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January 25, 2022
The ‘Predicament’ of Ecological Overshoot
The following contemplation has been prompted by some commentary regarding a recent article by Megan Seibert of the Real Green New Deal Project. It pulls together a couple of threads that I’ve been discussing the past few months…
There is no ‘remedy’ for our predicament of ecological overshoot, at least not one that most of us would like to implement. While it would be nice to have a ‘solution’, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner from which there appears to be no ‘escape’ — for a variety of reasons.
Most people don’t want to contemplate such an inevitability but the writing seems to be pretty clearly on the wall: we have ‘blossomed’ as a species in both numbers and living standards almost exclusively because of the exploitation of a one-time, finite cache of an energy-rich resource that has encountered significant diminishing returns but whose extraction and secondary impacts have led to pronounced and irreversible (at least in human lifespan terms) environmental/ecological destruction; this expansion of homo sapiens has blown well past the natural carrying capacity of our planetary environment and like any other species that experiences this the future can only be one of a massive ‘collapse’ — both in population numbers and sociocultural complexities.
Also like every other animal on this planet, we are hard-wired to avoid pain and seek out pleasure. But unlike other species we have a unique tool-making ability that we can use to help us address this genetic predisposition. So instead of accepting our painful plight and because of our complex cognitive abilities we have crafted a variety of pleasurable narratives to help us deny the impending reality — few of us ‘enjoy’ contemplating our mortality, so we avoid it or create comforting stories to soothe our anxieties and reduce our cognitive dissonance (an afterlife of some kind being one of the most common).
Throw on top of this the propensity for those at the top of our complex social structures to leverage crises to meet their primary motivation (control/expansion of the wealth-generation/extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and positions of ‘power’), and we have the perfect storm of circumstances to craft soothing stories of ‘solutions’ — especially through industrial production of ‘green/clean’ energy.
Conveniently left out of these tales (through both omission and commission) are the ‘costs’ of these ‘remedies’:
1) The actual unsustainability of industrial products dependent upon finite resources, including the fossil fuel platform.
2) The environmentally-/ecologically-destructive extraction and production processes required to construct, maintain, and then dispose of these ‘clean’ products.
3) The impossibility of any proposed energy alternative to fossil fuels to support our current energy-intensive complexities.
4) The social injustices being foisted upon peoples in the regions being exploited for many of the resources required for ‘green’ products.
5) The geopolitical chess games being played primarily over control of the resources — and the very real possibility of large-scale wars because of these.
6) The highlighting of immediately perceived benefits but the hiding of externalised negative consequences (that is made easier because of temporal lags in some of the effects).
Our propensity for ‘trusting’ authority combines with our desire to deny negative outcomes and leads the vast majority of people to believe that the oxymoronic solution of ‘green’ energy is real and achievable. Not only can we overcome the unfortunate consequences of our growth, but we can transition and sustain, no, improve, our standards of living if only we pursue with all our resources (both physical and monetary) the production of technologies cheered on by our ‘leaders’ — who just happen to profit handsomely from this. All it takes is belief…and, of course, the funnelling of LOTS of fiat currency into the hands of the ruling class.
Adding to the complexity of all of this, we walking/talking apes are highly emotional beings and loss impacts us significantly. We go through a rather complicated grieving process to come to grips with the negative emotions that accompany loss. The increasing recognition that we exist on a finite planet with finite resources and that we have reached or surpassed a tipping point in what we can ‘sustain’ of our social and physical complexities brings significant grief — few want the good times or conveniences to ever end. We experience a variety of stages in coming to accept our loss. Psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first proposed a five-stage process for this: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Most people, I would argue, are in one of the first three stages at this particular juncture of time. Many are still in complete denial. They continue to believe that things will work out just fine and that the Cassandras shouting about the apocalypse are just plain ‘kooky’. There are some who are indeed quite angry and they are protesting and demanding that our political systems address our issues. They are pushing back hard against the status quo systems, upset that they have been misled on many fronts. Then there are those who are bargaining hard and clinging to the idea that we can ‘tweak’ our current systems or find some ‘solution’, especially through the use of our technological prowess and resourcefulness.
Then there are those few who have moved into the acceptance stage. They recognise what has happened and what will happen. They have acknowledged the inevitability that the complex systems that we rely upon are well beyond our capacity to alter, except perhaps at the margins.
This is not to say those who have reached the acceptance stage have completely ‘given up’, which is an accusation often hurled by those in the earlier stages of grief — and usually along with a LOT of ad hominem attacks. Indeed those who I know accept our predicament are still ‘fighting’, as it were. They are attempting to: alert/inform others so as to not make our situation ever worse (which is exactly what technological ‘solutions’ do); pursuing marginal changes such as increasing the self-reliance/-sufficiency of local regions by advocating relocalisation and regenerative agriculture/permaculture, and/or advocating degrowth; and/or seeking solace through faith of some kind.
No one, not one of us gets out of here alive. Whether some of us or our descendants make it out the other side of the bottleneck we have created for ourselves is up in the air. I wish the stories that have been weaved about ‘renewables’ and the future they could provide were true but I’ve come to the realisation that the more we do to try and prolong our current energy-intensive complexities, the more we reduce the chances for any of us, including most other species (at least those that we haven’t already exterminated), to have much if any of a future.
A couple of relevant articles/links in no particular order of importance:
January 15, 2022
Decline of ‘Rationality’
Got involved in a discussion after an Facebook Friend (Alice Friedemann, whose work can be seen here) posted a study on the decline of ‘rationality’ over the past few decades.
My initial response was as follows:
My initial thought is that this shift is more the result of a paradigmatic shift in academia itself from ‘Modernism’ to ‘Post-Modernism’ that has slowly filtered into the mainstream than anything else. As a university student during the entire decade of the 1980s, I was exposed to A LOT of Post-Modernist philosophy that questioned ‘Rationality’. Off the top of my head I recall a number of the philosophies I was exposed to coming from such academics as: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Friedrich Nietzche, Martin Heidigger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stephen Jay Gould, G.W.F. Hegel, H.G. Gadamer, Thomas Kuhn, and Jurgen Habermas. The topics included: rationality, literary criticism, deconstruction, deconstructive criticism, hermeneutics, philology, metaphysics, and dialectics. These all reflected a questioning of the strict ‘factual’ or ‘rational’ universe at one level or another — especially the ‘subjectivity’ verses ‘objectivity’ aspects of ‘science’. Here’s just a few of the books I still have in my dwindling collection:
The conversation has brought back some of my interests that arose during my university education (the ten years were in the pursuit of four degrees from biology/physiology to psychology/anthropology that culminated in an M.A. in archaeology and B.Ed. for a career in education; retired almost ten years now). It’s been a while (decades) since I studied this stuff but here are my two cents on the topic:
There is definitely a difference between the hard/physical sciences and the soft/social ones. Measuring and observing chemical reactions, the movement of stars, or biological/physiological properties then projecting their past and/or future states is quite different then doing this when humans are involved in the equation, be it psychology, economics, history, etc..
Perhaps one of the reasons that the Post-Modern era occurred was the result of the social sciences attempting to legitimise their fields as ‘science’ in order to be taken more seriously. Regardless, I still believe humans cannot ever be ‘objective’, especially about themselves; there are just too many psychological mechanisms affecting our cognition. Then there are the ‘incentives’ that exist in research and academia that impact ‘science’; not only the interpretation of results but their use and distribution/publication.
I also believe that as an endeavour practised by very fallible human beings science cannot help but be ‘subjective’ in nature. On more than one occasion we can see the exact same physical evidence being ‘interpreted’ in diametrically-opposed ways by ‘experts’ in the same field, and consensus, if it does occur, can sometimes take place as a result of persuasiveness and influence of a group rather than as a reflection of the evidence itself. This makes one of the more important aspects of science, the modelling of future states, even more problematic — to say little about our ‘interpretations’ of past states.
Throw complexity, non-linearity, and chaos into the mix and everything becomes less prone to accurate modelling and interpretation, no matter how sophisticated or how much data is input. In fact, the more data and more complex the model the more prone it is to error, especially due to the assumptions that tend to get built into them. The smallest of input errors can result in the largest of output result errors.
Certainly there are some models and projections that are better than others and evidence leads to ‘laws’ that are for the most part, irrefutable; but for better or worse, science tends to work on probabilities and rarely absolutes, with the passage of time being the verification of how accurate the base assumptions and model are.
So, I think we need to be careful as Post-Modern thought is challenged and rejected that the pendulum doesn’t swing too far the other way and as some are doing attempt to place science upon a pedestal from which it cannot be questioned or criticised, ever. I’ve run into individuals who will not accept any questioning of ‘science’ or criticism of the endeavour. As soon as you pose a question you are labelled a ‘denier’ and ignored or attacked. Science is absolute, irrefutable, and always correct. Always.
One of the dangers I’ve observed in an unquestioning faith in ‘science’ becomes the increasing leveraging of cherry-picked science by the ruling class to justify/rationalise policy and/or actions; something that has happened in the past and that we seem to be seeing more and more of with it being accompanied by the insistence that the policy/action taken is absolutely correct, cannot be questioned, and anyone critical is anti-science, anti-rational, anti-government and should be silenced, ostracised, marginalised, deplatformed, etc., etc.. And it could very well be that the apparent increasing questioning of ‘science’ is the epiphenomenon of people questioning the ruling class, not necessarily the scientific process itself.
And while the above beliefs of mine may appear as anti-science to some I would argue they are not. They are simply critical awareness of the fact that science is an endeavour practised by very fallible human beings that live in a social world where they are pushed and pulled in numerous directions by a variety of forces that can and do influence the way they think and interpret their physical world. Add to this the (ab)use of ‘science’ by the ruling class and we have the perfect environment for controversy beyond a simple reflection about the human aspects of the practice of science.
We have to be very careful that science does not become a cult where its adherents are ‘righteous’ and ‘better than the others’ because of their ‘correct’ beliefs. That sounds an awful lot like using science to create a new religion to me.
I close with a passage near the beginning of an article on the idea of a ‘renewable’ energy transition by Professor Emeritus Dr. William Rees and Meghan Seibert that I believe is relevant:
“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.”
A few ‘related’ articles:
Fiat Currency Devaluation: A Ruling Elite ‘Solution’ to Growth Limits
Today’s post is my comment on the latest Honest Sorcerer’s piece regarding the misuse of the term ‘inflation’ and how currency devaluation and the coming energy squeeze overlap.
Another well-articulated summary of yet a further aspect of our species’ predicament brought about by a society’s attempts to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet and how our ruling class attempts to keep the party going for a tad longer (mostly for them and their ilk) as we bump up against and try to ignore the planet’s biogeophysical limits to growth.
Debauching a currency as a society continues to expand but encounters diminishing returns on its investments in complexity has a long and storied history. In fact, the ‘strategy’ of economic machinations of this type to kick-the-can-down-the-road as it were has been around for about as long as complex societies and their currencies have been. The most famous (at least for those schooled in Western cultures) is that of the multi-generational devaluation of the Roman denarius[1].
I penned a rather lengthy Contemplation on the economic manipulation we will experience increasingly as part of a series on our energy future. In this fourth and final installment (that aligns with your piece) I begin with this:
“In Part 1, I argue that energy underpins everything, including human complex societies. In Part 2, I suggest that the increasing need for diminishing resources, especially finite or limited ‘renewable’ ones, invariably leads to geopolitical tension between competing polities. Part 3 further posits that this geopolitical competition creates internal societal stresses that are met with rising authoritarianism and attempts at sociobehavioural control of domestic populations by the ruling elite.
Economic manipulation — mostly through the financial/monetary systems of a society, that the ruling caste controls — is part and parcel of addressing the societal stresses that arise as things become more complex (as a result of the problem-solving aspects of a society), competition with other polities increases, resources become more dear, and control of the population takes on greater urgency.”
Pre/history has witnessed this story play out countless times in a rather predictable fashion. First, a society addresses its various problems using the least expensive and easiest-to-achieve ‘solutions’. The surpluses that result from this approach allow for a society to continue expanding (hydrocarbons having strapped powerful rockets to this recurrent tendency). Eventually, however, diminishing returns on these ‘solutions’ are encountered. More expensive and harder-to-achieve ‘solutions’ are then pursued.
Surpluses can stave off having to abandon growth for a while but eventually a point is reached where the masses begin to bear the brunt of the economic contraction that accompanies expansion or even just to maintain the status quo — the elite finding ways to insulate themselves for as long as possible. In a society with a complex economic/monetary system, manipulation via currency devaluation is one of the go-to ‘solutions’ since it can disguise responsibility for the inevitable decline in living standards that are experienced from it while benefitting a few at the top of the power and wealth structures that exist in large, complex societies.
On the surface this approach can appear to be effective, and certainly the narrative managers that work on behalf of the ruling class to steer beliefs amongst the masses stress this to be the case. In reality, however, this currency devaluation is like eating one’s seed corn: it always ends badly, for everyone since it is stealing from the future…
I provide some further thoughts on this phenomena in these posts: Collapse Cometh IV; Collapse Cometh XI; Collapse Cometh XXXII; Collapse Cometh CXII.
December 21, 2021
On Narrative Control and ‘Fact Checking’
One of the areas of interest for me as I weaved my way through my ten years of formal post-secondary education (yes, I spent the entire decade of the 1980s pursuing four degrees at several different universities; some of it part-time as I waffled between education and full-time work for relatively good pay in a grocery store) was that of epistemology (the nature and origins of ‘knowledge’). It was likely the result of some of my required readings: Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Clifford Gertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures. Regardless, I ended up exploring (outside of my regular classes) such topics as deconstructive criticism, hermeneutics, and philology; interesting topics for someone who ended up teaching elementary school students (10 years) and as a school administrator (15 years).
Upon reflection, this exploration of how humans come to ‘know’ what they know (or at least what they believe) has led me to be rather skeptical of dominant narratives, especially of ‘authority figures’. My challenging of ‘authority’, as it were, may have come somewhat ‘naturally’ given I grew up in the household of a police officer. Not that I consider my dad to have been ‘authoritarian’, not at all, but the somewhat ‘natural’ pushback children can give to parents was slightly coloured in our household by the simple fact that my dad was a sociocultural authority figure on top of his role as a father.
Anyways, I believe I have always questioned to a certain extent the ‘popular’ stories we are exposed to. And as I’ve read more widely over the years, I’ve come to hold that these stories tend to always play to the pursuits of the people that dominate society’s economic and power structures. Reading Edward Bernays’ Propaganda, Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State, and Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance has certainly solidified that feeling. In fact, I’ve come to believe that the primary motivation of our ruling elite is the control/expansion of the wealth-generating/extraction systems that provide their revenue streams. Everything they do serves this purpose in one way or another. Everything.
As Chomsky makes clear in Hegemony or Survival, one of the dominant concerns of the ruling elite is controlling the masses. Without such control, their power and privilege is at risk since the masses far, far outnumber the elite.
Rothbard argues in Anatomy of the State even just simple, passive resignation by the people that the status quo structures are inevitable is enough to sustain them. To ensure such acceptance, the State employs ‘opinion molders’ to justify/rationalise/persuade the population of the beneficence of the ruling elite and that some alternative is far worse.
In Propaganda, Bernays sets out arguing that democracies being so complex require an unseen group of people to guide their ideas and beliefs so as to ensure cooperation. It is this special cadre that directs what stories/narratives are to be believed that is the real ruling power in a society, not its politicians. And, of course, Bernays became an important part of the US Empire’s storytelling to market geopolitical ‘interventions’ as adventures in nation building and spreading democracy.
So, narrative control is essential to maintaining power and privilege. One of the growing ways of controlling the narrative in a world of social media and non-mainstream/corporate digital news is to ‘disprove’ alternative stories. One of the more recent forms of such control has been the phenomenon of ‘fact checking’. Fact checking has been marketed as a form of objective and investigative research into claims disseminated by others. If one can ‘check’ the ‘facts’ and show them to be biased, prejudiced, misinformed, misguided, purposely false, etc., then one’s own narrative can be shown to be ‘true’ and ‘factual’.
It would appear, however, that the ‘fact-checking’ narrative itself is beginning to fray quite openly, perhaps reinforcing the accusation by some that the process of ‘fact checking’ is far more about giving the appearance of objective support for dominant/mainstream storylines (virtually always in favour of the power and economic structures that favour the ruling elite) rather than actually providing ‘factual’ buttressing of well-documented and evidentiary arguments.
Although you will have some difficulty finding the following stories in most (all?) mainstream/corporate media outlets (this is one of the ways legacy media censures stories; they simply don’t report on them at all or very marginally— see the organisation Project Censored for ongoing examples), there is increasing exposure that ‘fact checking’ is nothing more than another tool in the toolbox of narrative control/propaganda used by the ruling elite.
In a lawsuit by journalist John Stossel, Facebook has defended its ‘fact checking’ by claiming that the third-party fact checkers it uses are merely the ‘opinion’ of the fact checkers it depends upon and thus protected under the U.S.’s First Amendment. It’s ‘opinion’ not actually ‘factual’ so the lawsuit is frivolous.
In another accusation of wrong-doing, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has written an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta calling the censorship and flagging of some of their work very problematic. In fact, the editors of the journal called Facebook’s fact checking: “inaccurate, incompetent, and irresponsible.” Facebook/Meta has yet to reply.
We have a long-time journalist standing up to the fact-checking process and Facebook defending itself by stating these ‘fact checks’ are really just the opinion of others. Followed by a well-respected medical journal challenging Facebook’s fact checking as completely off-base and unfounded. Two pretty strong strikes against a powerful media’s supposed objective ‘fact checking’ and increasing censorship of non-mainstream stories.
I could go one with example after example of such blatant manipulation of narratives by our ruling elite and their so-called ‘fact checkers’ but what else is there to say? Except, if the mainstream/corporate media and/or government/politicians are pushing repeatedly a narrative (or purposely censoring one), then it likely serves the purpose of manipulating what you believe so as to maintain/expand the status quo power and/or economic structures of our society. Their stories, no matter the rationalisation/justification for them, should always be viewed critically and questioned. Chances are they are serving their narrow purposes, not the wider society’s.
I see this all the time in many of the energy/resource stories I read and the domineering economic paradigm through which the ‘facts’ are viewed at the expense of an ecological lens. And while there has been a growing incorporation of environmental/ecological concerns in the energy/resource narratives, it seems to me it’s more about crafting storylines that serve to leverage concern about natural limits to further expand wealth and control, and certainly not to address the notion that we can’t continue to pursue growth in any form in perpetuity without doing irreparable damage to the natural systems we depend upon for our very survival.
No, we can chase growth, employ everyone, and forever raise our standards of living by constructing ‘Net Zero’ buildings and electric vehicles, all powered by ‘clean/green’ energy, and living happily ever after. Comforting stories to be sure, but also ones that feed the insatiable profit-seeking of the ruling elite at the expense of the natural systems that provide our ability to be alive.
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong?
December 8, 2021
Exponential Growth, Natural Carrying Capacity, and Ecological Overshoot
The following very short contemplation was in response to some comments on an Andrew Nikiforuk article in The Tyee.
As an Apex predator, humans were on a path from the outset to likely overshoot the natural carrying capacity of their environment. As the late Dr. Albert Bartlett opines in a must-watch presentation on our inability to understand the exponential function: “…here we can see the human dilemma — everything we regard as good makes the population problem worse, everything we regard as bad helps solve the problem. There is a dilemma if ever there was one.”
As William Catton argues in Overshoot, we humans have had two approaches to overcoming carrying capacity limits and continuing our exponential population explosion and global reach/impact: the takeover and drawdown methods.
For millennia we relied upon taking over unexploited regions by migrating. The biggest boost came about with the European ‘discovery’ of a second hemisphere.
Then, a couple of centuries ago, we began exploiting the drawdown method that relies upon extraction of fossil energy to inflate the human carrying capacity.
Given that the drawdown method relies upon a finite resource, that avenue of extending the limits to our expansion could only ever be temporary. And, it would appear, we encountered diminishing returns on the drawdown method some decades ago but are only now really beginning to experience the limits imposed upon us by a finite planet.
Population biology shows us what happens to a species that comes to rely upon finite resources (or renewables ones that are over-harvested faster than can be replenished): population collapse.
We have this knowledge and awareness but for many reasons we tend to refuse to accept it. Instead we craft comforting narratives in our denial or bargaining to avoid thinking too deeply about it.
There is no solving this via our technology or ‘ingenuity’ (in fact, there’s a good argument to be made that our attempts to do this are actually expediting and adding to our overshoot by increasing our drawdown of finite resources, further overloading our planetary sinks, and further reducing our carrying capacity). Our refusal (for whatever reason) to degrow/downsize/power-down/etc. ensures we lose our chance to mitigate the consequences of our overshoot.
After posting this comment, Alice Friedemann (see her Energy Skeptic website) posted the following on Facebook. I encourage everyone to read this and consider signing it.
Avoiding ‘Collapse’ Awareness
The following is my comment on Alan Urban’s most recent post (see here) discussing his thoughts on why more people are not ‘collapse aware’.
The reasons you cite for most not being ‘collapse aware’ are part and parcel of a variety of explanations for this state of affairs. In my contemplations on the situation I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of this is due to human psychology and the mechanisms that help us to avoid anxiety-provoking thoughts.
First, we highly-cognitive apes deplore uncertainty and the idea of ‘collapse’ is all about an uncertain future and one in which we have little to no control over events. In response, we tend to grab a hold of stories that portray certainty, especially if they paint a more positive future (thanks optimism bias) — regardless of evidence to the contrary (see my posts that discuss this here and here).
In addition, we humans tend to defer to authority, get caught up in groupthink, strive to reduce our cognitive dissonance, and seek to justify our perceptions of the world (see my series of posts on these, beginning here). These aspects of human cognition make us most susceptible to certain forms of narrative management (aka propaganda), particularly stories that portray a comforting and certain future.
Then there’s what seems our complete and utter blindness to the underpinnings of our complex societies — energy — and the limits of our ability to sustain the quantities required to maintain our living standards (see my post series beginning here on this aspect). That we have been drawing down our primary source — hydrocarbons — at ever-increasing rates as we encounter the headwinds due to diminishing returns is increasingly rationalised away as simply a bump in the road since our ingenuity and technological prowess can address any impediments to our wishes/wants — physics be damned.
Add to the above the idea that perhaps the most important cognitive evolutionary shift for our species may have been where we became aware of our own mortality and then developed ways to deny this reality (see Ajit Varki and Danny Brower’s thesis here). Denying reality has become an entrenched means of reducing our anxiety, and it gets used often; and perhaps increasingly as the world goes sideways and provokes greater instances of uncertainty.
Combine the above with the hierarchical aspects of our social species and complex societies, and our story-telling means of communicating, and we have the perfect mix for why we rationalise away evidence for the impending ‘collapse’ of our current living arrangements and all the conveniences and comforts they afford us — especially in the so-called ‘advanced’ economies that have depended upon the lion’s share of what has been to this point in our history a growing supply of surplus energy.
We ignore the hard biogeophysical limits, we rationalise away the ecological systems destruction wrought by our demands, and we weave comforting narratives to avoid anxiety-provoking thoughts. We live in a world of what appears widely-held false beliefs where challenging them gets you ignored and/or ostracised by those clinging to mainstream notions. It’s often better to raise marginally-related topics and concerns to nudge others along a path of ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ as you suggest rather than confront the hard reality of limits and what overshooting them means to our future…
November 28, 2021
Energy-Averaging Systems and Complexity: A Recipe For Collapse
Supply chain disruptions and the product shortages that result have become a growing concern over the past couple of years and the reasons for these are as varied as the people providing the ‘analysis’. Production delays. Covid-19 pandemic. Pent-up consumer demand. Central bank monetary policy. Government economic stimulus. Consumer hoarding. Supply versus demand basics. Labour woes. Vaccination mandates. Union strikes. The number and variety of competing narratives is almost endless.
I have been once again reminded of the vagaries of our supply chains, the disruptions that can result, and our increasing dependence upon them with the unprecedented torrential rain and flood damage across many parts of British Columbia, Canada; and, of course, similar disruptions have occurred across the planet.
Instead of a recognition that perhaps a rethinking is needed of the complexities of our current systems and the dependencies that result from them, particularly in light of this increasingly problematic supply situation, we have politicians (and many in the media) doubling-down on the very systems that have helped to put us in the various predicaments we are encountering.
Our growing reliance on intensive-energy and other resource systems is not viewed as any type of dependency that places us in the crosshairs of ecological overshoot and unforeseen circumstances, but as a supply and demand conundrum that can be best addressed via our ingenuity and technology. Once again the primacy of a political and/or economic worldview, as opposed to an ecological one, shines through in our interpretation of world events; and of course the subsequent ‘solutions’ proposed.
Our dependence upon complex and thus fragile long-distance supply chains (over which we may have little control whatsoever) is not perceived as a consequence of resource constraints manifesting themselves on a finite planet with a growing population and concomitant resource requirements but as a result of ‘organisational’ weaknesses that can be overcome with the right political and/or economic ‘solutions’. Greater centralisation. More money ‘printing’. Increased taxes. Significant investment in ‘green’ energy. Massive wealth ‘redistribution’. Expansive infrastructure construction. Higher wages. Rationing. Forced vaccinations. The proposed ‘solutions’ are almost endless in nature and scope.
All of these ‘solutions’ have one thing in common: they attempt to ‘tweak’ our current economic/political systems. They fail to recognise that perhaps the weakness or ‘problem’ is with the system itself. A system that has built-in constraints that pre/history, and population biology, would suggest result in eventual failure.
Archaeologist Joseph Tainter discusses the benefits and vulnerabilities of ‘energy averaging systems’ (i.e., trade) that contributed to the collapse of the Chacoan society in his seminal text The Collapse of Complex Societies.
He argued that the energy averaging system employed early on took advantage of the Chacoan Basin’s diversity, distributing environmental vagaries of food production in a mutually-supportive network that increased subsistence security and accommodated population growth. At the beginning, this system was improved by adding more participants and increasing diversity but as time passed duplication of resource bases increased and less productive areas were added causing the buffering effect to decline.
This fits entirely with Tainter’s basic thesis that as problem-solving organisations, complex societies gravitate towards the easiest-to-implement and most beneficial ‘solutions’ to begin with. As time passes, the ‘solutions’ become more costly to society in terms of ‘investments’ (e.g., time, energy, resources, etc.) and the beneficial returns accrued diminish. This is the law of marginal utility, or diminishing returns, in action.
As return on investment dropped for those in the Chacoan Basin that were involved in the agricultural trade system, communities began to withdraw their participation in it. The collapse of the Chacoan society was not due primarily to environmental deterioration (although that did influence behaviour) but because the population choose to disengage when the challenge of another drought raised the costs of participation to a level that was more than the benefits of remaining. In other words, the benefits amassed by participation in the system declined over time and environmental inconsistencies finally pushed regions to remove themselves from a system that no longer provided them security of supplies; participants either moved out of the area or relocalised their economies. The return to a more simplified and local dependence emerged as supply chains could no longer provide security.
Having just completed rereading William Catton Jr.’s Overshoot, I can’t help but take a slightly different perspective than the mainstream ones that are being offered through our various media; what Catton terms an ecological perspective. And one that is influenced by Tainter’s thesis: our supply chain disruptions are increasingly coming under strain from our being in overshoot and encountering diminishing returns on our investments in them (and this is particularly true for one of the most fundamental resources that underpin our global industrial societies: fossil fuels).
What should we do? It’s one of the things I’ve stressed for some years in my local community (not that it seems to be having much impact, if any): we need to use what dwindling resources remain to relocalise as much as possible but particularly food production, procurement of potable water, and supplies of shelter needs for the regional climate so that supply disruptions do not result in a massive ‘collapse’ (an additional priority should also be to ‘decommission’ some of our more ‘dangerous’ creations such as nuclear power plants and biosafety labs).
Pre/history shows that relocalisation is going to happen eventually anyways, and in order to avert a sudden loss of important supplies that would have devastating consequences (especially food, water, and shelter), we should prepare ourselves now while we have the opportunity and resources to do so.
Instead, what I’ve observed is a doubling-down as it were of the processes that have created our predicament: pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet, using political/economic mechanisms along with hopes of future technologies to rationalise/justify this approach. While such a path may help to reduce the stress of growing cognitive dissonance, it does nothing to help mitigate the coming ‘storms’ that will increasingly disrupt supply chains.
The inability of our ‘leaders’ to view the world through anything but a political/economic paradigm and its built-in short-term focus has blinded them to the reality that we do not stand above and outside of nature or its biological principles and systems. We are as prone to overshoot and the consequences that come with it as any other species. And because of their blindness (and most people’s uncritical acceptance of their narratives) we are rushing towards a cliff that is directly ahead. In fact, perhaps we’ve already left solid ground but just haven’t realised it yet because, after all, denial is an extremely powerful drug.
November 25, 2021
Overlooking Ecological Overshoot
Today’s thought was prompted by an Andrew Nikiforuk article in The Tyee and my recent rereading of William Catton Jr.’s Overshoot.
I just finished rereading William Catton’s Overshoot. One of the things I’m coming to better appreciate is Catton’s idea that the ‘Age of Exuberance’ (a time created by human expansion in almost all its forms and mostly facilitated by our extraction of fossil fuels) has so infiltrated our thinking that we tend to view the world through almost exclusively human-created institutional lenses, especially economic and political ones. We have come to think of ourselves as completely removed from nature: we sit above and beyond our natural environment with the ability to both control and predict it; primarily due to our ‘ingenuity’ and ‘technological prowess’.
This non-ecological worldview is still very much entrenched in our thinking and comes through quite clearly in mainstream narratives regarding our various predicaments. Usually it goes like this: our ingenuity and technological prowess can ‘solve’ anything thrown our way so we can continue business-as-usual; in fact, we can continue expanding our presence and increase our standard of living to infinity and beyond (apologies to Buzz Lightyear).
What are by now increasingly looking to be insoluble problems appear to have been solved in the past by two different approaches that Catton describes: the takeover method (move into a different area via migration or military expansion) or the drawdown method (depend upon non-renewable and finite resources that have been laid down millennia ago). On a finite planet, there are limits to both of these approaches.
But because of our tendency towards cornucopian thinking, most analyses overlook the idea of resource depletion or overloaded sinks that can help to cleanse our waste products that accompany growth on a finite planet. It’s all about economics, politics, technology, etc..
Our traditional ‘solutions’, however, have probably surpassed any sustainable limits and instead of being able to rely upon our ‘savings’ we have to shift towards relying exclusively upon our ‘income’ which, unfortunately, doesn’t come close to being able to sustain so many of us. To better appreciate the increasing need to do this we also need to shift our interpretive paradigm towards one that puts us back within and an intricate part of ecological systems. Ecological considerations, especially that we’ve overshot our natural carrying capacity, are missing in action from most people’s thinking.
The first thing one must do when found in a hole you want to extricate yourself from is to stop digging. Until and unless we can both individually and as a collective stop pursuing the infinite growth chalice, we travel further and further into the black hole that is ecological overshoot with an eventual rebalancing (i.e., collapse) that we cannot control nor mitigate. Our ingenuity can’t do it. Our technology can’t do it (in fact, there’s a good argument to be made that pursuing technological ‘solutions’ actually exacerbates our overshoot).
It is increasingly likely that a ‘solution’ at this point is completely out of our grasp. We’ve pursued business-as-usual despite repeated warnings because we’ve viewed and interpreted our predicament through the wrong paradigm and put ourselves in a corner. It is likely that one’s energies/efforts may be best focused going forward upon local community resilience and self-sufficiency. Relocalising as much as possible but especially procurement of potable water, appropriate shelter needs (for regional climate), and food should be a priority. Continuing to expand and depend upon diminishing resources that come to us via complex, fragile, and centralised supply chains is a sure recipe for mass disaster.
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
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.
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.
Ruling Elite Rackets Everywhere…
My very brief comment on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article:
Throw on top of our energy predicament the overarching predicament of ecological overshoot and the situation is even more explosive.
And I can’t help but think that since everything in our world has become a racket for our ruling sociopaths in one way or another, the dominoes will fall even more quickly — especially for the masses of non-elite in our world.
I expect even more expansive surveillance, narrative management/control, authoritariansim, ‘othering’, price inflation , ‘austerity’, divisive politics, civil disobedience, denial/bargaining, breakdown of rule of law, sociobehavioural control, economic manipulation, geopolitical manoeuvring and clashes, etc., etc., as the-powers-that-be scramble to maintain their tenuous grip on control and sustain the various wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus power and prestige.
Homo sapiens have learned nothing from all the previous trials in large, complex societies and will indubitably repeat the same failed approaches to holding the centre that so-called ‘leaders’ have attempted repeatedly before our current experiment. What will be will be with respect to the insane and suicidal actions/policies of the ruling elite.
Intelligent creatures, just not too wise.
Personal/community ‘energies’ are best directed towards relocalising as much as possible in the limited time available to us, but especially food production, potable water procurement, and regional shelter needs. Any steps towards self-sufficiency in these basic needs will help (marginally) to mitigate the ‘collapse’ for some.
Most People Don’t Want Their Illusions Destroyed
Another one of those conversations with someone at the Degrowth Facebook Group I am a member of…
JM:
I’ve just had a lengthy debate with good-willed people who are serious proponents of a rapid transition to renewables. People actually do understand how far beyond carrying capacity we are and why but they do not accept their own understanding. When I suggest that humanity must live within the photosynthetic energy budget of the current biological cycle, the reaction is repulsion, anger, and ridicule. That reaction is a visceral understanding of the carrying capacity of Earth’s systems and that the only reason society exists beyond that capacity is the infusion of energy. The response is that renewables can supply plenty of ‘clean energy’ to support ‘society’. People see and are unwilling to relinquish the societal upside of our energy subsidy, and argue that the ecological downside can be managed, but do have an unacknowledged understanding of how far past carrying capacity we are.
AD:
I start to think we need to start from arguing that we have less than half a century of oil left — and explicitly accept the ‘right-wing’ argument that our wealth has been built on fossil fuels. We had a single planetary shot at using fossil fuels well, and we are in the final stages of squandering it. After the oil is gone, there will be no more rubber, bitumen or plastic. There will be no paint; there will be no drugs. There will be no way to make or transport the solar panels or wind turbines. If we insist on burning our chemical stocks for things that do not address essential human needs, we will run out of ways to address those needs. The issue is not ‘energy’ per se: it is resources more broadly — clean air and water; a functioning ecosystem, including fertile soils; raw materials for manufacture. You can’t make a tyre for a Tesla out of nuclear power…
Me:
AD, Throw on top of all this those dangerous complexities we’ve got scattered about the planet that require large amounts of hydrocarbons to maintain: nuclear power plants and their waste products; chemical production and storage facilities; and, biosafety labs. Interesting times ahead…
AD:
SB, I’m talking more about ‘how do we convince people’, though.
Me:
AD, It’s next to impossible to ‘convince’ others. Most people don’t want their illusions destroyed.
AD:
SB, Ultimately, the only reason I’m on a group like this is because my hope is to see degrowth achieved, which will require convincing people. What are your reasons for being on the group?
Me:
AD, To learn and share my learning/understandings. And degrowth/simplification is coming, it’s just a matter of how that’s still up in the air. Pre/historical precedents and biological principles suggest it won’t be ‘managed’.
AD:
SB, Which biological principles are those?
Me:
AD, Those associated with ecological overshoot primarily.
AD:
SB, I think you are talking through your hat.
Me:
AD, Then I suggest you read Meadows et al’s The Limits to Growth, Tainter’s The Collapse of Complexity Societies, and Catton’s Overshoot to better understand.
AD:
SB, asked you why you thought people couldn’t be convinced of a need to change. You replied, ‘because ecological overshoot’. That’s the non-sequitur that I called you on.
_____
My final response:
AD, Your comments/responses do not make it clear that you asked ‘why people couldn’t be convinced’; you asked why I was in the Degrowth group. Regardless, not sure if you’ve ever studied psychology (especially social psychology) but there are strong tendencies to protect oneself from anxiety-provoking thoughts — and the notions of collapse, overshoot, etc. are certainly those. So, I don’t know if it’s possible to convince/persuade many others of the need to change fundamental aspects of their behaviour unless they are willing to challenge many of their core beliefs and expectations; and most people, quite frankly, are not. And, I would argue, that tends to be human nature.
From attempts to reduce cognitive dissonance (see Festinger’s work), to the grieving stages outlined by Kubler-Ross (particularly denial and bargaining), to beliefs about agency (we have little, if any), tendencies towards deference to authority/expertise (see Milgram’s work), going along to get along and groupthink (see Janis’s work), to a potpourri of biases (especially confirmation and optimism bias) and heuristics that lead us to overly-simplify complex phenomena, Homo sapiens tend to ‘believe what they want to believe’; reality often plays a minor role in it, if at all.
As an article on the faulty beliefs about ‘renewables’, co-written by Dr. Bill Rees (of ecological footprint fame), argues: “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.”
Given these psychological mechanisms, our story-telling ways of communicating and developing belief systems, recent historical trends, energy blindness, and the huge role of propaganda/narrative management by our ‘ruling elite (see Bernays’ work) we tend to get overwhelmed by counter-narratives to our core beliefs and gravitate towards those that reinforce our own — regardless of how wrong or counterproductive they may be.
We very much rail against evidence that do not confirm the beliefs we hold. We deny. We ignore. We craft bargaining narratives to rationalise away ‘facts’ that don’t support our thinking; i.e., if only this happened…if we did this…yeah, but….
It is for these reasons above (along with others) that the quote “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed” arose (often attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche). And it is for these reasons that the overwhelming majority of people will not and cannot be convinced to give up what they perceive as ‘modernity’ (i.e., all the hydrocarbon-based complexities we have established over the past century+).
We, especially in the West, like to believe we are rational and objective but the overwhelming evidence would suggest otherwise. We are story-telling apes that have a strong tendency to craft tales to support our belief systems rather than develop belief systems based upon objective observations. Humans are exceedingly subjective.
Perhaps this is why author Robert Heinlein quipped that “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalising animal” in opposition to Aristotle’s definition that humans are a rational animal.
And it’s not simply enough to come up with a factual, persuasive argument but to have to overcome the massive counter narratives being fed to everyone by our ruling elite who benefit greatly from the status quo…
My personal experience strongly supports the observation that the significant majority of people do not want to be convinced that just like all living organisms, societies have an expiration date, and we can no more persuade everyone to ‘do what’s right’ than we can ‘science our way out of overshoot’.
Not only do we have a strong urge to deny our own mortality, we have a strong (perhaps even stronger) one to deny the mortality of our society and the living standards/expectations it holds for virtually all within it.
