"I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies." I'm not sure I follow, what are other low trust societies? Otherwise I'm with you here - living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society.
Societies with lots of corruption, adulteration, theft, forgery, counterfeit, etc that goes under-punished. If you are frequently burned by your transactions and interactions with business, government, etc you're going to have low trust.
> living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society.
Not everyone's goal is to progress a society though. If one's goal is to live a quiet life and do what makes them happy, what's wrong with living in a cabin in the woods?
That would only be a fundamental problem if everyone owes something to society. That's a much different conversation though, whether everyone is born into a debt that must be paid back to society.
If handiwork and subsistence farming are not what makes you happy, living in a cabin in the woods will not make you happy, because when you cannot outsource them to the rest of society, nearly all your time will be spent doing those things in order to survive.
Even once these basics are sorted, you will only live happily outside society as long as you are lucky enough to stay healthy.
If handiwork and producing or finding your own food is what makes you happy, then why does it matter whether you are outsourcing to society?
The second sounds like a separate goal unto itself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that goal, or with having multiple goals, but if you start by saying doing X makes you happy then it doesn't really make sense to say doing X won't actually make you happy because you aren't doing Y.
I think the point is more that there are a very limited number of very specific lifestyles that can exist outside of a society. If you happen to thrive in one of those lifestyles, awesome, cabin in the woods works great for you.
But you can't do that if your passion is making music, or mathematics, or computer programming, or electrical tinkering, etc. There just isn't an option to follow the vast majority of pursuits except if you also engage in society.
People don't have the physical or mental ability to live alone. Their version of "alone" is a world where there are institutions that exist to protect their property, guarantee their transactions, and where they are supplied with a massive amount of high-quality manufactured goods. Paying for them doesn't make you somehow independent of society, it's the nature of society. You're trading bits of paper with government promises printed on them.
There's a big difference in living alone versus living in a big city though. Living in a cabin in the woods, as the example here, doesn't mean alone and cut off from everyone else. It likely just means a quieter, more self sufficient life.
Presumably if one is actually living alone in the woods they wouldn't be dependent on the larger societal systems like money, security, manufactured goods, etc. How would the get the money to start with without having a job that interacts with the outside world?
> Not everyone's goal is to progress a society though.
Thank you. That was my initial thought too. Why is progress the goal? Not everything has to "progress" at all times. What progress needs to be made anyway? And towards what end? Who decides that?
There's an inherent good to stopping progress and spending some time in a cabin in the woods.
If we never stop and enjoy now, then why bother with tomorrow?
The really challenge I've had with "progress" as a goal is that it so frequently is missing the context of what we're trying to progress towards.
The idea seems to be that starting with what we have today and taking another step forward is always the right move. Never go backwards, and its okay if we don't define our goals beforehand as long as we keep moving our feet.
Yeah that's a really interesting take. To me, whether it has an end really depends on how you define progress and what the goals are.
In the common sense where progress is little more than moving our feet, there's no end unless civilization collapses.
If one goes at it from the angle of the goal bring "enough", the end really is just getting to a point of maintaining what we already have. Wanting to secure the basics like shelter and reliable access to food and water is met with much less than what we have today. Surely there's some level of convenience and enjoyment that make sense beyond just the basics, but are we not there yet? And if we are, would progress best be focused on the goal of maintaining what we have that gives the most people an enjoyable life while minimizing our impact on the rest of the environment and everything that allowed humans to be here in the first place?
The comment I was replying to was talking about the growth of the economies and society progress. It's not about owing, it's about what is happening - and I think we agree that if the goal of everybody in a society is to live a quiet life, there will be no progress. Maybe we'd even witness the contrary: a regress of said society, to the extent we can call sparse people living by themselves in the woods a "society". If that sounds negative and you feel the need to defend it, it's maybe because you actually agree it's a negative for the society. While being good for the individual, right.
> and I think we agree that if the goal of everybody in a society is to live a quiet life, there will be no progress
That's actually where it gets really interesting though. Progress isn't absolute, it's relational and requires first defining the goal. If one's goal is to live a quiet life where they minimize their dependence on others, living in a cabin in the woods and finding their solution for food and water is progress. That obviously doesn't fit for a larger society where the goal is generally increasing dependence and trust on the larger society, but neither is right or wrong.
If one's goal is to live a quiet life where they minimize their dependence on others, it is incumbent on them to figure out how to keep anybody who wants what they have from just coming in and taking it. That requires a society. Your deed to your land is civilization. Part of societal progress is making it so that deed can be trusted to keep people from just taking your cabin in the woods and throwing you out.
This has to be negotiated with the people who would want to take your cabin in the woods and throw you out.
They're having the same problems with political extremism as the US. To be clear, this is both that political figures are leaning towards the extreme ends of their ideologies, as well as a culture of dogma and isolation that pushes them and their citizens towards extremes.
Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin for 2 years & that probably had societal impact...
string from Wiki: "Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of notable figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr."
From what I remember, his reasons for living in the cabin are only explained at the end of the book. I wonder if people forget or are unaware of his intentions and just remember the 'dropping out of society' part.
my memory doesn't recall much beyond his long stretches of describing nature there...
but the point is: maybe going off-grid can be relevant? changes also can also occur in "small bubbles of reality" and their impact can be extensive or narrow, still, they are a change..?
...and then he came back and spread his contributions to the society, notable figures inclusive. Had he stayed in that cabin and only wrote in his diary, we'd had no idea a Thoreau ever lived. So this was not an example.
i live in a cabin in the woods, we have different lifestyles too.
im very technical, my nieghbour 'grizzly annie' is the opposite, but we trade back n forth.
