Alyx Woodward (obsolete) @Alyx@computerfairi.es

@packbat with any luck, friend, we're telling one right now

@packbat so I feel like we should trust our feelings more on this one. it's not our feelings that teach us that complex issues sometimes boil down to a simple few decisions that do the most good. instinctively we feel like that's how things actually work. but we've been pushed away from this notion

@packbat I think, really and truly, that our culture has taught us to be baffled by large problems. we've made a fetish of complexity and of overwhelming scope, partly because it feeds into our civilization's nauseating preoccupation with being The Best, with point events and point sources of greatness. it benefits this society to present issues as too messy for all but a few geniuses or rich men to solve

@packbat and the *hope* is...that it doesn't take MUCH to start things rolling. that's happened before in history; not *every* massive change gets set off by a murder or a riot. but...you know, whatever works ;=3

@packbat well, every massive event has to start from *some* kind of inciting event, after all. that's how societies always work, how equilibrium is restored in times of great social imbalance. one spark sets a cascade of other events in motion. what in a semiconductor junction would be called "avalanche breakdown" takes place, or what in a photomultiplier is produced by "secondary emission": one event triggers so many connected ones that they build to a flood

@packbat the problem is that people have a hard time keeping in mind that just because some massive political conflict, say, gets resolved with one debate (or one war, even), then that means debate (or war) are the ways to solve big problems. they're not. in fact they probably *weren't*, and there were ways of resolving the situation that didn't come to some dramatic, explosive climax

@packbat yeah. cos honestly the idea isn't a bad one, both from the practical dramatic standpoint of "okay how do you get your average human being even used to the idea of handling a gigantic crisis by reducing it to a few people" but also the plain truth that usually events *do* come to some kind of head where a few crucial decisions are the ones that matter the most. maybe not all in one place, in one group of people (the more the better, haha)