Living by a social construct of reality at wide divergence from the physical one is a good working definition of “societal madness”. Of course no social network will admit to that, but evidence of communities not getting along because they live by starkly different realities does develop.
In America today we seem to have a wide variety of mad social realities to choose from. It might even be a perennial human condition… Now they’ve come to clearly interfere with our adapting to changes in the physical world confronting us.
Over the past 50+ years there have been regular announcements of limitless affordable energy soon becoming available, such as Paul Krugman’s recent article “Here comes Solar”, with the consequences of that happening never getting discussed. The following is as posted to the more cautions Washington Post article yesterday 11/12/11.
One of the most overlooked drawbacks of creating affordable and plentiful solar energy, or ANY other form of energy, is what we’d do with it, the consequences of mankind having access to continually doubling amounts of energy. What if the improbable “cheap energy” solution were actually discovered?
Would cheap energy eliminate or worsen our other impact problems?
Energy is far from our only constraint on economic growth. Energy is actually what let us do the destruction of our environment as we have already done, none of which yet result from the CO2 and other GHG’s. Because we are already at the destructive threshold of many other environmental impact pressures we could expect growing energy use to cause even faster growing impact repercussions than we’ve experienced. They will not come with a neat technological fixes, either.
The core unrecognized problem is that growth is a construction process. It’s a mechanism for using the profits of a system to build a bigger and bigger system. That involves our using our (limited imagination) to take ever expanding control of our environment to do ever more things to our environment. Continue reading The problem with plentiful solar energy.. or any other→
Uroboros is the symbol of a system that consumes itself, either literally or symbolically. There are many kinds of feedback processes you could liken to a serpent eating its own tail. The compost from one generation of plants nourishes the next, for example, so the new generation is partly consuming the decay of the last generation, the “tail” of the cycle of growth and decay.
You definitely would not call plants growing in their own compost “self-cannibalistic”. Consuming ones’ own living parts, however, is quite an apt description of what happens at the natural limits of a growth system that ends its growth only because it exhausts its free resources. In economies the more competitive parts may then find nothing more interesting left to consume other than their own system’s weaker or less familiar living parts… (discussion contued at end)
(this is a concept for a part of a longer collaborative work)
The human quest for love, improving our lives and finding understanding, pursue human values that are not inherent in nature. Their pursuit requires reliable knowledge of nature, though, and the kind of values exhibited in her designs of natural systems. So ethics for using the earth is partly a matter of learning to notice the way nature makes complex relationships that work beautifully. It’s also a matter of observing how our having changed the earth alters our own ability to live by our own values.
A world of ecologies converted to monocultures
Nature offers myriad examples of how complex communities can live together, demonstrating many kinds of competition, collaboration, conflict and tolerance, etc., that do or don’t work. They offer something like a set of natural ethical principles for “what works”. In nature all living systems need to produce a profit of surplus energy, for example. Continue reading Ethics for Economics in the Anthropocene, life on a world changed by man→
The elementary problem of our economic system’s design
The problem arises because finance operates by a cultural belief system of multiplying forever,… That once seemed to be how the physical economy worked. Now it’s become obvious to most people that it was an illusion and never corresponded to the physical reality, and doesn’t allow the real economy to operate with its real resouces.
In a way it’s a very natural confusion, because people for thousands of years have thought of nature as their cultural belief system, run by Gods, theories of the future being like the past, or “Urban myths”, whatever. It’s an “easy” way to look at a natural world, that has too many independently working parts to quite fathom. So in our minds we get in the habit of substituting an imaginary world that pleases us… and confuse the world we invent that “we see” for the world we don’t invent that “we’re looking at”.
The simplest idea of what needs to change is to stop finance from continuing to grow its claims on the resources of the physical world economy. The real economy has already begun to converge toward the natural limits that will allow it to continue. Conceptually the task is:
— now that we’ve hit the tree, first take our foot off the gas —
That means that investing needs to change purposes, to stop being for multiplying investment, to being for the purpose of having money to spend. Spending from savings reduces financial capital. The right amount of spending from keeps the demands of finance on the economy and the earth at a stable sustainable level. At least, finance needs to restrain its demands on the economy to match how the economy is naturally responding to its limits. It might mean finance has to “give back” half or more of the economy’s wealth.
Otherwise the resources the physical system functionally needs to operate will continue to be increasingly claimed to serve the continual growth of finance, undermining the physical system.
The first learning steps beyond the impasse, on a new path.
Well, shutting down the world for repairs would be conceptually neat, but does not seem to use the path finding mechanisms that nature typically uses. She offers myriad examples of how run-away growth systems can change by maturing to become stable self-managing ecologies. That’s what we need to do, and learn how to mimic, that our culture knows little about, importantly because science has avoided studying the opportunistic learning of natural systems all but entirely.
I know this approach is problematic for someone accustomed to representing systems with equations. Real ecosystems are niche making learning and development processes, though, largely involved in “rule making” not “rule following” . The far better conceptual models for them are of collective learning and environmental development. Collective learning and development systems can cling to one systematic behavior while it is useful, and the break from it to find and cling to another model, when that is opportune, because the parts are actively learning as they go. Continue reading Can we shut down the system for repairs?→
A 1995 article in the Wall Street Journal offered this vivid image and a good discussion of the waves of immigration to the US from various other parts of the world during the past two centuries. They coincide with the great period of economic growth, and the radical changes in the economic environment as we went from the beginning of growth to its end.
Growth has changed from creating limitless opportunity for all, to creating unmanageable conflicts with the environment and within a society no longer upwardly mobile, perhaps in decline. That’s a very different world for immigrants to come into.
It’s no reflection on their different cultures, necessarily, as each wave of immigration seems to represent an old culture becoming adventurous. It may well also not benefit a society to accept waves of immigrants as it is no longer creating expanding opportunity for itself. That seems likely to have little to do with the immigrants themselves, though. Still, the wave of the 1900’s came to build a great society, and the wave of today is picking up scraps in a society losing its way and coming into great conflict with its own success.
One of the great stories of modern economic growth and its tragedy
The sad story of modern economic growth is that its formula for great success became its formula for tragic failure, all by itself, almost overnight, caused only by our neglecting to read nature’s signal to respond to our limits. That formula for success during growth is the self-investment or “seed” principle. You plant your seed to get more seed to plant. You use your profits to multiply your projects. Continue reading Waves of immigration, at growth’s beginning and end→
when a system becomes unable to supply its own needs, and gets cut off from former supplies. So, it’s a system that may seem to be working fine, but drifts over the line of profitability, and is abruptly rejected by its environment.
From beginning to end environmental systems need to produce some minimal margin of excess resources as profit, to maintain cushions for everything. Otherwise their parts will not have time to respond to shortages and their environmental connections break down.
Becoming both more costly to supply and more costly to run, to the limits of profitability, causes system bankruptcy, as it did for Rome. Rome wasted resources on making its high society richer throughout its decline, as if that would reverse its resource depletion.
… disillusionment occurs and systems break into parts, to end their lives.
The WNYC radio program On The Media, with Brook Gladstone and Bob Garfield is always insightful, and this week addressed The Personal Impact of the Web, and how the internet is changing human culture & society. There has been some question whether the dramatic changes in how people think and behave are good or bad, or just “change” that older generations feel left out of…
Of course it’s “all of the above”, and I added the following as a comment regarding how in an information age, social networks naturally tend to create their own realities to live in, with the consequence of becoming detached from the changes in the natural world occurring around them…
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"Cyberboy" learning that nature is now the network?
Bob & Brooke, Your ideas about how the internet is changing us are insightful and entertaining as always, but honestly, you’re missing the physics of it. The “internet generation” somewhat corresponds to the “productivity people”, the driving force of economic activity and growth around the world, and the internet is a major productivity tool, allowing us to control more and more with less and less awareness of it. Continue reading Does living in social networks change how we think??→
We’re driving an underperforming asset to return ever more
Excessive demands on ANY relationship naturally produce systemic collapses, like we’re now experiencing. I’ve been pointing to the root causes, in considerable detail, for many years. Ignoring them hasn’t made them go away.
It’s like compelling a runner to run faster when their body needs a rest. At natural limits you need to pace yourself, in response to the responses of the world around you.
It’s hard to grasp how we could have developed a world of expert designed systems that ignore that most obvious principle of survival, but it never the less is clearly evident. Our cultural belief is that driving the economy to produce multiplying returns is the ideal of economic stability.
