Doug Henwood:
> > > I suppose we'll have to take turns, but, still, egads.
Gordon:
> > Well, if you're going to eat chicken, and you don't like to
> > eat feathers, somebody's got to pluck them. Who plucks them
> > now?
JCWisc at aol.com:
> Post-revo, after you've spent enough time plucking chickens,
> you'll probably start to wish like hell that somebody would
> invent a goddam chicken-plucking machine. You might even want
> to try inventing one yourself. If you succeeded in doing so,
> maybe you'd decide that you'll specialize in plucking chickens,
> taking over from everyone else the onerous task... They'd be
> glad to give it up. Then it might make sense to raise all
> the chickens near the plucking factory... And then? And then?
> Thus is Sin readmitted to the world.
Well, not in my view. As I said two or three times before, there's no theoretical upper limit to the size or complexity of self-organized systems. The only impediment I can see to giant chicken-plucking combines is that I would imagine a distaste for eating the flesh of fellow sentient beings might follow a general movement towards anarchism. It would be a similar movement of consciousness, away from submission to powerful elites, abstractions and class sytems (of which the human / non-human dichotomy is one) and towards consciousness of the Minute Particulars of which I have already spoken. But one could certainly build, say, airplanes, and thereby assuage epidemics of airplane-deprivation anxiety.
-- Gordon