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Didn’t he literally move to a shack in the woods?
He did, and then they built roads around the place he'd retired to and destroyed it, which he claims ultimately gave him the resolve to start his bombing campaign.
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The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
You're mostly right. My statement wasn't meant to say "TK should go live with the Amish because they're exactly like what he proposes" - I don't think they are either. What I think is more like, the Amish are 70%-ish of the way from mainstream society to what TK says he wants, but they actually exist now, are accessible, and decent odds you could find an Amish church that would let you live with them for a while. Living with them would let him learn a lot about what it's actually like to live in such a society, how to live decently well with minimal contact with the industrial world, and get an idea about what it would be like to go further.
You are spot on and thinking about it I realise that I've seen TK's the lack of incrementalism before.
I was listening to radio broadcast about the Utopia Experiment. Dylan Evans sees total collapse coming and sets up his simple living experiment to try to get ahead of it. But quite early on, his attempts to make soap come unstuck because he has already given up the internet, so he cannot watch the "How to make soap" videos on You Tube. That is when I twigged that the story was going to turn into a mental health crisis. Going all in, rather than plotting a path and taking reasonable sized steps is usually a sign of mental illness. And so it was in Dylan Evans' case.
Reminiscent of Christopher McCandless too.
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I think he’s sort of half right. I think what seems to work well for most people is a sense of accomplishment especially in doing something physical. I don’t see that it means literally going out and living in the woods. But the kinds of things that seem to be associated with well-being — physical activity, a sense of affiliation with other people, and a job in which they get a sense that their work matters — are somewhat similar to what TK is suggesting. Even time in nature is good for mental health. But even going that far, I don’t see it as following that we should go live in the woods and farm with a sharpened sticks. You can have those things without going that far. You can take up sports especially team sports. You can go hiking or fishing or rock climbing. You can found or join a group of people to do good in the world.
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He did, but it's not clear to what extent he was actually living the kind of life he advertised, which would include getting all of his own food, water, and other supplies from nature by himself and never from stores or other things sourced from the "industrial economy". At the very least, the materials required for the bombing campaign most likely couldn't have been built without outside supplies. I rather doubt he did considering how little knowledge of living off the land he started with and how much time he must have devoted to the bombing campaign.
There's also the point of safety nets. In TK's advocated world, if you fail to hunt and gather or farm enough food, then you starve and possibly die, tough shit. Living in a shack in the woods in the United States, even if you mostly get your own food, you still have the option of going to a store if you fall short, or to a hospital if you get injured or sick. Maybe he would voluntarily refrain from those options, but I don't think we know.
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Yes, but that would only let him know how he enjoyed the survival lifestyle, not how everyone else would respond.
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