Post-Apocalyptic Programming

I didn't read it like that - I read it as the ability to self-govern requires great individual responsibility and emotional control. Whether this is the only way forward is up for debate, but I agree it requires an (unlikely?) level of public competence.

People organizing and working together is great.

People feeling they have a right to use violence to achieve their goals, not so much.

Edit: https://xkcd.com/386/

I will take this opportunity to to try to express myself a bit more clearly. I don't really expect to convince anyone of anything, but rather I would like to reach the few people out their that do resonate with me and my words.

Government is superstition just the way Santa is a superstition. You can call it an inter-subjective entity, or egregore, but ultimately it's not more real than any other imagined concept. It is perhaps a useful mental model to apply labels and titles to groups of people, or certain concepts, but it is also valuable to realize these are labels and models.

A government, as far as I know does not exist, insofar as I cannot interact with it as a single entity, or see it. If you look at this from an esoteric perspective, perhaps nothing is real, or it's all consciousness, or a simulation, or vibration of energy, however that doesn't change my lived experience of what appears real now.

I take issue with collective thinking, labeling a group of people with an identity, and then acting as if this identity is real. I don't have any animosity towards any other man or woman living in a different "country". I doubt many people do, and yet under the superstition of collective thinking, many people go to war, fighting against a "them" that someone did us "wrong", because we've been told so, or believe in large geopolitical movements. If every single conscious entity took a step back, and only acted violently in self-defense, there would be no war. There would simply be no reason to do it.

There are numerous arguments against this, such as "there will always be 'bad' people, so we need gang up and make sure they don't do bad things", and soon enough, there will be a group of people, believing they are the only people who can legitimately use force and violence, because they are stopping the 'bad people'. If you look at a history book, you'll find more death and destruction because of "governments" by a very long shot, and very little due to the few "bad apples".

The "Common Good" is another fallacy that leads to much suffering. How do we define it? We can use numbers, and metrics and "happiness surveys", and try to use left brain thinking to optimize for it, but ultimately "good" is in they experience of the individual conscious entity experiencing it. Trying to define it mathematically is taking away the agency and life of those who experience it, reveals a certain hubris and elitism that certain "experts" know what is best for everyone, for the "common good".

A book I recommend for those interested in what I'm saying is "The Most Dangerous Superstition" by Larkin Rose.

If you think I'm wrong, please continue to do so. I am supportive! I don't intend or expect to reach you.

And post apocalypse labor shortages would mean nobody will be growing food for you, so you most likely need to do it yourself.

If I survived and was industrious, I would start making tractors to sell, instead of twiddling with Forth.

I only see atoms dancing around. That doesn't make it a useful abstraction at the scale we are discussing. Government is just an abstraction over a group of people self organizing.

> People feeling they have a right to use violence to achieve their goals, not so much.

Agreed, but government monopoly on violence is the only system that seems to have stuck. I would prefer a system of anarchy where everybody just did the right thing, but I haven't seen any evidence such a system lasts more than hours. Maybe we have to eradicate the cultural training and distrust we have already instilled into ourselves too. I've sat down and worked out the "root philosophy" of our political opinions with as many folks who will sit still for it, and this smells like the "Libertarian presumption that people, removed from the system of control, would all act better" and being in active denial that their planed solution for nonconformity they can't handle is "round up a posse and threaten/kill nonconformists".