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Jerry's avatar

A fragment of a thought on green I just thought of a couple days after reading this, "frugality" might be another core value of green. Not taking more than you need, whether that's power or knowledge or material. Green is often fine with the violence of nature, as long as it's done out of necessity. The ogion character does not need to cast powerful spells (most of the time), he needs herbs and food from the forest, and that's reflected in what he focuses on. Chopping down a giant redwood feels wrong, but I think green would be ok with a small group of people chopping down one giant redwood to build their village. I think green would even be against trying to accumulate too much knowledge, not (only) because "some things are better left unknown" for whatever blue or black or red or white reason they shouldn't be known, but because relentlessly pursuing knowledge you personally don't need will disturb your peace, it's giving in to a form of greed.

idk, all that's just a fragmented thought so I'm not really certain on my points, but it seems to fit my intuition of green. Do others agree/disagree/have refinements?

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JiSK's avatar

The core insight of Green which I believe to be important and absent from Blue, Black, and White, is a very specific sense of conservatism - Do Not Break What You Cannot Repair, and its close cousin, Do Not Change What You Cannot Understand.

We have awe for great trees because they took enormous time to create, which we could not replicate even though we can (and some do) perfectly understand how it was done and how it in principle could be repeated. And for stars, and planets, and the Moon, and a number of delicate ecologies.

But awe fades with understanding. A total eclipse of the sun would be a world-shaking event to someone who did not understand the movements of the moon and planets - to someone who does understand it, and can plan a trip to a specific location years in advance to witness one (hi!), it's merely a pretty cool thing that is very hard to record in shareable format. Awe is not very resilient to knowledge.

And Green, generally, is like that. Important insights, a useful attitude summarized in instinct ingrained by biology, culture, or both, which has served us well for a very long time. (The Gods of the Copybook Headings, as Kipling calls it.) But accumulating knowledge fragments it, gradually renders it down, piece by piece, first making it superfulous, then later, harmful.

Maximum Blue will always have nuggets of Green left, examined, but that doesn't mean we need to actually respect Green's viewpoint. Instead, we can translate it - here, to Chesterton's Fence and "Do not call up what you cannot put down". And then all that remains is reminders that it is possible to mess yourself up by not respecting those old annoying principles, and no, really, you too must keep them in mind.

Separately - this doesn't really deserve it's own comment, but "solarpunk" disgusts me because it's a mirage. It's a vision of things that cannot be, that we could not possibly create without all the things that it disclaims. It's an Eloi-land that cannot exist because it declared at the outset that it hides no Morlocks. ("Cozy futurism", by contrast, is merely an incoherent dichotomy, though I suspect that if pressed to flesh it out, it would acquire all the same problems as solarpunk.)

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