impecable-type

Looking at the lay of the land as dense wilderness, with few roads, making transport difficult, that has to influence economic and political orchestration as it does contagion, no?

In other words, governing a raw jungle, with little in the way of infrastructure, means lots of areas will go ungoverned. And with that, it means the trappings of a civilization baked in modernity are gone: electricity, plumbing, other common services, heavy construction.

When modernization occurs, economic activity eventually requires degrees of consistent identification of individual people, to enable accounting and distribution. Without identity and credentials, volume of trade can’t scale.

So, how to integrate with a wilderness busily operating according to its own rules? Well, if you have to let the wilderness come to you, isn’t that inviting collisions?

It seems like colonialism and race are big juicy targets of exploitative blame, but if you look around, there’s a certain reality that the gravitational forces of modernity would have caused these tribal groups to collide and descend into conflict with any amount of activity that didn’t ease the exposure of ethnic tribal groups into modernization (and thus accounting, identification and representative credential provisioning) over multiple generations, very, very carefully. I don’t know that such a thing ever would have happened gently.

That the wilderness persists, and with it conflict among diverse customs, traditions and ways of life, seems to show that maybe it’s less about the colonialism, and more about way the (now entrenched) urban areas are forced to interact with a coarse intolerance for disorganized demand. It’s probably been this parasitic/addictive feedback loop for long enough that the equilibrium is a known quantity determined long ago, through layers of stacked moral hazards.

Those layers are certainly the ghosts of a colonial era, but now what? The colonial era is over, but the parasitic core of an urbanized gravitational whirlpool still produces the effects of a faceless entity, an architecture of amoral economy. The tribal ethnic groups still fight, and their spoils get eagerly mopped up and wrung out in buckets harvested by spectators.

How does one put the brakes on a cycle like this? Efface the cities themselves from the face of the earth? Clear cut and pave over the jungle? Seems like whether colonialism is to blame or not, the problem is essentially intractable with conventional thinking? Radical changes, meanwhile, remain unthinkable.

What to do?