Without quibbling over the exact definition of "need," I would like to live in that world too. Are you interested in enticing people to pursue this voluntarily or would you throw a monkey wrench in the works to make it happen?
Need is easy. Did you use it in the last week/month/year to survive? If yes, then you need it. If no, you don't.
I'm an anarchist. My strategy now is convince well vetted people by leading by example. However, it's becoming more and more clear that the behavior of civilized masses is leading to the likely destruction of all life on Earth. To me, this would make any violence against the civilized subhuman swarms self defense. I haven't resorted to self defense yet but have no problem doing so if cornered. For now, I am the monkey wrench. When the day comes that I need a bigger wrench, I have some ideas.
I agree that our current path (combining economic growth and population growth) has led to and will continue to lead to environmental destruction. I can see how the current economic and political systems allows that economic growth to happen. I would add one hypothetical: a much smaller global population that has something vaguely similar to the current economic system: if the global population were 500,000 humans, it wouldn't make much difference if they consumed at today's rate of consumption in the U.S.
My research and real world experience has shown that a population of half a billion humans is the maximum number of humans that our ecosystem could support sustainably if we farmed 100% of the 7.6 billion potentially arable acres of land on Earth using the most sustainable methods and had no drought or disease. Using truly sustainable food production methods, the best I've seen is 2.5 acres per adult per year. When you figure in drought, disease, and the necessary soil remediation, I think that 100 million is a reasonable number. Nature could easily absorb the damage caused by half a million petrochemical dependent humans.
to be determined... I wasn't sure if you are enticing people to adopt your views or if you would work to destroy the current system actively.
Like I said above, for now, I'm just hoping that the civi's kill themselves off as quickly and cleanly as possible. If it gets to the point where my personal freedom becomes compromised, I have no problem defending the ecosystems that make our meatbags possible. (I'm already on the list so screw it. Honesty is always good.)
I definitely see how the extreme consumerism (and I will add to that: population) tramples on the freedom of others (and leads to conflict as people trample on each other to get there piece of the pie). As for "only path," I don't know yet. I also don't envision humans, as a species, pursuing such a path voluntarily, so I didn't know to what degree you would "force" this outcome to happen.
"only path I've found" The last two words are important there. I'm not claiming to be the messiah, although my lifestyle and the one I promote is very similar to those of the supposed messiah types of the past.
Obviously, a minimalist society would wreak less havoc on the planet, and the gross inefficiencies of such a system might regulate population automatically.
Exactly. What we see as inefficiency, Nature sees as an autonomous regulatory system.
Our current economic system is fragile as compared to the world you describe. I don't know about happier... I don't know much about nomadic people today, but rural people in China are flocking to cities to make money.
Every anthropological study I've read that studied happiness has pointed to those with less being happier and more connected in community. Rural people in China are flocking to cities because they've been brainwashed by a communist state and pushed into corners. This is an excellent documentary that describes the propaganda machine well.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/schooling-the-world-2010/I have some idea of what the gift economy is, but I don't understand the part about following rules of Nature or how somebody can find/see/discover those rules. I also try to assess how difficult it would be for people to adopt new ways of thinking and new habits of behavior to transform society. Maybe you are the optimist and I am the pessimist, but my gut feeling is that it is far far far too demanding to ask people or expect people in a technological world to limit themselves to a gift economy (I don't see how computers would exist due to the difficulty of making the exchanges necessary to run the businesses... and people want their iPhones and computers). Do you agree that it would be an exceedingly difficult task to ask people to voluntarily switch to this economy?
The links I put in my post above explain this very well. Asking people to switch will never work because the modern human has been epigenetically devolved to have little faith or courage. Faith in Nature and the courage to carry on without a safety net are both necessary for gift economy to work. However, when fiat money crashes and everything people were hoarding to barter with is destroyed by fighting over it, the choices will be accept gift economy or starve.
Would you eliminate the gene pool of people who want to exchange silver or gold or fiat currency for agricultural goods???
If I could flip a switch and they'd all disappear, I'd flip that switch so fast. I won't breed with anyone that's dependent upon agriculture or money. When the collapse happens, the people coming to me wanting food for their gold/money are going to get turned away to starve. Post collapse, if I see someone fencing off hunting grounds that I or my tribe uses, whether it's for agriculture, to build a bank, or for any reason really, it will be my pleasure to ventilate their bodies with arrows.
If humans start cutting down apple trees to grow oranges, then that is the way it is. the same holds if you change "oranges" to "humans."
You're missing something though. If we allow the slave minded humans to cut down all of the trees, everything dies, and they know no other way than consumption. There's a line in the sand somewhere and I think civ might have already passed it but like I said above, my ethics don't allow me to counteract or defend until my personal freedom and health is affected.
I still don't perceive differences in economic wealth as being inherently bad, so I don't view free exchange of money/currency/gold as inherently evil... or maybe there is some other things that make you see economic exchange as bad (in addition to what you mentioned above). I do see potential for exploitation when too much power is in the hands of the few, and I don't really have a solution for that... so I guess why that is why some people lean your way or toward communism.
If you believe that there can ever be peace and freedom in a world of gross inequality, I'd recommend studying psychology, anthropology, history, economics, biology, etc. Robert Sapolsky has done great work in analyzing this kind of thing and a bunch of his Stanford lectures are posted for free on youtube. People, at lease modern devolved people, want what the other guy has, whether they need it or not, and they get violent when there's an imbalance. Hunter/gatherers actually design their cultures to prevent the inequality. For instance, in some tribes, each man makes his arrows a special way, then everyone swaps arrows. This way, it is less likely that a certain hunter will get cocky because no one really knows who shot which arrow. There are hundreds of examples like this.
If you want to entice people to adopt those views, then try your sales pitch on me.
Sales pitches are for scammers trying to sell crap. If' "I'm free, healthy, sustainable, and my lifestyle diesmpowers tyrants." isn't enough to get you looking into alternatives to an unsustainable way of life that's killing everything, there's nothing I can do.
It's rare that I type for this long but it just rained so it's cool, it's not too buggy, and I can't sleep so I figured I could type everything out. If you have further questions, I'd recommend browsing through the links I posted above.
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