physics of happening

September 24, 2006

We are saved!

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 1:38 pm

From: phil henshaw
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2006 12:25 PM
To: ‘overpopulation@googlegroups.com’
Subject: RE: We are saved!
All,

Doespopulation collapse solve population explosion? I call that quandary the game of intellectual ‘pin the needle’, arguing by extremes that are all off the chart. You see it all the time, like the Republican abhorrence of taxes because 100% taxation would slow down the economy. It’s amazingly seductive, apparently because people are so heavily influenced by fear, and lots of people who should know better are shameless in exploiting it.

Perhaps you could think of the evidence of simultaneous population explosion and collapse asdifferent responses to the same thing bycommunities which are self-controlledcompared to those thatare not. The ’smart’ choice for people in productive and responsive communities is to cut their reproduction toward extinction responding to the rising planetary burden of those who don€™t, while the people in unproductive and unresponsive communities multiply uncontrollably on the surpluses of the communities they’re replacing by the difference in their growth rates. When the first group disappears the other group rapidly undermines their own life supports and the second wave of the grand collapse makes it final…. (throwing in a little ‘pin the needle spin there at the end for excitement).

Well, I guess that solves the problem….sort of.

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Responding to:From: bob.heinonen
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 10:40 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: We are saved!

I just got through reading an article in the new Smithsonian magazine (October, 2006) entitled €œ300 Million and Counting€ by Joel Garreau. The title refers to the U.S. population count and that the U.S. is the third most populated nation in the world behind China and India.

First he talks about Paul Ehrlich€™s book €œThe Population Bomb€ of 1968 and how wrong it was. Then he says,

€œThat€™s why some people find it hard to wrap their minds around the big news in demographic circles today. It€™s not catastrophic population growth. It€™s catastrophic population shrinkage.

€œYes, shrinkage. True, the total global population has not yet finished increasing. But nearly half the world€™s population lives in countries where the native-born are not reproducing themselves fast enough to replace themselves. This is true in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russian, Japan, Canada and the United States. It’s also true in much of East Asia, pockets of Latin America and such Indian megacities as New Delhi, Mumbai (Bombay), Kolkata (Calcutta) and Chennai (Madras). Even China is reproducing at levels that fall short of replacement.

€œTypically, a couple has to produce about 2.1 children to replace themselves, allowing for death among the young. Even in traditionally Catholic countries in Europe, the birthrate has dropped to shockingly low levels in the last two generations: 1.3 in both Italy and Spain in 2005. In metropolitan Tokyo, the rate dropped to 0.98. In Hong Kong and Macau, it hit 0.96 and a hitherto unthinkable 0.84, respectively. Few demographers ever dreamed that in the absence of war, famine and pestilence €“ the fact, as a result of urbanization, development and education €“ birthrates would drop so dramatically. No one knows where the bottom is. Keep this up, and eventually your civilization will disappear.

Why does the author have such a totally opposite view from this group? And why did Bombay, Calcutta and Madras change their names?

Bob Heinonen

where doing good is the harm we’re fighting

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 1:27 pm

From: phil henshaw
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 1:38 AM
To: ‘overpopulation@googlegroups.com’
Subject: RE: Another good link to ponder
 

All,
One reason I see to criticize a great organization like NRDC (I’m a long standing member too) is that one of their effects is to divert the effort to heal the planet away from dealing with the central problem.   They and other genuinely well intended efforts to protect the earth are, in their physical effect, really just putting on a show of addressing the problem, diverting attention to various immediate ‘newsworthy’ issues and away from the relentlessly widening impacts of our fundamentally unsustainable development process.     
 
There’s a growth turning point for any natural system where multiplying good becomes bad, that we passed for most things, say 50 to a 100 years ago, and are bounding merrily along thinking that we’re still multiplying good, though the net effect has become the opposite.   That we’re not watching and these turning points sneak up on us is obvious, and that we need to learn to look for such things should be too.   On our road to infinity, where are the tipping points?   It’s a good question, that’s never been widely asked.
 
It may be a bizarre truth, but nearly everyone trying to effect change is caught up in multiplying what used to be ‘good’ that now has the actual effect of multiplying harm.   NRDC’s approach would work fine if there was not a growing cause of environmental impacts…. the institutionalized growth imperative of business, that they explicitly avoid mentioning, fixing its smaller impacts as bigger ones relentlessly develop.   It’s not from malintent in any way.   It’s from a shared mistaken perception held by both the ‘do-gooders’ and the ‘do-badders’ , that good intentions are good enough, even when the actual whole effect, fairly easily traced from a self-critical approach, is the opposite.

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Responding to:
From: Frank Vraniak
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 9:52 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Another good link to ponder
 

Let me get this right. The NRDC statement is lacking in insight but they are doing something and not just throwing ambiguous e-mails back and forth. We are making feeble attempts at making sure that we survive and it is better to “watch the world go round’” and do nothing. The fight against global warming is for the protection of us against the devastation of nature but lets not save nature because it really doesn’t support us in any way, shape or form. Got it. We are own best enemy but we are just now starting to look in the mirror and should destroy ourselves because we don’t like what we see. I am complicated but I am only the enemy if I choose to be. I know who my enemies are and they are ignorance, selfishness, greed, as well as a few others. Those are the enemies that cause the problems. They reside in people but not all of the people. The enemy is pretty simple if you ask me.       
 

—————————————————
Responding to:
From: Espey, Lawrence L.
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 7:59 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Another good link to ponder
 

Frank,
Although a mission statement is important, the NRDC statement is lacking in insight.  Nature (not mankind) ‘knows’ best how to “safeguard” itself.  This is the precise reason Homo sapiens is threatened with extinction.  Most, if not all, of our efforts to be “stewards of the Earth” are, in fact, only feable attempts to save our own habitat.  It is “us” that needs protection, not Nature.  As the cartoon character Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us!”  We are a terribly complicated enemy.
I wish you well.

————————————————— 
Responding to:
From: Frank Vraniak
Sent: Fri 9/22/2006 6:36 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: Another good link to ponder
 

All,
This is a mission statement from the NRDC.I just thought maybe we could move forward a bit and see if we are going to come up with one. Or am I just whistlin’ Dixie? Here is the link. It may be a good framework for something that I thought we were doing and not just talking about. “My opinion”,
Frankhttp://www.nrdc.org/about/mission.asp

Frank Vraniak’s Motto: I accept myself as a kook and a dreamer. Are there more of us than there are of you?

can ‘intelligence’ have an impact?

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 1:14 pm

From: phil henshaw
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2006 8:09 PM
To: ‘overpopulation@googlegroups.com’
Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation
Bob,
 
Perhaps if you thought of each kind of intelligence as a different language, only capable of receiving and interpreting certain kinds of nature’s phrases, you’d get the meaning of ‘cultural’ that I intended.   There’s women’s intelligence, for example, often quite different from men’s.   They may not be so hot on controlling things as men are, or even care about the kinds of devious schemes we dream up to bend the world to our will, but boy! wouldn’t we all live impoverished lives without their different way of seeing things, their fundamentally different intelligence?   

When you look around you begin to realize that a lot of the big differences between people we see are from their having different kinds of intelligence for the world, seeing and responding to entirely different totally real things.   We can catch glimpses of that now and then, but mostly we are simply not aware of what we’re not aware of.    No crime in that inherently, of course, but if you’re confronting mysterious problems, looking in the big grab bag of what lies beyond the narrow window of our own intelligence is a pretty good place to start!   Yes, what we all think of as the whole world is a small window on a real one that seems to just get ever richer the more we discover about it.
 
Naturally a graphic model with a back-up of physics principles, my suggestion that the everything fits a ‘bump on a curve’, takes getting used to.   I see no indication that any of the numerous things that make humans a very different kind of species changes the basics of reality though.   We’re still unable to change instantaneously, reach infinite heights or keep things from beginning and ending.   If you accept those three principles, you accept my model.   What will make it meaningful or useful may be different, of course.
 
I’m not so sure we’ve recognized the processes that are threatening the earth.   I still don’t see anyone else trying to make sense out of the enormous harm most people do by trying to do good without looking at its whole effect.
Regards,
 
Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Responding to:

From: bob.heinonen 
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 2:40 PM
Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation
Phil
I guess I am thinking of a biological self awareness type of intelligence more than a cultural intelligence.  Since no other system, that we are aware of, has had that critical ingredient, can we really assume that “symmetric evolutionary development processes” apply to humans.  After all, we have 1) recognized and defined the processes and, 2) are trying….right here….to overcome them for humanity.
Bob Heinonen
——————————–
Responding to:

From: phil henshaw
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2006 11:37 PM
To: ‘overpopulation@googlegroups.com’
Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation
Bob,
Well that’s the problem, it sure *seems* like intelligence is some definite benefit, but when you ponder the situation I find that what we take for intelligence applies only to a particular context.  It’s different in every culture, and we don’t know who’s going to be able to pick up our form of intelligence, and many don’t seem able to.   People have different intelligence for different things, it’s culture based, like another level of language.   The Chinese, for example, just developed the knack for economic ‘intelligence’ very recently, despite evidently having considerable native intelligence all along, just like all the people in the currently failing societies do too.
 
One of the things I’ve had the most fun with in life is stretching my intellect to be able to understand quite a lot about how natural systems work, only to find that I had gone so far outside the common culture of ideas to do it, and that my knowledge is of almost no use in a land in desperate need of it.   It’s really strange, for example, that science has almost nothing whatever to say about what growth is or what it’s for.    Growth is primarily for giving birth to things, but it runs itself, and we just don’t study things that run themselves… science only studies how things are controlled.   Studying control it the key motive, power and great failing of our intellect.   Things of nature that are not controlled are virtually invisible to us.  
 
That’s why I suggest people closely watch growth, because growth is a reliable tell-tale sign of an autonomous organism going through an unstable creative development process.    You watch that little up tick pulse of events to see what all is part of that flow.   It produces something like great stories at first, but then when you get comfortable with things all around you being half alive and acting as individuals, nature ends up looking much more natural than before, and you find more interesting things to do.
 
It’s true that what’s happening to mankind right now is unprecedented, and for that we get both a great show and a great responsibility.   Change is always unprecedented, of course, because nature is highly creative.    This is the only time, however, mankind has gone through the turning point of a growth process completely transforming our existence in only 600 years!    The turning point is where the organizational steps switch from ‘leaving home’ to ‘heading home’, from increasing to decreasing instability.   The solid global consensus professional plan is to prevent that at all costs.   If we fail to achieve that in a non-destructive way, my opinion is that we’re being born as a new species.   It seems so very unlikely, both because it’s such a strange idea, and because the financial growth imperative is extremely well defended and the most dangerous limit, multiplying confusion, seems to be developing quickly.
 
I’ve seen a transformative path to the insight that would allow us to ‘not blow it’ for some time, but it runs into huge natural defensive barriers for the old ways of thinking as well as the core problem, that we can’t even wonder about what we can’t see.    Every true leap in logic is all heart, of course.   Is it possible that people have good hearts?   There certainly are a lot of signs of a new enlightenment chasing after old fears.  One I like to point out is that we still may complain about ‘the rich’ and be legitimately worried that they have no idea what their power is good for, but actually, they’re mostly nice people.   There used to be real cruel overlords on top of every pile of money, but we’ve largely evolved beyond that.    Now, if we only knew what to do!
 

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Responding to:
From: bob.heinonen
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 8:54 AM
To: ‘overpopulation@googlegroups.com’
Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation
Phil,
I hear what you are saying.  But isn’t there one ingredient that all those system don’t have that we do have…intelligence.  Doesn’t intelligence have an impact on the progression of growth, climax, disordering & decay?  Maybe that is an unfair question since we know of no prior situation.
 
Can we make a leap in logic that says that intelligence can have an impact on the “symmetric evolutionary development processes”?  And that we as a group may be at least a part of the intelligence that has that impact?
 
Bob Heinonen

religion and overpopulation

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 12:53 pm

From: Phil
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2006 12:24 AM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
All,
I can hear that having a clear direction would be a relief and its own reward. The direction I hear being taken, though, is one that sounds the same as the ones taken many times before with much effort and commitment, and I don’t hear any sense of curiosity about how the others might have gotten lost along the way and why they failed to accomplish what they set out to do, or perhaps made matters worse.

Natural systems are so incredibly complicated. They frequently do things quite backward from how we think, and don’t come with any instruction manual… and we ARE talking about further interfering in natural systems that we appear to have made a mess of already. I’ve spent a lifetime closely observing them, all kinds. I developed a rigorous observation method. It’s my sig. ¸ ¸ ¸ ¸. · ´ ¯ ` ·. ¸ ¸ ¸ ¸

To understand any system you need to understand it’s complete life cycle. Systems are evolving loops of relationships (their ‘inside’) that begins with unstable growth, that either upsets it’s own development by achieving a stable climax (amazing magic) or by disintegrating at the peak of its ’success’ by overextending its connections. You don’t see as many of the latter because they don’t survive for us to see. If a living system invents a way to climax it may maintain itself with homeostasis for a while, but eventually starts to fall apart and then finally decays.

That’s 4 symmetric evolutionary development processes, growth, climax, disordering & decay, each quite different, each much the same, with one stable state in the middle. That’s all there is to systems theory, except for connecting it to the events all around us. Only you can do that. You don’t actually need any more except to simply watch systems behave, be a perceptive and unbiased observer, and slowly accumulate an understanding.

When the house is on fire, is it a good time to study the theory of combustion? Well, yea, if that’s not the only thing you do, and you feel a certain lack of understanding of what’s happening. Maybe it’s just a matter of the stove that was stoked too hot and all you have to do is send the fire tender on another errand and let it cool down! There’s all sorts of things to learn from how habits get stuck on multiplying what’s ‘good’ without considering the whole effect.

Phil Henshaw ¸ ¸ ¸ ¸. · ´ ¯ ` ·. ¸ ¸ ¸ ¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Replying to:
From: Melanie Szabo
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 10:06 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation
 

I also agree with Bob’s viewpoint. It would be a sad, sad world with human beings as the only living beings. For me, nature and all its creatures have medicinal, spiritual and restorative powers. Everything in nature offers lessons that we can learn, but unfortunately, most people believe nature is here only to serve us. Nature in and of itself is not a final means to an end. I tend towards Rationalism and some Transcendentalism (in that I think an ideal spiritual state is only realized through the individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions), and I agree with Stan about not needing €œno church, no book, or no weekly sermon to feel something spiritual.
Melanie
—————————————————
From: Frank Vraniak
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 8:00 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation
 

All, I agree with Bob’s view that it needs to encompass all beings on the planet. Most of humanity has forgotten about the other living creatures that have no say so in the matter about how the world is run or destroyed. My thoughts,
Frank
 

From: bob.heinonen
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 4:37 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation
 

That is a good basic definition, but Bonnie left an open end on the statement. €œthan the earth has resources to support € implies support of only humans. Should an expression of the overpopulation problem include concern for the welfare of all species (animal, plant, any living creature), not just humans? Or should the expression only revolve around the welfare of humanity?

Bob Heinonen
 

Replying to:
ChynahMoon
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 4:22 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: religion and overpopulation
Times New Roman”>
I imagine it could have many meanings but for us, as simply put as possible, does it not mean that there are more people on earth than the earth has resources to support?

Bonnie

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
–Margaret Mead

September 16, 2006

RE: Good ideas, so far, more still needed . . .

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 8:15 pm

9/15/06
Eric & all,
>Stan said:
> >Frank said:
> >I agree wholeheartedly that there are way too many people on this
> >planet using way too many resources. As far as what to do
> >about it, I think we should do nothing.
> In my opinion this should include doing nothing to help
> people live longer. Use medicine to alleviate pain, but not
> to prevent dying.

I don’t have time tonight, but I think this is a very important part of
the puzzle. How to do what we can and know how to feel about the
tragedies we’re unable prevent. The outside interventions in other
people’s societies that have been failing us for a long time, sometimes
just multiplying the tragedy to come, need to be stopped by a
combination of being reinvented, and the wisdom of accepting the things
we can’t change.

Sometimes the problem with aid programs has been interpreted as making
people aid dependent, standing in line waiting for hand-outs, rather
than assisting them in becoming independent. It’s been one of the big
issues for the neocon radicals, used to attack government aid of all
kinds. In the Times today there were two stories on it. Front page a
story about how the Palestinian community has become totally aid
dependent and suffering now that their government is out of favor. Then
on the front of the Business Section Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon chairman
of the World Bank, was in the news for holding up dozens of agreements
due to poor protections against corruption. He gave it to seem that
lots of nations are demanding their handouts and perhaps not willing to
provide sufficient safeguards, others thought he was just being mean.

It reminds me of the special anger the neocons reserved for Bill Clinton
for taking their idea of reforming welfare, redesigning it as a ladder
for people to climb on rather than a trap to get caught it, and taking
the ‘wrath of God’ purpose the neocons really wanted away from it. He
got it enacted as an act of more intelligent generosity instead. Boy
they hated him for that….

So, just curing disease and feeding the starving children, the charity
button, is the wrong motive because it often just multiplies the
problem. There’s got to be a right motive for allowing some
preventable tragedies happen, other than the temptation many people are
drawn to, that helping other people is a kind of robbery and any tragedy
is just punishment for people being undeserving.

Phil

RE: Good ideas . . .

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 8:07 pm

9/13/06
Eric & all,Thanks for asking. Let me just attempt to describe the ship and the wave idea. You know any great graphic designer types? It could be a good poster, and could make good money too!The idea of turning the ship of mankind into the wave of calamities coming at us, is so we don’t get blindsided and capsize. It would be a matter of doing one thing right, even though we get everything else wrong. It’s also about the common idea that you can’t learn from habitual mistakes until you watch as you make them.If you make a big mistake 10 times without seeing how it happens, it could happen to you 100 times. But when you see it as it’s happening, once or twice, then you don’t do it again. My best realistic hope for us is that we become aware enough of the genuine hidden errors of our ways to be watching as the earth’s bounty crashes down around us…

The specific wave I’m talking about is the wave, or more accurately, the wall, of complicated decision making that is rapidly approaching us as the unexpected consequences of exponential growth multiply and go out of control and our capacity for making competent decisions fails us. There’s a profound synergy of confusion and missteps developing as the destructive limit to growth. It’s not just huge over-consumption, species and ecological collapse, growing helpless populations and global warming. We also have ballooning imaginary finances, a new perpetual state war and extreme government dysfunction just when it’s most needed. There are also many of our ’solutions’, like promoting growth with conservation, that simply make things much worse. Then there’s, just, plain, speed. Growth is inherently a continuous acceleration of radical changes. Everyone is beginning to feel the swell of disorder, but its also swelling almost majestically, as if it were normal. Well, it is. It’s what necessarily happens to growth that doesn’t have other limits. If we’re alerted to watching it, i.e. turn the big ship and face the swell head on, we’ll have a chance of weathering it, blaming the wave instead of other things, learning from it as it crashes down on us. It could well be a profound tragedy to watch too, of course.

Living systems are a juggling act, amazingly entertaining and resourceful, but if the balls multiply and the juggler gets confused, chaos ensues and all the balls fall down. After systemic collapse you can’t simply flip a switch and restart a complex system. It has to regrow, and our not having the resources to do that any more could slow us down quite a bit further. The wall of complexity we’re heading into could collapse this whole seemingly vital and thriving world of ours the way Katrina collapsed New Orleans, or worse. We can hope a system shock comes early and is less than severe, giving us more evidence, and time for real insight to grow and spread.

——

Maybe we could work some of that into the Apology to our Grand Children… I also don’t want to focus exclusively on the ’sword of Damocles’ that we are clearly walking into. There’s also that ‘next bigger fish’ of mine. The growth of complex systems in nature is quite frequently for the purpose of giving birth to entirely new things. The possibilities seem very small that our amazing continuous 600 year growth process will have that happy end, but they’re definitely there.

My apology is that I haven’t written the book, having spent my time struggling to find any language I could speak in. In the mid 70’s I stumbled across this whole can of worms, in the guise of trying to understand what ‘approximation’ in science was leaving out. Approximation leaves out ALL the messy bits. That includes ALL the natural processes which connect things, and ALL the natural processes that are out of control, which for me was a real feast of discovery once I figured out how to spot them. It’s a long story.

Is any of this suggestive?

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

> Hi Phil,

…….clip

> I am still most intrigued with your big approach to turning
> the ship
> into the waves. We need to brainstorm about how we could
> accomplish
> this, even in slight ways.

> Eric R. Pianka
> The University of Texas at Austin

 

 

 

RE: Another dropout

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 8:02 pm

Hi all,
Lawrence needs no excuse to give time to his other interests, but he
said something intriguing. He said he was also withdrawing partly
because he found something disconcerting, but he couldn’t say what.
When I notice that in myself I take it as a real discovery, something
deep speaking up, a beginning of insight that remains poorly formed, a
little loose thread of hidden truth. It could be many things of course,
but two things come to mind. He seems accustomed to very civil
discourse, in a healthy world. We’re looking at the opposite on both
counts. In our discourse there’s a little taste of how what’s
physically happening to the earth is becoming quite ugly.

That does certainly distress me too, but I’ve been watching it intently
for a very long time, with methods designed for the purpose of studying
things that are out of control, and I have my own focus and some other
ways of letting those bitter feelings go. What I do still find
distressing concerns the fact that mankind has clearly failed to build
appropriate knowledge for this situation, our overwhelming the earth,
and we’re in trouble. That our conversation is ‘mixing it up’ and a
little disorderly is fundamentally good as I see it. To paraphrase a
fairly sound evolution theory, if you’re lost and experiment with
breaking the rules you’re following, it’s scary but you’re more likely
to find the real path. So I don’t mind people speaking quite freely.

One rule I keep breaking that’s a problem for some, a rule of polite
conversation, is by trying to speak about new truth. I also mix in
colorful and poetic language, with the purpose of having fun and being
disarming, perhaps adding a little context to fill out slightly
difficult ideas. It doesn’t usually bother me that people don’t do the
obvious thing and ask questions. I keep hoping they’ll mention where it
is they feel they must certainly be misunderstanding it, etc. But
leaving out that skeptical collaborative feedback, leaves out the
process required for people to combine perspectives in making genuinely
new things. Silence, which is what you’ve been giving me, gives me next
to nothing to go on.

When I suggest we reverse principles, and instead of giving things to
poor communities, we buy things from them instead, what do you think I’m
talking about?

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

RE: What do we do now?

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:54 pm

Eric & all,

Kitty offered a great question about a historical scholar friend who argues that life is so much better now we shouldn’t complain.

From my view there are lots of things you could point out to him.   He probably understands that there’s a limit to any one thing.   You can also have too much of any ‘good’ thing.   An endless explosion of ‘good’ is the most sure way of getting you there.   Everything begins with growth, but things that end with it end in sudden disarray.   Any of those examples I gave of natural systems that get in trouble with growth essentially do the same thing, keep multiplying what’s ‘good’ until it overwhelms their internal or external relationships.  

One of the common descriptions of the phenomenon is the ‘Fairy Tale’ about “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.    Do you see any sign of our having unleashed a run-away phantom producing wealth for us, and now going totally out of control??     The most stunning thing about this is that the endless multiplication of ‘wealth’ is the world consensus plan of all the ’smart’ people.    Clearly nature is throwing us a major curve, turning our ingenuity against us in a profound way, and we should be both in awe of what’s happening as well as angry and active in questioning everything about it.
One of the signs that something different is going on today than in prior times is that the incomes of working Americans leveled off 35 years ago, with high end incomes continuing to multiply as before.    That’s very different from how the economy grew before.   Note that 1970 is also about the time when sensitive people noticed we were beginning to collide with the environmental limits of the earth!    Part of my interpretation is that some parts of the economy have been more successful in shedding the complications of the growth conflicts than others.   The details are complicated partly because any system is complicated, but also because the complications brought on by our growth collisions with each other and natural limits on a small earth are a little like turbulence.  They’re explosions of complication from unexpected places that’ll never be explained.   Mostly we just call it overload and wave it off.   That’s part of why we’re so slow to respond to global warming and things.   The new complications of living on earth are still there, though, doing their job of slowing the system down, starting from the bottom up it seems….   Maybe the top just lifts off and floats away by itself, finding some other universe where its principles actually apply…?    I’m sure they’d like that, but expect something else will happen.
What can we do?   I have a simply defined procedural proposal, that also has significant complications.  It could be called the ‘SR feedback switch’.    All that means is to switch off the automatic growth driver of global finance resulting from investors ’R'einvesting their returns (in businesses obligated to produce more) instead of choosing to ‘S’pend them.   Seeing that as a solution follows from interpreting the problem as being that source of otherwise endless exploding feedback of competition.   It’s rather elemental cybernetic steering (i.e., meaning no more than ‘when going too fast ease back on the throttle’) but seems beyond ‘rocket science’ level economics.   No economist I know of has done anything but laugh at.    Another proposal is NDR, or ‘negative discount rate’.   That’s something proposed by other people, with similar responses from the establishment whose oddly warped thinking is the cause of the problem…    I also don’t understand it well enough to interpret.   It is supposed to have the same global effect, though.    I think the tour bus is way off the map.    We’ll have to see what happens.
I hope you could follow this.   Would be glad to clarify.   Thanks for your great questions Kitty,
—————-
 To Phil, Bruce, Eric, and the group,
I know an individual who’s an historical scholar (especially of Medievalism) as well as much influenced by Carlo Cipolla’s lectures and writings (pre- and post-industrial society, Berkeley, ’70s) — so he’s knowledgeable and articulate about life up to the Industrial Revolution but particularly how we’ve benefited from it.  And his contention is that life is so much better (i.e., easier) now that this alone renders ‘doom-ism’ null and void.  (While to me this is pitting apples vs. oranges.)  So when we discuss the inability of many organisims to adapt to changing geophysical environments (and their extinction), his argument is that humans clearly possess this ability, “just look around you,” he says with a flourish.  His contention is that our ’ingenuity’ — our ability to cool the air around us, avoid the contagion of polio, fly to the great cathedrals of Europe… — is the scale of our intraplanetary ’success’.
So one very real element we’re dealing with here is the determination of man to see technology, medical science, and the luxury of convenience as a cloak of security against an overpopulating planet — the tendency to view this scenario as “but I have gained!”  Intrinsically, I agree with Eric — that our arrogance can’t (mathematically) go on — that we have hit critical mass.  The overriding question is:  At what point do individuals recognize that we are in a habitat that’s bigger than our air-conditioners?  
I received an e-mail the other day from a group member, saying “…but what can we do about it?”   Ans:  Persevere by articulating a platform (and quickly) and getting the informed word out.  I watched Eric’s “Infowars” interview – and it’s pretty hard to twist his words into abject fatalism when he talks about setting-up his granddaughters’ college funds…  We do have hope — all of us.  Let’s work on a platform, shall we? 

Kitty  

RE: better examples?

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:47 pm

Great extra questions!
Bruce
> Phil,
> Concerning growth systems that killed themselves, why
> not just look at a few major corporations (which are in
> essence, growth systems) and see what happened to them?
> Anyone remember Montgomery Ward? Where are they now?
Like most classic American businesses it grew quite large and then
stabilized, became a ‘cash cow’ for feeding investments in other things,
and by the time it’s owners recognized the shape of threatening new
competition it was too stuck in old habits and couldn’t adapt. It had
to be broken up for parts.

> How about General Motors (”What’s good for General
> Motors is good for the USA”)? How are they doing now?
GM is a more modern company. My sense is that it’s been remaking itself
about every 20 years, more or less successfully. Modern businesses try
to encourage new ventures within their own organizations, trying to
remain ‘forever young’. That’s very hard to do when whole industries
come and go ever more rapidly with continuously multiplying amounts of
money feeding into investments to replace everything doing the
production… (That’s one of the weirdest one’s to me! You wouldn’t
want to stop change, but it’s worse to endlessly accelerate it.)

> Let’s go back further to the East India Company or the
> Hudson Bay Company. What’s happened to them?
I’m sure there are great books on each. It’s always a compelling story
of visionary people doing great things that turn out not to be so useful
anymore down the road. Time passes them bye.

> Look at Ford, IBM, or a host of other companies that
> made up the Dow Jones industrials just 50 years ago. Most of
> them are gone or in deep trouble.
There are a number of the giants companies that are struggling, and a
number that are adapting to become more versatile and creative.

> Or, perhaps look at dynasties the once ruled the earth
> (or some significant portion of it): Persia, Rome, Greece,
> Egypt, Babylonia, the Norse Vikings, the Ottoman Empire,
> Spain, England, China (which is the only one on the ascent
> again at this point), etc. They all had their day in the sun,
> and where are they now?
Come and gone… It certainly is curious why each of these long stable
ways of living seemed to loose interest and vanish. Good modern
examples of this that are just a little more dramatic, but the same
thing I think, are the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the
sudden collapse of the NYC crimewave. In both cases it strongly appears
that the social cultures turned off to their former way of life and let
it just fall to pieces.

> Will any of those suffice for your purposes? If not,
> let’s all try again.
Well, actually, you picked wonderful examples, but not a one that had to
do with failure caused by uncontrolled growth (from growing competition,
yes, but not from its own growth). A couple from history would include
the Biblical reference to a Tower of Babel and multiplying languages and
the California gold rush disasters.

Phil

> Bruce Barnbaum
>

RE: better examples?

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:44 pm

9/6/06
Eric & all, A few days ago I asked: Can anyone offer other examples of growth systems that get into trouble from being unable to control their own limits? People don’t seem to understand how the best of intentions lead human systems to overshoot, so looking at natural ones might help us understand the problem. Here’s an interesting one that can’t be studied in detail. It was a long time ago and this is all the data there is, a plankton species transition that went through overshoot and partial collapse 4 or 5 times as it evolved from one to the other…!

http://www.synapse9.com/G.tumida.pdf

——————–Well I guess not getting any real examples means getting used to the question. It really is hard not to take familiar things for granted. There are lots and lots of things which get into trouble from uncontrolled growth. I thought I’d get more of a response. Growth in most systems begins as a run-away process, like fire, and a sign of lacking either external or internal limits is something that grows so fast that it blows itself out, kills its host or rips apart and stops functioning. It’s also called ‘overshoot’.

‘Good’ bombs are designed to consume all their explosive, and bad bombs scatter their parts before the ignition is complete. Some of the ones I made as a kid were that way. Sometimes when you strike a match it starts off with a bang that blows the match out. There are lots of species, generally in what’s called the ‘r-selected’ group, that multiply furiously, like locusts and grasshoppers, way beyond sustainable population limits, as a general practice. They die back in the extreme, rest a little and try getting to infinity again, and again.

There’s the growth of human populations among people who don’t have a habit of learning, who see their self interest in having large families, expediting it to make them more secure. They multiply toward the point of making their lives quite insecure for exploding numbers of reasons when they hit the wall of confusion and disorder at the end. There’s also cancer and all the other diseases that kill their host by uncontrolled growth. Cancer isn’t smart. It’s only definition of good is multiplication, which is bad for it.

Generally the economists and businessmen of the last couple centuries have thought there would be no limit to economic growth because the earth and our imaginations were thought to be limitless, and so our only definition of good became multiplying wealth. I’m one of what seems to be a considerable majority of global systems thinkers who expect the limits of economic growth to be exceedingly hazardous for us. Why the people driving the growth toward overshoot and collapse, some of the most aggressive learners on the planet, are not aware of what’s happening seems to have to do with competitive advantage. They’re absorbed in a game, and there’s no one to tell them how it ends. With a global consensus on where to draw the line, and there is one, we could change that, but it’s not likely to happen.

You could add to the list lots of other things. It’s a very broad phenomenon. Anything that ‘gets out of control’ generally can be traced back to excessive multiplication of what was originally well ordered and stable. Party’s get out of control sometimes, for example, as to arguments. Some people, well probably most people some times anyway, get pleasure out of skirting the edge of control and ‘playing dangerous’. One thing I’ve never figured out is where chain letters go. They multiply explosively, but there must be some sort of message that builds up as they spread that ‘this is not real’ and they probably collapse abruptly and vanish at their largest point of expansion.

Growth is also the process by which everything that becomes stable gets its start. Things that are going to end up reaching and holding a higher level of development do something different. Finding that difference is really the question. We need to find useful and practical ways to enable self-control for things that are vital to us and seem to be heading beyond.

Does that help?

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..then responding to Bruce,

Great extra questions!

> systems) and see what happened to them?
> Anyone remember Montgomery Ward? Where are they now?

Like most classic American businesses it grew quite large and then stabilized, became a ‘cash cow’ for feeding investments in other things, and by the time it’s owners recognized the shape of threatening new competition it was too stuck in old habits and couldn’t adapt. It had to be broken up for parts.

> How about General Motors (”What’s good for General
> Motors is good for the USA”)? How are they doing now?

GM is a more modern company. My sense is that it’s been remaking itself about every 20 years, more or less successfully. Modern businesses try to encourage new ventures within their own organizations, trying to remain ‘forever young’. That’s very hard to do when whole industries come and go ever more rapidly with continuously multiplying amounts of money feeding into investments to replace everything doing the production… (That’s one of the weirdest one’s to me! You wouldn’t want to stop change, but it’s worse to endlessly accelerate it.)

> Let’s go back further to the East India Company or the
> Hudson Bay Company. What’s happened to them?

I’m sure there are great books on each. It’s always a compelling story of visionary people doing great things that turn out not to be so useful anymore down the road. Time passes them bye.

> Look at Ford, IBM, or a host of other companies that
> made up the Dow Jones industrials just 50 years ago. Most of
> them are gone or in deep trouble.

There are a number of the giants companies that are struggling, and a number that are adapting to become more versatile and creative.

> Or, perhaps look at dynasties the once ruled the earth
> (or some significant portion of it): Persia, Rome, Greece,
> Egypt, Babylonia, the Norse Vikings, the Ottoman Empire,
> Spain, England, China (which is the only one on the ascent
> again at this point), etc. They all had their day in the sun,
> and where are they now?

Come and gone… It certainly is curious why each of these long stable ways of living seemed to loose interest and vanish. Good modern examples of this that are just a little more dramatic, but the same thing I think, are the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the sudden collapse of the NYC crimewave. In both cases it strongly appears that the social cultures turned off to their former way of life and let it just fall to pieces.

> Will any of those suffice for your purposes? If not,
> let’s all try again.

Well, actually, you picked wonderful examples, but not a one that had to do with failure caused by uncontrolled growth (from growing competition, yes, but not from its own growth). A couple from history would include the Biblical reference to a Tower of Babel and multiplying languages and the California gold rush disasters.

Phil

> Bruce Barnbaum

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