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How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?
I consider myself psychologically even-keeled and don't doomscroll, but unless you actively try to avoid information, nasty stuff inevitably seeps through. For instance, I saw in the last 24 hours a surveillance video of someone carjacking a poor helpless woman at the gas station, and another who wrote that they know of a backyard puppy breeder who has four bitches constantly getting pregnant and living in filth just to cheaply breed and sell puppies for some absurd sum. I think the normal reaction is to feel a combination of anger and sadness. But rationally, that emotional response seems pointless. It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.
I realized that it would be much simpler to frame everything as nature and natural. Crying over a mouse being gobbled up by an owl seems as pointless as doing the same for a fly being caught by a Venus flytrap or a blueberry being decomposed by fungi. These things just happen. I'm not super familiar with zen or its equivalent. Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
At any rate, I plan to remind myself of this whenever I feel any emotion the next time I see a headline that some DA dropped charges against repeat criminals or some author pulled her novel because some nobody complained that she was culturally appropriating an oppressed minority group. Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.
This ideology may work decently for you individually, although I think it takes a heroic individual to truly accept that brutal state of affairs.
Over time though, and on a societal level, this type of thinking will inevitably descend back into the might-makes-right, strong eat the weak world that we rose from. During the Axial revolution back around the time of Socrates, men realized that they could make themselves better. That there was a different way to live than simply accepting Nature as red in tooth and claw - we could master nature. But more importantly, we could master ourselves.
All the beauty and ease your life is filled with has been delivered to you from generations of your ancestors that rejected this naturalistic worldview in order to build a better future for their descendants. You can spit on their sacrifices and just focus on getting yours, man, but I reject your worldview as fundamentally selfish, and wrong.
I hate the world my ancestors have made. I hate the shiny metal prison that uses drugs and manipulative interactive propaganda to try and convince people they're happier or have more agency than a medieval serf.
I yearn for brutality and its reality. I yearn for the truth of man's condition in this Chtonic age of lies.
But most of all I despise those that, as you do, hide their cowardly quest for mere comfort behind a communal social standard that only exists to leech on their betters with impunity.
If rejecting this giant daycare is egoism then egoism is a moral duty.
Feel free to travel to Somalia, Syria or Ukraine with brutality available to experience. Personally I am entirely not looking for more brutality in my life, thank you very much.
They have. (for "happier" I do not really have enough knowledge to answer, but I also expect that)
Claiming that typical people nowadays have less agency than medieval serf is a quite wild claim. What kind of serfdom you compare to modern life?
I mean I've been to places like that. It is refreshing in a way, but you don't really get the proper experience as a tourist.
Plus none of that is needed, I can just go to my cabin in the woods.
But all my personal tribulations make your quest for comfort that has sacrificed freedom and humanity no less evil, of course.
How many years of manual labor do you need to buy a dwelling for you and your family? How much free time do you have per day? Per year? How much control do other humans have on the way you live your daily life? How many hours do you have away from anybody? How much do you pay in taxes? Can you be conscripted in an army against your will?
I don't find it wild at all personally once you actually look at what is going on instead of the stories people tell about what is going on.
But of course the only answer when we start to look at the grim reality of modern man is to clutch at the true purpose: comfort. Oh but wouldn't you just get sick and die, wouldn't it all be very hard work? Yes, but at least you would have lived a human life and not that of a machine.
Dwelling of quality matching one that serf had? Zero, better is available for free and abandoned. I prefer to pay for superior standard.
Much more than serfs. Much much more than median, but that is also higher than what serfs had.
For start, I am allowed to leave settlement where I was born. I guess you can find axis on which serfs had more freedom but overall this claim seems extremely shaky.
Can you be more specific? Freedom of selecting how I will work, freedom of movement are fairly important to me and would not switch to serfdom unless forced.
Are you under impression that serfs could not be? And I am vastly less likely to die in war than serf and vastly less likely to be conscripted. And in case of conscription I am vastly more likely to survive.
Less than serfs, unless you mean some nonsense metrics like absolute tax value. Or you do not count mandatory work as taxes.
On any meaningful metric like tax burden I pay less.
As much as I want, unlike serfs (though if anything I would focus on family/meaningful connections with others - that seems much better target if you want to go "we are in worse situation than serfs")
You're not allowed to live in shantytowns and shacks, you're not even allowed to build them, I know men who tried, eventually the constabulary comes to kick you out of your illegal out of code dwelling and force you to pay into the racket.
Best I've seen is people who convert existing farming structures, and that runs you at least some years of labor to buy the land.
You'll have to forgive me, I don't see our 80 days a year of mandated holy rest from here.
I'm not talking about freedom to choose what you do for a living, the modern world clearly requires that flexibility and thus give you much larger on paper freedom there. I'm talking about the amount of scrutiny you get doing this work, hence why I follow up with asking how long of a time you spend away from anybody's gaze. But that one's not really a contest, the serf doesn't have a black rectangle in his pocket that tells everybody where he is and allows them to summon him at all times.
Outside of perpetually insane places, such as Russia, conscription has been viewed as abominable throughout the middle ages and a clear act of tyranny. It took a literal revolutionary government beset by ennemies on all sides to change that norm in France. And the change of that norm led to the Napoleonic era and the invention of total war.
People always seem surprised when they learn about this, but ask any medieval historian and they'll tell you just this.
I don't think I need to say anything here really.
lets take simple one...
For start, weekends alone give you 105 free days in 2023. Add to that public holidays, paid holidays (last one may not apply in USA, I guess - but I expect that you can still take unpaid time off).
Also, [citation needed] for that 80 days.
Also, you seem to narrow down from serfdom in general to some specific variety. Can you be more specific? Again, what kind of serfdom you compare to modern life?
(all numbers are for comparison purposes only)
If I earn 6 000, got taxed 3 000 while serf would have total income 600 and got taxed 500 then my tax burden is lesser. Despite that I pay 3000 and serf 500.
If I earn 6 000, 4 000 going to taxes then burden may be still lesser than earning 600 and getting taxed 350.
Obviously this comparisons are fraught with problems given that vast majority of tax burden for serfs was mandatory labor, which could be treated also as payment for land (and partially was). And many restrictions both past in modern are effectively taxes.
Medieval historian friend of mine gave me that particular figure, Of course it's more complicated than that, but if anything it's a lower bound you can work out out of Urban VIII's limitation of non sunday days of obligation to 36 in the 17th century. Bishops could institute at many new feasts for their dioceses as they wanted before then and you'll find larger lists if you look for them.
But really what we're arguing about is the total amount of work people put in and how comparable it is to the modern work week, which is unsurprisingly a debated topic. Lower estimates, such as what you'll find in Schor's heavily quoted book are around 150, higher estimates are about 300. But fittingly for this thread since Schor's book became popular it's become a culture war topic that people use to push various labor related agendas so I'm disinclined to believe any American view on the matter.
I'm mostly going off Pierre Goubert's account which is definitely on the lower side of that debate, but I don't have those books around me to give you a proper figure from him.
I'm really only talking about what I know and have been taught about, which is its form in Anglo-French civilization.
Oh I see what you mean.
I think a better measure is effective total tax rate. Though as you say that's more difficult to measure because there were so many different entities at the time and most of it was in kind.
We do have extensive scholarly work on that in my country because tax has such a storied history in France and was one of the specifically claimed reasons for the French Revolution.
The way the historians measure it, since it is mostly composed of indirect taxes, is to measure the amount of days worked a year.
François Hincker in his book on this topic Les Français devant l'impôt sous l'Ancien Régime, which I eventually read because it was quoted on one of my exams, gives us a pretty stunning figure that stayed with me:
18 days total, which can be compared to say, France's current mean total tax rate of 56.9% which with the equivalent average salary computes to 208 days yearly to pay taxes.
Now I'm not saying the comparison holds for every place in Europe at that time, but when De Jouvenel and others argue that the revolution actually worsened the tax burden for everyone including myself, I'm inclined to believe them.
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