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The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be
Today’s Contemplation is my brief comment on an article posted on Facebook by Tristan Sykes of Just Collapse.
The article in question (short and concise) is an update of the World3 model used in creating the various scenarios in the 1972 The Limits to Growth study using the most recent empirical data.
While the authors make clear the uncertainty involved in a data’s trendline after it reaches its ‘tipping point’ (although one could argue there exists great uncertainty in any such modelling beyond the present; complex systems with their nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena are impossible to map out with ‘perfect’ accuracy), the interesting — but not surprising — thing to note is that virtually all of these projections exhibit not just shifts of their peaks into the future but ‘higher highs’ followed by temporally-contracted declines (i.e., a quicker ‘collapse’) resulting in ‘lower lows’.
‘Deniers’ will argue this highlights the fallibility of ‘doom-based’ narratives’ and ‘bargainers’ will likely suggest this buys humanity more time to ‘mitigate/manage’ our predicament. But, perhaps, this merely points out how non-linear system-feedback loops behave.
As Donella Meadows argued in Thinking in Systems: A Primer: “…Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long. Overlong delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse.”
The delays in these peaks that are projected are looking to allow us to go further into overshoot — providing fodder for those rationalising away our predicament — and most likely result in a ‘correction’ that will most certainly ‘dampen’ adaptive responses as the time to do so will be shorter. Such a situation may also possibly feed into further negative feedback loops as attempted adaptations could be quite maladaptive (as many (most? all?) have been the past few decades given the influence and direction of our societies’ wealth-extractors who are leveraging our predicament at every turn).
While it is indeed difficult to make predictions, especially if they’re about the future, overshoot and collapse remains the predicted ‘conclusion’ of this business-as-usual scenario, despite the uncertainty painted by the authors.
As the saying goes, the future ain’t what it used to be; it seems to be getting worse by the day…
May 27, 2022
Cognition and Belief Systems: Part Two — Deference to Authority
This contemplation is the second part of a look at several psychological mechanisms at play in our thinking about ecological overshoot and the accompanying societal ‘collapse’ that will eventually result. You can find Part One here.
In Part One, I briefly summarised four psychological mechanisms I’ve been reflecting upon in the context of ecological overshoot and in particular the collapse of our global, industrialised complex societies that will (or, as some argue, has already begun to) accompany this overshoot.
One of the primary considerations in understanding how our cognitions and thus our beliefs and behaviours are going to be affected by the unfolding of the consequences of ecological overshoot and the concomitant ‘collapse’ of our societies is the anxiety/stress that such a future (and present) is going to have (is having) upon us; personally, on a familial level, and on the broader societal scale. Contemplating an unknowable future that is unlikely to provide many of the energetic conveniences most currently depend upon and/or that will challenge our complex systems to the breaking point because of extreme weather events[1] or supply chain disruptions/breakdowns (especially food, water, energy), etc. can be exceedingly anxiety-provoking.
Mix these (and many other) psychological mechanisms in with Edward Thorndike’s Law of Effect — that postulates all animals have an innate motivation to avoid pain/seek pleasure[2] — and you have an animal whose sense-making abilities are leveraged by its mind to deny/ignore away evidence that challenges them and can cause painful, anxiety-provoking emotions (in fact, there appears to be neuroscientific support for this[3]). In response, we appear to employ all sorts of biases/rationalisations to support our belief systems (a ‘pleasurable’ sensation) regardless of disconfirming evidence (that can lead to painful/stressful emotions).
It’s long been recognised that complex societies[4] by their very nature become socially hierarchal in nature[5], with ‘power’ structures arising from the organisational requirements of living in large social groupings[6].
As archaeologist Joseph Tainter points out in The Collapse of Complex Societies[7]: where more complex political differentiation exists, permanent positions of authority/rank can exist in an ‘office’ that can be hereditary in nature; inequality becomes more pervasive; these groups tend to be larger and more densely populated; political organisation is larger, extending beyond local community; a political economy arises with rank having authority to direct labour and economic surpluses; and, with greater size comes a need for more social organisation that is less dependent upon kinship relations (ties that have historically constrained individual political ambitions).
Tainter goes on to point out that ‘States’ are characterized by their territorial organisation (i.e. membership determined by place of birth/residence). In addition, “a ruling authority monopolizes sovereignty and delegates all power”, with the ruling class being non-kinship-based professionals that hold a monopoly on force within the territory (e.g. taxes, laws, draft) and is validated by a state-wide ideology[8]. Maintaining territorial integrity becomes stressed and being more populated society becomes even more stratified and specialized, particularly with regard to occupation.
Further, complex states like their simpler societies must divert resources and activities to legitimizing authority in order for the political system to survive. While coercion can ensure some compliance, it is a more costly approach than moral validity. As a result states tend to focus on a symbolic and sacred ‘centre’ (necessarily independent of its various territorial parts), which is why they always have an official religion, linking leadership to the supernatural (which helps unify different groups/regions). When other avenues for retaining power arise, the need for such religious integration recedes — although not the sense of the sacred.
As social psychology has demonstrated, human deference/obedience to authority is a significant tendency. In a complex society that invariably develops hierarchical structures that facilitate organisation as it grows in size and complexity, this propensity can be — and pre/history shows it has been — leveraged by a society’s rulers to ensure efficiency but also to maintain compliance and control, regardless of its pursuit of ‘equality’ or ‘democratisation’[9].
I have the feeling that this deference to authority is perhaps one of the more problematic of human tendencies, especially as we glide down the Seneca Cliff of cheap resource availability (especially energy) and all the knock-on effects of this.
As Tainter further argues about complex societies, those at the top of human social hierarchies work hard to maintain their privileged position using coercion, moral validity, or a combination of the two. A ‘moral’ validation is developed by creating a narrative that the status/authority of the ruling elite is due to their directly descending from the gods, through to, more recently, it being based upon the will of the people.
There is likely no higher motive for the ruling class than to maintain their positions atop a complex society’s organisational structures. In fact, one of the beliefs that I have developed over the years and have argued is that the primary motivation of the ruling class is the control/expansion/maintenance of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus the power/prestige that they tend to seek[10].
In addition, as Lord Acton has been credited with observing: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely[11]. The research is still relatively young in this area and while most suggests power can but doesn’t always corrupt, there is still not definitive consensus upon the idea[12]. So once in power, it can be argued, all sorts of machinations are employed to keep and/or expand an individual’s/family’s/group’s hold on it. It is certainly not always in the best interests of the ruling elite, however, for the ruled to know about or believe such manipulations occur for they do require the consent of the governed, even in totalitarian regimes. Note that on the rare occasion when the curtain is drawn back to expose corruption/nepotism/criminal behaviour/etc., the incident is explained away or viewed as a one-off by a lone wolf or group (usually political opposition) and do not have the best interests of the people in mind as all the rest do (#sarc).
As a result of our tendency to trust/obey authorities, humans are susceptible to narrative control/propaganda. And one must consider that the ruling elite are well aware of this fact and leverage it to their advantage. Perhaps nowhere is this made more obvious than in the research and writings of the ‘father of propaganda’ and US government consultant, Edward Bernays, particularly within his seminal text Propaganda where he outlines the necessity of narrative control in complex societies:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” [13]
One can additionally look at the expenditures (hundreds of billions of US dollars) diverted to advertising by businesses[14] to support this argument. If marketing/narrative control was ineffective, neither businesses nor governments would spend so much of their time and wealth employing it in attempts at being ‘persuasive’. Suffice it to say, our ruling class is well aware of the psychological mechanisms at play in forming beliefs, and have been for some time.
It may be that humanity’s deference to authority is one of our most perilous psychological tendencies as we increasingly experience the negative consequences of ecological overshoot. It is because of this behaviour that we can be drawn into and blindly accept maladaptive strategies that are offered up by our ‘leaders’. As crises emerge, our ruling class will offer ‘solutions’ but one’s that do not do what they are marketed as doing but, in fact, quite often the exact opposite — such as the stories we are told about non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies and their ability to support not only our current complexities but continued growth in a clean and sustainable fashion[15].
As the energy/resource descent proceeds and possibly accelerates we might expect that those who ‘manage’ our narratives to expand their efforts to mask ‘collapse’[16], use it to highlight the evils of our ‘enemies’ so as to deflect anger from our own ruling class[17], and/or leverage crises to their advantage[18].
In addition, many if not most of the developments we have come to ‘celebrate’ as symbolic of our ingenuity (e.g., technology) and the language we use (e.g., progress, success) are mostly if not entirely energetically- and ecologically-blind. They tend to elevate one specific aspect of our existence (e.g., economic growth), ignore the negative consequences of their favoured narrative (e.g., biodiversity impacts are not relevant), and then encourage adaptations that align with this but are the exact opposite of what we likely need to be doing (e.g., degrowth). Pursuing such a maladaptive strategy, however, does benefit the ruling class who tends to own or be heavily invested in the industrial processes needed and/or the financial institutions required for growth to take place.
Given all the above, deference to authority can be viewed as an exceedingly problematic tendency that could well lead us into significantly more difficult times than we have experienced to date — in fact, likely speeding up the collapse that always accompanies a species overshooting its natural environmental carrying capacity. If our ‘leaders’ adopt and/or encourage maladaptation to our predicament and we mindlessly obey because that is what we do, we end up making our circumstances worse but end up cheering them on because to do otherwise leads to extremely anxiety-provoking emotions.
It can be argued that we don’t solve anything, for example, by pursuing non-renewable renewables (and increasing ecological destruction), we simply further reduce human carrying capacity. But in the thirst for expanding their revenue streams, our ‘authorities’ will market/cheerlead such consumer products as a panacea for perceived ‘problems’, relegating the negative consequences to the sphere of misinformation and/or ostracising/censoring those who raise them while raiding national ‘treasuries’, all the while ensuring the masses hear the message that what they are doing is great for ‘the people’ and their non-negotiable way of life[19].
As we continue to descend our energy/resource cliffs, it will be increasingly important to come to the realisation that there are no white knights coming to the rescue — especially from the ruling class. The solutions being pushed/marketed by those at the top of our social power structures should not be trusted just because they are in positions of authority; they need to be viewed for what they tend to be: a leveraging of ‘power’ to expand/maintain privilege and wealth.
We cannot grow or spend our way out of overshoot; in fact, we do the opposite in trying this. We cannot continue to destroy the planet with alternatives to fossil fuels and expect to avoid collapse in the process. We need to be considering that we are being led astray by people and groups who do not in any way have our best interests in mind.
‘Salvation’ is not likely to be found in our hierarchical social structures but perhaps within our close kinship-based circles[20].
Part Three of this multi-part Contemplation can be found here.
Please consider visiting my website and supporting my work through the purchase of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai, that chronicles the ‘collapse’ of modern society. For less than $10 Canadian you can receive the entire trilogy in PDF format.
[1] Having just experienced such an event with the most populated region of Canada having been hit with a devastating derecho storm, I can attest to the added stress that occurs. I think our family’s anxiety was mitigated with the help of previous preparations for such times but many others were not so prepared for several days without electrical power or the damage that took place — we were also much luckier than some having only sustained minor physical damage to our property (a blown down fence); in our immediate community there were homes/businesses damaged, cars crushed/damaged, and many power lines down due to snapped hydro poles and large tree falls. I am happy that all the seedlings I had planted the day before the storm were undamaged but it reminded me of the vagary of food production and vital importance of having surpluses set aside and establishing what Joseph Tainter terms ‘energy-averaging systems’: regional trade to support life when things go sideways in your area.
[2] https://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html
[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202001/the-neuroscience-seeking-pleasure-and-avoiding-pain
[4] https://anthropology.iresearchnet.com/complex-societies/
[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/social-hierarchy; https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/140641/; https://evolution-institute.org/blog/the-evolution-of-hierarchy/
[6] http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/complex.PDF; https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/211336; https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1942.44.1.02a00040; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494206/
[7] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.Collapse_of_Complex_Societies
[8] I would also recommend Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State as a relatively short and concise text on motivations of the ruling class and their machinations to maintain/expand their power/wealth/prestige. (https://cdn.mises.org/Anatomy%20of%20the%20State_3.pdf).
[9] Try pointing out to someone the unquestionable yet religious-like faith in the institution of representative democracy and its concomitant belief that one has agency via the ballot box. Firm believers in this process for ‘choosing’ leaders and providing input into societal ‘decisions’ will stanchly defend it and even attack ferociously any challenges to it — why do ‘leaders’ always suggest they are defending ‘democracy’ whenever they are pontificating about the evils of a geopolitical foe? Because it feeds into the narrative. Few people will entertain the argument that the entire election process is mostly theatre to help ‘legitimise’ our ruling class’s hold on power or the idea that they have no agency in the fundamental decisions made by politicians.
[10] I believe I have developed this notion primarily through my readings of Charles Hugh Smith who blogs at https://www.oftwominds.com. I cannot locate any exact reference by him to this idea at this time, however. Regardless, the concept does align with historical evidence and psychological mechanisms.
[11] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_dalbergacton_109401?src=t_power_corrupts
[12] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/200908/how-power-corrupts-leaders; https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/does_power_corrupt_everyone_equally; https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-science-behind-why-power-corrupts-and-what-can-be-done-to-mitigate-it; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-power-corrupts-37165345/. Also consider Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment here (https://www.prisonexp.org) and the Power Paradox that occurs (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/power_paradox): “Power is given to those individuals, groups, or nations who advance the interests of the greater good in socially-intelligent fashion. Yet unfortunately, having power renders many individuals as impulsive and poorly attuned to others as your garden-variety frontal lobe patient, making them prone to act abusively and lose the esteem of their peers. What people want from leaders — social intelligence — is what is damaged by the experience of power.
[13] I highly recommend reading Bernays’s Propaganda (https://archive.org/details/BernaysPropaganda). It lays out fairly clearly the notion of creating narratives to direct what people believe.
[14] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spending-in-the-us/
[15] To be fair, this view is via my personal interpretive lens that has shifted over the years as I have researched and learned more; there are various competing narratives that one can choose from.
[16] Look at the manipulations that have been taking place for decades with respect to consumer price inflation and its pernicious impact upon pretty well everyone outside the top 1–10% of earners. You will only hear that ‘mild’ inflation is great for the economy and nothing about the currency devaluation that is taking place as a result of infinite credit/debt growth.
[17] Almost everything going wrong in the West currently is the fault of that evil Vladimir Putin.
[18] The quote “Never let a good crisis go to waste” has been attributed to a number of politicians including Winston Churchill, but demonstrates the thinking of our political class when it comes to using a crisis to their advantage.
[19] There is a very good argument that the creation and distribution of fiat currency by our ruling class falls into this category as well. They maintain that it is done responsibly and for the benefits of society but evidence would suggest the opposite.
[20] Unfortunately, for most ‘advanced’ economies these kinship-based circles have been eroded for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the ‘mobility’ provided by cheap energy. Small, local communities may be the next best avenue for the coming ‘transition’.
May 19, 2022
Cognition and Belief Systems in a ‘Collapsing’ World: Part One
Keeping in mind that we humans are storytelling primates with extraordinary cognitive abilities, I’ve been reflecting upon a few of the psychological phenomena that are key to how we form beliefs, especially as they pertain to ecological overshoot and its concomitant societal ‘collapse’. The specific mechanisms I have been thinking about include: deference to authority, groupthink, cognitive dissonance, and the justification hypothesis[1]. I studied all of these during my few years of interest in psychology[2] while at university and have been re-exposed to their importance in the past handful of years[3].
This contemplation is quite a bit longer than my usual ones so will be broken up into parts as I reflect upon, edit, and invariably expand it…please try to bear with me until the end of these few contemplations to see how I view these psychological processes as important to our impending ‘collapse’ — or, at least, one’s interpretation of it and ultimate reactions in light of personal and societal perspectives.
What we believe is extremely important to our perception of the world as it creates a ‘reality’ for us that may or may not have much in common with observable, physical evidence. Ultimately it would appear that we believe what we want to believe; ‘facts’ be damned. We very much don’t want to acknowledge this but we seem to be, as author Robert Heinlein has been credited with stating, rationalising animals not rational ones; and research is increasingly supporting this view[5].
Megan Siebert and William Rees highlight this point at the start of an article on the impediments and consequences of pursuing non-renewable ‘renewables’: “We begin with a reminder that humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives — even scientific theories — are socially constructed “stories” that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework.”[6]
This is an important perspective to take on our species since it is the narratives that we construct (or have constructed for us) that impact significantly our belief systems and thus everyday actions and reactions. But the stories we cling to also influence greatly our understanding of events, helping us to comprehend (or miscomprehend) a complex world — its past, present, and how it may unfold in the future[7].
Thinking about ‘collapse’ and ecological overshoot necessarily has us attempting to frame a picture of the variables impacting our world and how events are going to ‘unfold’[8]. I’ve increasingly come to believe that predicting the trajectory of complex systems is, well, complex; in fact, I’d argue impossible. We need look no further than meteorological models to get a glimpse at how difficult (impossible?) it is to predict relatively simple, complex systems such as wind and precipitation patterns. Throw human behaviour into the mix and complexity goes off the charts.
Dan Gardner’s Future Babble[9] is an excellent reminder that complex systems with their non-linearity and emergent phenomena[10] cannot be predicted accurately, so there is no ‘certainty’ to be found in constructed stories, regardless of the sophistication of the model used in the prediction or the amount of data/evidence inputted into the model. ‘Uncertainty’ will always exist and the tiniest of errors in a fundamental assumption at the start can have oversized impacts on the projected trajectory and endgame. Ultimately, only time will tell what the future holds but this simply is not sufficient to an human wanting certainty to reduce their anxiety about an unknowable future.
We want to know what the future holds. How things may rollout in the days, months, years ahead is fundamentally important to us as we tend to find uncertainty extremely anxiety-provoking. One of the methods for reducing the stress/anxiety that accompanies uncertainty is to take solace in ‘certain’ narratives; regardless of the evidence/facts that support them. And oftentimes it matters little how accurate a person’s or institution’s previous prognostications have been. If the story sounds plausible and it is given with certitude, we are more prone to believe it even if previous predictions have never been accurate.
So, to ensure our beliefs about the future are ‘certain’, we employ a host of cognitive biases to help us become confident in our thinking. What are these? Simply “[a] cognitive bias is a subconscious error in thinking that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you, and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments. Biases are unconscious and automatic processes designed to make decision-making quicker and more efficient. Cognitive biases can be caused by a number of different things, such as heuristics (mental shortcuts), social pressures, and emotions.”[11]
Without further ado, here are four of the mechanisms that I’ve been considering as important as we slide down the Seneca Cliff of ‘collapse’ and attempt to make sense of our world[12].
Deference to Authority
Wishing to try to understand better German society’s apparent willingness to participate in the vilification and systematic elimination of countless Jews during World War II, Yale University’s Stanley Milgram began exploring the relationship between authority and the well-known tendency of people to obey instructions issued by authoritative figures[13].
Milgram’s ‘Shock Experiments’ demonstrated rather plainly the willingness of individuals to obey the demands/requests of supposed ‘authority’ figures to a point of overriding their moral principles. This was said to be the result of a relinquishment of responsibility for one’s actions in the presence of an authority figure but also because of a person’s acceptance of the definition or viewpoint of the situation as supplied by the authority figure.
Basically, humans tend to trust and obey individuals in positions of ‘authority’. We follow their diktats. We believe their stories. We do as we are instructed. Not always, but certainly most people do, most of the time.
Groupthink
Irving Janis coined the term Groupthink “to describe a premature concurrence-seeking tendency that interferes with collective decision-making processes and leads to poor decisions. It is characterized by deterioration in group member mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgments that result from in-group pressures to seek consensus. It is what happens when the task demands on a decision-making group are overwhelmed by the social demands to reach consensus. When experiencing groupthink, members tend to make simplistic statements about the issues and more positive in-group references than those in nongroupthink cases.”[14]
Supplemental research has suggested that groupthink is far more likely when group leadership is directive in style, when greater amounts of mind-guarding occur (tendency to keep group members from being exposed to contrarian viewpoints and information), and a tendency to self-censor. Solomon Asch’s research on behavioural conformity is also of particular interest to this mechanism[15]. Asch found that individuals are likely to conform to the observations and opinions of peers in social situations. As social animals, humans tend to conform to their social group in behaviours and ideas. This tendency increases when: more people are present; a task is more difficult; and, other members are of higher social status.
Fundamentally, humans have a tendency to meet the ‘norms’ of the social group in which they find themselves and will accept the group’s ideas and behaviours, primarily to avoid the negative social pressures that accompany non-conformity. We may not necessarily agree with certain things, but we tend to go along for better or worse.
Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger investigated and defined the idea that humans experience negative emotions when they hold conflicting or inconsistent cognitions[16]. The resulting state of discomfort leads us to become motivated to align our cognitive knowledge, and the more discomfort or anxiety we feel from such conflicting cognition the more we struggle to reduce the resulting tension. It is during such efforts to reduce the dissonance we are feeling that we engage in significant rationalisation that can convince us to accept knowledge that we might otherwise not agree with.
“And that is what is so interesting about cognitive dissonance. In our effort to reduce dissonance, we come to distort our choices to make them seem better, we come to like what we have suffered to attain, and we change our attitudes to fit our behaviors.”[17]
Essentially, in the attempt to achieve consistency in knowledge about the world we align our behaviours with our attitudes, and to reduce the anxiety that may arise from inconsistent cognitions we accept or reject certain information leading us to construct a ‘reality’ that is less anxiety-provoking than we might otherwise hold. We create a belief system that is comforting and then tend to cling to it fiercely.
Justification Hypothesis
The Justification Hypothesis is part of the Grand Unified Theory of Psychology[18]. It argues that human cognition differs from other animals due to the relationship between language, self-consciousness, and social existence. The interaction of these phenomena result in our beliefs functioning to legitimise our particular perception of the world. We consequently engage in systems and processes that serve to justify our behaviours[19].
The concept is founded upon three premises. First, the development of language and living in social groupings led to the problem of having to justify actions/behaviours; why did you do what you did? Second, our attainment of self-consciousness created a system of aligning internal concepts of self with external actions; we strive to hold a stable view of oneself and create the same image for our peers. Third, since we are social beings living with many others, sometimes in very large groupings, we create sociocultural expectations/beliefs/values about normative behaviour along with large-scale systems to justify these.
Primarily, this hypothesis points to our tendency to rationalise our behaviour and beliefs as a result of our biology, psychology, and social interactions with others in order to maintain our self-image and avoid conflict with others.
You can locate Part Two of this multi-part Contemplation here.
[1] These are just a handful of the many processes that are relevant to human cognition and our formation of ‘knowledge’. Epistemology and some related fields are fascinating areas to explore; especially social psychology since we are, after all, very social animals and form our knowledge from and with others.
[2] It may have actually been meeting this great girl in one of the classes that kept me interested in the subject. Once she agreed to marry me I shifted over to archaeology;) And now we’re closing in on our 36th anniversary.
[3] Reading a couple of recent psychology course textbooks along with my youngest daughter as she took some courses so she’d have someone to bounce concepts/understandings off of during online courses due to the pandemic closures has been perhaps the best refresher.
[5] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-81515-001
[6] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508/htm?fbclid=IwAR2ISt5shfV4wpFEc8jxbQnrrxyllyvZP-xDnoHhWrjGTQRIqUNfk3hOK1g
[7] And I acknowledge that this is as true for me as everyone else. In fact, I would admit that the more I come to ‘understand’, the more I come to appreciate how much I don’t completely understand and how ‘simple’ our comprehension of an exceedingly complex universe truly is.
[8] It also, because of how we form ideas/beliefs, has us interpreting the present and past through particular lenses/worldviews/schemas/paradigms.
[9] Gardner, D. Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail — and Why We Believe Them Anyway. McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2010. (ISBN 978–0–7710–3513–5)
[10] Here I recommend reading Donella Meadows work, especially Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. (ISBN 978–1–60358–055–7)
[11] https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-bias.html
[12] Note that my summaries are in no way ‘comprehensive’. These are my highlighting of what I view as important aspects of these phenomena.
[13] https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social-influence/obedience-to-authority-studies/
[14] https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/industrial-organizational-psychology/group-dynamics/groupthink-i-o/
[15] https://www.verywellmind.com/the-asch-conformity-experiments-2794996
[16] https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social-psychology-theories/cognitive-dissonance-theory/
[17] ibid
[18] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-0058-5_1
[19] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201112/the-justification-hypothesis
Societal ‘Collapse: The Past is Prologue
Today’s Contemplation has been once again prompted by the latest musings of The Honest Sorcerer. I believe their posts motivate me more than most others I read because we very often focus upon the same subject matter and appear, for the most part, to come at the issue(s) from a similar standpoint. In fact, I have had more than one person accuse me of being The Honest Sorcerer and simply using a different name/platform — which I will take as a compliment given how much I enjoy their articles.
Here is my posted comment on their Substack publication:
I’ve found it most enlightening (and I’m sure it’s my personal bias in having some background in the subject) to consider past experiments in complex societies and the societal responses/reactions to the cyclical phenomenon of ‘collapse/simplification’ to guide our discussion on how things may unfold. Archaeology demonstrates that despite human ingenuity and having the best ‘technology’ of the time, similar patterns emerge across both time and space as a complex society ‘dissolves’.
As the saying goes, ‘It’s difficult to make predictions, especially if they’re about the future’; however, there’s also the Shakespearean phrase ‘What’s past is prologue’ suggesting that we can learn from pre/history and its apparent oft-repeated processes as we have hints as to what may befall us as our societal ‘decline’ proceeds providing an educated guess on the future (the best we might hope for in an uncertain and complex world full of nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena, to say little about Black Swan events).
I’ve written a number of posts about this, most recently just a couple of months ago entitled What Do Previous Experiments in Societal Complexity Suggest About ‘Managing’ Our Future (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-cxlviii-fb2491bb08fe). Some of its points are quite similar to those you make.
In this piece of writing I focused on the aims of the ‘degrowth’ movement and why our ‘collapse’ will not likely be ‘managed’ in the way many degrowthers hope. I make the argument, based upon my understanding of archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies, that:
1) “…society’s power-brokers place the burden of ‘contraction’ upon the masses via currency devaluation, increased taxes, forever wars, increased totalitarianism, narrative management, etc..”
2) “Once surpluses are exhausted, everyday operating ‘costs’ begin to suffer and living standards for the majority begin to wane. A gradual decline in complexity ensues.”
3) “As societal investments encounter the Law of Marginal Utility due to ever-increasing costs of problem solving and its associated complexity, society experiences declining living standards. Eventually, participants opt out of the arrangement (i.e., social ‘contract’) — usually by migrating — resulting in a withdrawal of the support/labour necessary to maintain the various complex systems.”
4) “…to offset our increasing experience with diminishing returns, especially as it pertains to energy, we have employed significant debt-/credit-based fiat currency expansion to increase our drawdown of important resources among other perceived ‘needs’…”
5) “…to sustain a society’s complexity as it bumps up against limits to expanding its problem-solving ability (particularly its finite resource requirements), surpluses are drawn upon…The drawdown of these surpluses puts society at greater risk of being incapable of reacting to a sudden stress surge that may expedite the ‘collapse’ of complexity.”
6) “…once diminishing returns sets in for a society, collapse requires merely the passage of time. New energy sources, however, do little to address the issues that arise from expanded technology use–particularly the finiteness of the materials required and the overloading of planetary sinks that occur from their extraction and processing…”
7) “…pre/historic evidence also demonstrates a peer polity competition trap where competing ‘states’ drive the pursuit of complexity (regardless of environmental and/or human costs) for fear of absorption by a competing state. In such situations, ever-increasing costs create ever-decreasing marginal returns that end in domination by one state, or collapse of all competing polities. Where no or an insufficient energy subsidy exists, collapse of the competing states occurs at about the same time.”
We should be able to learn from these past trials in large, complex societies. And I recall putting this prospect to Jared Diamond about a decade ago when I heard him speak at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. His response (and I’m paraphrasing) was that just because we have this capability does not in any way mean we will use it.
Do I believe humanity will heed the lessons of the past?
In those early days of my journey down the rabbit hole of societal ‘collapse’ that began with my exploration of the concept of Peak Oil and its implications for our world (I thank the rental from our local Blockbuster in late 2010 of the documentary Collapse with the late Michael Ruppert for this), I thought we could avoid the pending decline of society. I thought that human ingenuity and intelligence could and would come to understand our plight and take remedial steps to set things right.
I no longer believe this; in fact, I chuckle somewhat at my naivete in those early days as I struggled to move through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grieving. I experienced an awful lot of denial and bargaining.
Pre/history appears to show that every complex society has reacted to their decline in somewhat parallel ways. Not exactly the same, but pretty damn similar despite the vast differences between them in terms of time, geographic location, and sociocultural practices.
Despite all of this evidence, most of us involved in the current iteration (at least those that have the ‘privilege’ to contemplate such things; many in our world of course don’t) have a tendency to believe that this time is different — especially because of our ingenuity and technology leading to our perpetual ability to ‘solve’ any issue that arises — and the narratives we craft in light of this belief system. But our responses appear to be unfolding in ways not unlike those that previous societies have experienced.
In fact, there’s a good argument to be made that our ‘modern’ responses are even more broadly and significantly detrimental to our future prospects because of the ever-present and widely disseminated propaganda that aims to keep the masses ignorant of the various revenue-generation/-extraction rackets siphoning resources towards the top of our power/wealth structures, and that appear to be expanding and speeding up as the surplus energy that has sustained our growth moves towards zero and then goes negative.
And as I conclude in the piece referenced above,
Little to none of the above takes into consideration our current overarching predicament: ecological overshoot (and all of its symptom predicaments such as biodiversity loss, resource depletion, sink overloading, etc.).
Having significantly surpassed the natural environmental carrying capacity of our planet, we have strapped booster rockets to the issue of complex society ‘collapse’.
We have chosen to employ a debt-/credit-based economic system to more quickly extricate finite resources from the ground in order to meet current demands rather than significantly reduce stealing them from the future. We have created belief systems that human ingenuity and finite resource-based technologies are god-like in their abilities to alter the Laws of Thermodynamics (especially in regard to entropy) and biological principles such as overshoot…
Given we cannot control complex systems, we also cannot predict them well (if at all) and thus we cannot forecast the future with any certainty. But there exist physical laws and limits, biological/evolutionary principles, and pre/historical examples/experiments that all point towards a future quite different from the optimistic ones painted by those who believe we have control over such things.
I expect one last ginormous pulse of energetic ‘consumption’ in a most wasteful binge (and likely mostly towards geopolitical strife over the table scraps of finite resources) and a significant amount of narrative management by society’s wealth-extracting forces before ‘the great simplification’ and Nature’s corrective responses to our overshoot take hold — showing Homo sapiens who is really in charge…and it’s not us.
Also see these:
Cognition and Belief Systems: Part Six — Sociopolitical ‘Collapse’ and Ecological Overshoot (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-lvi-1f3de97ef6e9)
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong? Part One (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-lix-800413db180a)
Energy Future, Part 3: Authoritarianism and Sociobehavioural Control (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-xciii-78f4f61f8a1d)
Energy Future, Part 4: Economic Manipulation (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-xcix-1eaf7ac0c5c6)
Collapse Now to Avoid the Rush: The Long Emergency (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-cxxxv-5b9d26816e33)
Declining Returns, Societal Surpluses, and Collapse (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-cxli-c3a58b371496)
Ruling Caste Responses to Societal Breakdown/Decline (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-cxliii-a063a8dee7ff)
Today’s Contemplation is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article that looks at the financial nature of our modern world.
Rackets: Keeping the Curtains on Reality Drawn
Excellent summation of our predicament and how reality is being ‘hidden’ by the story-telling nature of our species — especially the stories being disseminated by those benefitting most from our current practices and trajectory.
I’ve come to believe almost everything today is a racket of one form or another. And by racket, I defer to what U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler stated about this phenomenon with respect to war: “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”
And this is where humanity appears to stand at the moment in our history on this planet: rackets are everywhere.
We are surrounded by rackets meant to keep the wealth-extraction/-generation schemes going and remaining in place in one form or another for at least another quarter or election cycle. And the stories associated with them are not only meant to keep the masses ignorant of the fraudulent nature of our practices and institutions, but to get the masses to support and cheerlead them on while ostracising and shouting down the voices that dare challenge or expose them.
And as our descent down the Seneca Cliff speeds up (due, of course, to the limits you discuss), the rackets are expanding in number and size in order to not only siphon more and more wealth from the masses towards the few at the top of our wealth and power structures, but to compensate for the expanding nature of our decline as the surplus energy needed to pursue growth quickly fades.
A perfect positive feedback loop expediting our descent and ensuring the inevitable ‘collapse’ is all the more spectacular and all-consuming in nature.
But, hey, let’s hear another feel-good story about our human ingenuity and technological prowess ‘solving’ all this and humanity living happily-ever-after, holding hands with each other and Nature…that tale is all lot more fun to listen to and believe in. Even if it is only a fairy tale told to make us feel safe and comfortable as the approaching storm grows in size and intensity.
September 21, 2021
Ecological Overshoot and Political Responses
Today’s post has been prompted by some thoughts regarding the inability of our political systems to respond in a timely manner to our plight of ecological overshoot penned by Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, and posted by Alice Friedemann of energyskeptic.com.
I agree with virtually everything Rex argues, especially the role of self-interest by our political class for their apparent rejection of the notion of ecological overshoot and what needs to be done to address the negative impacts this predicament will have on our societies (we can’t avoid these impacts but we might be capable of mitigating their worst outcomes somewhat). My experience with government (I spent many years involved with unions/federations/councils and their political action committees, including chairing some and being directly involved in negotiating contracts, thus having to deal directly with senior administrators and politicians) and readings pertaining to various sociocultural areas (e.g., economics, geopolitics, political systems, pre/history, etc.) have solidified for me the notion that our sociopolitical institutions are for a variety of reasons the last place we should be looking to ‘correct our course’ and attempt to confront the many complex issues of our overshoot and that are beginning to become more obvious. In fact, it is likely (I believe guaranteed) that our ‘ruling class’ will continue to do the exact opposite of what is needed.
Government systems appear to be a means to an end for maintaining the power (and thus wealth) structures within our complex societies. The ‘elite’ of society uses the various governmental bureaucracies/institutions/agencies (as well as other areas they tend to control such as media, education, entertainment, etc.) to meet their primary objective: the control and/or expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams. Everything they do more or less is to help meet that end. And, yes, they do throw some bones to the masses periodically if only to keep them mollified, distracted, and less likely to rebel (as Noam Chomsky has argued so well, control of the people is one of the most important concerns of those who hold power and privilege); one of the more ‘effective’ means in my view is the theatrical performance we refer to as ‘elections’ — convincing the masses in ‘representative democracies’ that they have agency via the ballot box is perhaps one of the most successful scams the ruling class has accomplished for as Johann von Goethe observed: the easiest slave is the one who believes he is free.
Growth, the very antithesis of addressing ecological overshoot, is promoted by government to help in their pursuit of both wealth and power. But it also addresses the unfortunate consequence of the way we have sustained growth the last few decades: exponentially-exploding debt (somewhat north of 200 trillion U.S. dollars at present for the globe, and the larger the debt the larger and more sustained the payments to the ‘lenders/creators’ of the world’s various currencies — the financial institutions that seem to work hand-in-glove with our governments). This debt has not only turned our financial/economic/monetary systems into gargantuan Ponzi schemes, it has necessitated the continuation of growth in perpetuity to help pay off the debt (significant revenue for the financiers) and keep the Ponzi schemes from collapsing.
Of course, such infinite growth is a tad difficult on a finite planet so the other options of addressing our financial dilemmas is to increase taxes and/or inflate away the debt. Our feckless ‘leaders’ are attempting all three of these approaches to keep things from collapsing. They cheerlead and encourage growth, telling the masses it has only beneficial properties and minimising, ignoring, or denying the negative aspects. Taxes are expanded continually and applied to increasing numbers of economic interactions, although the wealthy have an almost infinite number of ways to minimise their tax obligations, unlike the masses. Inflation (which in its original form refers to ever-increasing money/credit printing but eventually results in price inflation which is what most people think of) is, in perfect Orwellian language use, said to be a positive force for our economy while it actually debases our currency which serves the purposes of the large debtors (governments and large corporations) but harms the masses because of the debauching of their ‘money’ as is becoming increasingly obvious as wealth inequality continues to explode.
For all of these reasons (and more) it is unlikely (I would actually put the likelihood at zero) our political systems would ever intentionally curtail the pursuit of growth for it is their seed corn. They will pursue and cheerlead it right up until collapse can no longer be denied, and then attempt to push it some more as they tell those experiencing precipitous decline to stop believing their lying eyes; and/or blame our failing societies on some foreign/domestic bogeymen, but certainly not them and their policies.
The government, as with the rest of the ruling class and unfortunately most people, will not hear the arguments about ecological overshoot at all. It matters not how much ‘science’, data, or evidence is thrown at them. Almost everyone but especially the elite are in total denial (or at least feigning it, perhaps just to reduce their cognitive dissonance). This is why I have abandoned any ‘hope’ that our ‘leaders’ will in any way address ecological overshoot even if they do admit it exists — if they do, it will likely be leveraged to pursue activities that not only enrich the ruling class further but make our overshoot worse, such as ‘clean’ energy which is anything but clean and certainly not sustainable as sold. And, unfortunately, the political systems (at least in so-called ‘representative’ democracies) have morphed into out-promising the other parties for what ‘goodies’ they will provide freely to citizens. More. More. More. Which, again, is the opposite of what is needed to counter our going even further into overshoot…not that it may matter much at this point given how far we are likely already past the most important tipping points.
As Rex argues, the ‘solutions’ that will matter most to people will be at the local level. Relocalistion of as much production and distribution of goods as possible (but especially potable water, food, and shelter needs — including that which is needed to deal with local weather/climate, such as wood for winter heating) is the best approach to be taking to help one’s community mitigate as much as possible the coming storm. It’s likely to get ugly and ‘government’ will be nowhere to be found to turn to; you will need to depend upon immediate family, friends, and community members so cultivate those relationships and work on getting them to understand our predicament and begin making your local community as self-sufficient and resilient as possible.
August 17, 2021
Are We Being Duped Regarding Global Warming?
Today’s contemplation was prompted by an email my mum sent me. As she closes in on 80, I find that she’s becoming a bit more open-minded about things but remains somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to global warming/anthropogenic climate change. We periodically share thoughts on the state of the world, especially politics, and I think I’ve almost got her convinced to abandon her faith/trust in government…
Anyways, here is the comment about global warming she forwarded to me and my relatively quick response (typed up while I was engaged in replacing a floor/foundation for one of our greenhouses — I never considered a decade ago when I installed the first greenhouse, of three, that the mini-garden ties I was using to terrace our backyard would decay/rot so quickly so I am replacing them with concrete blocks and putting in a patio stone floor so that my eldest daughter who has taken over the greenhouse can have many years of use with it, hopefully). I have added some minor supplemental thoughts (in italics) and supporting links to a few sources (see endnotes).
Comment:
With global warming having become as much a political issue as a scientific inquiry, I went from wondering whether mankind might really be influencing the climate to someone questioning a science I do not understand. I am now worried we are being duped by people with an agenda, like keep the money gravy train running. No one has yet explained to my satisfaction the big ice age followed by warming then a mini-ice age, followed by warming, all before mankind was a significant presence on earth and did nothing but have a few campfires.
Response:
That human activity has an impact on our environment and ecological systems, I have little doubt. How could almost eight billion of us and our resource demands not? Especially the so-called ‘advanced’ economies[i]. There is growing evidence that shows that our industrial civilisation has surpassed several planetary biophysical limits and likely overloaded a number of the planet’s compensatory sinks due to the vast amounts of waste material produced in its quest to procure the minerals and energy that our tools require for their manufacture and pollutants produced through their use.[ii]
The issue with the focus on global warming/climate change/carbon emissions is multi-faceted —such stories are never as simple as we’re led to believe. Geologic history shows pretty clearly that the planet’s climate changes and probably most significantly as a result of the sun’s cycles.[iii]
Is human activity exacerbating natural cycles? Quite possibly[iv]. Is it as catastrophic as painted by some?[v] Only time can truly tell since modelling of complex systems is fraught with difficulties.[vi] One minor variation of one of many variables that are used to create future predictions can shift the eventual outcome significantly.[vii] Of course, humans don’t like uncertainty (which is really all that can be provided about the future — probabilistic scenarios that may or may not occur — no matter how complex one’s predictive model is) so we cling to and tend to believe forecasts that are at their root uncertain; their potential accuracy matters not.[viii]
One of the other complications of the narrative is that our ruling class always leverages crises to their advantage. Always. I have little doubt that the hyper focus on climate and carbon emissions is being used to pursue the ruling class’s primary motivation: control/expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams.[ix]
The ‘problem’ of climate change is always presented with ‘solutions’ but those ‘solutions’ do not address carbon emissions in the least; in fact, there’s a good argument to be made that they actually increase them.[x] Much as the ruling class manufactures consent for any policy that the masses might question/reject (almost always via significant propaganda campaigns), they have created a narrative that is designed to persuade people to believe something that is increasingly being shown to be completely false and little more than marketing/sloganeering.[xi]
These ‘solutions’ also, conveniently, increase the revenue streams of the ruling class via taxes and complete replacement/overhaul of virtually all important technology (e.g., ‘renewable’ energy, electric vehicles, etc.). Scratch even gently below the surface of the ‘clean/green’ energy story and you discover it’s all basically bullshit.[xii] These technologies not only are not sustainable because of their dependence upon finite resources (including very much on the fossil fuel platform itself), but their production is hugely ecologically destructive. We are being sold a load of crap on various fronts so that the sociopaths that ‘control’ our world can profit. This being said, we do face some significant environmental and resource depletion challenges.
Probably the most dire predicament we face is ecological overshoot — too damn many people (especially living in ‘advanced’ economies) for a planet with finite resources.[xiii] The constant push for growth (which really is just to prolong/support the gargantuan Ponzi that our financial/economic/monetary systems have become) is the exact opposite of what we likely need to be doing; as is the push to ‘electrify’ everything.[xiv] The unfortunate thing for the future is that any species that overshoots its natural carrying capacity has only one way to be rebalanced: a massive die-off.[xv] When that occurs (and how it unfolds) is anybody’s guess…
As much as we tend to believe we understand our world and its complexities, I would contend we do not; at least, not very well. To compensate for this uncertainty we have developed all sorts of psychological mechanisms that lead us to believe particular narratives with some ‘certainty’. The beginning of a recent paper that challenges the mainstream story surrounding ‘renewable’ energy (that has been presented as a panacea for reducing carbon emissions; although I would argue Peak Oil is a more troubling issue in the energy needs of industrial civilisation[xvi]) is pertinent to this idea: “We begin with a reminder that humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives — even scientific theories — are socially constructed “stories” that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework.”[xvii]
[i] https://archive.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/the-environment/general-analysis-on-the-environment/45393-how-much-of-the-worlds-resource-consumption-occurs-in-rich-countries.html; https://www.livescience.com/20308-greedy-nations-top-resource-users-earth.html
[ii] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800914001323; https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/1259855.full; https://ideas.ted.com/the-9-limits-of-our-planet-and-how-weve-raced-past-4-of-them/; https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2015-01-15-planetary-boundaries—an-update.html
[iii] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-does-sun-affect-our-climate; https://phys.org/news/2017-03-sun-impact-climate-quantified.html
[iv] https://sciencing.com/what-human-activities-affect-the-carbon-cycle-12083853.html; https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/680; https://phys.org/news/2010-12-human-affect-carbon.html
[v] https://www.populationconnectionaction.org/2021/08/12/ipcc-catastrophic-climate-change-is-coming/; https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1025898341/major-report-warns-climate-change-is-accelerating-and-humans-must-cut-emissions-; https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/deepadaptation.pdf
[vi] https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/complexsystems/introduction.html; https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf
[vii] https://issues.org/climate-change-scenarios-lost-touch-reality-pielke-ritchie/?fbclid=IwAR1dbpSNqPXWr9QyfC-fDzlWrvfswO3LLZKj08szexcCb_7h7uRW2j7Qv54
[viii] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Babble-Pundits-Hedgehogs-Foxes/dp/0452297575
[ix] https://www.counterpunch.org/20 , 15/10/06/yes-there-is-an-imperialist-ruling-class/; https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_globalelite07.htm
[x] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/jan/09/wind-turbines-increasing-carbon-emissions; https://www.amazon.com/Life-after-Fossil-Fuels-Alternative/dp/3030703347; https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/opinion/mondaycop22-lower-co2-emissions-with-lower-carbon-solar-energy/
[xi] https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499; https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598; https://planetofthehumans.com; https://www.brightgreenlies.com
[xii] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-renewable-energy-technologies; https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/715’ https://www.nap.edu/read/12619/chapter/7; https://www.altenergymag.com/article/2015/08/the-dark-side-of-renewable-energy-negative-impacts-of-renewables-on-the-environment/20963/; https://www.routledge.com/Environmental-Impacts-of-Renewable-Energy/Spellman/p/book/9781482249460; https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-environmental-impact-of-lithium-batteries/
[xiii] https://www.pnas.org/content/99/14/9266; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319810.Overshoot
[xiv] https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/our-economy-is-a-ponzi-scheme-8fc56b9e594f; https://eand.co/how-the-economy-became-one-giant-ponzi-scheme-4ac84bf18738; https://moneyweek.com/economy/global-economy/601657/why-our-economy-is-a-giant-ponzi-scheme
[xv] https://thesenecaeffect.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/humans-in-ecological-overshoot-collapse-now-to-avoid-a-larger-catastrophe/; https://www.earthovershoot.org/who-we-are/frequent-questions.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)
[xvi] https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/29458/peak-oil-decline-coronavirus-economy/; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-peak-oil-already-happened/; http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/liegl1/
[xvii] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508/htm?fbclid=IwAR2ISt5shfV4wpFEc8jxbQnrrxyllyvZP-xDnoHhWrjGTQRIqUNfk3hOK1g
Growth and Denial: A Bad Combination
Today’s Contemplation is a glimpse into some conversation between myself and another around growth, denial, and differences in what can/should be advocated for.
Post by GW:
Just saw the sign coming in to town which reads “Country close to the city” it should read “Condos close to the city”
RB: …we need to make sure we are seeing the most responsible planning surrounding that development as we can. I have a growing feeling that some of our areas of intensification are both deviating from our growth strategies and will not be receiving needed services in a timely fashion to ensure complete communities, maximal livability, and minimal consequences.
I have long held a belief that spending time, energy, and breath just opposing growth and development is a waste. Understand the need (and legal requirements) to grow, understand the planning processes and facets of private ownership, and spend your time advocating for the best possible planning to ensure the best possible community living experience as that growth gets underway.
Me: RB, may I suggest some homework to help expand your perspective on the issue of growth and the negative consequences we tend to ignore/deny (and has led us into ecological overshoot):
1) This presentation, entitled Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy, by the late Dr. Albert Bartlett that explains our blindness to how exponential growth works and how it has led us into overshoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4.
2) This 30-year update to the 1972 Limits to Growth study by MIT researchers; pay particular attention to the Business-As-Usual scenario that we seem to be tracking almost exactly and the negative consequences of this: https://www.amazon.ca/Limits-Growth-30-Year-Donella-Meadows/dp/193149858X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=82KI5K3MPE34&keywords=30+year+update+limits+to+growth&qid=1700239657&s=books&sprefix=30+year+update+limits+to+growth%2Cstripbooks%2C97&sr=1-1. You can find a synopsis of this text here: https://donellameadows.org/archives/a-synopsis-limits-to-growth-the-30-year-update/.
3) This 1988 academic research text, The Collapse of Complex Societies, by archaeologist Joseph Tainter that highlights the recurrent/cyclical decline that has occurred to every complex society to date due to the diminishing returns that invariably arises as a population attempts to continue growing beyond the resources (mostly energy) that can support it: https://www.amazon.ca/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Joseph-Tainter/dp/052138673X. Summary notes can be found here: https://olduvai.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Collapse-of-Complex-Societies.pdf.
4) This 1980 text, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William Catton Jr. that outlines the biological principles that invariably impact species that grow beyond their environment’s ability to support them. https://www.amazon.ca/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change-ebook/dp/B00VVH4UGG/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3UNABBTCM5RCJ&keywords=overshoot&qid=1700239867&sprefix=overshoot%2Caps%2C500&sr=8-1. Summary notes can be found here: https://olduvai.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Overshoot_-The-Ecological-Basis-of-Revolutionary-Change.pdf
NG: Steve Bull, a more than likely nuclear war should damper population growth.
Me: RB, I would also advise digging deeper and looking behind the curtain with respect to what has ‘supported’ our extraordinary growth the past couple of decades (mostly financialisation of our economic systems; i.e., ginormous amounts of debt that has turned into nothing more than Ponzi financing to keep growth afloat to the tune of hundreds of trillions of dollars currently — a perfect example of what Tainter refers to as diminishing returns and is being felt increasingly by the masses due to the inevitable weight of price inflation/currency devaluation) and centuries (mostly the leveraging and expeditious drawdown of a one-time cache of hydrocarbon energy that has provided a surplus of energy that has allowed us to continue to pursue exponential growth beyond our natural carrying capacity, but that is declining/disappearing at an alarming rate (dive into the issue of Peak Oil) — it’s no surprise that nations rich in these resources are the focus of so much geopolitical chaos.
Then there’s the symptom predicaments of overshoot and the various planetary boundaries we’ve blow past in extraordinary expansion throughout the globe. See this: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html
That most believe such growth can continue without dire consequences is not surprising given the amount of conditioning and propaganda we are exposed to about growth (particularly by those that profit from it). That we cannot even challenge such orthodoxy speaks volumes as to our mass denial.
RB: Steve Bull, you and I have had this conversation in past.
If our society suddenly shifts to establishing and enforcing population controls and an economic system that isn’t dependant on infinite growth, I will change my tune.
Until then, I am going to focus my advocacy based on existing realities for best possible outcomes.
Me: RB, we will have to agree to disagree, once again, regarding what is ‘best’ to advocate for. While I would contend that we (especially in so-called ‘advanced’ and ‘emerging’ economies) are unlikely to willingly pursue ‘degrowth’, or even halting growth (for a variety of reasons, but perhaps mostly because we all want the Ponzi to continue), I would also argue that accepting it and trying to work with it is akin to being complicit in mass suicide…which is what the increasing amount of evidence regarding our overshoot is suggesting.
RB: To each their own, of course. And I am most certainly not disregarding your concerns, which are absolutely reasonable. I just have to pick my battles, so to speak. If that makes me complicit, so be.
Me: RB, fair enough. Me, I prefer not to be overly complicit in this tragedy we are embarked upon as a species. While we can ignore/deny the laws of physics, biological principles, and pre/historic evidence, they are ever-present, unforgiving, and will eventually catch up with us.
August 10, 2021
The Predicament of Ecological Overshoot Cannot Be ‘Solved’, Especially Via ‘Renewables’
Today’s very brief ‘contemplation’ is a comment I penned on an article that discusses the limits to growth we have probably surpassed, Kuber-Ross’s stages of grief (especially denial and bargaining) that the world seems to be experiencing in the wake of increasing awareness of our existential dilemmas/predicaments, and a call for cooperation amongst the world’s people to address our plight.
I have repeatedly experienced the denial and anger that tends to arise when one challenges another’s personal beliefs. I should know better than to present countervailing evidence/narratives, especially given the defensive psychological mechanisms that arise to preserve such beliefs. We tend to look for confirmation of our strongly-held views by surrounding ourselves with like-minded voices, not disruptive narratives that can lead to cognitive dissonance. Such stories are denigrated and attacked (as the author of the article points out for the Limits to Growth authors).
I do believe, however, that the acceptance of our limits in many aspects leads to a conclusion that degrowth needs to be not only considered and discussed, but widely pursued if humanity is to have any hope of at least some of us transitioning through the self-made bottleneck that is directly ahead of us. Pursing the ‘wrong’ path will only make our predicament far, far more challenging and greatly reduce any opportunities for at least some of humanity to survive.
As I have come to understand our predicaments better (not perfectly of course, but better), I have reached the conclusion that the best way to mitigate our situation (or at least preserve some semblance of human society) is to pursue degrowth strategies. What I have encountered along the way is a very well-meaning but somewhat problematic counterproposal (that is very narrowly focused in my view) that the best way to confront our situation is to throw everything we have at transitioning us from fossil fuels to ‘renewables’ (I put this in quotes since their dependence on non-renewable, finite resources — including fossil fuels — suggests they are not truly ‘renewable’).
This approach appears to be the mainstream one and the one that seems to be getting the most support at this time probably because it is comforting in the sense that ‘others’ are responsible for seeing its funding, development, distribution, etc. and it offers a means of maintaining our complexities without much disruption; at least that is the narrative/perception (but also likely because there is much profit to be made in the attempts to completely replace the fossil fuel-dependent technologies currently employed).
Increasingly, however, this storyline is showing many plot holes: energy-return-on-energy-invested close to zero or even negative; non-renewable, finite resource limits; environmental/ecological destruction to procure needed resources; dependency upon the fossil fuel platform for the procurement and processing of necessary materials as well as the distribution, maintenance, and afterlife disposal/reclamation processes. As I attempt to point these roadblocks out to the advocates of ‘renewables’ and suggest degrowth is a more realistic path given the biophysical limits of living on a finite planet, I am quite chagrined with the variety of personal attacks I am subjected to. From being a climate change ‘denier’ to a shill for the fossil fuel industry, the anger/denial that is displayed is quite something.
So, if we are hoping for cooperation and discussion to help us confront our existential dilemmas, there is much, much work that has to be done. What I am experiencing is not unique to those who have accepted our limitations and predicaments. The ‘clean/green’ energy crowd seems unwilling to accept that their ‘solution’ and convictions may in fact expedite, or at least contribute to, the further degradation of the planet and result in the exact opposite of what they believe. I fail to see how this can be resolved in a timely manner when so much of the propaganda we are exposed to by our world ‘leaders’ cheerlead it as a means to continue expanding our growth and ensuring prosperity for all.
July 24, 2021
Ecological Overshoot, Hydrocarbon Energy, and Biophysical Reality
Discussing ‘renewable’ energy and its shortcomings with those who hold on to the belief that they offer us a ‘solution’ to the predicaments humanity faces is always ‘challenging’. Today’s contemplation is based on a recent dialogue I have had with a few people who seek to hold on to the belief that we can completely abandon fossil fuels and simply shift support for society’s complexities over to ‘renewables, and my response to someone who complimented my viewpoint (an unusual occurrence on the pages of the online media site (The Tyee) I frequent, whose writers/editors/commenters mostly support ‘renewables’ and the promises the proponents of them make). The story is not so straightforward and most don’t want to hear that. You can check out the conversation here.
Thank you. The root cause of our problem appears to be ecological overshoot brought on, primarily, by our exploitation of a one-time energy cache (fossil fuels) that has helped to ‘power’ amazing technological tools and processes that, in turn, have allowed us to exploit the planet and its resources substantially. This has led to a number of positive feedback loops, particularly exponential increases in population, waste (including greenhouse gases), and the speed at which we use these finite resources.
The crowd that insists ‘renewable’ energy (and it’s not truly ‘renewable’ given its dependency on finite resources, and certainly not ‘green/clean’ based on the processes necessary to produce them) can ‘sustain’ our energy-intensive complexities tend to be willfully ignorant of their negative consequences and deficiencies. In fact, my guess is that many have little experience with or knowledge of them (see Alice Friedemann’s work at Energy Skeptic and especially her most recent Springer Energy Series publication, Life After Fossil Fuels) and are grasping for solutions to our predicaments.
The cost, components, capacity, and energy-return-on-energy-invested for ‘renewables’ is nowhere near what most imagine; and I’m thinking most hold on to the belief that governments will ‘pay’ for the massive systems that would be needed to support our complex societies (and there simply aren’t enough finite resources on this planet to do this; to say little about the massive debts already existing within our Ponzi-like financial/economic/monetary systems that themselves are on the verge of collapse and the struggles many people have in just affording day-to-day living expenses). I personally have installed a photovoltaic system as an emergency backup system for our home. I have spent well in excess of $10,000 putting up about 2.2 KwH of panels, connecting charge controllers, deep cycle batteries, and inverters. I am under no delusion that such a system can sustain our household, particularly in our Canadian winters. The power is intermittent. The batteries drain relatively quickly. And charging can take days/weeks when its cloudy and cold, and/or snow builds up on them.
The religious-like adherence to the belief that ‘renewables’ are part-and-parcel of a ‘solution’ to the negative consequences of fossil fuels leads many to ‘attack’ anyone who questions their ‘faith’ (see Mike Stasse’s Damn the Matrix). I have been accused numerous times of being a shill for the fossil fuel industry and even threatened because of this allegation; one person recently wished me the worst possible end I can imagine and then multiply it by 1000 because I questioned the entire ‘renewable’ mantra and didn’t by into his ‘solution’ for addressing the climate crisis.
I usually attribute this to the first few stages — denial, anger, bargaining — of Kubler-Ross’s model of grief, which people who come to realise our predicaments tend to travel through. It is also a result of believing that what we face is a problem that can be solved when in actuality it appears to be a predicament that we are going to have to face and attempt to ‘weather’ (see Erik Michaels’ Problems, Predicaments, and Technology). In fact, I would argue attempts to replace fossil fuel inputs with alternatives is a very misguided and potentially catastrophic path to take. The fossil fuel platform is significantly required for almost all the processes necessary to shift to alternatives. From steel and concrete manufacturing to the heavy machinery necessary in mining and transportation, large fossil fuel inputs are required.
Then there’s the fossil fuel inputs into modern industrial agriculture: the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, heavy machinery, irrigation, and transportation that sustain food production in sufficient quantities and keep the just-in-time, long distance, supply chains functioning — to say little about the finiteness of the chemicals required for fertilizers or the drawing down of water aquifers. Food shortages would be guaranteed to be massive should fossil fuel inputs suddenly disappear without local, regenerative permaculture being ready to replace it; something we are woefully blind to. ‘Electrifying’ everything does little to address many of the negative consequences of our overshoot.
There are so many negative consequences to our overshoot that we are ignoring — in our zeal to sustain our complexities via ‘renewables’ — that would continue or expand by chasing such ‘solutions’ as widespread adoption of electric vehicles and solar/wind energy. In our rush to justify all the modern ‘conveniences’/‘energy slaves’ we have (especially in so-called ‘advanced’ economies) we are taking the world even further into overshoot which will lead to an even more catastrophic ‘collapse’ when it finally occurs.
We can accept that ‘collapse’ is imminent (and pre/history shows this occurs for every complex society that we have experimented with for the past 10,000+ years — see archaeologist Joseph Tainters’ text The Collapse of Complex Societies) and attempt to prepare for it, or continue the wishful thinking path that ‘this time is different’ and chase actions that will make the situation even more dire. I would prefer the former but my guess is we will attempt the latter for two main reasons.
First, we have been propagandised by what should be called ‘snake oil salesmen’ and their marketers who have taken advantage of our energy crisis. They have created a massive marketing campaign to sell their products and done so on our emotions, particularly fear and the need to have some ‘certainty’ about the future (refer to Dan Gardner’s Future Babble). The marketers have set fossil fuels up as the ‘problem’ and offered a ‘solution’ that just happens to enrich them. As with all such marketing, the negative consequences of their products have been left out of the narrative.
Second, having bought into the sales pitch, most people have created a set of beliefs that serve to help justify their living arrangements and avoid the difficulties that very likely lay ahead. Core beliefs are difficult to challenge. Questioning them creates cognitive dissonance in the adherent which can only be dissipated by clinging more strongly to the belief (usually by ignoring or attacking those challenging them) or reflecting on the beliefs and shifting them towards a more neutral or different stance. Most people tend to protect their core belief systems, regardless of the evidence/facts/data that would suggest they are misguided/misinformed; thus the ire/anger by some when the idea of ‘renewables’ being able to replace fossil fuels is confronted.
For the most part, the future is unwritten. We can accept the challenges of a world without all the energy slaves we have created with our ingenuity and tool-making acumen, and prepare for life with less, far less. Or, we can continue down the ‘business-as-usual’ path and attempt to sustain the unsustainable (see Meadows et al.’s Limits to Growth and its various updates), and that will likely result in far more chaos and difficulty as the bottleneck we have created closes around us (see William Catton Jr.’s book, Overshoot).
I’m increasingly chagrined to see us continue to chase the infinite growth chalice with a belief that this will all work out just fine, thank you, as long as we abandon fossil fuels and shift to ‘renewables’ with a religious-like fervour that completely ignores some harsh, biophysical realities. I am reminded of author Robert Heinlein’s observation that we are rationalising creatures, not rational ones, and we are leading ourselves into a very, very precarious and dangerous place.
Keep Calm and Carry On
Today’s Contemplation is my comment on a recent post by Allan Urban that speaks to his experiences attempting to share his learnings on ‘collapse’. For those that have read it, you can likely recognise similar reactions from others; I certainly did.
After years of experiencing the same ‘frustrations’ in attempting to share my ‘insights’ regarding our predicament, I’ve come to understand that we all believe what we want to believe and that regardless of the evidence/facts that point to our inevitable collision with ‘collapse’ most will reject the idea and carry on in the belief that tomorrow (and the future) will be much like yesterday and today. For the most part, that’s a good belief system and one that has been proven correct again and again for people, and how others respond to challenges to this system are fairly typical.
The list of psychological mechanisms to avoid anxiety-provoking thoughts is almost endless. And the idea of ‘collapse’ is most certainly anxiety-provoking. Fight or flight. Groupthink. Going along to get along. Deference to authority/expertise (especially the ruling caste of our societies — e.g., government, legacy media). Cognitive dissonance reduction. Stages of grieving (particularly denial of reality and bargaining). These are next to impossible to overcome.
So, while I write about the situation (see https://olduvai.ca) and my perspective on it, I don’t engage too many others — especially in my personal, social circles — with my views. The exception being those who respond to my writings and are interested in the topics involved.
I have also completely abandoned any ‘hope’ that our political systems (or even most (all?) non-governmental ones) are the place to look for ‘salvation’. These systems are designed for the most part (and motivated by) self-preservation and the status quo. There are few if any that truly aim to ‘deconstruct’ our extractive/exploitive systems that have led us to where we our. That’s not their role; in fact, quite the opposite.
Our governing systems in particular are pre/historic institutions in place to maintain/expand the control of wealth-generating/-extracting systems that provide revenue streams for a select few. Their current iterations weave comforting narratives about ‘representation’ and beneficent policies/actions for the masses, but these are propaganda meant to appease and mollify — nothing more. Their aims are primarily oriented towards growing these systems of extraction and exploitation, regardless of the social and/or ecological systems costs.
We have not only cyclical complex society ‘collapse’ processes to contend with in our modern-day experiment of a globalised (and financialised) system, but the various symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot as well — especially depletion of probably the most fundament of resources to our modern complexities: hydrocarbons.
If pre/history is any indication of how things will unfold (and I would contend it very much is), then most of us will deny/ignore the signals long after our decline is well and truly underway — as many argue it already is. We will carry on in our ignorance and complicity, believing things will improve and someone, somewhere will ‘solve’ all this. Keep calm and carry on.
Keeping the ruling caste’s feet to the fire is commendable (if the pressure directs them in a way to degrow our existence, not grow it via even more ‘green/clean’ technology) but ultimately will not result in system changes. It will be Nature that corrects our Overshoot, as it always does with species that blow past its natural carrying capacity.
Perhaps our energies are best focused upon attempts to mitigate the consequences as best we can for our local communities. Relocalise and simplify, or as John Michael Greer has suggested: Collapse now and avoid the rush.
Reality is an Inconvenience to Beliefs
Today’s brief Contemplation was prompted by The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article that looks at the latest energy ‘breakthrough’ (seems there is one every other week) and how it’s going to save modern civilisation, our species, and the planet.
In this globalised world where virtually every economic transaction has become finacialised, and one cannot for long survive without some type of revenue stream (because we have lost the skills/knowledge to live apart from our complex and monetised energy-averaging systems), it seems to me that everything has become a racket — in terms of a fraudulent scheme.
And ‘energy’, being the most fundamental of ‘resources’ for life, has been fully captured by the multitude of racketeers — as has all the revenue-generating/-extracting aspects of our sociocultural existence.
War. Politics. Food. Health. Education. Resources. You name it.
These are all being leveraged by our society’s ruling caste, grifters, and wannabes to generate revenue. And attracting investment capital with some technological/innovative ‘breakthrough’ works because of our ongoing (if very misguided, primarily due to recency bias) belief that human ingenuity and technological prowess can solve all ‘problems’ — predicaments without ‘solutions’ don’t exist.
As I more deeply explore the story-telling nature of our species and the psychological mechanisms at play during this communication process, it is becoming clear that it matters little — if at all — that the narrative being shared aligns with physical reality or not. We believe what we want to believe and all it takes is that the tale we are being told needs to be ‘plausible’, provide us with a sense of agency (especially self-efficacy), reinforces our self-esteem, reduces our cognitive dissonance, is believed by many in our social circle, and is being told by a ‘trusted/authoritative’ source.
Dave Pollard, who writes here, has put forward a ‘Law of Human Beliefs’ (see his latest here) that is quite relevant to this observation:
“Pollard’s Law of Human Beliefs: We believe what we want to believe, not what is actually true. We want to believe in happy endings, simple answers, the inevitability of progress, self-control, karma, responsibility, destiny, miracles, a proper order of things, the power of love, and infinite human capacity and agency. Most of us want to believe in a higher power that can step in when we falter. We want to believe what those in our circles of trust believe (even if it’s crazy, gaslighting or propaganda). So we tend to seek sources that reinforce those beliefs and ignore those that undermine or unsettle them. Our hopes and expectations are determined by those beliefs. Our worldview is the sum of those beliefs, hopes and expectations, and bears no necessary resemblance to truth or reality. This invented reality is the only way we can make sense of a world that is impossible to grasp, to understand, or to ever really make sense of.”
Our denial of reality is strong and often, if not always, cannot be overcome. We go to all sorts of lengths to rationalise and justify our belief systems, regardless of evidence/facts that challenge them.
And as Ajit Varki has postulated in his and Danny Brower’s theory on the origins of the human mind,
“The human ability to understand and consider our own mortality without being consumed by fear seems natural to us. In fact, it appears to be just one manifestation of a peculiar human ability to ignore, rationalize, or outright deny obvious realities, and even to believe in multiple or alternate realities at the same time…
Even when we do acknowledge such realities, we tend to indulge in magical thinking, behaving as if these statistics apply to everyone else, but not to ourselves. Many humans also ignore or even deny scientific and societal realities such as biological evolution, anthropogenic climate change, human “overshoot” with nonrenewable resource depletion, gross degradation of our environment, massive expansion of national debt, ballooning healthcare costs, covert or overt racism, and so on.”
(See Rob Mielcarski’s site, un-Denial, for a lot more on this subject.)
Biogeophysical limits — meh, it’s not reality; it’s just another conspiracy theory by those tinfoil hat-wearing ecofascists. Please disregard all that ‘collapse/overshoot’ nonsense and carry on with your consumption and dreams of perpetual growth on a finite planet…oh, and please send us any investment money while you’re at it (and/or encourage your government to) so we can solve those predicaments the nutcases keep yammering on about.
February 20, 2023
That Uncertain Road, Part 1
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
― Richard P. Feynman
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
― Albert Einstein
There are many words that could be used to describe the future and humanity’s ability to know how it will unfold. Unknowable. Unpredictable. Uncertain. Unwritten. Undetermined. Unforeseeable.
These tool-making, story-telling apes we have termed homo sapiens just happen to abhor this aspect of existence. Uncertainty has been found to result in negative affect for most people in most situations[1]. In fact, it has been suggested that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”[2] and that “…fear of the unknown may be a, or possibly the, fundamental fear, representing an Archimedean lever for human psychology”[3].
As Dan Gardner reminds the reader in Future Babble[4] humans want and need control, especially of their environment/surroundings. Not having control, or at least the sense of it, can lead to stress, disease, and early death. Having some ‘certainty’ about what the future holds is a type of control, even if we know what happens is out of our personal control.
We have developed a host of psychological mechanisms to defend against our fear of uncertainty (e.g., illusion of control). In fact, psychologists have found an increased dependence upon magical thinking when control is lost or uncertainty increases[5]. In addition, people will cling more fiercely to their belief system in the face of counterfactual evidence in order to increase their sense of certainty. They will ignore or deny those things that increase their cognitive dissonance and the uncertainty it creates.
We also more often tend to see patterns where none exist as we search for certainty[6]. Reassurance about the future motivates people to seek it somewhere. Anywhere.
Cognitive psychologists suggest prospection, the term used to describe the generation of possible future scenarios, is a central tenet of both cognition and emotion[7]. But it is also a fundamental aspect of learning for any animal that is driven by their avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure since being able to sense patterns of environmental changes or actions of other animals can alter their behaviour to seek a reward or avoid a punishment — perhaps the most basic one being falling prey to a potential predator.
As tool makers, we leverage this rather unique ability in attempts to help us control our environment, thus providing a sense of security against this uncertain future. And it seems we often fall back on this skill to help us believe some as-yet-to-be-hatched ‘tool’ will be created to help us achieve what we have yet to achieve — certainty about the future by solving our various problems, such as a lack of ‘clean’ energy.
As story tellers, we craft all variety of narratives to help us understand our world — the past, the present, and especially the future. Religion. Biology. Politics. Physics. Economics. History. Mathematics. Psychology. Astrology. Ecology. Chemistry. Philosophy.
Are any of the tales we tell and share accurate reflections of our world and its functioning? Can we predict the future? Can we, using all of our cognitive abilities, understandings of the world, and technologies reduce the uncertainty that lays before us?
The answer may actually be irrelevant since we all tend to believe what we believe — be it learned or conditioned, accurate or misinformed. And we use what we believe to reduce our anxiety about an uncertain future.
Despite all of the above, and knowing full well that predictions about the future are just stories we tell to reduce our uncertainty, the following is one perspective on what the future may hold based upon two beliefs that seem certain to me, although I know they don’t to everyone:
1) We exist upon a planet with finite resources;
2) Biological and historical precedents exist from which we can learn and help us map a likely future.
First, we live upon a planet with a finite amount of resources available to us. Despite the story that infinite substitutability can overcome or mitigate this reality, I firmly believe we cannot create more of our most important resources from thin air. This is especially true for life’s primary resource, energy. As the First Law of thermodynamics states: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. This limits what is available to all species upon our planet.
Second, there exist biological and historical ‘experiments’ concerning ecological overshoot and complex society ‘collapse’ that we can use to help us understand important processes and how they are likely to unfold.
To paraphrase the saying about events rhyming with the past, there should be no assumptions that the future will unfold exactly as it has in the past. While there will no doubt be similarities because humans are animals with strong genetic predispositions that act and react in somewhat constrained ways, we are also a species with strong sociocultural influences upon our behaviour that vary in both time and place. And the contextual environment within which we are behaving is never precisely the same; particularly given the complexities that accumulate and impact us — especially technological in nature.
There is so much that has already been written and could be said about ecological overshoot and humanity’s prospects as we travel further into it. It is important to my thinking here that I note that humans are a biological species similar to every other one on our planet and there exist many behavioural responses that we cannot avoid because of this. Perhaps the most fundamental biologically-based one is that of reproduction and a species tendency to reproduce to a level that can be sustained by their immediate habitat. Overshooting this sustainable carrying capacity invariably results in moving to an uninhabited and unexploited area or ‘reversion to the mean’ of a species’ population size[8].
Humans however, as an apex predator and with their tool-making abilities, have been able to exceed significantly the natural, environmental carrying capacity allowing us to go well beyond the limits imposed by nature. Population biology demonstrates that such a situation cannot and will not go on indefinitely. And the resulting ‘correction’ may as a result of this being even more dramatic in nature.
As William Catton Jr. argues, our ability to employ technological tools to expand our carrying capacity has resulted in a trap that now threatens the environment and ecological systems we require for our survival. Blind to what we are doing, we have embraced and increased the speed with which we are drawing down the finite resources we rely upon. There will be, based upon other species that have overshot their environmental carrying capacity, a reversion to the mean of population size that can be ‘sustained’ — and it will be much, much lower than may have been reached in an uncontaminated and undamaged environment[9].
Further, Catton observes that “[o]vershoot will occur, if it hasn’t already. We may come to feel guilty about stealing from the future, but we will continue to do it. Overshoot will further aggravate the reduction of carrying capacity. Crash must follow. The greater the overshoot, the greater the crash.” (p. 253)
The following graph from Catton’s text provides four possible growth scenarios, with Panel D being the most likely for humanity. As he explains “’carrying capacity’ has been represented by two different curves. A major fraction of the recent, apparently high carrying capacity for human high-energy living must be attributed to temporary resources — i.e., non-renewable fossil acreage, the earth’s savings deposits. In Panel D, it is optimistically assumed that the component of carrying capacity based on renewable resources has remained stable so far. But it is recognized that serious overshoot, induced by temporarily high composite carrying capacity, will at least temporarily undermine even the sustainable component.” (p. 253)
That’s overshoot in a nutshell: an epic crash in population as our fundamental resources can no longer support our numbers. The writing seems on the wall that human population numbers are likely to fall precipitously from their current and relatively high numbers.
How that unfolds is yet to be determined, but it seems the most likely scenario some time down the road as the resources, especially energy, become more scarce to support our inflated numbers…
In Part 2, I will elaborate on what I believe our pre/historical precedents suggest about what we might expect down that uncertain road…
A Self-Sufficient Community — Better Than Precious Metals or Fiat/Digital Currencies
Today I’m sharing a conversation with others via the Comments section for a post on the website Zerohedge — as well as a preamble to the conversation to set the context for my part in the conversation. The article is focused upon the future of fiat currency but comes via the website Schiffgold that for all intents and purposes markets precious metals, warning of the perils of fiat currency.
For anyone who follows such sites, you will be cognizant of the ongoing debates regarding precious metals and fiat/electronic currencies. Essentially, the disagreements are founded upon differences of opinion regarding the best avenue for storing one’s ‘wealth’, particularly surplus wealth, to help avoid the inevitable collapse of current fiat currencies.
I have written a bit about such topics, particularly as they pertain to growth and collapse, in these posts:
Feeding the Growth Monster: Fiat Currency and Technology Blog Medium
Fiat Currency: Debasement and Infinite Growth Blog Medium
Fiat Currency, Infinite Growth, Finite Resources: A Recipe For Collapse Blog Medium
Greenwashing, Fiat Currency, Narrative Management: More On Climate Change and Elite Confabs Medium
Ruling Caste Responses To Societal Breakdown/Collapse Medium
When I first fell down the rabbit’s hole that is Peak Oil and began to explore all the issues related to this most fundamental of predicaments for our societal complexities, storing surplus wealth was a concern for me[1]. My wife and I were still both working full-time in relatively secure and well-paying careers (we’re both since retired), our house was paid off, and our two children were still in high school. We had always been relatively frugal in our consumption and were privileged enough to be in a situation where our income almost always exceeded our expenditures — early in our marriage, when we were both still students, was the exception. But, once we paid off our mortgage (which we did as expediently as possible after our student loans were paid off, that carried 14+% interest on them when we graduated) we were spending far less than we were earning.
As I dug deeper into the complexities of energy and its implications for our globe, I worried more and more about the future and how to best insulate my family from what may come. I was drawn towards precious metals given my educational background in archaeology and the presence of it as a means of exchange throughout recorded history. But as I delved deeper and deeper into the cyclical recurrence of societal ‘collapse’ it became clear that without local self-sufficiency/-resiliency having a hoard of precious metals (many of which have been found by archaeologists, and thus unused/abandoned) or an electronic wallet holding digital currency was probably moot and not a secure means of ‘preserving wealth’.
I have come to understand/believe that community resiliency and a focus on our fundamental needs may be the most appropriate response to the coming storm that is a loss of surplus energy and the consequential breakdown of energy-averaging systems (i.e., long-distance trade). This is why I now suggest that relocalising food production, potable water procurement, and regional shelter needs may be one’s best approach to help insulate one’s community and thus family.
I have spent the better part of a decade exploring and practising how to produce as much food as possible on our relatively small, suburban piece of land north of Toronto and initiated a food gardening guild in my community. These are by no means a ‘solution’ to our predicaments and I could currently feed our household of five adults for about two weeks on our garden harvest — if we’re lucky. I take solace, however, in the fact that each year the gardens produce a bit more and my ongoing experiments meet with success more often than failure (from which I try to learn from).
My fledgling attempts are far, far behind others I communicate with or read about online, but I am far, far ahead of almost my entire social circle. Apart from my blood siblings, none are pursuing any form of self-sufficiency but are hip-deep in ignorance, denial, and bargaining — carrying on with their ‘modern’, relatively affluent lifestyles.
My much younger sister (who has put her career as a gynaecological oncologist on hold as she is home with three young children) has been experimenting with food production and chicken raising the past couple of years. And my younger brother — who is months away from retiring as a fire station captain — has recently purchased a remote property (relative to the densely populated southern Ontario where he and I reside) in northern Ontario where I spent a week this summer helping him get some neglected raised beds cleaned up — there were surprisingly a plethora of well-established perennial food plants present.
Anyways, without further ado, here is the conversation that reflects some different perspectives…
Me: While precious metals or crypto may be a store of wealth as argued by many, I think I’d sooner ‘invest’ what little surplus I have in physical tools/supplies to help my family/community become more self-sufficient and resilient. As the saying goes, you can’t eat gold. Physical materials that will help in food production, procurement of potable water, and regional shelter needs may be a much better focus for folks than either fiat, electronic wallets, or metals at this point in the fourth turning…oh, and a means to protect what you have may be wise as well — from community cohesiveness to armaments of some kind.
Weirdly: Saving money is for excess value. You have it right. Tools, businesses, friends, community until you are limited, then save in bitcoin.
Me: I think I’d sooner save excess in silver/gold than bitcoin. Chances are high that grid-down scenarios are likely to increase in frequency and size as the center loses control making electronic-based ‘wealth’ about as useful as our politicians…but as price inflation is quickly eating away any excess for me, this may be a moot point.
JudgeSmails984: Grid down scenarios? Are you high? I live in Northern California where they shut the power off when it’s windy and ask you not to charge your EVs in the summer when everybody is using their AC, and still, the power never goes out for more than a few hours, anywhere.
your “increasing frequency of grid down occurrences” statement is idiotic and not based on real world reliability data. Outside of natural disasters and yahoos shooting up transformers here and there, the electrical grid is a highly distributed architecture of critical infrastructure, and there are almost no significant outages, anywhere that matters in the US.
Also-almost all critical facilities like hospitals and law enforcement all have backup diesel generators-our electrical system is very robust and resilient.
how so many people plan their investments around something that never happens, has never happened but might happen, is beyond me. It’s like taking a parka into the desert at noon because it might snow while you are there…it could happen, the next ice age could begin today.
JudgeSmails984: I have a 3 month instability limit. You shut the lights off and leave the humans without food to fend for themselves, I have one bullet for myself in that unlikely scenario.
Given that my current GF is diabetic, she’d probably check out a month after the CVS stores ran outta insulin.
I have freeze dried food, some gold, silver, cash to get through a short period of disorder, but I have no interest in living rough, like indefinitely, for years without security, food, comfort etc. through a new, post apocalyptic dark age.
I’ve had 50 good years, rather go out with a bang than suffer slowly and watch those I love perish.
Good luck with your long term ambitions though. Hope nobody you love gets a tooth abscess or bacterial infection…once cured at the clinic on the corner, now likely fatal.
Me: Living ‘rough’ is completely subjective in nature and our species has done so for many, many millennia in the past; and by all accounts (despite the misconceptions of many due to a focus upon what befell the ruling elite upon previous societal collapses) lived fulfilling lives.
Yes, some of our complex conveniences will be absent but a lot of what befalls a complex society during its ‘collapse’ will actually be an improvement for many; that’s why and how collapses happen, it’s an economic/political choice by people who abandon the systems imposed by the ruling caste of a society for what they perceive as an improved situation — read archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.
If your local community is self-sufficient and can get through the initial chaos of faltering/declining complexities, there’s no reason a ‘dark age’ cannot be avoided.
HardKnoxKid: Totally agree…… My yard is full of estate sale tools….. lots of hoes, shovels, metal rods, rolls of electrical wire….. great buys at some of these sales……. one day, all those nice electronics folks have will not do them poop….. watched a 30 year old black woman in my country meat market….. had 3 kids under 10…. she walked in right before me…. got out of an old Corolla, but clean….. kids very well mannered. She was looking at the meat, and telling the kids maybe they would have beef for dinner…. and picked up a couple packages of stew beef…… As I shopped, I saw her being very wise. After I paid for my small cart, I found her adding up her few items….. I gave her a $50……. told her to buy steak or whatever she wanted….. she was very reserved and cried lightly…… I could tell that “she” had a rough upbringing….. and if I could help her just for an evening, then that is my pleasure…… And yet, we send trillions over seas for all the crooks………Don’t have any vehicle or mortgage or credit card payments….. don’t give to big charities…… this is my way of giving…… It feels good.
Surreality: That’s good in the community. I think do both. We and our communities also need to preserve our wealth as well as have resources to be resilient.
A handful of interesting articles to ponder:
The Energy Crisis is Here to Stay
Debt, Currency Debasement & War — The Timeless Pillars of Failure
The System Isn’t Designed to Help You
The Cycle of Evil
Today’s Energy Bottleneck May Bring Down Major Governments
Why Civilization Would Collapse Even Without Climate Change
Climate Disaster Is Here — and the State Will Never Save Us
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got 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).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars):
Book 1: $2.99
Book 2: $3.89
Book 3: $3.89
Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
https://paypal.me/olduvaitrilogy?country.x=CA&locale.x=en_US
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
Solace Will Not Be Found Within Our Sociopolitical Systems — Biogeophysical Limitations Cannot Be Overcome By Way Of Policy
The following Contemplation is composed of some thoughts I had as I read through and reflected upon an article that was posted on the website Zerohedge. It argues that the policies being pursued by our political systems to address climate change are likely to result in greater human suffering and what is needed is better policy by governments.
While there are some pertinent points made (such as highlighting the abuses imposed upon some local populations where resources for non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies are being extracted from), my very first thought when I finished the article was “Why, that’s so cute that you still believe we live in a ‘democracy’ that ‘serves’ the citizens it purports to and is responsive to and cares about those citizens.”
This, however, is the default believe system for a very significant portion of a nation’s population and particularly those of the West that claim to live in ‘representative democracies’. It is one of the overarching narratives that people are exposed to from a very young age and it’s hard for any to see behind the curtain that has been erected by our socialisation/enculturation and the massive propaganda that is a part of that. The denial/bargaining/rationalising others engage in when this particular core belief is challenged is breathtaking to behold at times. Very, very few wish to view critically the notion that our political systems are ‘representative’ or ‘responsive’. They accept it as a given and do not wish their illusions to be destroyed lest cognitive dissonance overwhelm them.
I have written numerous times about this and won’t dwell on these points except to share links to a handful of those Contemplations:
Collapse Cometh X (Who Do ‘Representative’ Governments Truly Represent)
Collapse Cometh CXII (Our Banking System: Government vs. Private Control, Part 1)
Collapse Cometh CXIX (Local Community Resiliency and Political Systems)
Collapse Cometh CXXX (Only Local Leadership Can Help Communities Now)
Collapse Cometh CXXXVII (Local Self-Resilience Is Imperative to Pursue In Light Of Ecological Overshoot)
In addition, just as problematic (perhaps more so) in the rhetoric of the authors is their blindness to the limitations of what is being proposed and the bargaining and magical thinking that this entails. Yes, the policies being pursued by our governments are going to increase human suffering; but ultimately not in the way that the authors believe — they are going to exacerbate our ecological overshoot predicament and cause Nature’s reversion to the mean all the more chaotic and widespread.
While the sociopaths in our world leverage each and every worry/risk (e.g., climate change/global warming, war, economy, the ‘other’, etc.) to meet their primary goal of control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus power/influence/prestige, such analyses as presented here are as guilty of leveraging magical thinking to argue for something as profoundly misguided: the continuation of perpetual growth/progress on a finite planet through improved political policies. For example, they suggest implementing ‘responsible mining’ and ‘domestic production of complex technologies’ to avoid human suffering.
Such an approach appears blind to the energy/resource limits on a planet with biogeophysical constraints, and what can/cannot be accomplished with respect to ongoing growth and ‘progress’. Exponential growth of any species beyond the natural carrying capacity of its environment always leads to ecological overshoot and eventually collapse of the population. And there is ample evidence that humans are well into overshoot and have been for some time eating our seed corn (and creating self-congratulatory narratives) to avoid this truth.
Homo sapiens are no different from any other species in this regard. Except that we have a ruling caste that is leveraging the various symptom predicaments of overshoot (via ‘solutions’ to predicaments that have none, or to justify/rationalise invasion and occupation of resource-rich lands) in order to keep padding their offshore bank accounts and control their respective populations; and all the while they are helping to expedite the collapse of our complex societies and ecological systems in the process — mostly by drawing down finite resources to keep the mythos of perpetual growth/progress alive just a bit longer.
Yes, the vast majority of ‘solutions’ being marketed to address ‘climate change’ are mostly (if not totally) rackets being perpetrated upon society (e.g., ‘green/clean’ energy production, carbon capture and storage, Net Zero, electrification of everything) and the threats of our overarching predicament of overshoot (i.e., biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, atmospheric overloading, chemical pollutants, etc.) are getting lost in the kerfuffle — mostly through denial and bargaining.
And, yes, as diminishing returns on our investments continues to pick up speed with our exponential drawing down of resources, it is likely that the threat of ‘climate change’ or ‘war’ will be used to rationalise the need for massive ‘austerity’ (except of course for the ‘privileged’ minority) as our ruling caste attempts to protect and insulate themselves.
In fact, there’s a good argument that this approach has actually been occurring for a century+ and reality has simply been ‘papered over’ through massive currency devaluation and debt (hundreds of trillions of interest-bearing debt to date), and the increase of resource theft from regions outside the centre and not already overexploited (especially of hydrocarbons, the lifeblood of our societal complexities — there’s a reason the Middle East has been a quagmire for decades and the dominant nation coming out of World War 2 created the Petrodollar System).
But as William Yeats reminded us in The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”. The fall/decline of complex societies is a recurrent theme in human pre/history regardless of the policies of the ruling caste and the best technologies of the time. Diminishing returns on investments in complexity along with the predicament of ecological overshoot is resulting in this cyclical phenomenon shifting from regional collapse to being global in nature.
How this proceeds exactly this time around is anyone’s guess, but the process cannot be avoided…and without recognising the actual predicament of overshoot and its inevitable consequences our approaches to what is unfolding will continue to be misguided and simply make Nature’s correction all the more devastating.
And our political systems and ruling caste members are likely the very last place we should be looking for guidance on all of this given their primary motivation/goal requires doing the exact opposite of what our species needs to be pursuing: rapid and significant degrowth.
