Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCXLIX–
The Celebration of Our Own Undoing, Part 1
The Mechanics of Our Predicament
We are peculiar creatures, we humans. I have spent much of my recent years — since that jarring viewing of Collapse more than fifteen years ago — watching our species with a mixture of bewilderment and a strange, sorrowful awe. We stand at the edge of the abyss, and yet most throw a party.
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The vast majority of humans celebrate the technologies that consume the last of our finite resources. They champion the complexity that fractures our social fabric. They advertise the growth that feeds our ecological overshoot. Even more troubling, I have observed that some among the “collapse-aware” community — those who should know better — are themselves cheerleading massive buildouts of complex technologies, seemingly blind to the overloading of planetary boundaries this contributes to, ignoring the material extraction, land use, and waste streams that accompany such industrial-scale deployments. And many–both those aware and those in denial–advocate for “solutions” that will, in practice, exacerbate our overshoot predicament.
It is backassward, plain and simple.
Let me be clear: when I use the word “we” throughout this essay, I am employing a catch-all shorthand representing the significant majority of our kind. I recognise full well that not everyone celebrates growth, nor has everyone contributed equally to our predicaments. There are dissenters, indigenous communities, and individuals who have long resisted this trajectory. But they remain, tragically, a minority.
But the question that has gnawed at me, that has turned over in my mind through countless Contemplations, is why? Why do so many of our species sing hymns of praise to the very forces that are sharpening the knife at our own throats?
I used to believe it was because most were simply misinformed and misled by blind spots in their thinking. I held for a long time the notion that if some could just present the data clearly enough, lay out the ecological overshoot evidence and the thermodynamic realities starkly enough, everyone would wake up. I was wrong. Very wrong.
The problem is not in our libraries; it is in our limbic systems. We are not a rational species — we are a rationalising one. We do not observe the world and then form beliefs based on evidence. No, we form beliefs based on comfort, on identity, on what allows us to keep putting one foot in front of the other without collapsing into despair. And then, with the cunning of a defence attorney, we construct elaborate justifications for why our comforting fictions are true and why the inconvenient evidence must be mistaken.
Some of this, I believe, is due to the fact that the ruling elite profit immensely from the status quo arrangements and the growth imperative that accompanies the system as is, and thus push and reinforce them at every turn. Many others simply go along to get along, deferring to the “authorities” and those around them who encourage economic growth and technological “progress” as the only path forward. It is easier to follow than to question, easier to trust than to investigate, easier to celebrate than to mourn.
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The Weight of Overshoot
Let me begin this contemplative dive into the situation with William Catton. In his book Overshoot, Catton laid out a theory that has haunted me since I first encountered it. He defines “carrying capacity” as the maximum permanently supportable population — the number of people a given environment can support indefinitely. If this number is exceeded, environmental damage occurs, and this in time reduces the carrying capacity. A sustainable economic system is one that does not exceed the carrying capacity.
Catton traces our current predicament back to what he called “the Age of Exuberance” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time, an attitudinal revolution occurred. The planet’s carrying capacity grew, largely as a result of Europeans taking over lands that were being used less intensively by aboriginal peoples. Those who benefitted came to believe that their good fortune was a result of the “limitlessness” of the Earth’s resources — a belief Catton called the “cornucopian myth”.
Then came the Industrial Revolution. The earth’s carrying capacity underwent an even greater expansion, partly through the settling of new lands and partly through an increase in the consumption of hydrocarbon fuels. This was done by drawing down — “stealing from the future” — from a finite, nonrenewable reservoir of resources. Thus carrying capacity was greatly enlarged, and populations grew.
But here is the crucial point: an increase in carrying capacity presents a choice. The same number of people can live at a higher standard, or a larger number can live at previous standards. Humans chose the latter. And then they chose again. And again. By drawing down resources that are largely non-renewable and damaging our environmental support systems, our species have overshot our permanent carrying capacity. Humanity is living beyond our means.
Catton was a calm but unflinching realist. He suggested that we cannot stop this wave — for we have already overshot the Earth’s capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, engineers, and technocrats who continue to write optimistically about energy alternatives. The technological panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas or tap new sources of energy are, in Catton’s view, dangerous delusions.
The Maximum Power Principle
But why did we overshoot? Why did we draw down finite resources with such abandon? Howard T. Odum’s Maximum Power Principle offers a partial answer. Odum proposed that during self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximise power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency. In systems — both ecological and economic — those configurations that maximise power, not efficiency, will be at a selective advantage.
This is not human-focused; it is not intentional. It is a generic feature of evolution in ecosystems. The maximum power principle is the instrument of natural selection in systems. It applies to systems without life, in the origin of life, and in systems with life.
What this means is profound and disturbing: our civilisation, our economy, our entire global system is organised not for sustainability, not for efficiency, not for long-term survival — but for maximum power intake and energy transformation. We are not inefficient. We are working exactly as designed. The design is simply one that leads to overshoot and collapse.
Odum’s principle explains why we pursue growth even when it is demonstrably destructive. It explains why we extract hydrocarbon fuels at ever-increasing rates, why we convert forests to agriculture, why we fish the oceans to depletion. The system is selecting for maximum power, and we are merely the agents of that selection.
The Limits to Growth
In 1972, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a book that should have stopped us in our tracks. The Limits to Growth used a computer model called World3 to simulate the consequences of interactions between the Earth’s and human systems. The model was based on five variables: world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. These variables were considered to grow exponentially, while the ability of technology to increase resource availability was only linear.
The purpose of The Limits to Growth was not to make specific predictions, but to explore how exponential growth interacts with finite resources. The authors intended to explore the possibility of a sustainable feedback pattern. What they found was that without significant changes, the global system would likely overshoot and collapse sometime in the twenty-first century.
We are now living through one of those simulations. The book’s business-as-usual scenario is playing out before our eyes. And what have we done? We have largely ignored it. We have dismissed the result of that particular simulation as alarmist, as Malthusian, as techno-pessimism. We have continued to pursue growth, to celebrate growth, to worship growth — even as the evidence mounts that growth is destroying us.
The book contained a message of hope, as well: Humans could create a society in which they can live indefinitely on Earth if they imposed limits on themselves and their production of material goods. But we have not imposed those limits. We have done the opposite. We have removed limits. We have deregulated, liberalised, globalised. We have accelerated.
The Diminishing Returns of Complexity
Joseph Tainter, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, offers another piece of the puzzle. Human societies are fundamentally problem-solving organisations, and complexity arises directly out of this problem-solving aspect. As we encounter challenges, we develop more complex structures, institutions, and technologies to address them. But this very process contains the seeds of our undoing. Tainter examined historical instances of societal collapse — the Western Roman Empire, the Mayan civilisation, the Chaco Canyon culture — and proposed that societies fall when the costs of complexity exceed the benefits.
As societies advance in complexity, the demands made on each individual also rise. In many spheres, the return on investment in complexity begins to decline after a certain point. Not only must a population allocate greater and greater amounts of resources to maintaining an evolving society, but after a certain point, higher amounts of this investment will yield smaller increments of return. Investment in complexity is therefore a strategy that results in increasing costs and declining marginal returns.
Organisational solutions tend to be cumulative. Once developed, complex social features are rarely dropped. As systems develop more parts, and more complex interactions among these parts, the potential for problems, conflicts, and incongruities develops disproportionately. Complexity itself breeds further costs.
The most general, most accessible, and least expensive solutions to societal problems are attempted first. As these are exhausted, continued stresses require further and more expensive investments in complexity, along with a continued flow of resources to maintain the existing infrastructure of a complex society. As investments in complexity reach the point of diminished marginal returns, a complex society becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse.
Tainter defines collapse as a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity. It manifests in less economic and occupational specialisation, less centralised control, less information flow, less overall coordination, reduced investment in monumental architecture, and a reduction in population size. Collapse can be precipitated by a sudden stress surge — such as climatic fluctuations — imposed on a society which no longer has significant reserves of productive capacity or accumulated surpluses.
We are that society. We have exhausted our easiest solutions. We have invested in ever-greater complexity — global supply chains, financial instruments, bureaucratic layers, digital infrastructures. And we are now experiencing diminishing returns. Each new layer of complexity costs more than the last and delivers less benefit. Not only are we experiencing diminishing returns, but we are accelerating this process by doubling and tripling down on technological “solutions” that also exacerbate our overshoot. We chase each new fix with ever-greater fervour, only to discover that each solution creates more problems, which in turn demand further solutions — a vicious feedback loop that propels us ever faster toward collapse. The system is becoming rigid and overstretched. One problem or another will inevitably trigger its collapse.
The Progress Trap
Ronald Wright, in his book A Short History of Progress, synthesises many of these insights into a single, devastating concept: the progress trap. A progress trap is the condition human societies experience when, in pursuing progress through human ingenuity, they inadvertently introduce problems they do not have the resources or political will to solve. This prevents further progress and sometimes leads to societal collapse.
Wright identifies the central problem as being one of scale and political will. The error is often to extrapolate from what appears to work well on a small scale to a larger scale, which depletes natural resources and causes environmental degradation. Large-scale implementation also tends to be subject to diminishing returns.
In a progress trap, those in positions of authority are unwilling to make changes necessary for future survival. To do so they would need to sacrifice their current status and political power at the top of our social and political hierarchies. They may also be unable to raise public support and the necessary economic resources, even if they try.
Wright sketches world history so far as a succession of progress traps. In the early Stone Age, improved hunting techniques in vulnerable areas caused the extinction of many prey species, leaving the enlarged populace without an adequate food supply. Agriculture, the apparent alternative, brought its own problems. The internal combustion engine is a progress trap — an invention that seems brilliant at the time but comes with unforeseen consequences. The leveraging of a one-time cache of hydrocarbon fuels to power our myriad of complex technologies is another significant trap.
Present global civilisation has covered the planet to such an extent there are no new resources in sight. Wright concludes that if not averted by some other means, collapse will be on a global scale, when it comes. Current economic crises, population problems, and global climate change are symptoms that highlight the interdependence of current national economies and ecologies.
The Paradox of Our Intelligence
Let us now turn to a puzzle that has vexed evolutionary biologists for generations. Why are we so smart? Why did humans develop a brain far more powerful than any other species on Earth? Evolution frequently rediscovers successful solutions — the eye, for instance, evolved independently in several different species. If a powerful brain is such a useful adaptation, why haven’t chimpanzees, elephants, crows, and dolphins evolved similar intelligence? Intelligence that can problem solve via technologies to the extent that humans can?
Ajit Varki and Danny Brower posed this very question. Their answer, the Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory, is one of the most unsettling ideas I have ever encountered. A more powerful brain with an extended theory of mind inevitably becomes aware of mortality. By observing common dangerous activities like hunting and childbirth, such a brain would recognise the inevitability of death. This awareness of mortality would cause depression and reduced risk-taking, thus preventing the trait from being passed on to the next generation.
This cognitive barrier prevented the evolution of a more powerful brain in all but one species. About 100,000 years ago, one small group of hominids in Africa broke through this barrier by simultaneously evolving an extended theory of mind with denial of death. While denial of death may appear to be a suspiciously complicated behaviour to evolve quickly, it can be implemented by a modest tweak to the fear suppression module that mammals use when forced to fight. A side effect of this solution is that not only is death denied, but anything unpleasant is denied — thus the adaptation manifests as denial of reality, otherwise known as optimism bias.
On its own, denial of reality is maladaptive because it causes behaviours not optimal for survival. However, the two maladaptive behaviours — an extended theory of mind and denial of reality — when combined, become highly adaptive by enabling the evolution of a more powerful brain. The probability of this combination emerging at the same time is very low, and apparently has occurred only once on this planet, just as the eukaryotic cell emerged only once.
Think about what this means. Our defining characteristic as a species — our intelligence, our self-awareness, our capacity for abstract thought — is inseparable from our capacity for denial. We are not intelligent despite our self-deception; we are intelligent because of it. The very trait that allowed us to take over the planet — our powerful brain — came packaged with a built-in mechanism for denying unpleasant realities. We are, quite literally, wired for denial.
The Mind-Virus
But denial of reality is not merely an individual quirk. There is something deeper at work, something that operates at the level of the collective. From Indigenous North American traditions comes the term wetiko — a life-eating compulsion that turns us against one another and the living world. In its Native American meaning, wetiko is an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people’s minds, leading to selfishness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself.
Paul Levy has brought this ancient insight into dialogue with Jungian psychology, framing wetiko as a mind-parasite that exploits our blind spots. It is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus renders people oblivious to their own madness and compels them to act against their own best interests.
The wetiko psychosis is the mental derangement that leads our species to consume life-giving soils, to extract and burn hydrocarbon fuels–powering a vast array of technologies–until the various compensatory sinks on the planet are overloaded and can no longer cleanse the Earth, and to pursue growth until the biosphere can no longer support us. It manifests as greed, excess, and a sense of separation from nature. It is the psycho-spiritual disease that makes amnesiacs of us — erasing our natural sense of basic interdependence with the living world.
Wetiko underlies every form of self-destruction, both individual and collective. It is the voice that tells us we can continue with business as usual, that technology will save us, and that the climate and environmental scientists are exaggerating. It is the rationalisation engine that allows us to celebrate the very forces that are destroying us.
In Part 2, I will explore the convergence of our evolutionary inheritance with the collective mind-virus known as wetiko, examining how these forces combine to create our current predicament. I will delve deeper into the psychology of denial — specifically how technological salvation narratives exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities, and how ruling elites leverage these mechanisms to maintain their wealth and power. The Contemplation will then turn to the tragic nature of our condition, the fork in the road we face between continued growth and purposeful contraction, and finally, the possibility of seeing wetiko clearly enough to break free from its hold. I will conclude by asking whether we can overcome our nature, or whether we will continue to dance all the way to the edge.
A “hat tip” to Erik Michaels who writes at Problems, Predicaments, and Technology along with Rob Mielcarski who writes at Un-Denial whose articles have provided much of the impetus for exploring a number of the topics discussed above, particularly the MORT theory and Wetiko psychosis.
Special Offer
If you have made it to the end of this Contemplation, I have an offer for you. Send me an email at olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com requesting a copy of Part 1 of my trilogy and I’ll fire off a PDF of it to you for your “fictional” reading pleasure. If you like the beginning of the tale, please consider ordering the trilogy here: Purchase Book(s) — Olduvai.ca.
What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:
Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.
Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.
If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my “fictional” novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the “profits” of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
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You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.