Magical Thinking to Help Avoid Anxiety-Provoking Thoughts
Today’s contemplation shares a comment I made to a Facebook Group a number of days ago in response to an article by Dr. Ugo Bardi — whose writing, especially around limits to growth and his proposal about the Seneca cliff decline we are likely to face as we bump into the biophysical limits imposed by a finite planet, I have enjoyed and greatly learned from. While we agree on much, we have a definite disagreement regarding the role and potential of non-renewable, energy-harvesting technologies (what most refer to simply as ‘renewable’ energy — a powerful marketing twist of language given the actual technologies required are in a very limited way ‘renewable’ (i.e., recyclable/rebuildable) and are not energy sources but technologies to harvest ‘renewable’ energy).
Dr. Bardi posted the article I responded to in reaction to another article that was penned by The Honest Sorcerer that I had shared on one of the several Facebook Groups Dr. Bardi hosts. My original comment is in bold below with some links/charts to articles/research that support my perspective and some concluding remarks.
Whether the article is ‘peer-reviewed’ or not (and there are certainly issues with the ‘gold standard’ of peer review), the fact remains that non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies appear to be an extension of our fossil fuel-based energies relying upon them significantly in both the upstream and downstream industrial processes necessary for their production, maintenance, and after-life reclamation and/or disposal.
Ideally, peer review is an objective and forceful gate-keeper that serves to eliminate poor ‘science’ prior to it being widely distributed but the process is certainly less than perfect and has it criticisms, even from within academia (in fact, the mainstay of gate-keeping — that is, repeating the experiment — is rarely, if ever carried out; mostly because there is not one to replicate):
While there exist some small-scale examples of ‘renewables’ producing needed industrial products and ‘fuelling’ heavy equipment (and lots of marketing propaganda by vested interests around these; mostly, I would argue, to attract capital), the scale and cost are prohibitive, especially for a world already drowning in debt — to say little about the finite resources required to ‘convert’ the processes necessary. The bottom line is that in the present, and forgoing some miraculous as-yet-to-be-discovered technology, fossil fuel-based industrial processes are required for energy-harvesting technologies:
These processes also add significant pollutants to a world already experiencing overloading of its various compensatory sinks, to say little of the reality that fossil fuel use has seen little if any contraction in demand despite decades of exponential increase in so-called renewables.
Here are a handful of ‘academic’ articles on how the industrial processes necessary for ‘renewables’ impact negatively the environment. They are neither ‘clean’ nor ‘green’ but are almost always referred to them as such (again, a marketing ploy):
Here are a couple of charts to demonstrate that fossil fuel use has not decreased as ‘renewable energy technologies have increased in use (and significantly increased the past two decades). As this article highlights, the increase in ‘renewables’ has not detracted from our fossil fuel use (our dependence upon fossil fuels has continued to increase), it has simply offset the decline in nuclear-powered energy:
Highlighting the negative aspects of these technologies and the observation that they do not seem to be actually ‘solving’ in any way our fundamental predicament of ecological overshoot, or reducing our dependency upon fossil fuels, or reducing our destruction of the planet, is not ‘a mission received from God’; it is about challenging a narrative that seems quite problematic but is being marketed by many as the ‘solution’ to something that is increasingly looking to be a predicament that cannot be solved — and as William Catton Jr. pointed out in his 1980 text, we seem destined to experience the collapse that always tends to accompany overshoot because: “..habits of thought persist…people continue to advocate further technological breakthroughs as the supposedly sure cure for carrying capacity deficits. The very idea that technology caused overshoot, and that it made us too colossal to endure, remains alien to too many minds for ‘de-collosalization’ to be a really feasible alternative to literal die-off. There is a persistent drive to apply remedies that aggravate the problem.”
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My ‘motivation’ for sharing the above is to provide the opportunity for the reader to decide thru their own reading and ‘research’ which story appears more believable. As The Honest Sorcerer recently wrote in this article (and others have similarly argued[1]), it takes some ‘magical thinking’ to believe that non-renewable, energy-harvesting technologies are any type of ‘solution’ for the predicament of ecological overshoot and for attempting to ‘sustain’ our globalised, complex society.
The widespread adoption of magical thinking to avoid anxiety-provoking cognitions is in no way surprising. It is perhaps, as Ajit Varki argues, that “Some aspects of human cognition and behavior appear unusual or exaggerated relative to those of other intelligent, warm-blooded, long-lived social species — including certain mammals (cetaceans, elephants and great apes) and birds (corvids and passerines). One such collection of related features is our facile ability for reality denial in the face of clear facts, a high capacity for self-deception and false beliefs, overarching optimism bias and irrational risk-taking behavior…”[2].
The allure of non-renewable, energy-harvesting technologies is that they can create a story in which a transition to a ‘green/clean/sustainable’ future with most (all?) of our current complexities is not only possible but assured; in fact, for some, it is the only future we should be pursuing if we are to avoid civilizational ‘collapse’.
Such a future may be possible, I suppose, if ALL the right conditions are met — the most significant that I can think of off the top of my head are being far fewer people, far less imperial endeavours by our ruling elite, and the acceptance of far, far lower living standards by those in so-called ‘advanced’ economies.
Revealing the impediments that exist in such a narrative is not a God-inspired mission as Dr. Bardi accuses. But it can create both anxiety and significant uncertainty for those who have hooked their wagon up to the ‘renewable’ horses and are hoping to get to the big sustainable city on the horizon. So it’s not surprising that many (most?) rail against the argument that our current complexities can in no way be sustained via non-renewable, energy-harvesting technologies and our future path is likely going to be far more chaotic and problematic than most imagine — at least for those that ponder such a predicament, since most actually tend not to think about it.
A book I highly recommend to help in one’s understanding of our penchant for clinging to stories that appear ‘certain’ but very often are not is Dan Gardner’s Future Babble (my personal summary notes can be found here).
As he argues:
It is more often than not the confident, self-assured voice providing a simple story (regardless of ‘evidence’ to the contrary) that is the most persuasive and influences beliefs more — one told by the ‘hedgehogs’ as Gardner calls them. Contradictory evidence is rationalised away and certainty assured.
Given our predisposition to avoiding uncertainty and wishing control (to avoid fear and anxiety), we search for certainty, employ magical thinking, and see patterns where none exist; and someone who sounds like they are sure of their story (and especially if they are an ‘authority’ figure or ‘expert’) is preferred to the ‘foxes’ who will acknowledge complexity and uncertainty about their narrative with warnings and unsureness. Research demonstrates, however, that it is the enthusiasm and confidence more than the expert status that persuades people. It instills a sense of trust. Unfortunately, such overconfidence can lead people astray and into accepting false beliefs.
Further, Gardner argues that human cultures have always created stories about themselves and their world. This allows knowledge to be passed from generation to generation, strengthens social bonds, and allows possible outcomes to be practised. These narratives also function to explain and make sense of phenomena but if such stories are left unresolved, we are unsettled and search for resolution. And if the narrative doesn’t fit into our prior beliefs, we tend to ignore it or deny its implications. If we happen upon a ‘trusted’ expert’s story that resonates with our beliefs and values, we cling to it regardless of their prediction record (usually by forgetting failures but celebrating successes).
Misremembering and hindsight bias not only contribute to the illusion that the past was not uncertain but lead us to be less sceptical of prognostications about the future. We don’t recall that we worried about an uncertain future previously and that most predictions never materilaised. We seek certainty about the future and find it in trustful ‘experts’ and their forecasts.
In the end, we all believe what we want to believe; ‘facts’ be damned…
We could ‘debate’ the ‘facts’ forever and in reality be no closer whatsoever to the ‘truth’ as to whether ‘renewables’ could support a complex society, for only the playing out of the timeline can determine which perspective is ‘correct’. From a scientific method standpoint, we would carry out a number of experiments where significant variables would be controlled (hopefully) and eventually reach consensus on an interpretation of evidence.
Obviously, we cannot do such reality-testing for many (most?) of the narratives we create in our attempts to understand the world and sketch a rough picture of the future, so we continue to debate with the psychological mechanisms that impact our perceptions and beliefs influencing us constantly. While it is one thing to recognise that we are affected by these psychological phenomena, it is quite something different to be able to shield ourselves from them no matter how much we try.
In addition, we often have little to no idea about the eventual consequences of a remedy for a perceived problem, especially if it is a relatively newly recognised one — let alone a predicament that has no ‘solutions’. One of the things I have argued about complex systems is that with their non-linear feedback loops and emergent phenomena, they are impossible to predict (let alone control). Even with the most sophisticated models and the most powerful computer systems, the tiniest of errors in baseline assumptions can result in predictive trajectories being completely off-base from what may eventually occur.
I raise the above point because one of the arguments against pursuing non-renewable energy-harvesting technologies is that their production would bolster our overshoot by further withdrawing finite resources and overloading compensatory sinks. It would put us in even worse peril then we already seem to be in. Is this assured? Obviously not since the future is unwritten and unknowable but the danger remains. To argue there is no danger requires some significant denial, bargaining, and magical thinking.
Regardless of the real dangers and the accumulating evidence that our technologies have in fact created our overshoot and pursuing more of them will result in significant ecological damage, I have a feeling that attempting to create more of them is exactly what we will do. For it is the ruling elite who tend to be the ones who steer our economic policies and decisions, and they stand to profit handsomely from the production of such technologies due to their ownership of the industrial processes and financial institutions required for their production and distribution.
The notion of a managed ‘collapse’ which some advocate for is anathema to those that sit atop the power and wealth structures that exist in our globalised complex society. Better to advocate for and cheerlead confidently a path that can be packaged in a shiny techno-box of hope and certainty for the masses while ensuring revenue streams are maintained or even expanded.
Time to get off the economic growth train? Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock
What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy can’t grow for ever.
This week’s Addicted to Growth conference in Sydney is exploring how to move beyond growth economics and towards a “steady-state” economy.
But what is a steady-state economy? Why it is it desirable or necessary? And what would it be like to live in?
The global predicament
We used to live on a planet that was relatively empty of humans; today it is full to overflowing, with more people consuming more resources. We would need one and a half Earths to sustain the existing economy into the future. Every year this ecological overshoot continues, the foundations of our existence, and that of other species, are undermined.
At the same time, there are great multitudes around the world who are, by any humane standard, under-consuming, and the humanitarian challenge of eliminating global poverty is likely to increase the burden on ecosystems still further.
Meanwhile the population is set to hit 11 billion this century. Despite this, the richest nations still seek to grow their economies without apparent limit.
Like a snake eating its own tail, our growth-orientated civilisation suffers from the delusion that there are no environmental limits to growth. But rethinking growth in an age of limits cannot be avoided. The only question is whether it will be by design or disaster.
Degrowth to a steady-state economy
The idea of the steady-state economy presents us with an alternative. This term is somewhat misleading, however, because it suggests that we simply need to maintain the size of the existing economy and stop seeking further growth.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
For Shoshana Zuboff, to be human involves using one’s will to shape one’s own future. In this respect she draws on the philosopher Hannah Arendt. Arendt analysed the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and saw the frustration of the will of each person to shape their future as crucial to her analysis of totalitarianism. For Arendt the will is “the organ for the future.” In Chapter Eleven Zuboff uses the writing of her book – or her commitment to write it – as an example of what it means “to have a claim to the future tense”.
“Just as the past always presents itself to the mind in the guise of certainty, the future’s main characteristic is its basic uncertainty, no matter how high a degree of probability prediction may attain.”….with freedom of will we undertake action that is entirely contingent on our determination to see our project through. These are acts that we could have left undone but for our commitment. “A will that is not free”, Arendt concludes, “is a contradiction in terms.”.
Zuboff adds: “The freedom of will is the existential bone structure that carries the moral flesh of every promise and my insistence on its integrity is not an indulgence in nostalgia or a random privileging of the pre digital human story as somehow more truly human. This is the only kind of freedom that we can guarantee ourselves, no matter what the weight of entropy or inertia….These bones are the necessary condition for the possibility of civilisation as a ‘moral milieu’ that favours the dignity of the individual and respects the distinctively human capacities for dialogue and problem solving. Any person, idea or practice that breaks these bones and tears this flesh robs us of a self authored and we-authored future” (p331)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A fixation with growth in economics has seen GDP increase in proportion to environmental damage. As planetary limits draw ever closer and are even being surpassed, such a model cannot be sustained. Riccardo Mastini explains how a job guarantee could open up the way to a sustainable economic model.
Since the dawn of capitalism, market economies have placed a high emphasis on labour productivity. Continuous improvements in technology geared towards productivity increases lead to more output being produced for a given amount of labour. But crucially these advances also mean that fewer people are needed to produce the same amount of goods and services each year. As long as the economy expands fast enough to offset increases in labour productivity there is no problem. But if the economy does not grow, people lose their jobs.
Economic growth has been necessary within this system just to prevent mass unemployment. Communities and the politicians that represent them celebrate the construction of a new factory not so much for the increase in supply of some needed product, but because of the jobs it creates. In advanced economies, the shortage of employment has become more pressing than the shortage of products. Basically, we produce goods and services mostly to keep people employed rather than to cater for their needs.
But what if economic growth were to slow down and, eventually, come to a halt in the near future? More than half a century of ‘growth propaganda’ supporting the dogma that pursuing never-ending growth is plausible and desirable may make this new prospect shocking for some. However, there is now overwhelming evidence that decoupling GDP growth from increases in natural resource and energy use is impossible. And our plundering of Earth’s bounty has already reached unsustainable levels with the overshot of several planetary boundaries.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Coming up on Small Farm Future – some posts on the hows and whys of social transformation towards more sustainable societies, which have been prefigured in recent posts like this one on ‘self-systemic’ agriculture and my previous one on utopias – perhaps particularly in relation to the ensuing discussion about individualism and collectivism. Here, I’ll look at the question of transformation via personal consumption choices in societies of mass consumption, which I touched on a while back. That discussion prompted Peter Kalmas, climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution to get in touch and kindly send me his book.
Maybe first I should set out a brief position statement. As I see it, the world is beset with enormous inequities, creating a lot of human misery, and looming environmental crises, creating yet more human (and non-human) misery. The dominant paradigm for tackling these problems involves lifting people out of poverty through growing the capitalist global economy, and mitigating the environmental problems caused by this economic growth through technical innovation. I don’t think this will work on either count – it won’t lift many people out of poverty and it won’t succeed in mitigating environmental problems. If we continue down this path, it seems to me likely that there will be major breakdowns in human social systems and in the Earth’s biophysical systems. In fact, there already are. These may proliferate in all sorts of surprising and dystopian ways, but I don’t see much point in speculating about how such ‘collapse’ scenarios may unfold. I do see a point in speculating about alternative scenarios that may create better outcomes, and in particular about how such scenarios may emerge from present social processes, because that may give some kind of a handle on how to increase the probability of those better outcomes occurring. So that, generally speaking, is what I want to focus my writing around.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ten years after the crash, the movement to replace neoliberalism is in the ascendency. Well organised campaigns cover everything from the promotion of pluralism in economic curricula to the application of new economic principles in local communities. Academics and campaigners, who prior to the crash were lone voices in the wind, have been joined by a growing chorus of economists and commentators acknowledging that neoliberalism is not working. Importantly, these now include those in mainstream institutions that have become synonymous with the status quo, such as the IMF and OECD. Meanwhile, bottom up movements, surfing a heady mix of social media and dissatisfaction with orthodox economic ideas, are beginning to score political victories across the world.
This is because neoliberalism – the broad set of political-economic ideas and policies which have dominated public life over the last 40 years – has failed, in both theory and in practice. It is in the wake of the global financial crisis that these failures have plumbed new depths. Financial instability looms over economies shackled by insufficient investment. Living standards stagnate and work becomes ever more insecure, shattering the implicit bargain of the entire endeavour. The human costs of this experiment have been enormous, with psychological and non-communicable ill-health becoming the hallmark of a system that cares for little but profit. Inequality, itself linked to ill-health, has grown to levels unseen since the nineteenth century, leading to large power imbalances throughout society. Socio-economic mobility has been further stalled by the erosion of the public realm, from universities to the legal system. Most pressingly, neoliberalism continues to rely on a growth model that is destroying the biophysical preconditions upon which it relies, increasing the chance of collapse in the climate and other natural systems.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts
