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Man is fallen

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Flann 5
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Re: Man is fallen

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DWill wrote:Hey Flann, I'm not familiar with the statement of Haidt's you cite. It makes him sound quite reductive about religion, which I don't find him to be. When he talks about the sense of elevation as a need of all humans, and identifies this sense as perhaps the foundation of all religion, he is not saying that it was built into us to foster the survival of individuals or groups. It's just the way we're made up. There is no difference here between his POV and saying that God made us this way. I think Haidt has shown himself to be, like David Sloan Wilson, a nonpartisan atheist. I say bravo to that.

You could look into the last few chapters of The Happiness Hypothesis for more info.
Hi Dwill. I agree with you that Haidt is non partisan and argues against Dawkins,for instance, on his explanation of religious memes.
I was going on a talk Haidt gave which seems to be distilled from his book,"The Righteous mind." I'll provide a link and for convenience if you start 38 minutes in he takes about ten minutes from there to give his explanation for religions.

In this talk it does seem reductionist.He starts with shared intentionality and goes on to develop the idea of "a moral matrix" which is required to deal with "free riders and slackers."
Co-operative groups are favoured by natural selection and among competing groups a "tribal mind" develops distinguishing them from others.
He extrapolates from the centrality of the ancient campfire to religious manifestations of this as exemplified in circling by Muslims and pagan circling of maypoles to modern more secular circling such as joined hands around America.

What's curious is that he seems to regard morality as a "consensual hallucination." Everything is driven by Darwinian imperatives of survival and reproduction.
He may be saying that we are made this way but it looks like he is saying that's it's an inevitable development from evolutionary requirements.

It may be as you say Dwill ,that he expands his ideas in other books as you suggest.
Here's the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5_WdU5aGkA


One of the more difficult questions is the origin of language in humans. Noam Chomsky the linguistics expert accepts the standard evolutionary account. He considers language to have emerged "suddenly" in evolutionary terms. Language is innate to human nature in his view and not really something that is gradually learned. Rather we are wired for language.
He thinks there may be laws such as natural laws which account for it's design. Here's a brief excerpt from Chomsky on Language design.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLk47AMBdTA

Chomsky of course would doubtless take issue with Jonathan Haidt on the benefits of capitalism and would read history rather differently.
The recent global economic crash and the collateral human damage from it would appear to advise caution on the "benefits"of capitalism.

Another question for the standard view of human development is the business of "out of place artifacts." This is a strange world with postulates of aliens creating advanced civilizations and a conspiracy in archaeology to suppress contrary evidence.

I'm sceptical about such hypotheses about aliens but there does seem to be some explanation required for these artifacts.

The ubiquitous existence of pyramids in the ancient world is a commonly cited one.

P.S. Just looking into this,it seems that a lot of speculation is based on the technology thought to be required to build these ancient monuments.
This seems false and these people did have the tools and methods to build these.
No need for aliens to do this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=phZUl9zulqg
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Re: Man is fallen

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Robert Tulip wrote: I think of the fall primarily in terms of the alienation from nature produced by a society where culture has been cut loose from the local moorings of a subsistence clan. An alienated society can produce ideology that serves the interests of rulers.

“Rules and obedience” mean hierarchy, property and ideology. These developments were at the essence of the new concept of progress, the idea of constant technological improvement, which really got going with the rise of metal and writing. There is a paradoxical relationship between material progress and moral fall.
Thanks, Robert, for a fulsome and stimulating discussion. Basically I agree with much of it, but I will note a quibble or two. First, I don't think the idea of progress was well established until Bacon, Gutenberg and then the late Renaissance. We know that the Chinese managed to maintain a world view in which "nothing new under the sun" happens, right up to the 19th century. Prometheus represents somewhat of an exception, but I rather doubt that the Greeks envisioned an ongoing process of progress, despite the achievements of Athens. Aristotle's political model was of cycles, for example. Rise and fall might be a more typical picture of how they viewed civilization.

On the other hand, the connection between material progress and moral fall seems to me to have quite a bit of content wrapped up in it. Surely it was not difficult to recognize "because we can" as an operative principle among the rich. The Bible is full of stories of kings taking what is not rightfully theirs, for example. And earlier, Samson and Delilah acted out the allure of city lights.
Your point here about the intrinsically patriarchal and military incentives that emerge from agriculture is a good one. I find it fascinating to analyse Christianity as a reaction against these trends, but one which was largely co-opted by imperial thinking with its messianic core surgically removed.
You might be interested in Mendenhall's book about the culture and beliefs of Ancient Israel. He would have it that the Hebrews were rebel proto-anarchists who left the aggressive power buildups of SW Anatolia and N Mesopotamia in the late Bronze Age, and deliberately adopted a covenant process to bridge over lack of ethnic commonality and to stave off the argument for needing a King (Leviathan, essentially). This fits with the somewhat complex history of the early monarchy in Israel, and the prophetic tradition with its appeal to Covenant religion against royalty and statecraft. Jesus took his cues from the prophetic literature, so in some sense he was part of a long anti-imperial tradition.
But surely the problem is that the defence mechanisms produced by unrepentant evil with its distorted self-concept involve deluded belief that evil is good.
Umm, I am not sure about this. Soldiers were in the business of slicing people open for power, not slicing moral issues. Sure, there were clerics around who were willing to justify the slaughter if they got to feeling guilty (and others who disagreed, like Bartolomé de las Casas). But I think the moral self-congratulation is more interesting to us than it was to the people of the time. The role of the Garden of Eden in the Conquistadors' self-acceptance cannot have been very significant, even if they told themselves they were bringing the blessings of baptism.

You say that a real moral compass comes from demystifying supernatural fantasies, but I think there has never been any problem for humans to justify atrocities, with religion serving only as one of many approaches, or simply to ignore justification. I would mention Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Rape of Nanjing, the Aztec and Cretan systems of sacrifice, Pol Pot, the Cultural Revolution, and Hiroshima. Just to warm up.

Edit to add: despite my claim that toxicity builds up in the unrepentant, I think people have had an easy time accepting dominance ideologies without much of that effect. Basically, the community acceptance becomes the justification. Just as the feudal society accepted "one's place" including "droit de seigneur", so we have no trouble accepting that people from outside America do not have the right to come in, and can even contemplate ending 200 years of birthright citizenship, despite the obvious moral transgression. No supernatural needed, any more than it ever was.
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Re: Man is fallen

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Interbane wrote: There is something objective resting at the core of morality, but not in a supernatural sense.
We've come close to distilling it in it's most simple form; do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
In my three or four year hiatus from BookTalk, I have become convinced of this. I believe it is no more complicated than working out the "gut level" meaning of the term "moral" or "right" into systematic logical implications. I think of it as "reversibility" and believe Rawls' "veil of ignorance" is needed to work it out properly.
When a cultures mores stray too far from the golden rule, we can sense that something is wrong about their morality. There are many examples of a moral code mutated by sanctity or purity, so that harm is justified within the same system. In some cases, it might have been justified in the culture, when the taboo behavior put the population at risk in some way. Wasting water, for example. But the solutions to these sorts of moral mutations is to solve the underlying problem, not accept the moral mutation. Increase water availability rather than incorporating water punishments worldwide.


We are fortunate to live in a time when humanity can actually contemplate the end of dire poverty. Solving problems like water shortages is now within the grasp of the human race. Does that mean we should drop all of the distortions to the golden rule that come from dealing with scarcity? Maybe, but that will require breakthroughs as well - in social "technology".
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Re: Man is fallen

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Harry Marks wrote:DWill -
Theocracy is compatible with democracy. The army in Egypt ousted an elected government because the secularized (and sometimes Christian) elites considered themselves threatened by it.

We tend to think of Iran, where the theocratic powers interfere with democracy, but there are just as many examples where the majority pushes its religion. Do you realize that many countries in Europe still have tax-supported churches?
Well, perhaps so on the matter of theocrats being democrats, in their own way. Iran holds elections at multiple levels, after all. The apparent non-separation of church and state in many countries, including European ones is an interesting artifact where this state sponsorship (which comes in various forms according to the country) doesn't correspond to religiosity in general. Some suggest that it behooves European countries to preserve religious culture if not the practice of religion. A lot of cathedrals need maintaining. Over here, no state church but high religiosity, said to be a paradox but not really.
Haidt has particular points about psychology to make, for professional academic reasons. He is content to simply spell them out and provide the reasoning behind them. When it comes to the implications, he tends to go for a contrarian provocative implication, rather than a balanced view. For example, his notion that liberals "lack a dimension" of morality is riddled with assumptions that he brushes under the rug in order to stir up attention. The implication that liberals are not being fully moral is conveniently hidden behind his overall point that moral judgements are made viscerally.
An interesting view of Haidt, which seems rather harsh to me on first take. But then, I admire The Righteous Mind. He did migrate from liberalism to some suspended state between that and conservatism, which he says enabled him to get a more objective view of his former assumptions as a committed liberal. I do not think he says, or means for us to think, that liberals are less moral. He believes that liberals have "greater difficulty understanding conservatives, rather than the other way around, because liberals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality. In particular, liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community" (pp.312-313). He goes on to say that both liberal and conservative are needed to maintain a healthy political life.

Haidt's approach to morality, as a "professional academic" is mostly descriptive, just as was that of a forbear he admires, the sociologist Emile Durkheim. Your and interbane's interest seems to be normative, deciding which of the several flavors of morality are really worthy of the name.
When it comes to "majority rule" vs. "protection of minority rights" one must take a stand on what morality means. If one passes the buck to "gut instinct" the result is different than if one takes on board the issues of individual autonomy embedded in the Enlightenment view. Specifically, if one focuses on the right to find one's own path to moral behavior, possibly different from that of the community at large, one comes to a particular way to sort out the tension between the desire of the community to foster morals and the desire of individuals to be protected from the community's requirements.

If morality means "whatever people feel it means" then why should not the broadest possible majority have the final say on what counts as morality?
That's a very important discussion to have, I'm sure. The tension between description and prescription comes in here as well. It's simply true, Haidt says, and it's borne out by his research, that morality has more legs, or taste receptors," than just autonomy and care, arrived at through the application of reason. But far from consisting of "whatever people feel," these sort into definite categories across cultures. There is value in recognizing this because we do need to get along, domestically and internationally, with divergent groups. Understanding them will be key, vs. simply opposing our values to theirs.
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Harry Marks wrote:I don't think the idea of progress was well established until Bacon, Gutenberg and then the late Renaissance.
You are right about the modern ideology, but I am talking about actual progress, as seen in major examples such as the replacement of the bronze age by the iron age in 1000 BC, and the invention of the wheel, writing, etc. My point here is that the old myth of successive declining ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron has an ironic mirror in the progress in technology required to smelt and refine and forge these successively more difficult metals, with the corollary that the iron empires had vastly more scope and power to eliminate diversity than the earlier low tech systems where the highest metal in use was gold or silver, which themselves involved significant progress over the previous use of stone and wood. Maybe societies who only use things of stone and wood exist more in a state of grace while high technology enables a state of corruption?
Harry Marks wrote: Aristotle's political model was of cycles
Aristotle was the tutor to Alexander the Great, whose establishment of Hellenistic rule over the eastern Mediterranean was celebrated as bringing the progress of logical Greek dynamism over effete eastern stagnation.
Harry Marks wrote: the connection between material progress and moral fall seems to me to have quite a bit of content wrapped up in it. Surely it was not difficult to recognize "because we can" as an operative principle among the rich. The Bible is full of stories of kings taking what is not rightfully theirs, for example.
The British monarchy has two slogans, Dieu et mon droit, which means God and my sword, and honi soit que mal y pense, which means Fuck Off. As Joseph Conrad said in Heart of Darkness, “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or who have slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
Harry Marks wrote: prophetic tradition with its appeal to Covenant religion against royalty and statecraft. Jesus took his cues from the prophetic literature, so in some sense he was part of a long anti-imperial tradition.
I am not sure you can so clearly distinguish between the prophetic tradition in Israel and statecraft. I see the prophets as presenting a message that Israel required excellent diplomatic skills to achieve good relations with its large neighbours, with the only method to save Israeli independence being high moral standards that would cause their neighbours to be well disposed to them. But the Bible prophets explain that instead Israel had appalling moral standards, and this was the excuse for Syria and Babylon to invade. It illustrates that the ideal of a state of grace is seen as a political condition of peace, freedom and friendship, while the state of corruption associated with the fall from grace involves war, bondage and hatred. When the Gospels have Jesus say his kingdom is not of this world, it suggests a kingdom based on principles of grace which are not attainable in a world dominated and corrupted by iron swords.
Harry Marks wrote: Soldiers were in the business of slicing people open for power, not slicing moral issues.
Military conquest requires an ideological intensity and self belief, producing a moral framework to justify the Athenian principle in the Melian dialogue that the strong take what they can and the weak accept what they must.
Harry Marks wrote: The role of the Garden of Eden in the Conquistadors' self-acceptance cannot have been very significant, even if they told themselves they were bringing the blessings of baptism.
The Garden of Eden was the Paradise from which Adam was expelled at the Fall, and the creation story which required the saving work of Christ to redeem the world through his blood, in the Christian myth. The false belief of Christendom that belief conferred redemption produced an appalling scale of alienated delusion through the dark ages and subsequently. We still suffer under the burden of this massive error.
Harry Marks wrote:
You say that a real moral compass comes from demystifying supernatural fantasies, but I think there has never been any problem for humans to justify atrocities, with religion serving only as one of many approaches, or simply to ignore justification. I would mention Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Rape of Nanjing, the Aztec and Cretan systems of sacrifice, Pol Pot, the Cultural Revolution, and Hiroshima. Just to warm up.
It has always been a problem for humans to justify atrocity, since there have always been critics who decry atrocity as evil. You might say that Stalin’s maxim ‘no man no problem’ was a simple solution, but it produced cascading syndromes of trauma which continue to inflict bad karma on Russia.
Harry Marks wrote: despite my claim that toxicity builds up in the unrepentant, I think people have had an easy time accepting dominance ideologies without much of that effect. Basically, the community acceptance becomes the justification. Just as the feudal society accepted "one's place" including "droit de seigneur", so we have no trouble accepting that people from outside America do not have the right to come in, and can even contemplate ending 200 years of birthright citizenship, despite the obvious moral transgression. No supernatural needed, any more than it ever was.
The supernatural fantasy is a sublimation of the toxic effect of unrepentant evil, lurking in the subconscious of an avowedly secular and rational society. The toxicity of the fall includes people’s ability to believe untrue claims in the face of abundant evidence. A corrupted society is inured to sensitivity and perception, building a carapace of delusion that is impervious to evidence. This was the message of the prophets of Israel, that unless Israel repented and converted its behaviour to remove the hypocritical clash between its words and its deeds, it faced conquest and destruction.
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Thanks for interesting discussion. Kinda fun to think about.
Robert Tulip wrote: I am talking about actual progress, . . .
the iron empires had vastly more scope and power to eliminate diversity than the earlier low tech systems
I am interested in the way you put that: "eliminate diversity". The point was probably literally to put people to work for the rulers. Once the possibility of an agricultural surplus was understood, the military competition to capture more of it was likely to follow. I don't think the early layers of empire were really into eliminating, say, ethnic diversity. Maybe it was easier to enslave foreigners? I'm really not sure, but the Persians supposedly endured where previous Middle Eastern empires had failed because they tolerated the continuation of different cultures. So maybe there was a lot of ethnic cleansing going on.
establishment of Hellenistic rule over the eastern Mediterranean was celebrated as bringing the progress of logical Greek dynamism over effete eastern stagnation.
I remember hearing of logic, but not particularly of dynamism, in the Hellenistic blessing brought to the rest of the world. The Macedonians were conscious of having inferior civilization, but that did not stop them from conquering and adopting logic to go with their horses.
I am not sure you can so clearly distinguish between the prophetic tradition in Israel and statecraft.
Okay, a reasonable point. Mendenhall even has the prophet Nathan conspiring with David and Bathsheba to legitimize her line in the succession, a version I had never heard before. Certainly Ezekiel and Jeremiah had a lot to say about alliances and submission. I only had in mind the opposition of Elijah and the monotheist party to the statecraft which involved foreign queens and foreign gods.
I see the prophets as presenting a message that Israel required excellent diplomatic skills to achieve good relations with its large neighbours, with the only method to save Israeli independence being high moral standards that would cause their neighbours to be well disposed to them. But the Bible prophets explain that instead Israel had appalling moral standards, and this was the excuse for Syria and Babylon to invade.
Well, I don't think I can go along with that reading. Good behavior doesn't seem to have been an issue for any of the conquerors, and the prophets were all over the place on what was being punished. Religious apostasy? Oppression of the poor? Taking God for granted? Violence and robbery? All of these and more are blamed by someone at some point.
It illustrates that the ideal of a state of grace is seen as a political condition of peace, freedom and friendship, while the state of corruption associated with the fall from grace involves war, bondage and hatred. When the Gospels have Jesus say his kingdom is not of this world, it suggests a kingdom based on principles of grace which are not attainable in a world dominated and corrupted by iron swords.
I think Mendenhall's interpretation makes more sense. The covenant was between the people and God, but that also means one with another. That would give them some strength and overcome ethnic diversity. One of the decalogue commandments was "don't take the Lord's name in vain" which is most sensibly read as "if you take an oath, better stick to it". I think that was seen as a more innocent way than the warlords took to enslave their vassals, but even with the solidarity of the covenant they would not automatically have peace, prosperity and freedom, much less a state of innocence and grace.
Military conquest requires an ideological intensity and self belief, producing a moral framework to justify the Athenian principle in the Melian dialogue that the strong take what they can and the weak accept what they must.
Indeed.
[/quote] The false belief of Christendom that belief conferred redemption produced an appalling scale of alienated delusion through the dark ages and subsequently. We still suffer under the burden of this massive error. [/quote]
I think belief gets overemphasized because the Councils and the Protestants made such a thing of "right belief". The church certainly emphasized confession and absolution, as well as the Eucharist, as the critical "means of grace", though catechism was required and wrong belief was not to be proclaimed.
It has always been a problem for humans to justify atrocity, since there have always been critics who decry atrocity as evil. You might say that Stalin’s maxim ‘no man no problem’ was a simple solution, but it produced cascading syndromes of trauma which continue to inflict bad karma on Russia.
Interesting. I recently read Gaddis' short book (only 3 or 4 hundred pages) on the Cold War, and he agrees with you. The coldly calculated effect does not erase the searing impact on the people being ruled by such terror, and the USSR was having a more and more difficult time justifying their brutality as the Cold War wore on. So the toxic effects may be there in systemic evil as well, though I still suspect it is a different phenomenon from personal choice to be evil.
The supernatural fantasy is a sublimation of the toxic effect of unrepentant evil, lurking in the subconscious of an avowedly secular and rational society. The toxicity of the fall includes people’s ability to believe untrue claims in the face of abundant evidence. A corrupted society is inured to sensitivity and perception, building a carapace of delusion that is impervious to evidence. This was the message of the prophets of Israel, that unless Israel repented and converted its behaviour to remove the hypocritical clash between its words and its deeds, it faced conquest and destruction.
Hmm. I am tempted not to comment on this at all, since I see things so differently. Does rejection of immigration corrupt a society? Then secular Europe is at least as corrupt as the supposedly Christian U.S. I think it is just a natural instinct for fending off competition, and the moral side of the issue rarely comes up when people contemplate "all of the Third World" being allowed in. Does it work better (or worse) with supernaturalism to sublimate with? I see no obvious evidence either way.

Bruce Springsteen sees it, at least. Ghost of Tom Joad.
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Harry Marks wrote:Thanks for interesting discussion. Kinda fun to think about.
Yes, it goes back to Interbane’s comment at the start of the thread that Josh Duggar has tried to deflect the blame for his porn addiction and adultery on to the fall of Adam and Eve from grace when they got twicked by that wascally snake. Like if people accept it is all Adam’s fault, then Josh can be forgiven. I don’t want to dwell on the self-justifying theories of the fall of contemporary hypocritical evangelicalism, but rather try to engage on whether this obscure idea of the fall actually has merit as part of a scientific understanding of history.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote: I am talking about actual progress, . . . the iron empires had vastly more scope and power to eliminate diversity than the earlier low tech systems
I am interested in the way you put that: "eliminate diversity". The point was probably literally to put people to work for the rulers. Once the possibility of an agricultural surplus was understood, the military competition to capture more of it was likely to follow. I don't think the early layers of empire were really into eliminating, say, ethnic diversity. Maybe it was easier to enslave foreigners? I'm really not sure, but the Persians supposedly endured where previous Middle Eastern empires had failed because they tolerated the continuation of different cultures. So maybe there was a lot of ethnic cleansing going on.
Technological progress supports cultural evolution towards larger and more uniform societal patterns. We see it today where iphones mean everyone is a unique individual but in the same way. The faster and stronger the connection, the less the diversity.

But as with biodiversity, having smaller separate gene pools can actually create a robust protection for an ecosystem against catastrophe, as seen in the potential vulnerability of crops that have been cultivated to all be the same in a monoculture, even while this small system can be steamrollered when the empire strikes back. The extinction of the world's frogs and bats and coral reefs caused by human monoculture is effectively a product of the fall from grace.

Empires do by their nature eliminate diversity, even if by something as seemingly innocuous as requiring that people light incense at the statue of Caesar, as the Romans did, while allowing local customs that are not seen as seditious. This seemingly tolerant Roman attitude covered a tyrannical reality, which produced the Jewish diaspora when all the Jews were expelled, killed or enslaved. Josephus commented that the only reason the Romans stopped crucifying Jews outside Jerusalem was that they ran out of wood. There is a slippery slope from a nod to Caesar to rampant execution.

A state of grace means heaven on earth. That does not need to be imagined as something magical, but rather as a situation where people are free, secure and prosperous. The reality of history is that technology has simultaneously created both freedom and slavery.

In terms of now imagining a recovery from the state of corruption, the challenge is to visualise a potential realistic critical path, considering the time frame and process required. A starting point is to examine existing theories of history, including the theory of the fall, and see how they contain a distorted reflection of something real.
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Robert Tulip wrote: We see it today where iphones mean everyone is a unique individual but in the same way. The faster and stronger the connection, the less the diversity.
I am fascinated by this blending. I have been teaching at international schools, and it is true that everyone wants to be the way "everyone is" (parents and teachers excepted, of course). To some extent little subcultures seem to be facilitated by the internet, but I think they tend to orient themselves relative to the great Global Village as if it was a magnetic field.
But as with biodiversity, having smaller separate gene pools can actually create a robust protection for an ecosystem against catastrophe,
Our striving for control leaves out the unknown unknowns, and, as you point out, leaves us more vulnerable to them than if we had not solved all the known knowns. The fall may be related directly to this urge to take control, but I have trouble thinking of the result as a bad thing, even though we may yet destroy the source of our living. Basically, I like our control-freak of a culture, especially if it can chill out now.
A state of grace means heaven on earth. That does not need to be imagined as something magical, but rather as a situation where people are free, secure and prosperous. The reality of history is that technology has simultaneously created both freedom and slavery.
In terms of now imagining a recovery from the state of corruption, the challenge is to visualise a potential realistic critical path, considering the time frame and process required.

I tend to think in terms of the steady state that will happen, whether in 100 years or 1000 years, when we know most of what we need to know about natural science. Then we can find fulfillment in each other, on a family scale, a local scale and a universal scale. No great exploration or conquest awaiting, and I say a fond good riddance to them.
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