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It’s All Chemistry, Isn’t It?

April 28, 2024

It’s All Chemistry, Isn’t It?

This is #29 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.


Chart above is my own invention, having studied the various chemicals that scientists believe are involved in feelings of intense love.
The title of this post is a quote attributed to Jimi Hendrix, when he was asked in an interview to explain the special chemistry he had with his audiences.

It’s impossible not to look at them. They are possessed, so utterly consumed by the flood of chemicals feeding off each other that they are oblivious to everyone else in the café. Their feral passion for each other is at once riveting and disconcerting. A man noticing their antics looks disapprovingly. A woman looks at them with a torn expression, a mixture of what might be dismay and (perhaps nostalgic) envy…

… But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Back to this couple in a moment.

This body has taken me for a walk, today, to the nearby lake. It’s a rare sunny spring day here on the temperate rainforest coast, and there are lots of people about.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about bonobos and chimps, our cousins from which we separated evolutionarily about six million years ago, and with whom we still share almost 99% of our DNA. As Robert Sapolsky discovered with his suddenly-matriarchal and peaceful baboon troupe, the rather extraordinary differences in behaviour between chimps and bonobos in the wild (most people can’t tell them apart) are not biologically, but culturally conditioned. Chimps and gorillas evolved on the north side of the Congo river; bonobos on the south side. The river was too wide for the species to cross…

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

Childhood: Conditioned to Pretend to Know

April 24, 2024

Childhood: Conditioned to Pretend to Know

barsotti-nobody-knows-anything
 New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti
When I was a young child, I would look at my parents and other adults interacting with each other, with a mixture of bewilderment and amazement. “Surely”, I thought to myself, “they don’t really believe what they’re saying. It must be like an act, like the adult form of playing — they’re just pretending to know what they’re talking about, ‘playing’ at being adults.”

I was always a ‘slow learner’. I didn’t mimic adults’ behaviour like a lot of kids. I had been conditioned to try to understand what was going on, and why it was happening, before emulating anyone. And I was conditioned to always speak the truth, no matter what, which meant waiting until I thought I had some idea of what the truth in a particular situation really was. In many situations I never did have any idea what the truth was, so my conditioning drove me to stay open and assert no opinion — which drove other children and adults crazy.

So lots of kids learned ‘social graces’ — like how to behave in ritual situations (church, parties, school), and how to converse (what was permissible and advisable to say, and not permissible or advisable to say, to certain classes of adults, to get their approval, regardless of what one really believed). Not me.

I never learned how to sweet-talk, how to coerce, how to ridicule, how to deceive, how to persuade. Why would one ever want to learn and practice such dishonest skills? So I didn’t talk much, and largely withdrew from social contact both with other kids and with adults. I couldn’t understand their behaviour, and didn’t much want to learn it, even if would make my life easier.

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

A Blameless Explanation of Why Everything is Falling Apart, for Schoolkids

April 18, 2024

A Blameless Explanation of Why Everything is Falling Apart, for Schoolkids

If I were invited to talk to a group of students (of any age) today, to explain why everything seems to be hopeless and falling apart, this is what I think I would tell them.


When I was young and idealistic, back in the 1960s — back when your grandparents were your age — everything seemed possible. We’d apparently forced an end to the ghastly war in Vietnam through our massive protests. We were strident environmentalists, really believing we could avert the global ecological disaster many were already predicting.

There were seven things in particular we thought were true and important to fight for, and there seemed to be nearly universal agreement that these goals were both possible and desirable to achieve:

  1. world peace
  2. an equitable (re-)distribution of wealth (and power) — enough that everyone could live a comfortable life, and not so much for anyone that it would inevitably lead to waste or abuse
  3. radical action to halt and reverse ecological destruction — we already knew back then about the risk of catastrophic climate change
  4. women’s equality, and autonomy over their own bodies
  5. free, universal, quality health care, education, employment security, old-age security, and public transportation
  6. enforced regulations to rein in capitalist excesses and oligopolies, and ensure clean, safe communities and workplaces, and
  7. a truly democratic polity — a system where the citizenry was well-informed, and the political system was democratic and responsive to the citizens’ collective will.

We didn’t believe that any of these goals would be easy to achieve, but in the late 1960s we thought they were possible. In fact, it was generally considered the absolute responsibility of governments to work towards and sustain these seven goals.

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

Acceptance, Forgiveness, Gratitude

April 14, 2024

Acceptance, Forgiveness, Gratitude


Since I’ve come to the (tentative) conclusion that we have no free will (and that in fact there is no ‘self’ to have free will), it’s utterly changed the lens through which I see the world. I now see that our behaviour is completely conditioned by our biology and our culture, given the circumstances of the moment, and that ‘we’ have no ‘choice’ but to do what we do. We are all doing our best (though that is often, seemingly, pretty awful), and no one is to ‘blame’. For anything. Even though our conditioning, so often, causes us to inflict, and to suffer, horrible violence and trauma.

As I’ve internalized this, my writing has morphed from describing what I think ‘should’ be done to instead just trying to understand why (ie as a result of what conditioning and what circumstances) things are as they are. So I now use the ‘reminders’ list above, to cope with the accelerating collapse of our civilization and its component systems, instead of any action or preparation list. We can’t act, after all, other that how we’re conditioned, and we can’t prepare for something we cannot possibly predict.

Still, even this list is really wishful thinking. I cannot ‘choose’ to do or not do these things. I can, perhaps, by keeping it in front of me, track the degree to which my behaviour does or does not align with these ‘reminders’. If that helps me to cohere somewhat to these reminders, it is only because that is what my conditioning already inclines me to do. Everything is determined (ie a consequence of our conditioning, and of the circumstances of each moment, neither of which we have any agency over), but nothing is determinable (ie predictable, because, unless we are gods, we cannot know how we are next going to be conditioned, nor what the circumstances of each moment will be).

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

How De-Dollarization is Likely to Play Out

February 13, 2024

How De-Dollarization is Likely to Play Out


Much has been written in recent years about “De-dollarization” — the shift from the use of the US dollar as the “international reserve currency” in favour of more diverse bi-lateral and multi-lateral currency agreements and transactions.

The current system has a long and complicated history, but its most essential features are as follows:

  1. In 1944, with the war grinding on and currencies in crisis, most countries signed on to the Bretton Woods Agreement, which “required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce”. The US dollar hence replaced the “gold standard” with US dollar reserves, rather than amounts of gold, being what each country was required to maintain to support the fixed rates of exchange. The IMF was simultaneously established to enforce the Agreement.
  2. This replacement of gold with the US dollar created for the US what is called exorbitant privilege. It means that basically they can create (print into existence) additional US dollars without limit and without any requirement that they be supported by assets, and other countries are required to honour them as ‘real’ money. As a result, the US can run up unlimited deficits (eg through reckless military and ‘security’ spending), deficits that would render any other country bankrupt and lead to a crippling devaluation of their currency and severe IMF-imposed restrictions on future spending  (as has happened to many ‘developing’ countries in the Global South).

…click on the above link to read the rest…

What the “Rules Based International Order” Really Means

December 5, 2023

What the “Rules Based International Order” Really Means


This map, from Multipolarista, shows the US-centred Empire bloc of nations (in red) that subscribe to the US-invented Rules Based International Order. The countries in green do not recognize that order, and they continue to support de facto a UN-centred international system governed by international law.

There was a meeting a couple of years ago between the US and China where the two sides — pro-Empire and pro-Multipolarity — each used their own coded language to express what they had been conditioned, very differently, to believe to be in the best interests of world order and security. Clinton Fernandez, an Australian professor and former intelligence officer, recounts the event in his book Sub-Imperial Power:

AT A HIGH-LEVEL SUMMIT between the United States and China in March 2021, the US Secretary of State said he was ‘committed to leading with diplomacy to advance the interests of the United States and to strengthen the rules-based international order’. The director of China’s Foreign Affairs Commission countered by saying that China and the international community upheld ‘the United Nations–centred international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called rules-based international order’.

China was essentially saying that the ‘rules-based international order’ was simply a euphemism for the will of the (US) Empire, and that China would fiercely oppose that Empire in favour of an ‘international order’ underpinned by international law (ie governed, at least ostensibly, in the interests of the people, not that of corporate wealth and power, and based on bilateral negotiations between autonomous nations, not the edicts of Empire).

This is perhaps the ultimate expression of the 21st century’s greatest “clash of ideologies”, one that could quite conceivably end in nuclear annihilation…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Why We Cannot Prevent Collapse

July 20, 2023

Why We Cannot Prevent Collapse


my own graphic; right click on image to open in a new tab and enlarge or download

Yes, I know — every box in the ‘vicious cycle’ graphic above is hugely debatable. But you know, I’m just tired of debating it. I think it describes what’s going on in the world both at an individual and at a collective level, for just about all 8 billion of us mildly deranged apes, reflected in our public behaviours, our public discourse, and in the heads of people I’ve met of every political persuasion and position of authority.

Derrick Jensen famously said that if we pay attention to the natural world and ‘listen to the land’ we will know just what to do. That’s the ‘know’ in quotation marks in this chart, which attempts to explain why, for very human reasons, although we ‘know’, we don’t, with few exceptions, and can’t collectively at any scale, do anything about it.

I’ve used “mass coherent collective action” (aka “the Great Turning”) as the example of salvationist thinking in the chart; it’s the “humanist” style of salvation myth of most people I know. I could have easily used any of the other classical or current salvation myths — the rapture, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, geoengineering, “great transition”, neosurvivalism, posthumanism etc — they all serve the same useless (in practical terms) comforting function. Nothing wrong with them as long as they’re seen for what they are, and are not.

Thanks for the inspiration to a number of collapsnik writers who have been musing helpfully on this subject, particularly about personal and collective human agency, about our human propensity to obfuscate and put out of mind truths we don’t want to deal with, and about our inclination for disingenuous wishful thinking — including Erik Michaels, Indrajit Samarajiva, and Tim Morgan.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

How Do We Teach the Critical Skills Needed to Face Collapse?

October 16, 2022

How Do We Teach the Critical Skills Needed to Face Collapse?

So civilization, at least as we know it, is going to collapse — political, economic, social, educational, health, transportation, technological systems all will fail, a bit a first, and then more and more.

We have no idea when it will be complete — could be in 10 years, or in 40. We have no idea how it will play out — how quickly, where first, what systems and governments will go first.

We don’t even know how people will react to this Slow (and Permanent) Emergency. So how can we possibly prepare for it?

I think the best answer to this is to teach a lot of people a lot of skills, hard and soft, that they don’t currently have, so that we’re kind of ready for anything. Here’s a list of ten possibly critical soft skills, and ten possibly critical hard skills, that very few of us (in most countries) are competent at at the moment. The ones in italics are, IMO, those that it is important that most people learn; for the remainder, it’s important that some people in each community be very competent at them:

Soft Skills:

  • Critical thinking — the ability to think for yourself, reason things through, be self-aware of how emotions play into each issue, and basically the capacity to study, research, analyze, problem-solve and learn without being spoon-fed.
  • Group facilitation — the ability to help groups work and think collectively, achieve consensus, resolve conflicts, and manage themselves, notably by modelling exemplary facilitation skills themselves.
  • Helping people cope — the ability to counsel others on dealing with and healing from loss, uncertainty, fear, grief, shame, anger, anxiety and other emotions that will inevitably arise and make people dysfunctional as the crises of collapse unfold.
  • Preparing healthy food — the ability to cook and otherwise prepare, blend, and complement foods “from scratch”.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The End of the Common Good

December 6, 2021

The End of the Common Good


image by Gopal Vijayaraghavan on flickr, CC-BY-2.0

Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gopal, a doctor and a journalist, have been researching vaccine hesitancy for decades. In a recent NYT article they offered this remarkable perspective on it:

Over the past four decades, governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services. This has two important consequences for public health. First, people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them. And second, public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves. That means an important source of vaccine hesitancy is the erosion of the idea of a common good.

One of the most striking examples of this transformation is in the United States, where anti-vaccination attitudes have been growing for decades. For Covid-19, commentators have chalked up vaccine distrust to everything from online misinformation campaigns, to our tribal political culture, to a fear of needles. Race has been highlighted in particular: In the early months of the vaccine rollout, white Americans were twice as likely as Black Americans to get vaccinated. Dr. Anthony Fauci pointed to the long shadow of racism on our country’s medical institutions, like the notorious Tuskegee syphilis trials, while others emphasized the negative experiences of Black and Latinos in the examination room. These views are not wrong; compared to white Americans, communities of color do experience the American health care system differently. But a closer look at the data reveals a more complicated picture.

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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