[FRIAM] Enlightened Self Interest: was Help for texas

[Steven A Smith]

Glen/Marcus/et alia -

I have of late, been trying to understand a little more deeply the 
concept of "Enlightened Self Interest", mostly as it applies to me 
personally, but by extension how it applies to my identity groups 
(family, neighbors, region, culture, nation, species, sapients-at-large, 
life-that-plays, life in all it's forms, pan-conscious matter, et/ad, 
cet/naus).

    In /Out of My Life and Thought/ Schweitzer wrote:

        The most immediate fact of man’s consciousness is the assertion
        "I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to
        live"

        — Albert Schweitzer

I find this particular observation/assertion by Schweitzer nicely poetic 
in it's self-referentiality, but also quite apt toward my apprehension 
of "what is life?" and just how far must/might I extend my 
"self-interest" to be properly enlightened.

Since the beginning of the Holocene (by definition), we humans have been 
adapting our environment to our (presumed) liking at a monotonically 
increasing (and concave up if not precisely geometric nor exponential?) 
rate.   I'm not needing to invoke Singularian concepts to suggest that 
we are (and have been for some time) out-driving our headlights.   For 
all of our abilities in predictive science and constructive engineering, 
there are always "unintended consequences".   Even in a clockwork 
universe, we must live with "the halting problem" whence the only way to 
know for sure how things are going to turn out is to watch them evolve 
into their fullness over time.

It is not surprising (to me) that at every turn our "best ideas" turn 
out to have "hidden gotchas".... that building a global civilization 
predicated on a constant expansion of resource exploitation (first 
forests and prairies, then clean water sources, then coal, oil, and gas 
deposits) eventually hits a limit. Hubbert's "Peak Oil" 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil> didn't even consider (or was 
aware of?) the consequences of greenhouse gas buildup and climate 
change.   Hubbert's predictions seem to have borne out pretty well in 
the US until we figured out "hydraulic fracturing" (see upturn in green 
line)

    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil>


It is also not surprising (to me) that Free Markets and Capitalism and 
even Representative Democracy are loaded with unintended consequences 
and that we are very naturally faced with the possibility that they are 
fundamentally flawed in ways we might only be starting to understand.   
I'm not advocating a return to *earlier* flawed systems (e.g. 
autocratic/fuedal/fascist/???) but rather a *continued* reflection and 
refinement on WHAT MEANS "enlightened"?  And what are the boundaries of 
"self".

In the thread I bent/hijacked here, I would cynically claim that Marcus 
was trying to find relief in some of these paradoxes by gerrymandering 
"selfness"...  and Glen holding the line on a more holistic view of 
systems.

A great deal of our problems in the world seem to arise out of shifting 
definitions of "self".  The populism in the first world that recently 
exhibits as xenophobia, whitelash, etc.  is precisely that.     I think 
it is built into us as humans/mammals/vertebrates/life-itself to be 
self-centered, to look after our own personal well-being before we look 
to that of others.   Our tribal/clan dunbar-number-scale affinities may 
cause us to be locally altruistic at times and look after 
family/friends/neighbors/tribe before ourselves, but beyond that our 
instincts are xenophobic.   It takes more careful thought to extend 
one's enlightenment very far I suspect.

In this globally connected world we have built (it has always been a 
single whole, but with transportation and communication, we have 
short-circuited a lot of the existing feedback loops in "nature" with 
our own) it is likely that our instincts aren't even close to being 
on-mark.   At best, we need to be very careful (IMO) at how we define 
"self" as we pursue "enlightened self-interest".    We have collectively 
shown a great amount of disregard for the subjects of our exploitation 
and colonization over the centuries, and in some cases, that is coming 
back to bite us hard with terrorism, but maybe more significantly in the 
form of mass refugee movements.    In a yet-larger scope, our 
abuses/exploitation of other species and even the very geology of the 
planet have lead to unintended consequences (local diversification and 
ecological collapses, and now global climate change),  yet one common 
response is to just "push harder".

Perhaps that is all we are geared to do...   if something isn't 
working... push harder?    History suggests that this (almost) works for 
(a subset of) the population which survives today.   Maybe there will be 
a Muskian civilization on Mars or in the Asteroid Belt or even the Moon 
or LEO space habitats.  Maybe there will be bubbled cities on the ocean 
floor or underground or even on the surface, where the ultimate in 
"gated communities" survive.   And some vestigal collapsed ecosystem 
which, if our lucky bubble-people can leave it alone will return to some 
kind of robust and diverse equilibrium over some (long by human 
attention standards) time.

Looking more closely for the first time at Carbon Footprints and 
per-Capita budgets... I'm appalled to realize that the USA and the first 
world in general are at 10-20x what is considered sustainable for the 
planet and that even the least developed (China/India) are over the 
limit and heading toward our standard as fast as possible.

Here is a very accessible (and I hope not too naive or inaccurate) 
resource that provides an interesting summary:
     http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/carbon-targets-for-your-footprint

with a 4 ton footprint (1/4 our average but 4x what might be needed) we 
see estimates like:

    *Housing: * 1.04 t = 1500 kWh of US grid electricity

    *Travel:* 0.94 t = 2000 miles driving at 20 MPG

    *Food:* 1.1 t = a mostly vegan diet with limited food waste

    *Products:* 0.51 t = $1000 worth of products

    *Services: * 0.4 t = $2000 worth of services


Which only a truly homeless person today can beat by much?   Maybe the 
demi-wealthy (read most of us here, even if you think you aren't) can 
game this a little by installing PV on our homes, replace our ICE 
vehicles with EVs (hybrids in the interim) that double or quadruple our 
vehicular travel range, grow some of our own food (I think most of the 
1.1 t is commercial farming techniques and transportation) and pick and 
choose the products and services we feel we need to match our ethical 
ideals.


I've rambled enough here...

Carry on,
  - Steve




On 9/10/17 12:05 PM, ┣glen┫ wrote:
> On 09/10/2017 10:12 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> It is not necessarily the case that `we' are a whole and must look after one another.  The population can be partitioned into compartmentalized subsets.
> You're conflating willing payment with unforeseen consequences.  When we don't look after one another purposefully, we end up "looking after one another" in the form of systemic damage to the whole system.  So, while you're right that we don't have to pay attention, purposefully, to risk pools, the costs will always be present.  By paying attention to it, the argument goes, we lessen the overall damage, at the cost of the "redistribution wealth" the right wingers are so afraid of.
>
> So, you're wrong in the naive assertion.  It is not merely necessary, it is THE CASE that we are a whole and always "look after one another", in the end.  The question is about when to do the looking ... before or after bad things happen.
>

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