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FAQ
If we want to say we are against new things, we need to know what “new” and what “things” are. A “thing” is stuff put together for people to use in this or that way. ‘Stuff’ people call the thing’s matter, or its “material”. In a wooden chair, the material is the wood. But most chairs today are made from plastic, which is in itself another thing, made out of natural gas or petroleum, which is the matter. Now-a-days, most things seem to require a long chain of changed matter before we reach a matter which is natural. This makes it so that we often look around and cannot even tell what the natural matter any of the things are made from! This is bad because it makes us ignorant. Things are made for reasons people come up with, such as ‘to drink hot water’ or ‘to have a place to sit’. These reasons are the thing’s purpose, the use the thing will have. It can also be called the thing’s form, since it comes from our thoughts rather than from the stuff. So a thing is matter put together (or ‘transformed’ or ‘modified’) for a purpose, or what people call an artifact. Obviously, not all things are artifacts. A rock, for example, is not. But non-artifacts are not the things that concern us, since these are not the things we can or cannot make. Then, it makes no sense to advocate against the making of new things that cannot even be made by us. The only things we talk about when we say “no more things” are the things that we can, in fact, make. But what are the things we can in fact make? These seem to grow by the minute. But since the idea of a new thing to make would itself be a new thing, we are also against it. We are against new-old things, new-new things, and new-possible things (because these lead to new-actual things).
There are two senses in which a thing can be said to be “new”. ‘Old new things’ are the newly made things which we have already had. In other words, they are new things of old inventions. For example: new chairs, new drawers, new sweaters, new glasses. New-new things are new things that are based on ideas that have not existed before.
There are two roots of the problem. The first comes from the amount of things being made, the second comes from having to come up with new things. The root of the problem of things is thing-making at the massive scale. ‘Massive scale’ means many, many things, an amount of things no human being, or group of human beings, could be expected to make in a single day. Thing-making is called ‘production’, and the means by which we make things at the massive scale is called ‘industry’. So the means for massive thing-making is called industrial production or manufacturing. This form of thing-making is relatively new, which is why most humans in most of history did not have the problem of too many things. We cannot ask Aristotle what to do about it. The problem of too many things is something new, a new thing, another one for the stupid collection of the massive amount of new things we continue to have, but would be better not to.
The bad consequences of TMT (too many things) are long and everybody knows it, which makes it even weirder that we still have massive thing-making, although everyone seems to know its bad. Here are a few:
As it is obvious, having a bunch of useless things that we already have anyways in their old versions is not worth it.
4. Bad consequences of too many inventions? ‘Invention’ is coming up with a thing to make for a new purpose. New inventions need to solve problems. If there is no problem, there is no reason to come up with a thing-based solution. If not getting your clothes dried fast is not a problem, the dryer is not a solution. Then: to have the excuse to come up with new things, the pro-thing forces must do either one of these two things:
Here is an example. One big source of fake-problems for the sake of making more things is selling women stuff that makes them feel less ugly. But to sell a woman something that makes her feel less ugly, you have to make her feel ugly in the first place. Otherwise, you would not have an excuse to make a thing to be sold so that they feel less ugly! Based on the number of new things that are made for the purpose of solving the problem of women feeling ugly, one would think we have an epidemic of really ugly women. Only that way the amount of trash beauty things they sell makes sense. But that is not true. Women are fine. The only logical conclusion to be reached is that the women-ugliness epidemic is a FAKE problem generated for the sake of thing-making and thing-selling. Exceptions? Does this mean we are against the pottery cup you made with your yoga gals, or the painting your four-year-old made at school? No. These ‘things’ are allowed. Since the problem is the massive making of new old things, and the creation of problems to make excuses to make new-new things, there are forms of ‘making new things’ that are fine. But since we still want to keep the slogan “no more things”, we need to define these ok things as non-things. Sorry. So these non-things that is OK to make:
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