What are the pros and cons of living off-grid? By living off-grid, I don't just mean living off the electrical grid. I mean off-grid in the sense of having opinions completely non-mainstream, believing in unpopular religious perspectives, subscribing to alternative arts, speaking a different language, living away from large cities, taking non-traditional jobs, and dropping out of school.
It's hard to identify the pros and cons, but I want to explore the various ways in which we can be off-grid.
One of the most novel ways is being agenetic. Ultimately our genes created this machine with some sort of "design" in mind, particularly to be the vehicle for duplicating DNA into our progeny. However, what if you circumvented that design? You could choose not to marry or have kids. That would be the simplest defiance. You could go even further, for example, by not catering to your self-interest, or not getting jealous, or not subconsciously manipulating others through emotional back-n'-forth. Transcending genetics is in a large part transcending emotion.
Utimately you cannot transcend all emotional causes. Some emotion is indeed drawing you to seek transcendence. However, your emotional desire for transcendence was probably meant as a method of obtaining new knowledge, not as a way to avoid the ultimate genetic design.
You could have chosen as a child not to learn the language of your parents. You could try to seek a truly independent, natural, and pure form of communication.
Using the off-grid measure is a new way of looking at ourselves. Rather than calling this person an "independent" person or a "dependent" person, we should analyze to what degrees and in what areas is this person consciously or unconsciously living off-grid. What aspects of being off-grid are morally correct? How is morality merely a matter of just swimming mainstream?
For example, I am off-grid religiously simply because the concepts violate what I believe. However, I'm strongly on-grid when it comes to education and the career-ist life; I have stuck with schooling through the end of college. I'm also on-grid morality-wise as I naturally follow the golden rule: do unto others as they do unto you.
What are the benefits of being on or off grid? What are the genetic underpinnings of a desire to relate to the mainstream or average in varying ways?
To what extent are we naturally chained to the mainstream that is completely inescapable? I didn't choose to speak English, I didn't choose to graduate from High School, nor did I choose to have an eclectic worldview. Those were all chosen by my parents. But my parents didn't really choose, but rather they too were emotionally trapped by a guilt that if they didn't give me those things they would be cutting me short. Imagine how much of a sin it would be not to teach your children a language or to deny them from schooling? why? See, there is a compellation that the "grid" makes you feel right and wrong automatically without a coherent rational analysis.
And it's this grid-based computing that is the essence of the cultural revolution in humans. You can call it grid-based, or memetics, or whatever. It's a matter of coupled oscillation and synchrony that provides much of the substance of style of living.
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I didn't ask to be thinking about religion, or Christ, or morals, or attitudes, or philosophies, or democrats, or republicans, or left, or right. I didn't ask to have to make an opinion on gay marriage, to discuss Supreme Court decisions, to look at the land where I was born and connect it to the concept of nationhood.
I didn't ask to think in terms of careers, and marriages, IRAs and college tuitions. I didn't ask to have to testify on the nuances of Indie Rock or Progressive Rock, and to then care about it afterward.
Other forces have foisted all these concepts, or memes, into my head. I woke one day, and there was a dictionary full of issues that I was to then discuss with vigor, where my opinion or lack thereof, or my interest, or lack thereof, would cause me hope and fear, anxiety and optimism, and potentially forge or divide relationships with humans.
Where are the real humans and real emotions that aren't slaves to concepts? I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of memes that I did not ask to germinate in my mind. I open my mouth and out pours these ideas that are fighting not on my behalf but on the behalf of themselves, using the battleground of group consciousness as a place to persist and grow.
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When analyzing memes it's important to eliminate bias when describing their spreading mechanisms. Take religion for example.
One interpretation of the spread of religion is that it captures its hosts' attention and encourages them to spread. It does so by scaring them about the answer to a question that's on everybody's mind: "what happens after death?" Because understanding the existence of heaven and hell clears up their confusion and is of tremendous use for them, they want to share the same information with others. Another way it could spread is that telling others to be moral is in your best interests, and hence you are likely to support religious institutions.
This could be called a "negative" memetic interpretation. I use "negative" in that it assumes that man is dumb in his choice of memes, and is more of a null substance through which the meme spreads.
A "positive" interpretation could be as follows: religion makes you happy and because you want to share the secrets of happiness to your loved ones, you willingly spend the effort to educate others about it. That religion persists is a testamant to the value and truth of the religion.
You should be objective in either case... therefore synthesizing both the negative and positive ways that memes spread.
The reason why I emphasize this, though, is that I get the feeling memetics is being widely misused as a way of discrediting the validity of certain values and institutions, such as religion.
Dawkins listed the following three characteristics for any successful replicator:
copying-fidelity:
the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying pattern will quickly become unrecognizable.
fecundity:
the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more copies of a text than an office copying machine.
longevity:
the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have photographed or otherwise reproduced it.
Professional matchmakers also play into the picture, but not in as direct a way as one would expect. Matchmakers who charge for using astrological methods compete with those who don't. But the astrologer matches by arbitrary criteria that produce dead-end courtships. Ironically, that causes customers to come back and pay for return visits. However, the matchmaker who succeeds in making sensible pairings looses customers more quickly, since more of them find satisfying relationships. These differences help the astrological service expand and take on new practitioners. It's another viral mechanism for astrological compatibility ideas to spread, not just despite their flaws, but because of their flaws.
I picked up a magazine called "What Is Enlightenment" which was less enlightening and more informative. Here's a scan of a page [200+K] that I thought was an interesting way to model meme evolution. (Oh yeah, I just bought a new Scanner, HP Deskjet 7130 (all-in-one)... seems to be working well)
Meme, meta-memes and politics by Keith Henson
Richard Dawkins, perhaps the foremost evolutionary biologist of our times,
starts Chapter 5 of his recent book, The Blind Watchmaker with "It's raining
DNA outside." He goes on to describe a willow tree that is shedding fluffy
seeds far and wide across the landscape. The paragraph ends: "The whole
performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all is in aid of one thing and one
thing only, the spreading of DNA around the countryside. Not just any DNA, but
DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow
trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. Those fluffy specks are,
literally, spreading instructions for making themselves. They are there because
their ancestors succeeded in doing the same. It is raining instructions out
there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading
algorithms. That's not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any
plainer if it were raining floppy disks."
I like the metaphor that the human mind is the substrate, or primal soup, for memes to emerge to life.
![page [200+K]](/scans/Spiral Dynamics.jpg){kind=link}