My favorite section of this post was the “green according to non-green” section, which I felt captured really well the various ways that other colors see past green.
I don’t fully feel like the green part inside me resonated with any of your descriptions of it, though. So let me have a go at describing green, and seeing if that resonates with you.
Green is the idea that you don’t have to strive towards anything. Thinking that green is instrumentally useful towards some other goal misses the whole point of green, which is about getting out of a goal- or action-oriented mindset. When you do that, your perception expands from a tunnel-vision “how can I get what I want” to actually experiencing the world in its unfiltered glory—actually looking at the redwoods. If you do that, then you can’t help but feel awe. And when you step out of your self-oriented tunnel, suddenly the world has far more potential for harmony than you’d previously seen, because in fact the motivations that are causing the disharmony are… illusions, in some sense. Green looks at someone cutting down a redwood and sees someone who is hurting themself, by forcibly shutting off the parts of themselves that are capable of appreciation and awe. Knowing this doesn’t actually save the redwoods, necessarily, but it does make it far easier to be in a state of acceptance, because deep down nobody is actually your enemy.
Green is the idea that you don’t have to strive towards anything.
Can only be said by somebody not currently starving, freezing/parched or chased by a tiger. Modern civilization has insulated us from those “green” delights so thoroughly that we have an idealized conception far removed from how things routinely are in the natural world. Self-preservation is the first thing that any living being strives towards, the greenest thing there is, any “yin” can be entertained only when that’s sorted out.
Fighting with tigers is red-green, or Gruul by MTG terminology. The passionate, anarchic struggle of nature red in tooth and claw. Using natural systems to stay alive even as it destroys is black-green, or Golgari. Rot, swarms, reckless consumption that overwhelms.
Pure green is a group of prehistoric humans sitting around a campfire sharing ghost stories and gazing at the stars. It’s a cave filled with handprints of hundreds of generations that came before. It’s cats louging in a sunbeam or birds preening their feathers. It’s rabbits huddling up in their dens until the weather is better, it’s capybaras and monkeys in hot springs, and bears lazily going to hibernate. These have intelligible justifications, sure, but what do these animals experience while engaging in these activities?
Most vertebrates seem to have a sense of green, of relaxation and watching the world flow by. Physiologically, when humans and other animals relax, the sympathetic nervious system is suppressed and the parasympathetic system stays/becomes active. This causes the muscles to relax and causes the blood stream to prioritize digestion. For humans at least, stress and the pressure to find solutions right now decrease and the mind wanders. Attention loses its focus but remains high-bandwidth. This green state is where people most often come up with ‘creative’ solutions that draw on a holistic understanding of the situation.
Green is the notion that you don’t have to strive towards anything, and the moment an animal does need to strive for something they mix in red, blue, black, or white, depending on what the situation calls for and the animal’s color evolved toolset.
The colors exist because no color on its own is viable. Green can’t keep you alive, and that’s okay, it isn’t meant to.
A sensible point, though dating yin to the advent of ‘modern civilization’ is too extreme. The ‘spiritual’ or ‘yin-like’ aspects of green have a long history pre-dating modern civilization.
The level of material security required before one can ‘indulge in yin’ is probably extremely low (though of course strongly dependent on local environmental conditions).
Right, the modern civilization point is more about the “green” archetype. The “yin” thing is of course much more ancient and subtle, but even so I doubt that it (and philosophy in general) was a major consideration before the advent of agriculture leading to greater stability, especially for the higher classes.
Yeah, the basic failure mode of green is that it is reliant on cartoonish descriptions of nature that is much closer to Pocahontas or really any Disney movie than real-life nature, and in general is extremely non-self reliant in the sense that it relies heavily on both Blue and Red’s efforts to preserve the idealized Green.
Otherwise, it collapses into large scale black and arguably red personalities of nature.
Knowing this doesn’t actually save the redwoods, necessarily, but it does make it far easier to be in a state of acceptance, because deep down nobody is actually your enemy.
Huh, I’d say the opposite. Green-according-to-black says “fuck all the people who are harming nature”, because black sees the world through an adversarial lens. But actual green is better at getting out of the adversarial/striving mindset.
I’d say “fuck all the people who are harming nature” is black-red/rakdos’s view of white-green/selesnya. The “fuck X” attitude implies a certain passion that pure black would call wasted motion. Black is about power. It’s not adversarial per se, just mercenary/agentic. Meanwhile the judginess towards others is an admixture of white. Green is about appreciating what is, not endorsing or holding on to it.
Black’s view of green is “careless idiots, easy to take advantage of if you catch them by surprise”. When black meets green, black notices how the commune’s rules would allow someone to scam them of all their cash and how the charms they’re wearing cost 10 times less to produce than what they paid for it.
Black-red/Rakdos’ view of green is “tree huggers, weirdly in love with nature rather than everything else you can care about”. When rakdos meets green they’re inspired to throw a party in the woods, concluding it’s kinda lame without a lightshow or a proper toilet, and leaving tons of garbage when they return home.
Black’s view of white-green/selesnya is “people who don’t seem to grasp the tragedy of the commons who can get obnoxiously intrusive about it. Sure nature can be nice but it’s not worth wasting that much political capital on.” When black meets selesnya, it tries to find an angle by which selesnya can give them more power. Maybe a ecological development grant that has shoddy selection criteria or a lopsided political deal.
Meanwhile black-green/golgari is “It is natural for people to be selfish. Everyone chooses themselves eventually, that’s an evolutionary given. I will make selfish choices and appreciate the world, as any sane person would”. It views selesnya as a grift, green as passive, black as self-absorbed, and rakdos as irrational.
I would say ecofascism is white-green-black/Abzan. The hard agency of black, the sense of communal approach of white, and the appreciation of nature of green, but lacking the academic rigor of blue or the wild passion of red.
I think this is in tension with the idea that green can be conservation of what he was talking about where spirituality is the idea of facing the other. That means that cutting down a redwood cuts away the other and the awe that you would feel in favor of your own power. Green isn’t a Buddhist view of the world, it’s the idea that there is a boundary between you and other and the other is worth regarding
My favorite section of this post was the “green according to non-green” section, which I felt captured really well the various ways that other colors see past green.
I don’t fully feel like the green part inside me resonated with any of your descriptions of it, though. So let me have a go at describing green, and seeing if that resonates with you.
Green is the idea that you don’t have to strive towards anything. Thinking that green is instrumentally useful towards some other goal misses the whole point of green, which is about getting out of a goal- or action-oriented mindset. When you do that, your perception expands from a tunnel-vision “how can I get what I want” to actually experiencing the world in its unfiltered glory—actually looking at the redwoods. If you do that, then you can’t help but feel awe. And when you step out of your self-oriented tunnel, suddenly the world has far more potential for harmony than you’d previously seen, because in fact the motivations that are causing the disharmony are… illusions, in some sense. Green looks at someone cutting down a redwood and sees someone who is hurting themself, by forcibly shutting off the parts of themselves that are capable of appreciation and awe. Knowing this doesn’t actually save the redwoods, necessarily, but it does make it far easier to be in a state of acceptance, because deep down nobody is actually your enemy.
Can only be said by somebody not currently starving, freezing/parched or chased by a tiger. Modern civilization has insulated us from those “green” delights so thoroughly that we have an idealized conception far removed from how things routinely are in the natural world. Self-preservation is the first thing that any living being strives towards, the greenest thing there is, any “yin” can be entertained only when that’s sorted out.
Fighting with tigers is red-green, or Gruul by MTG terminology. The passionate, anarchic struggle of nature red in tooth and claw. Using natural systems to stay alive even as it destroys is black-green, or Golgari. Rot, swarms, reckless consumption that overwhelms.
Pure green is a group of prehistoric humans sitting around a campfire sharing ghost stories and gazing at the stars. It’s a cave filled with handprints of hundreds of generations that came before. It’s cats louging in a sunbeam or birds preening their feathers. It’s rabbits huddling up in their dens until the weather is better, it’s capybaras and monkeys in hot springs, and bears lazily going to hibernate. These have intelligible justifications, sure, but what do these animals experience while engaging in these activities?
Most vertebrates seem to have a sense of green, of relaxation and watching the world flow by. Physiologically, when humans and other animals relax, the sympathetic nervious system is suppressed and the parasympathetic system stays/becomes active. This causes the muscles to relax and causes the blood stream to prioritize digestion. For humans at least, stress and the pressure to find solutions right now decrease and the mind wanders. Attention loses its focus but remains high-bandwidth. This green state is where people most often come up with ‘creative’ solutions that draw on a holistic understanding of the situation.
Green is the notion that you don’t have to strive towards anything, and the moment an animal does need to strive for something they mix in red, blue, black, or white, depending on what the situation calls for and the animal’s
colorevolved toolset.The colors exist because no color on its own is viable. Green can’t keep you alive, and that’s okay, it isn’t meant to.
A sensible point, though dating yin to the advent of ‘modern civilization’ is too extreme. The ‘spiritual’ or ‘yin-like’ aspects of green have a long history pre-dating modern civilization.
The level of material security required before one can ‘indulge in yin’ is probably extremely low (though of course strongly dependent on local environmental conditions).
Right, the modern civilization point is more about the “green” archetype. The “yin” thing is of course much more ancient and subtle, but even so I doubt that it (and philosophy in general) was a major consideration before the advent of agriculture leading to greater stability, especially for the higher classes.
Yeah, the basic failure mode of green is that it is reliant on cartoonish descriptions of nature that is much closer to Pocahontas or really any Disney movie than real-life nature, and in general is extremely non-self reliant in the sense that it relies heavily on both Blue and Red’s efforts to preserve the idealized Green.
Otherwise, it collapses into large scale black and arguably red personalities of nature.
This sounds like green-according-to-black.
My view of green is much more ecofascist-y.
Huh, I’d say the opposite. Green-according-to-black says “fuck all the people who are harming nature”, because black sees the world through an adversarial lens. But actual green is better at getting out of the adversarial/striving mindset.
I’d say “fuck all the people who are harming nature” is black-red/rakdos’s view of white-green/selesnya. The “fuck X” attitude implies a certain passion that pure black would call wasted motion. Black is about power. It’s not adversarial per se, just mercenary/agentic. Meanwhile the judginess towards others is an admixture of white. Green is about appreciating what is, not endorsing or holding on to it.
Black’s view of green is “careless idiots, easy to take advantage of if you catch them by surprise”. When black meets green, black notices how the commune’s rules would allow someone to scam them of all their cash and how the charms they’re wearing cost 10 times less to produce than what they paid for it.
Black-red/Rakdos’ view of green is “tree huggers, weirdly in love with nature rather than everything else you can care about”. When rakdos meets green they’re inspired to throw a party in the woods, concluding it’s kinda lame without a lightshow or a proper toilet, and leaving tons of garbage when they return home.
Black’s view of white-green/selesnya is “people who don’t seem to grasp the tragedy of the commons who can get obnoxiously intrusive about it. Sure nature can be nice but it’s not worth wasting that much political capital on.” When black meets selesnya, it tries to find an angle by which selesnya can give them more power. Maybe a ecological development grant that has shoddy selection criteria or a lopsided political deal.
Meanwhile black-green/golgari is “It is natural for people to be selfish. Everyone chooses themselves eventually, that’s an evolutionary given. I will make selfish choices and appreciate the world, as any sane person would”. It views selesnya as a grift, green as passive, black as self-absorbed, and rakdos as irrational.
I would say ecofascism is white-green-black/Abzan. The hard agency of black, the sense of communal approach of white, and the appreciation of nature of green, but lacking the academic rigor of blue or the wild passion of red.
I think this is in tension with the idea that green can be conservation of what he was talking about where spirituality is the idea of facing the other. That means that cutting down a redwood cuts away the other and the awe that you would feel in favor of your own power. Green isn’t a Buddhist view of the world, it’s the idea that there is a boundary between you and other and the other is worth regarding