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Derek Beyer's avatar

This makes me think of "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia" which argues that human beings have long sought new and hostile environments as a way of escaping central authority. In your formulation, the culture itself is the authority one might be trying to escape.

Secondly, this makes me think of "Finite and Infinite Games". Culture and civilization should he infinite games; no faction should ever win completely or permanently. Wolves are supposed to subdue their prey, but it would he a disaster to consume all of them. Likewise, empire creates victors and assimilates cultures into a larger, more capable whole (though the process is about as ugly as watching a deer be devoured) but to assimilate everyone surely spells an end to a game that isn't supposed to end.

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sillie goose's avatar

Great write up! It’s an inspiring thought to imagine that humanity might have a sanctuary far outside our cultural reach.

Where our precedents do not stand, our grand narratives are ignored, our collective unconscious is separated, and our rituals are rescinded.

I’ve seen so many posts craving freedom from our monoculture. Hoping that we might cast aside our phones, embrace more communal living, shift the goals of our city planning, and so many other hopes.

Though the monoculture acts as a Hobbes-like leviathan. The hopes of a socialized ape have little sway over its towering and totalizing presence. As your essay suggests, we might defeat it by distance instead of destruction.

Out there. Among the stars. We can be free. Not only in the way science fiction authors play with a single tweak on a status quo, but a drift of tectonic proportions. This small existence on Earth may be our Cambrian explosion of culture and in a few short millennia we might hardly recognize ourselves.

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