I’ll bet you can’t imagine it

. . . the extent of downscaling that would make sense.

* * * *

The extent of downscaling that would make sense is nothing short of breathtaking. It’s almost inconceivable to us moderns.

We live with our heads in Cyberspace, Media, Institutions, Geopolitics, the Economy, etc. Those things are really big. Unnaturally big relative to all that went before and all that the rest of the creatures experience.

We can’t imagine that we live within a situation that’s crazy, but it is crazy. It’s crazy far-flung, crazy over-choice, crazy surfeit. Crazy complex, distracting, stressful. It’s actually overwhelming, but we’re conditioned to accept it as normal and learn how to cope. The degree to which we cope is a wonder — though there’s more not-fully-coping than we generally want to admit.

Can you imagine the alternative? Can you imagine how almost all human beings lived until about 300 years ago? Naturally, being the way we are and having the value system we do, we tend to think about and study the anomalous societies in the past that were more like our own, precursors to our own: Sumer, Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc. At the time of Sumer about 99.9% of humanity lived in the Old Ways and 0.1% lived in the New Ways. But the kids’ textbooks focus on Sumer. At the time of the Roman Empire about 85% of humanity lived in the Old Ways and 15% lived in the New Ways. But the kids’ textbooks focus on Rome.

Do our kids’ textbooks give any indication that the Old Ways were OK and the New Ways are aberrant and problematic?

* * * *

Imagine that most of your attention goes to the people, places, and happenings within, say, a twenty mile radius of your home. You might need a while to think that through. It’s near-inconceivable to us moderns; we’re so expansive, so mobile, so cosmopolitan. We have so much information (and so little perspective on it).

The most radical thing to suggest is that we come back down to local-ness and proximity. From where we’ve arrived, it takes a great leap to imagine the pace of it, the peace of it, the manageability of it, the human-scale of it:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15766601-the-world-until-yesterday