Avail Yourself The Ascent Of Humanity Devised By Charles Eisenstein Displayed As Copy

from here on the review reveals more about me than the book,

I found some quotes from this book and they seemed so right, so revolutionary, that I was compelled to buy it.


Yes he had some gems that really spoke to me, BUT, oh why do I see so many big BUTS

Just to clear the air, I think my worldview is probably atypical and would be discounted by most people from wildly differing political, religious or any kind of leaning.
So to bare my soul on Goodreads, "The World", however you define it doesn't make sense, As a species we look for some pattern in existence that explains it all, but I think the moment you think you "understand" you are missing the point.
Blah, Blah, Blah, I do go on way to much,

HOWEVER, while I do suspect some Zen type, nondualism mumbo jumbo may be where we should look, I am wary of easy answers to a complex world.
So the thing is, while Eisenstein tickles that emotional itch that "the world" is askew, unfortunately he easily and quickly wanders into some pretty weak new agey rhetoric

Things that I like:

Xvii.
The denial of human nature rests in turn upon an illusion, a misconception of the self and world, We have defined ourselves as other than what we are, as discrete subjects separate from each other and separate from the world around us.


. Not only does our acquisitiveness arise out of separation, it reinforces it as well, The notion that a forest, a gene, an idea, an image, a song is a separate thing that admits ownership is quite new.
Who are we to own a piece of the world, to separate out a part of the sacred universe and make it mine

.
I have witnessed dramatic healing simply by affirming to someone, “You are right, this isnt how life is supposed to be” a realization that empowers change.


. Remember Zeran: “Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities, ” Any psychiatry that seeks to adjust us to such a society is itself insane,

THAT is what I'm talking about!

And he goes on to describe how he thinks the way our society has grown, while wildly successful is actually contrary to our "true nature".
And even here I have to note that it is tricky business to say what is true human nature, but for now I let it go.


Basically, the current world view is that we humans are objects separated from each other and the rest of the world.
So the culture of individualism, capitalism, even the scientific method reinforce our separateness, And his contention is that in the pre agricultural days of mankind “we” were more attuned to the world around, AND healthier.
In fact the usual Hobbes assertion that without civilization, life outside society would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.
' is in fact empirically wrong,

Let's not argue that point now as we only have so much time,

The upshot is if you have a notion, like him and me, that we are actually connected as a people, an environment, a world, then this kind of stuff really resonates.
Mostly because he spends the first half of the book point out how the modern view is so strong people can't see the metaphorical lenses one is forced to put on for the world to make sense.
Of course if he, and I are wrong OR if you, dear reader, can't take off your objectifying goggles, then this is all just hokum.


But for me I see or maybe just suspect that capitalism, most religion, modern psychology all worked to mold us into shapes were not meant to be.
The laws of economics for instance or not laws at all but just agreed upon conventions that only have bearing because people believe in them.
So all of our successes are built upon a tinker bell type bedrock,

So, more stuff I like,

. When “I” is defined not as a discrete individual but through a web of relationships with people, earth, animals, and plants, then any harm to them violates ourselves as well.
Even as moderns we sometimes feel and echo of this violation when we see the bulldozers knocking down the trees to build a new shopping center.
This is because our separation from the trees is illusory,

. The socialist solution to the Marxist crisis fails because it doesnt get at the root of the problem, which is not the private ownership of property but rather the concept of property to begin with.


. We conceptually separate ourselves from the environment in order to manipulate it our successful manipulation of the environment spurs our conceptual separation from it.
The concept of property naturally flows out of such an objectification

,
Then came the big BUTS, . .

But thenhe goes into how we should NOT discount holistic medicine and while he doesn't explicitly denounce modern medicine there is definitely a derogatory tone about it.
He really got my attention when he implied Autism is caused by childhood vaccinations, I mean is he really going down that road

, Sometimes the causal link is quite specific, for example the link between the increasing universality of childhood vaccinations and the rise in various immune disorders afflicting children.
Best known is the link with autism which can be understood as an autoimmune attack on myelin in the brain.


And at some point he brings up Carlos Castaneda, I mean really Evenyears ago it was widely known the guy made up most if not all of the stuff in his books.


And then, he comes up with how young peoples idealism is the real answer to lifes problems and those perky kids know we are here for a purpose! But he never says how that purpose is exemplified by the yutes! Plus if they come up with their own purpose and feel great, what about the billionaire class, surely they are idealist too! Or even the old speaker of the house Paul Ryan, he and his buddies had idealist keggers dreaming about a beautiful world where if you don't have health care or can't afford college you have the freedom to fail, or maybe die.


So yeah, idealism is a powerful force,

Nits to Pick

I'll calm down, but one nit is that at one point he says people in theth century were more literary and basically better educated than now.
But then he says schools were invented in theth century expressly to prepare children for industry and were designed to crush the soul to make them less independent.
So which is it

Overall it seems like for all his claims that the modern way of thinking puts blinders on us it seems to me he just wants to have it all his own way.
He cant say life and living is complicated and sometimes it doesnt work out, Its all bad, really bad now but when we were hunter gatherers it was be good, BUT he then says he isnt claiming he is calling for a return to the hunter gather way of life.
It is never that there is simply a tradeoff and science and mechanization help in some ways but detract from the good parts of a simpler time.
Of course the protechnology people are laughing at me for even suggesting tech is anything less than a positive force in civilization.


THEN the last part of the book he takes the really confusing parts of physics like the double slit experiment or the Schrodingers cat kind of stuff and says it proves the ambiguous results or stuff like holistic medicine.
So he is using that to PROVE his point, He cant just say something is confusing, this guy "KNOWS" everything, and if you don't believe it, just ask him

Oh well, I am just getting muddled now, and this book wore me out.
Goodish book but for me it was like having to dig through a LOT of not so clear stuff to find some gems.


NOW that I'm over that, I really need to get some Terry Pratchett in my brain,

.

UPDATE: for some reason a year later I started thinking about this book, There was some weird economic idea I could not remember but it was tickling my brain and I had to revisit this to get some relief.
For now this is just a note to myself about the devilishly interesting notion of "negative interest" and currency designed to loose value or "decay".


I wish I could buckle down and study to find out the difference from or similarity to normal inflation which seems to me to be currency in decay.
How does that figure in this idea

Anyway here is my bookmark of sorts,

From Chapter

Given the determining role of interest, the first alternative currency system to consider is one that structurally eliminates it, or even that bears interests opposite.
After all, if interest causes competition, scarcity, and polarization, then might not its opposite create cooperation, abundance, and community And if interest represents the proceeds from the ancient and ongoing robbery of the commons, might not its opposite replenish it
What would that opposite look like It would be a money that, like bread, becomes less valuable over time.
It would be money, in other words, that decaysmoney that is subject to a negative interest rate, also known as a demurrage charge.
  Decaying currency is one of the central ideas of this book, but before I lay out its history, application, economic theory, and consequences, I would like to say a bit about the term “decay,” which I have been advised to avoid due to its negative connotations.

. .
Gesell advocated currency decay as a device for decoupling money as a storeofvalue from money as a medium of exchange.
Money would no longer be preferred to physical capital, The result, he foresaw, would be an end to the artificial scarcity and economic depression that happens when there are plenty of goods to be exchanged but a lack of money by which to exchange them.
His proposal would force money to circulate, No longer would the owners of money have an incentive to withhold it from the economy, waiting for scarcity to build up to the point where returns on real capital exceed the rate of interest.
This is the second reason for calling it “freemoney”: freed from the control of the wealthy, money would circulate freely instead of coagulating in vast, stagnant pools as it does today.


Gesell saw the interestbearing property of money as a brake on prosperity, As soon as goods become so abundant that returns on capital investment go lower than the minimum rate of interest, the owners of money withhold it from investment.
The money to perform transactions disappears from circulation, and the familiar crisis of overcapacity looms, with its paradoxical accompaniment of scarcity of goods for the vast majority of people.

. .

Both the wara and the Wörgl currency bore a demurrage rate ofpercent per month, Contemporary accounts attributed to this the very rapid velocity of the currencies circulation, Instead of generating interest and growing, accumulation of wealth became a burden, much like possessions are a burden to the nomadic huntergatherer.
As theorized by Gesell, money afflicted with lossinducing properties ceased to be preferred over any other commodity as a store of value.
It is impossible to prove, however, that the rejuvenating effects of these currencies came from demurrage and not from the increase in the money supply, or from the economically localizing effect of a local currency such as the Wörgl.
Ready to take your mind for a walk, I have just the book, Eisenstein challenges your every belief, He pushes you to see your life and the world around you differently, Filled with current science the book jumps from fact to philosophy almost seamlessly unifying the two in unbelievable ways,

This can be purchased or read as a ebook for free sitelinkhere, This book radically shifted my understanding about the world, our cultures, what science is telling us, language, how we use time, education, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
It is philosophy with relevance for the world we live in today, Long, but worth the time! It has a throbbing start,

And then the author starts praising the primitive times, And modernity has been a terrible time, did separate our souls from our body, and we are heading towards the disaster.


And then some bright perks that make sense,

And then again some intentional lies "English is the richest language that ever happened in the human history".


And then some more bright perks,

And then a furious attack on the Scientific Methods, and praise to homeopathy,

And then I decided to close it, and move to another book, Highs and lows. Extremely disappointed in the chapter attacking the scientific method and other parts attempting to lend credence to quack quantum physics, biodynamics, homeopathy and other empirically invalidated "alternatives.
" While there are some dogmatic scientists, the enterprise of science is a dogma remedy, The author is at his best addressing irrational technofixes and the erosion of social, spiritual, natural, and cultural capital, A mixed bag of a book I found this book several years

ago and have taken quite a long time to finish it.
It is densely written with lots of thought provoking ideas, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to see the world in a new way,

Life Changing! Stellar to no end! An orchestrated deconstruction of our collective technologyasdues ex machina wish fullfillment fantasies, weaving together strings of history, psychology, mythology, and physics, in a straightforward fashion simple enough for my comparatively simple brain.
However, this is NOT a fast read, The result is an elegant culmination of disparate variables events, myths, and obsessive fanatical scientism that offers an explain for our current human conditionnotably a misguided Cartesian conception of humans and the world as machines, "separate" from the natural world and a curious unshakeable, pesky preoccupation with "Gee Whiz the Future!" technological fixes to the problems our technologies created.
What to do about this It's an amazing, uncanny work by a remarkably insightful and surprisingly young person,

TLDR: How and maybe why we got ourselves into this pickle, .