 
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 93 23:00:14 PDT
From: dms!curly!grigsby@netcom.com (Spiral Death Trap)
Message-Id: <9304090600.AA08292@curly.agames.com>
To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: Back -- Pardon Our Dust


I get occasional pings from folx here but haven't said anything, but
thought I should since I've been thinking about and doing some stuff.

The more I thought about What's Wrong With What's Going On Now, the
more I look at the nuclear family as the doom of humans.  The separation
of people into tiny groups forces many things to happen, most bad.

1) Children are limited tremendously in their experience when growing up,
in the time when the human brain is most capable of learning and 
assimilation.  Life at home means contact with as few as zero people one's
own age, and the total entrustment of one's life to two people who often
don't really have a clue.  Later, the inability of two people to provide
guidance means that you get shipped off to school, e.g. obedience
training, to be socialized.  We all know what is learned in school:
that authority is not to be questioned, unthinking obedience to arbitrary
rules is good, creative thought is almost always bad, and the kids who
get big fastest get to dominate (age classification is almost as
arbitrary as hair color for measuring maturity level in a kid's growth.)
Plus, getting all your behavior patterns from two people gives us a
very narrow view of life and the world.

2) Fragmentation forces everyone to duplicate the possessions and holdings
of everyone else in order to maintain an interesting level of comfort,
making more work necessary to attain the same level than if things were
shared.

3) Social interaction is allowed only in the framework of consumption
(i.e. going out to eat, to a "club", to a movie, etc.) since the activities
available at "home" are so limited by 2) above.

4) Therefore, we can only assuage our loneliness through consumption,
perpetuating the system that causes it.  Have kids, go back to 1).

Tribal life can address these problems.  Think: for hundreds of thousands
of years past until the advent of large-scale agriculture (with which most
history books START and call "The Great Leap Forward" -- more brainwashing)
the usual social context of people was the small tribe.

I think that most of the larger-scale problems in Western civilization (?)
can be traced to the breakdown of the tribal context and the looking to
higher authority of church, state, etc.

  It figures, then, that this unit would be the most natural and
satisfying context for us to live in.  Tribes also have their
disadvantages: it is easy to have a dominating, hierarchical power
structure that makes life in a dictatorship seem free and easy.  The
need to be alone and different must also be respected, and the line
between tribal loyalty and xenophobia or pillage can be hard to draw.
These problems are surmountable, however: those of the nuclear family
are not, if our goal is to lead lives containing ecstasy as well as
comfort.  Life is painful when you can't trust anyone beyond your
immediate family, and often not even them.

	This screed is a bit disorganized, but I figure people can sort
it out.  Big influences on my thinking recently have been Bob Black,
the May '68 Paris revolutionaries, Terence McKenna, Guy Debord, Olaf
Stapledon, R. A. Lafferty, and others.


So who else is still here?  Has everyone boinged off to someplace 
unreachable?

// g

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