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What to do... to steer our unmanageable world 3/6/10 |
Observe the world with fresh open eyes, and use what you do for a lasting purpose. It's enriching.
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In
a phrase, what we need is purpose for growth other than creating solutions
that become too complex to manage. |
What is most important is for mankind to learn how to stop trying to multiply our control of nature. It's curiously hidden from us, how we are trying to remake nature in our image instead of trying to become part of nature as one of its brilliant accomplishments. A "small matter" in some ways, now causing the multiplying conflicts in our own interests now directly resulting from "forging ahead" with our ancient misguided plan. I discuss many sides of that on my site, but you probably need to just be open minded and come to your own original view before my approaches will really help I think.
Many people want to know how they can individually reduce their negative impacts on the world, or promote positive change. Our culture has not show us a way to study how change accumulates in nature though, or what animates natural events, ever. So as we discover how nature has changed it will be unavoidably creating a new culture. Our old trusted ideas of how to solve things, investing in growing solutions to have more money to invest in more growing solutions, is essentially what's now causing growing problems. So we also need to observe what animates the way we choose solutions, asking where do our belief come from anyway, as part of rediscovering our world and new purposes.
Everyone has to make consumer choices, but is what you buy the right question? The positive effect of buying apparently low impact consumer goods is likely to be small compared to the accumulative effect on both yourself and your world of using what you buy for a lasting purpose. Choosing what to buy also still supports an economy that needs ever growing impacts to remain financially stable, for example. It would have a lasting accumulative effect to question that, and a negative accumulative effect to be satisfied that buying the right things in doing your part, and remaining unaware of what the economy does with your money.
Choosing the right things to spend on has weak influence for two other very good reasons, that help you see how nature accumulates effects. Most money you spend will have average impacts per dollar, or about 3/4 lb of CO2 and adding to our economy's control of nature by 3% of the price. So by having nearly the same average impact per dollar buying expensive "green" products does more harm than cheap products. You could buy cheaper products, but because you'd then buy more that strategy also offers no escape... and neither alters the system causing the problem at all.
The key, as with so many vexing problems, is changing the question. It's not what you buy, but what you use it for. Whatever you spend on, judge it by how well you or others can use it to change the future. It's not what needs you serve today. It's the lasting meaning of what you do with your choices. A switch to sustainability is one from satisfying wants to having a lasting meaning for the world around you. 3/5/10 3/8
We need to, as a whole community, get off the path we are on but seem captives
in a spiral of seeing how far we can push our presently narrowing path before it
closes out entirely. It's like the housing bubble, but it's a bubble of thinking
we can and need to take ever increasing control of our environments. That we can
control things better in the short term is the illusion that keeps us thinking
we can control ever more things in a misbehaving world without losing control in
the long term.
That is a complete illusion, of course, just the same way the limitless
appreciation of housing values was an illusion, a bubble of misinformation
created by a circle of little self-deceptions... that we all thought was fun but
turned out badly. What we need to figure out is how to allow things that are
naturally uncontrolled to take care of themselves, a different path to making
peace with nature. 3/6/10
The real trouble with understanding your own accumulative effects on the world is that the human theory of cause and effect, like pool balls bouncing around transmitting effects from elsewhere, isn't the way nature accumulates effects. Bouncing balls is not the glue nature uses, you might say. The effects of pressures and forces are real and all, but they nearly all dissipate as they bounce around, rather than accumulate. So...our usual idea of "cause and effect" simply does not apply. That's a key reason for why good intentions often don't have their intended effect...
Lasting cause and effect in nature is about how things that are organized from the inside develop on their own, make use of their environments as they develop. They may capitalize on the crumbs of opportunity you leave lying around, perhaps, as if the systems of nature, cultures and ecologies, were organisms engaged in foraging and dodging as their way of learning and growing.
Most things in nature which are organized and animated from the inside seem to respond to finding limits in one direction by poking around in other directions near bye. Complex human societies, one after another in history, seem to have collapsed because human cultures get stuck on directions of exploration that run out.
The real trouble with
understanding your own accumulative effects on the world is that the human
theory of cause and effect, like pool balls bouncing around transmitting effects
from elsewhere, isn't the way nature accumulates effects. Bouncing balls is not
the glue nature uses, you might say. The effects of pressures and forces are
real and all, but they nearly all dissipate as they bounce around, rather than
accumulate. So...our usual idea of "cause and effect" simply does not apply.
That's a key reason for why good intentions often don't have their intended
effect...
Lasting cause and effect in nature is about how things that are organized from
the inside develop on their own, make use of their environments as they develop.
They may capitalize on the crumbs of opportunity you leave lying around,
perhaps, as if the systems of nature, cultures and ecologies, were organisms
engaged in foraging and dodging as their way of learning and growing.
Most things in nature which are organized and animated from the inside seem to
respond to finding limits in one direction by poking around in other directions
near bye. Complex human societies, one after another in history, seem to have
collapsed because human cultures get stuck on directions of exploration that run
out.
To me it looks like they just find themselves unable to look around and change
with the times. It appears to be caused physiologically by our way of defining
our realities as independent social agreements on what to believe, and treating
those cultural realities as if they were the world we live in.
Today it seems new cultural realities are multiplying furiously, as if we were
responding to a need to replace ones that had run out. They don't seem to be
leading the main culture anywhere, though, but developing more and more separate
little cells, and just breaking the main culture apart. That we have a common
physical world that physically determines our choices makes that one quite
reliable universal connection we could develop.
3/6/10
Something that helps prevent us from seeing the systems of nature at work in our changing world is the wonderful way our minds reprogram every night and give us a new world that makes sense again every morning. It gives us the impression of the world always being a new fixed snapshot every day, so our thinking is always in terms of a world that is about to vanish and be replaced, in effect. The information about the quickening and lagging responses to things from frame to frame get efficiently erased, is the problem. Quickening and lagging responses to change are what tell you where your world is starting up or finishing up its vast flowing changes of form. 3/6/10
A related post to "ThomasPaynesCorner" - re: The Polemics of Carrying Capacity: 3/5/10
I agree. We’re not framing the problem correctly… It’s great to hear someone reaching out to look beyond the common metaphors:
“Does anyone see the fundamental flaw yet? Does anyone else see what’s wrong here?
I think the real problem is that, loosely speaking, both the environmentalists and the capitalists are speaking with uninformed metaphors. It leaves both unable to accurately describe or successfully effect the natural processes that are systematically multiplying our impacts. I’ve been carefully studying the systems thinking competencies of many fields of research as well as popular discussion. It really looks like we’re all just not studying nature well enough to see how nature works, and so can’t make our language relevant and avoid conflict with how nature works.
Now it seems we’re heading into a panic. What we’re doing is evidently disrupting everything. It’s like we’ve notice the our house is on fire, and while large crowds are hoping the firemen can pour on enough gasoline to put the fires out, there is also a small scattered and disorganized group of people deciding to study combustion to see if that might help in some way. Studying combustion to see how fire works seems like a good thing to do in this case. We can’t escape from the house and the fire is getting worse. We really better discover why it seems our efforts are only fanning the flames.
What physically causes complex systems to grow is the way they propagate. They grow by producing a surplus and using that surplus to expand their scale, their surplus and their rate of propagation. What most people could see for themselves in observing individual growth systems that they all get started when they’re small and then multiply toward changing explosively. Some of them stop growing by themselves, though, and remain healthy as systems. Others continue growing until they are stopped by either exhausting their resources, disrupting their environments or disrupting themselves.
I think the big difference between those outcomes is whether something internal brings an end to growth without bringing an end to the system, or not. Those that survive their own growth somehow turn off one part of their own propagation and leave everything else working. That means the ‘start-up’ part of the system is dispensable. They seem to continue making a surplus, but use it for some better purpose than for expanding to a point of failure.
The way people have been very slow to learn about nature, relative to our fast changing impacts and disruptions, are handicapping us. So, our first line of defense might be to slow things down. We might persuade people who have surpluses to “waste them” on advancing our learning about how nature physically works. That would slow down the propagation of change and speed up our ability to adapt.
The most important step seems to be realizing that our minds think in terms of models, but nature doesn’t. So the big step would be to learn how to refer separately to models and to the systems of nature they refer to. Science has been habitually referring to the systems of nature as being our models, actually, exposing another way we’re kind of “behind on our homework”. In nature how instrumental causes take place is through complex developmental processes. Environmental systems doesn’t use logic. They don’t work like logic does in a great many ways.
Capitalism and its scheme of multiplying our control of the earth to serve human desires is perfectly logical, as a theory, except that the environments, humans and our needs are all complex natural things. The biggest part of finding how to change the logic of capitalism so we do not grow to our own exhaustion is figuring out which naturally dispensable parts could allow the rest to remain healthy.
I think if things slowed down to let us catch up with our various kind of overdue homework what we need to do would begin to seem real and might become manageable.
What's most "illogical" about natural systems is that they change their designs by continuous progressions, like growth, maturation, break-down and decay. To study them you break their changes down in your mind by their characteristic developmental phases. Progressions of environmental measures identify what is changing together and how the organization of systems change as flowing processes as diagrammed in Chapters.htm and Pages.htm. Any individual system will display its own individual versions, having the same succession of continuities. The reason to use "development over time" as the common language of systems, rather than their designs, is that their designs are changing continuously from beginning to end, so any one design is a snapshot of a moment in the evolution of the system. In their change over time every system is a whole succession from beginning to end, a variation on the same.
General exercises are discussed in the "bump on a curve notepad".