Ideally, we should talk. I’m an accomplished senior natural systems scientist who has been decoding the “weirdness” of our world’s suicidal head-on, breakneck accelerating collision with the natural world for 40+ years. I began as a physicist, and when I discovered that physics has no explanation for organization, or particularly how organizations begin and end, I realized all of physics is made of shortcuts for manipulating things we don’t understand, as its source of funding. I checked the history… and yes physics was founded on the demonstration of that method by the first scientist, Thales of Miletus, showing that equations can be used to time purchases in the Greek olive market to make a financial killing.
Contrary to its image, science became the workshop for driving economics, using the profits from research to multiply the research and keep growing with ever doubling profits. All the time the method uses only abstractions, taken out of context to simplify the work, and so detached from its contexts of local system organizations that give anything in them their primary meaning. The modern world’s separation from nature that it greatly adds to is much older, but multiplying our control of nature with abstractions taken out of contexts of nature surely adds quite a lot.
So… as a result of their design, whether intended or not, the design of theoretical; science without contextual information about the working contexts of nature, makes physics and economics appear to have no natural limits at all, that is until your civilization starts to collapse, as we’re now experiencing, as the only indicator available to the natural limits of a limitless growth system in nature, a kind of QED!, affecting directly affecting the two most important fields of science we use to steer the planet. It’s not that we couldn’t make some corrections for that, the best would be to use the abstractions to help us see how very different nature’s complexly layered designs and self-adjusting designs are. It’s removing nature entirely from the picture of science that seems to be the cause of the current head start to a general civilization collapse to rival those of the past.
Given how powerful and profitable simple rules for controlling nature are it seems five millennia or so of human cultures favored the simple abstract rules of power and ignored the horrific complications from which they would develop. Made blind to the internally and externally responsive designs of nature, the designers of abstract rules would hear and see things in the cultures around them that lived by nature’s rules and have no reason at all to think of going back to those older forms of knowledge and wisdom.
However, various anthropologists, who worked more like archeologists, sifting every layer, began to study the three great and prosperous civilizations that appeared to have collapsed from being too prosperous, like we are too, (#1 Babel, #2 Bronze Age Atlantis, and #3 Rome). It seems inevitably, that if ruled by unnatural laws… “something else always happens on the way to the Forum.” Economies designed to multiply without limit do naturally destabilize their internal cultures and explode in contradictions.
At present, in our case, growing inequity between the layers of the working and wealthy households remained at least proportional; to their long stable relationships up to the end of WWII and the general “update” of capitalism that would follow and spoil the day. Profits began to suddenly concentrate only at the top and failed to filter down as before, from a change in competition at the top it seems. The growth of the American economy, put in place by decisions of the SEC, heavily favored wealth concentration at the top, in the financial world and its shareholders. Apparently, they saw no reason not to take virtually the whole pie for themselves, not realizing the peace provided by the prior pattern of trickle down that kept the society unified, and the new one would take power over the steering of everyone’s world to maximize profits at the top.
As in the Bronze Age Collapse (if my reading is correct) that resulted in such outrage from the bottom that it occurred to the working layers of the economy they could do better without the top, leading to collapse not reversing the order. As decision making had come to be based on the abstractions favoring each community separately, they both made great plans blind to all their contexts that, at the limit of growth for the whole, would rapidly tear it apart.
So, This is the societal sequence of events that takes us to the point when and where the gaps of connection become wide enough and the legitimate but uninformed grievances and resentments become extreme enough allowing a civilization to become prone to takeover by hatred and vengeance seeking cults, driven to their desperation, like our so called Christian-Nation and its legitimate but misunderstood grievances, choosing all the wrong solutions and people, like teaming up with the similarly resentful member of the super-rich as a “savior,” Mr. Donald Trump, still sore from not being accepted in polite New York society.
Cette la Vie! What happens next is the killer. With the divergence of once shared interests continues, segments of the cultures split apart economically that once mingled amiably. becoming enraged and at each other’s throats instead, starting tp smash things for the pleasure of insulting the evil images of the folks they have come to resent for doing them harm, even if almost totally misplaced. The actual harm may be coming from their own leader, one of the super-rich causing the demise of good working-class life. For the dispossessed and their leader orchestrating the destruction of the cultural assets of America’s once commonly celebrated culture, is more than a terrible shame. Somehow the smashers never realize that if they smash the working connections there won’t be anything left for them either.
That is what we see in rough terms today, Trump rewarding the vengeful resentments he has fed in his base, who will help him retain power, but who will not be helped at all by the severe damage to the society he and they are attacking and blaming for the oppressive working class exploitation that their leader had a big part in, as all power players who in a panic honestly seem to become blind to their own roles in alienating the parts of society they most depend on.
What Trump says he is offering to the resentful roots of Middle America, that he fanned into flames to serve him won’t be delivered. They just served him by letting him take control of congress and the courts, using a great misrepresentation of who was responsible for their very legitimate complaints. They were left behind by the business world, because of the “fast money” produced by the “Shareholder Value” plan of the super-rich… most of whom if memory serves were extremist Republicans.
They are nearly all like everybody else now, just wanting their old world, or something like it, back. The Trump program of smashing the working parts of America’s once unified civil society and common culture, only assures he won’t be able to help his own resentful base. Dismantling the workings of a system to serve the people won’t help anyone at all, in fact, what also did happen in the Bronze Age. You’d just never get it back. But is this a moment, of having had a taste of it, we should now know what’s wrong with politicians skillfully weaving resentments into hatreds for them to exploit — and walk away. No one ever needs that again, and history is so full of that very evil. Hate is not helpful at all.
What you’ll need is the original dreams revived, with “some midcourse corrections,” for sure, and a long effort to keep learning about what happens when you seriously mess with a real good thing. We could still have the American national family plan, I don’t think. That isn’t worn out yet, that plan to heal the wounds, start caring for the planet and all the vibrant cultures we admire, respect and love as part of our home.
