storm and I
contributed regularly to the Deep Ecology list.
  To me, they're looking forward to a Positive Future.  D.

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http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/deep-ecology/jun99/msg00080.html
  {11 June 1999 01:43 UTC} had:

**  I now have an objection ... to an attitude common not only among humans.
**  It's the "Dangerous! Stay far away from it!" instruction, usually by
adults to children (including among other mammals and birds).
** It was a real eye-opener when I realised the significance of the
statement: "The poison is in the dose, not the substance". This is
intimately related to (i) the simplistic way most people conduct their
thinking and deciding, and (ii) more specifically, the tribal "us-them"
dichotomy, a wish to "know who your trustworthy friends are"; all else
being foreigners to be shunned.
**  Basically, the world and even everyday life is complex, and people make
serious mistakes when they act as if it's simple: black-white; open-shut;
right-wrong; yes-no; I'd-trust-you-with-my-life - untrustworthy.

**  For this case, I see a range of suitability for most (all?) things and
methods. This isn't immutable; Eric Storm and I have said that there was a
wider range of degree and type of sustainable activity in the distant past
when there were far fewer humans.
    Take coal and oil. From my physics viewpoint, it's crazy to use them
for energy sources - with their high-carbon chains, burning is just
speeding-up the "increasing entropy" process, the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. Far better to _add_ a little energy needed to polymerise
them and create something long-lasting and very useful like plastics (I
don't mean the recent 'throw-away' attitude to plastics). 
    However, there _are_ cases where the high-energy-per-unit-weight of
gasoline allows a high-value job to be done which would otherwise either
not be done or would take 10-to-100 times longer, leaving time for
necessary other jobs. I'm specifically thinking of a shoulder-carried
circular-saw brush-cutter on our farm, used for keeping tracks and pasture
clear of old-man gorse; the regular animal-care would suffer if the
clearing was done with a hand-saw. Likewise, there are some necessary jobs
to be done where aluminum (produced in small quantities using
hydro-electricity), possibly recycled, is far and away better than any
alternative.
    In all cases, the total amount used is the important factor, not
_whether_ it is used. Like poison. As Eric said here:

>One of my criteria for sustainability is how much the activity will be
done.  Almost anything can be sustainable if only done once.  And, almost
anything can be unsustainable if done nine billion times (human population
in 25 years?).  Although I can see that each region will have different
"carrying capacities" for each activity, with our global economy and
general mind set, I'd like to try to do only those things that I wouldn't
mind EVERYONE doing.
>

[David, Sept.2001:] In that same D-E post, I went on to talk about: 
**  Now we're into a really major area: what is worth doing, now and in the
future. ... I did a rough calculation of how many people would be needed in
New Zealand to do only the necessary work. ... I focussed on the
'necessary' - I used the idea of zero-based decision-making: _everything_
has to be justified.
 ...
**  My point is, if you use a sufficiently stringent criterion for
'necessary', you find that almost all of what people do now is unnecessary.
**  Since anything beyond the 'necessary' is optional, it _should_ be
optional! The people themselves should have the option; not people with
power (rich, or corporations, or governments) arranging things for _their_
own benefit, and convincing everyone(?) that they must work, to survive. 
**  People will clamour to do one of the 'necessary' jobs, including
housing and school repairs, just to have something useful to do. Money and
'the market' won't be the major decider of what people do, as they are now.
**  With so much time on most people's hands, most of the time, activities
like hiking, sailing clinker-built boats, horse-riding, gliding, making
music and other performance, and so on will be a focus of many people's
lives, not just 'frivolous' additions ...

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http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/deep-ecology/jun99/msg00084.html
  has:
[Eric: ]
>  Would it just be more of the "necessary jobs" that "people will clamour
to do"?  Since we've got the people, and they need purposeful jobs,
wouldn't "worker productivity" become a negative concept?  ...
>But if we are clever enough, there will be a good balance of things to do
and people to do them.  I'd still like to leave plenty of time ...
>

**  This discussion, mainly between Eric Storm and me, seems to be leading
towards some sort of overall direction, benevolent dictatorship, to
restrain humans' prehistoric drives now that limitation is necessary.
**  Also, there's an assumption, by adherents to most beliefs, that you
just have to present 'the benighted' with reasons to believe, in a
sufficiently persuasive manner, and they will naturally come around to your
way of thinking.
**  The connection between these two points is that I think Deep Ecologists
[Positive Futurists] should face up to the unlikelihood that the 'ordinary
man in the street' will see deep ecology, or voluntary simplicity, or islam
or christianity or whatever, as life- and goal-changing _for_them_. Leaving
some outside coercion, like a legal system (with its implicit use of force
as a last resort), as the only way to get enough human activities changed
soon enough to save the earth's ecology.
**  Methods _are_ important as well as aims; so what methods might work?

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[D., 2001:] and here's a bowdlerised version of:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/deep-ecology/jun99/msg00087.html :-

At 10:17 13/06/99 -0700, Eric Storm wrote:
>By definition (sorry to knit-pick), "a sufficiently persuasive manner"
_would_ get others to "come around to your way of thinking."  The questions
are "How 'persuasive' would you have to be?", and "Would that be ethical?"
>
1) I don't include coercion or chemical mind-altering as a methods of
persuasion. This euphemism from crime novels seems to have been accepted as
a new meaning.
2) Persuasion itself would _not_ get me to change my mind on some things.
...
3) So the 'assumption' by the belief-adherents is incorrect. 

  Nit-picking (a primate activity) is good, but should be done well or it's
irritating. (Using the biology meaning of irritable. As has just happened.)
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In: http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/deep-ecology/jun99/msg00098.html , I
sort-of apologised for the phrase I've left out above, in this way:
**  Part of the reason I used the objected-to phrase is that I was trying
to point out that laughing at the so-limited opinions of the past is common
around the world, including in "darkest Africa".
**  As someone who has spent some of the more effective and valued (by
others) parts of his life in third-world countries (including Africa and
India), I see myself as bringing a breath of real life into the
'drawing-room discussions' common on earnest lists like this. An attempt to
open the gates of the ghetto, a little.
**  However, (i) I've pushed too hard, (ii) I could have been wrong, and
(iii) I know I have a swelled head.

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David.
David MacClement [davd @ ihug.co.nz] (remove spaces)
http://davd.tripod.com/GrRR-010907_titles.html#top
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
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