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The Simple Story of Civilization

December 20, 2022

The Simple Story of Civilization

The stories we fashion about ourselves are heavily influenced by our short life spans during an age of unprecedented complexity. We humans, it would seem, are unfathomably complicated creatures who defy simple “just-so” characterizations. Animals, or humans tens of thousands of years ago are fair game for simple stories, but not so for transcendent modern humans.

Two major problems I have with this attitude are that 1) we are animals, and 2) we have exactly the same hardware (albeit with slightly smaller brains) as we had 100,000 years ago.

So allow me to pull back from our present age of baffling complexity to outline a simple story covering the broad sweep of the human saga. The result may be a little startling, and, for a number of readers, sure to be rejected by cultural antibodies as “not applicable” (see also my views of our civilization as a cult).

Story Timeline

In order to make comprehensible the vast tract of human time on this planet—itself 5,000 times shorter than the age of the universe—I will compare the 2.5–3 million year presence of humans (genus Homo) on Earth to a 75 year human lifespan: a span that we can grasp intuitively. On this scale, we get the following analogous periods:

  1. First 70 years: various species of humans evolve and coexist (sustainably) on the planet;
  2. Last 5 years: the age of Homo Sapiens (about 200,000 yr; mostly sustainably);
  3. Last 15 weeks: the age of civilization (agriculture; then cities) (10,000 yr);
  4. Last 4 days: the age of science (400 yr);
  5. Last 36 hours: the age of fossil fuels (150 yr of increasingly significant use);
  6. Last 12 hours: the age of rapid global ecological devastation (50 yr).

On this lifetime scale, agriculture is a recent, unexpected hobby we picked up, and one that is still pretty new to us in the scheme of things…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”

December 4, 2022

Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”

The dismal reality is that green energy will save not the complex web of life on Earth but the particular way of life of one domineering species.

A boiler tower surrounded by mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert, Calif., on Aug. 26, 2022. Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

CONSERVATION BIOLOGY FINDS itself in a terrifying place today, witness to mass extinction, helpless to stop the march of industrial Homo sapiens, the pillage of habitat, the loss of wildlands, and the impoverishment of ecosystems. Many of its leading figures are in despair. “I’m 40 years into conservation biology and I can tell you we are losing badly, getting our asses kicked,” Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Barack Obama, told me recently. “There are almost no reasons to be optimistic.”This might explain the discipline’s desperate hitching of its wagon to the climate movement. Climate, after all, is the environmental cause du jour, eclipsing all other sustainability concerns, increasingly attractive as a rallying cry for a public that has canonized it as one of the major political, social, and economic issues of our time. Mainstream climate activism of the Bill McKibben variety points toward a grandly hopeful end within the confines of acceptable capitalist discourse: decarbonization of the global economy, with technologies driven by profit-seeking corporations subsidized by governments. Taking up this banner of optimistic can-do-ism, the environmental movement has convinced itself, and sought to convince the public, that with a worldwide build-out of renewable energy systems, humanity will power its dynamic industrial civilization with jobs-producing green machines while also — somehow — rescuing countless species from the brink.

“But this happens to be a lie,” Ashe told me. “The lie is that if we address the climate crisis, we will also solve the biodiversity crisis.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

5 Reasons Not to Predict the End of the World

September 17, 2022

5 Reasons Not to Predict the End of the World

“Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”

— Haruki Murakami

So you want to talk about the end of the world without sounding like a crank?

Rule #1 should be: Don’t predict when it will happen.

A lot of the writing on this site has to do with the collapse of civilization (and what that means). Following Jem Bendell, author of the now (in)famous “Deep Adaptation paper”, I anticipate “inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe, and possible extinction”.

Of course, all civilizations collapse. And all species die. Eventually, everything ends. But we are now in a process of acceleration toward that end. When will this happen? Who knows. The best answer I have read is “sooner rather than later”–which doesn’t really say much.

I have noticed, though, that a lot of people who are in the Doomer and Post-Doom communities are not so circumspect when it comes to putting a date on the end of the world.

Here’s five reasons why you shouldn’t put a date on the end of the world.

1. You’re wrong. (Collapse is complex.)

The collapse of any civilization is a complex phenomenon. Our global industrial-capitalist civilization is incredibly complex. And it stands to reason that the collapse of that civilization will be complex as well. And that makes predicting it that much harder.

I think some of the tendency to over-simplify collapse is driven by an unconscious desire for control. We feel out of control in our lives. Contemplating collapse only amplifies this. Imagining a simplified collapse gives us a sense of control. A false sense. The desire for control is a big part of the reason people deny collapse. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that we would see vestiges of this desire in the doomer and post-doom communities.

When you talk about collapse as something simple, you’re wrong. Because it’s complex.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster

August 19, 2022

Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster

All civilizations collapse. The challenge is how to slow it down enough to prolong our happiness.

Dennis Jarvis
Temple of the Great Jaguar, GuatemalaDENNIS JARVIS

During the first century of our era, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that life would be much happier if things would only decline as slowly as they grow. Unfortunately, as Seneca noted, “increases are of sluggish growth but the way to ruin is rapid.” We may call this universal rule the Seneca effect.

Seneca’s idea that “ruin is rapid” touches something deep in our minds. Ruin, which we may also call “collapse,” is a feature of our world. We experience it with our health, our job, our family, our investments. We know that when ruin comes, it is unpredictable, rapid, destructive, and spectacular. And it seems to be impossible to stop until everything that can be destroyed is destroyed.

The same is true of civilizations. Not one in history has lasted forever: Why should ours be an exception? Surely you’ve heard of the climatic “tipping points,” which mark, for example, the start of the collapse of Earth’s climate system. The result in this case might be to propel us to a different planet where it is not clear that humankind could survive. It is hard to imagine a more complete kind of ruin.

So, can we avoid collapse, or at least reduce its damage? That generates another question: What causes collapse in the first place? At the time of Seneca, people were happy just to note that collapses do, in fact, occur. But today we have robust scientific models called “complex systems.” Here is a picture showing the typical behavior of a collapsing system, calculated using a simple mathematical model (see Figure 1).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Phase Shift — Part 1

August 9, 2022

Image credit: Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash

News stories and popular narratives on recent — and not so recent — events like how the economy got broke or why inflation is soaring focus too much on human decisions. As if ‘choices’ leading up to these events were made in a completely rational manner, and as if what would happen tomorrow were completely up to the people making the next round of decisions.

Pundits and politicians tend to refer to events in the age-old framing of good vs evil, people doing the right, or in case of evil folks, foolish things (1). This leads us to the widespread illusion, that all we have to do in case of trouble is to get rid of the wrong people and start doing things the right way (which is always ‘our way’ of course).

It is needless to say how much of a hubris this is. Human exceptionalism at its best. The world, classically understood through the concepts of money, politics and history — all human artifacts — is by definition human centered and thus miss a large swathe of the picture. Stories based on these human concepts naturally focus on the actor and not the scene the actor is playing its role. Just like stories of heroes and kings of old.

Our elites, trained in law schools, history classes and courses on neoclassical economics, however, cannot even think outside this rather narrow framing. Thing is, they do not even need to. Spinning stories masterfully built around money, politics, history and law is more than enough to launch people into power — but it fails exceptionally in driving us through the coming bottleneck.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This is how civilisations collapse

June 15, 2022

This is how civilisations collapse

Last week, in an attempt to explain away the supply chain woes that are increasingly leading to goods shortages in America, President Biden cited a popular neoliberal fable. He observed that to make a pencil, wood and graphite must be sourced from the other ends of the world before the finished product can end up in American hands. “It sounds silly, but that’s exactly how it happens,” Biden mused, “that’s just the nature of the modern economy.” But the result, he added, is that “when global disruptions hit… it can hit supply chains particularly hard”.

For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who used the pencil fable to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, “but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”. As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in Globalists, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible.

They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of a total system collapse. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean you’re no longer able to buy a new car; a drought on the other end of the world means empty shelves at home.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the Future Already Written?

May 20, 2022

Image credit: Emile Guillemot

Generally speaking the future is impossible to tell. The story of us could take many different paths branching into ever different versions of its current self. There are an infinite number futures, which we shape and select every day, every hour, every minute with our conscious decisions, our actions and deeds. We make our choices based on free will and select the right or wrong path ahead of us based on morals and ethics.

The bad news is, that this is only a myth, incompatible with the laws of physics.

Living in an illusion

Having self-consciousness comes with certain limitations and a good deal of illusions to help us disregard those limits. Through what appears to be a cause and effect relationship however— like having a desire to eat an apple, then grabbing one from the kitchen table — it makes us believe that it is us who are making conscious decisions resulting in deliberate action.

The hard truth is that there is neither ‘you’ or ‘I’, ‘us’ or ‘them’ in this story, nor there was a ‘conscious decision’ in the first place. There is no need for those. We’ve lived without these concepts for many millennia just fine, so do our fellow animal companions we share this planet with. Pronouns are mere artifacts of our language accidentally ‘invented’ together with the story of an ‘independent self’. One, which is free to decide what to do, where to go, whom to talk to. One, which has a free will to do so. The problem is that this idea is fully incompatible with the laws of nature and physics — and thus can safely be called an illusion.

Sorry to disappoint you, but you neither have free will — and as you will see — nor a separate independent self.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster

April 25, 2022

Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster

All civilizations collapse. The challenge is how to slow it down enough to prolong our happiness.

Dennis Jarvis
Temple of the Great Jaguar, GuatemalaDENNIS JARVIS

During the first century of our era, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that life would be much happier if things would only decline as slowly as they grow. Unfortunately, as Seneca noted, “increases are of sluggish growth but the way to ruin is rapid.” We may call this universal rule the Seneca effect.

Seneca’s idea that “ruin is rapid” touches something deep in our minds. Ruin, which we may also call “collapse,” is a feature of our world. We experience it with our health, our job, our family, our investments. We know that when ruin comes, it is unpredictable, rapid, destructive, and spectacular. And it seems to be impossible to stop until everything that can be destroyed is destroyed.

The same is true of civilizations. Not one in history has lasted forever: Why should ours be an exception? Surely you’ve heard of the climatic “tipping points,” which mark, for example, the start of the collapse of Earth’s climate system. The result in this case might be to propel us to a different planet where it is not clear that humankind could survive. It is hard to imagine a more complete kind of ruin.

So, can we avoid collapse, or at least reduce its damage? That generates another question: What causes collapse in the first place? At the time of Seneca, people were happy just to note that collapses do, in fact, occur. But today we have robust scientific models called “complex systems.” Here is a picture showing the typical behavior of a collapsing system, calculated using a simple mathematical model (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Seneca curve, from Bardi's ‘The Seneca Effect’ (2017). The intensity of something as a function of time (going left to right). For intensity, imagine it is the value of a financial stock. It grows slowly, then it declines rapidly when the company generating it goes bankrupt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great Economic Destruction & COMPLEXITY

March 11, 2022

The Great Economic Destruction & COMPLEXITY

COMMENT #1: OK Marty, it is now becoming obvious that not only Trump reads your stuff but so does Obama. Trump bought a $19 million remote island and Obama bought one for $15 million. This is not a coincidence. Your war cycle goes nuts next year and we have the worst crop of world leaders pushing us into oblivion. I think it’s to fess up to all the elites who are your clients.

UT

COMMENT #2: I remember you said you don’t know how Socrates does it. Are you any closer to finding out how it is actually predicting events? Do you think it is connecting to a different dimension/realm? everything is possible!
All the best
M

ANSWER: Neither Trump nor Obama subscribe to our services, at least under their own name. Just about every government is tapping into our forecasts because the computer has called just about everything in my life to my own amazement. They held me in contempt and desperately tried to have me build it for them. I said we would run whatever study they wanted, but the CIA simply reply that they had to own it. It took many years for me to stand up against that, for it would have deprived my main objective to show that there may be a better way to manage society — living with the cycle instead of trying to suppress it. Fed Chairman Arthur Burns concluded that all the battles trying to defeat the business cycle always failed because of COMPLEXITY.

I believe that the success of Socrates is based upon COMPLEXITY that we as humans cannot fully comprehend, no less see. I believe the world economy is much like a rainforest where there are countless species of insects, animals, plant life, and different components of soil…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the Future Predetermined?

February 16, 2022

Is the Future Predetermined?

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; it is easy to see why the government wanted Socrates. You said Monday would be the low then a bounce and that is what unfolds. You forecast so many markets and you get it to the day. Others claim this is the guy who called 2008 so buy his latest forecast resting on a single forecast. Your track record is far beyond anyone ever. How can you do this? Is the future predetermined?

HC

Many people have written in to ask the same question, for example: “I had begun settling on the position (with relative comfort) that while technicals provide insights into the market, its the market makers that manipulate conditions to the point of driving it in one direction or the other – unless of course, there’s a significant fundamental reason for the market to be guided by the invisible hand.
However, after experiencing Socrates and learning more about your approach, I find it challenging (mentally) to accept that there isn’t a pre-designed aspect guiding markets the way they roll.”

Others have asked: “Does Socrates foresee the birth and emergence of great teachers to come who have the capacity of overcoming the Deep State and bringing the world back into an economic balance?” Then there are questions such as: “Because Socrates was created by you, does it carry an inherent bias on economic theories about the world that it generates 1000 reports on a day for? Is it not impossible to truly be conscious and to accurately see the global economic landscape without having a fundamental empathy (being truly human to know what human nature is).”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2022: Energy limits are likely to push the world economy into recessionIn my view, there are three ways a growing economy can be sustained:

January 19, 2022

2022: Energy limits are likely to push the world economy into recessionIn my view, there are three ways a growing economy can be sustained:

  1. With a growing supply of cheap-to-produce energy products, matched to the economy’s energy needs.
  2. With growing debt and other indirect promises of future goods and services, such as rising asset prices.
  3. With growing complexity, such as greater mechanization of processes and supply lines that extend around the world.

All three of these approaches are reaching limits. The empty shelves some of us have been seeing recently are testimony to the fact that complexity is reaching a limit. And the growth in debt looks increasingly like a bubble that can easily be popped, perhaps by rising interest rates.

In my view, the first item listed is critical at this time: Is the supply of cheap-to-produce energy products growing fast enough to keep the world economy operating and the debt bubble inflated? My analysis suggests that it is not. There are two parts to this problem:

[a] The cost of producing fossil fuels and delivering them to where they are needed is rising rapidly because of the effects of depletion. This higher cost cannot be passed on to customers, without causing recession. Politicians will act to keep prices low for the benefit of consumers. Ultimately, these low prices will lead to falling production because of inadequate reinvestment to offset depletion.

[b] Non-fossil fuel energy products are not living up to the expectations of their developers. They are not available when they are needed, where they are needed, at a low enough cost for customers. Electricity prices don’t rise high enough to cover their true cost of production. Subsidies for wind and solar tend to drive nuclear electricity out of business, leaving an electricity situation that is worse, rather than better. Rolling blackouts can be expected to become an increasing problem.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

5 Signs a Civilization is About to Fail

October 11, 2021

5 Signs a Civilization is About to Fail

 

Things do not have to run out for their scarcity to become destabilizing

October 5, 2021

Things do not have to run out for their scarcity to become destabilizing

Economic cornucopians who believe “innovation” and “substitution” will solve every constraint on the resources needed for modern civilization use a clever piece of misdirection to deflect the arguments of those concerned about limits. These cornucopians say that the claim by the limits crowd that we will “run out” of resources we need to maintain the smooth functioning of our complex industrial society is nonsense.

But that statement is a straw man designed to avoid the real issue, an issue which we see in abundance all around us today, namely: Things do not have to run out for their scarcity to become destabilizing. This is a key argument among those concerned about limits and the effects of those limits on the stable functioning of modern society.

We have not run out of fossil fuels but shortages are creating widespread problems in China and Europe. We are not running out of water in the world, but there is not enough of it in the right place to supply all the needs of those living in the American Southwest. That lack of water is leading to a reduction in geothermal power generation as well. And, drought in California is reducing the amount hydroelectric generation by a third so far this year.

High natural gas prices in Europe are not only affecting those who burn the fuel for heat and transportation, but also those who use natural gas as a chemical feedstock. Two British fertilizer plants ceased operations because the high price of natural gas is making it too costly to produce nitrogen fertilizers…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A problem shared is a problem doubled

September 11, 2021

A problem shared is a problem doubled

At seven minutes to five on the afternoon of 9 August 2019, a lightening strike caused the loss of 150MW of distributed power (i.e., a large number of small wind, diesel and solar generators) from the National Grid.  This sudden loss triggered the safety system on the giant Hornsea wind farm in the North Sea, taking another 799MW of power from the system.  Fortunately, regulations at the time required that the Grid operator keep 1GW of back up capacity for precisely this kind of emergency.  And so standby turbines at the Little Barford gas power station were started.  However, the system failed, taking 244MW of Little Barford’s power offline too.  This loss of power tripped a further 350MW of distributed generation bringing the total loss of power to 1,481MW.  Within the next minute, 900MW of National Grid’s 1GW of backup capacity was brought online, stabilising the frequency at 49.2Hz.  Seconds later, however, the gas turbine at Little Barford failed; bringing the loss of power to 1,691MW.  At this point, National Grid had consumed all of its 1GW backup capacity and had no resource to cope with further power losses or frequency fluctuations.  Then, half a minute later (16:53:50) the frequency fell to 48.8Hz; triggering the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme and automatically disconnecting 1.1 million business and household consumers.  In response, and for yet to be discovered reasons, (16:53:58) a third turbine at Little Barford went offline bringing the total loss of power to 1,878MW – nearly double Ofgem’s stipulated backup capacity.

Network Rail was among the large industrial users in the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme, so that at the peak of the Friday evening rush hour, a large part of the UK’s rail network was brought to a halt…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse

July 20, 2021

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse

Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It’s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.

The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.

Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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