[MD] BBC documentary 'the trap'

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi Arlo, Khaled,

Arlo said / quoted
"The "funeral procession" of those urban commuters, the loss of
reasonable "communities" within the urban landscape, the S/O
profiteering of a runaway consumerist culture, the "de-humanizing" of
people into these large impersonal patterns, all this culminates into
what Pirsig describes as such."

I also think Khaled was right; it's the scale of community that allows
this impersonal image of everybody else to exist, and allows anyone
driven by objective numbers to profit without concern for the downside
of the losers. The smaller our constituencies, the more natural it is
for us to see the involvement of our fellow people.

Take the original "fuck-you" / poker-game version of game-theory.
Maybe just 5 or 8 "friends" around a table. The fuck-you element is
fine within the limits of the game - Bankrupting a friend within those
limits is the price of playing that game ... but anyone re-mortgaging
their family home (or whatever) to get the cash to join the next game
would get a word in their ear ... from a friend.

(A very topical debate in the web of internet "social network"
communities - is what makes someone a "friend" ... as opposed to just
one of thousands / millions with a subscriber link.)

Regards
Ian


On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Arlo Bensinger<ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Khaled]
> On a side note here. You tend to see less or no homeless or destitute people
> the smaller the towns or cities get.
>
> [Arlo]
> I had a friend once suggest that "urban" living is unnatural, that the human
> psychological norm is in groups about the size of a small village or a
> tribe, where one person can, realistically, know all his "neighbors". In the
> X thousands of years of human history, this has been, of course, the way
> things were (mostly). Humans organized themselves into communities based on
> this psychological limitation of how many people, reasonably, can any one
> person keep straight.
>
> Even in cities, over most human history, you have the formation of
> "communities" within the cityscape, wherein most people stayed, worked,
> lived, etc. "Neighborhoods" were, despite the vast landscape of millions of
> strangers, areas of psychological health where people could feel safe, cared
> for, invested in and protected.
>
> This has changed. In ZMM Pirsig writes, "The explanation, I suppose, is that
> the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's
> psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big
> but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed."
>
> Pirsig lays the blame on the demise of this sense of community on the S/O
> paradigm that has taken hold of Western culture.
>
> "It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in
> Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary
> America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And
> people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of
> their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them.
> The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant.
> And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little
> flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of
> an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not
> on TV."
>
> Pirsig, too, notices that in smaller communities this self-made
> psychological isolation is not as rampant.
>
> "But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and
> Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and
> meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky
> above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what
> was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness.
> That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly
> any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but
> if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true."
>
> The "funeral procession" of those urban commuters, the loss of reasonable
> "communities" within the urban landscape, the S/O profiteering of a runaway
> consumerist culture, the "de-humanizing" of people into these large
> impersonal patterns, all this culminates into what Pirsig describes as such.
> "I know what it is! We've arrived at the West Coast! We're all strangers
> again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral
> procession! The one everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern,
> ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. We've been out of it for
> so long I'd forgotten all about it."
>
> We are strangers again.
>
> Right there. That's the problem.
>
> In small towns, the "market" responds as people make decisions knowing how
> their own actions impact the well-being of their neighbors. If your local
> shop kept a hazardous workplace where your neighbors were getting seriously
> injured, you would not shop there. They would go out of business. But when
> the shop is overseas, and the people getting injured are strangers in every
> way, then such issues are not of concern. So long as I get my cheap goods,
> then what else is there? The "invisible hand" breaks down.
>
>
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