I've been digesting the Sorenson essay, and now I'm seeing a whole different framework for civilized vs primitive. Sorenson's "preconquest consciousness", or "noble savage", is what I want to call core primitive. In the most remote places, you really do find Eden -- humans with barely a trace of negative emotion. But the core primitive is fragile. Just a little disturbance will break it down into Sorenson's "savage savage". This happens at the edges of the primitive regions, where primitive culture is thrown into turmoil by destabilizing factors, so I call it edge primitive. And because these are the kind of primitives that civilized people usually deal with, we are tempted to think they're all like that.

But it's the same with civilization! Primitivists point to the edges, the interface of conquest, Columbus hacking up Arawak children. But when you get through the edge civilized, to the core civilized, you find people like us, peaceful, cooperative, with fun and interesting and relatively easy lives.

Of course the core civilized is a long way from perfect, while the core primitive is only a short way from perfect. But we've had a million years to work on the core primitive, and the core civilized is still in the testing stage.

Waldheimkehr: The forest was here first. Before the clearing, before the axes and the fire and the field boundaries, this ground carried oak and beech and had done for thousands of years, and the village was an interruption in it, a few centuries long, which is nothing. Heimkehr is the word for a soldier walking back up his own road, for a child returning to the house they grew up in. It carries the sense that the returning thing belongs where it is going. So Waldheimkehr says the woodland did not invade and did not conquer; it came back to ground that had been its own, and found the interruption over.

For Labor Day, a full repost of this 2019 post on meritocracy, and an archive of the linked article:

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition. I completely agree with the author's general idea, but I don't quite like the way he frames it. He centers his argument on the word meritocracy, which he defines in terms of "talent and effort." But the crisis he describes is not at all about talent, but about the overvaluing of effort.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a society that still describes itself as a meritocracy, but in its definition of merit, it completely factors out the quantity of work you've done. So college admission might be determined by a series of tests, with a generous time limit, and designed so that studying gives you almost no advantage. Then, when you're applying for a job, you could be tested by doing the actual stuff you'll be doing in the job, and your score is simply the quality of your work.

I think that society would be a lot better than this one. Nobody would be in a hurry and everything would be done well. Some kind of balance would be even better. But we're all the way at the opposite extreme. We don't have even one college, or one job, that rewards the quality of your work and doesn't care about quantity.

I've seen some buzz lately about the male-female pay gap. But at least men and women are in the same ballpark. I'd like to close the much wider pay gap between hard workers and lazy people. I'm completely serious. Nobody really wants to do nothing all day. "Laziness" means holding out for activities that you find intrinsically enjoyable.

Another thought experiment. Imagine if the unconditional basic income, and the maximum income, were the same. If there were no connection between how much money you get, and what you do all day, then we'd find out what we really want to do all day. That's how I view the UBI, not as a way to soften the robot takeover of human work, but as a way to rebuild the world of human work, out of what we actually like doing.

They found that the plastic in some soil samples was pocked with tiny holes that happened to exactly match the size of a specific bacteria that was much more abundant in these samples. This suggests that certain bacteria have plastic-eating enzymes attached to their surface and challenges a widely held assumption that bacteria simply ‘disperse’ enzymes and wait for them to break down materials.

Two fun Ask Reddit threads. What is your favorite foreign word that doesn't have a word in English? And What is the cringiest midlife crisis you've witnessed?

From the Spirituality subreddit, Does God exist? If Yes Why he dosnt speak to anyone or visits anybody? The answers include a wide range of options for thinking about "God" other than a man in the sky. It's funny, when I was a kid, God the father totally made sense, and the Holy Spirit made no sense at all. Now it's exactly the opposite.

And some music. The band Green Lung has made a new Spotify playlist, Black Magick Radio, a tight 82 minute collection of "Occult bangers of the 60s and 70s". One of the songs, A Witch's Guide To The Underground by Carolanne Pegg, I have just added to my Psychedelic Folk playlist.