Cocoons

Over on Gab, a recent post by Judge Dread @judgedread encapsulated a point I know I've made in the past:

Cities breed liberalism because cities are the only place where you can survive with absolutely no contact with the realities of the natural world, and liberalism is above all else a denial of nature.
#Science

 What I find funny is that it's liberals who insist on passing on trite stories about how helping a butterfly out of its cocoon basically kills it, because it needs that struggle to properly expand its wings, to grow, to blossom as it were.

CAs an aside, perhaps that's why they wear every petty slight and setback on their shoulders like a badge of honor? No, because then they'd realize it's part of life and get on with it.

I've pointed to it again and again, and I think it bears repeating, as it has lessons even for those who don't believe in carrying firearms. Eric Raymond's "Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun". There's a fair amount of explanation, go read the whole damn thing but the core of it is this:

The first and most important of these lessons is this: it all comes down to you.

No one's finger is on the trigger but your own. All the talk-talk in your head, all the emotions in your heart, all the experiences of your past — these things may inform your choice, but they can't move your finger. All the socialization and rationalization and justification in the world, all the approval or disapproval of your neighbors — none of these things can pull the trigger either. They can change how you feel about the choice, but only you can actually make the choice. Only you. Only here. Only now. Fire, or not?

A second is this: never count on being able to undo your choices.

If you shoot someone through the heart, dead is dead. You can't take it back. There are no do-overs. Real choice is like that; you make it, you live with it — or die with it.

A third lesson is this: the universe doesn't care about motives.

If your gun has an accidental discharge while pointed an unsafe direction, the bullet will kill just as dead as if you had been aiming the shot. I didn't mean to may persuade others that you are less likely to repeat a behavior, but it won't bring a corpse back to life.

These lessons can be extrapolated to any environment where day to day and moment to moment decisions can have fatal consequences, as a matter of daily, ongoing reality. The ocean doesn't care if you really wanted to put that o-ring in correctly or not - it just cares that in a sub at 400 feet, there's an opening it can squeeze through.

Time preference also matters. A thug with a gun is still a thug, still violent, and isn't thinking out consequences. In a world with people who have a longer term outlook though, and are just as willing to be violent to protect themselves, the thugs tend to get weeded out.

We in the west live in cocoons - and those in the cocoons are too ignorant to easily distinguish between the wolves and the sheepdogs. We're isolated from the impersonal nature of the universe, from the realities of death to even feed ourselves, and anything that makes people uncomfortable is suppressed, the sheepdogs vilified instead of more raised.

Molyneux had a recent discussion with Vox that covers how r/K selection can be manipulated by those rabbits in their warm little burrows and cocoons.

The problem is one day the fences break down, the cocoons are ripped away, and reality comes to bite those who have not learned to govern themselves hard.