{"id":1812,"date":"2012-05-21T22:13:36","date_gmt":"2012-05-22T02:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=1812"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:46:55","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:46:55","slug":"the-circle-ever-more-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/the-circle-ever-more-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"A circle ever more broken"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve found that it eventually pays, <\/em>to let my moral dilemmas hurt my feelings if I actually want to know the answer. <\/em> I don’t ever dwell on emotional pain. \u00a0I just know I can learn from it if I attentively listen to what it’s about. \u00a0Our world is spiraling out of control, yet again, as if people had no clue as to why.<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Pentecostal\u00a0anthem “May the Circle be Unbroken<\/a>” <\/em>contains a kernel of systems physics I hadn’t noticed until recently, in a spiral the circles don’t connect, <\/em><\/strong>but are eve more separated. \u00a0 It came to mind when a question led me to think about the heartbreak of alienation\u00a0that people all over the earth feel so personally, when they realize that are living in societies leading them into\u00a0desperate\u00a0troubles.<\/p>\n

That was one of the common\u00a0recognitions\u00a0among the generation born after WWII, and the popular impetus for the “counter culture”. \u00a0The sense everyone seemed to share was that the post war culture seemed like it would just repeat the same sort of horrible sequence of global catastrophes it had just experienced, and might learn nothing from it at all. \u00a0 That time lots was actually learned from the experience, of course. \u00a0 Only thirty years later, though, world society is clearly creating conditions for the same scale of mega-catastrophe for mankind\u00a0again.<\/p>\n

It helps to face the fact “we’re doing it again”.<\/h3>\n

We have an economy requiring everyone’s energetic cooperation, running into\u00a0destabilizing\u00a0limits in virtually every direction at once, with no offer of a solution but “try harder”… \u00a0 That’s a total formula for disaster. \u00a0 It helps to face the fact “we’re doing it again”. \u00a0 The “circle” today is ever more broken.<\/p>\n

\"broken<\/em>
Growth is a chain of events for creating an ever more broken circle. It's a construction process leaving ever more unbuilt, to be completed or the spiral goes out of control. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

People keep making cultures and economies that spiral out of control. \u00a0They abuse the love, cooperation and talents of their people, steering their lives toward performing\u00a0tasks leading to great evil. \u00a0 But.. who is society but a consensus on common purposes? \u00a0 No one is “in change”. \u00a0 \u00a0Still people somehow build great societies with all good intent, that contain an internal logic that is “broken”. \u00a0 Gradually over time we just notice them “spiraling ever further out of control”, each loop an ever further break from the past.<\/p>\n

These aren’t metaphors, really. \u00a0Growth is a spiral process. \u00a0It physically builds upon the changes of to past to create ever greater changes in the future, diverging ever further from its prior path on every cycle. \u00a0That we’re now losing control of it is generally felt. It’s also accurately observed in the “fishtailing” of over-corrections and panicked avoidance of terrible\u00a0consequences, dodging the\u00a0consequent\u00a0failures of guesswork on which excess reliance was placed.<\/p>\n

Economic planners are\u00a0“shooting from the hip”, unsure what to do, because nothing is really working. \u00a0The general progression is of events becoming ever more unmanageable. \u00a0 Having things spiral out of control is a very natural process, like some cosmic storm of misfortunes, that happens in environments. \u00a0 The error if there is one is our failing to notice it in time to reign it in, to make our “circle” unbroken again.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

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\n<\/em><\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

I write little notes to myself when I have an idea, the following one starting on a sandwich napkin while sitting at the bus stop. \u00a0 It might help explain the emotional trap that makes all kinds of people feel helpless to\u00a0change\u00a0“the system” as it spirals out of control. \u00a0 What points to it how our\u00a0solutions for stabilizing the “broken circle” just end up causing it to spiral further out of control, \u00a0fishtailing when .<\/p>\n

There are naturally lots of other kinds of errors of knowledge and intent too, but not many being made by nearly everyone at once. \u00a0 I think there’s just one main reason everyone’s sincere efforts to solve societal problems might keep making them much worse, though.<\/p>\n

The error is our responding to strain by trying to do a better job, of solving the old problem, and so making the problem worse. \u00a0 At natural limits we face NEW problems, but people don’t generally think its their job to define the problems.<\/p>\n

Making the circle unbroken requires an ethos of spiraling in not out,
\nmaking the circle more\u00a0regular\u00a0rather than expanding faster.<\/h3>\n

To keep the family circle unbroken, everyone makes choices thinking of it as a whole. \u00a0 No one has the job of doing that for society. \u00a0 At work our purposes are mostly controlled by our\u00a0employers, whose own purposes are generally determined by others too, and all need to play by the rules of their competition. \u00a0 What happens\u00a0naturally\u00a0is that businesses that are managed to multiply their own business interests, take over, without any goal but continuing to grow as fast as they can and not hold back, even to prosper\u00a0against\u00a0each other if the society as a whole gets in trouble. <\/em><\/p>\n

As a rule to follow the standardization of endless growth for every business gives our work life a goal of keeping up with making ever bigger and more complex changes to the earth, till they become unmanageable. \u00a0 Both employees and managers, however, think it’s “none of their business” what purposes set by the business are. \u00a0We’re reminded it’s none of our business if we bring it up too, or are asked to leave. <\/em><\/p>\n

So, without realizing, we end up thinking we are trying to keep ourselves whole, while also trying to multiply our\u00a0businesses\u00a0till they and the economy they’re part of go out of control. \u00a0We go along with expanding our own tasks by ever bigger steps. \u00a0It then spirals out of control for no one’s particular fault at all, except our own error in agreeing to <\/strong><\/em>accept ever\u00a0expanding tasks. <\/strong>We work to maintain the\u00a0broken circle of our society, with no goal for it but to have it spiral out of control. \u00a0To change that we’d “only” need to discover our economy’s goal and purpose, and start closing the circle toward it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thinking its the someone else’s business to think about the system as a whole makes it no one’s business. \u00a0 We see the gifts of growth as rewards for doing the right thing, not realizing that they’re more “on loan” and can only be kept if the ever more broken circle is to be made whole. \u00a0We also dread the idea of intruding on other people’s decisions, to tell them that they need to use their money to heal their environment now, as using wealth to just multiply their own demands is threatening the earth as a whole.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s painful to realize our task is to be “abnormal” somehow, as what’s “normal”\u00a0is our collective effort to create ever more tasks that can’t be finished and become unmanageable.<\/p>\n

It’s our cooperative approach for all our efforts, to “do better” to make economic growth more efficient as a way of sustaining prosperity.<\/h3>\n

It’s not just that growth is a process of changing things by ever bigger material steps. \u00a0It’s that as a physical process, aiming to maximize its use of all the earth’s resources, its implicit objective is to deplete everything humans find\u00a0usable\u00a0on earth as quickly as possible. \u00a0 \u00a0If you look at resource use figures, improving efficiency in using them always increases their use, creating expanding access to more rapidly depleting finite natural supplies.<\/p>\n

What our economy needs most from us is a different purpose.<\/h3>\n
\"\"
Growth maintains a circle ever more broken at each step<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If historically we’ve always<\/strong><\/em> had a culture of destroying our resources as a way of creating prosperity, but that doesn’t make multiplying it’s scale a workable goal of life. \u00a0 That has also bothered a lot of people, for quite a long time too, and the moral problem is just morality. \u00a0 Historically it does appear to be a source of the greatest tragedies that human societies.<\/p>\n

We naturally organize societies around productivity and growth, and time and again that seems to have led to tragedy because societies were unable to change goals. \u00a0 Everyone appears to assume its someone else’s job to change their culture, as its the original goal (of multiplying consumption of everything…) becomes dangerous to continue.<\/p>\n

they saw their self-destruction coming a long way off and did little to prevent it but to be more efficient at\u00a0pursuing\u00a0the wrong purpose<\/h3>\n

We’re not alone in history, of course, in letting our formula for success become a grand cause of failure, it seems, to cause the strangest of tragic human cultural events. Evidence\u00a0of high cultures that vanished completely for no apparent reason\u00a0seems to go back many thousands of years. \u00a0 It seems to be the rather well worn path for human societies that they use their best collective talents to accomplish what becomes great evil.<\/p>\n

My\u00a0readings on the how complex societies have generally failed suggests that they all<\/em><\/span> saw their self-destruction coming a long way off and did little to prevent it except try to become more efficient at\u00a0pursuing\u00a0the wrong purpose. \u00a0 There were writings at the time of Rome’s decline, like this one, on why Roman society was disintegrating, unable to live on a budget and taxing its farmers and soils to death.<\/p>\n

That takes major investments of time and effort to destroy an advanced civilization that way! \u00a0 \u00a0The end coming would have been even more clear to the Easter Islanders. \u00a0They went so far as to cut down their last tree, when their island economic system relied heavily on making boats from great trees. \u00a0 It was similar for the Mayan cultures that slashed and burned their forests. \u00a0 \u00a0They all apparently saw it coming, but just didn’t realize it was each person’s job to identify the next goal of society, to name another purpose as the old one was failing.<\/p>\n

They might have see that being ever more efficient at their familiar purpose was becoming self-destructive, but didn’t apparently connect their own efforts to save their societies that what was driving them to collapse. \u00a0\u00a0The solutions they chose, and that we are now choosing too, promoted temporary\u00a0sustainability for\u00a0outmoded societal purposes, accumulating societal strains rather than relieving them.<\/p>\n

It’s like an auto-immune reaction as a source of disease. \u00a0 The added urgency to solve societal problems stimulates increasing efforts causing them, adding a very vicious feedback for cooperative societies of creative people, engaged in making their own problems far worse.<\/p>\n

It’s the path of all great societies that fail to face their haunting moral dilemmas, and just work harder at failed solutions.<\/h3>\n

The tragedy of “sustainable development” (SD) is that while creating immediate prosperity, it still operates in a global growth economic system. \u00a0So it adds to the intense demands for shrinking resources. \u00a0How limited resources are allocated is always by rich and poor, and so SD contributed to global inequity, and naturally creates more poverty.<\/p>\n

It’s not that some SD concepts wouldn’t work well in a no-growth economy and be sustainable in the long term. \u00a0The problem is that SD doesn’t change the growth economy. \u00a0The food crisis, reflecting the rising cost of limited food commodities, is made worse by all the\u00a0continually\u00a0increasing food demands.<\/p>\n

So even the SD aimed at the helping underfed communities would be add to all their economic demands on the earth. \u00a0It would temporarily help the more competitive investment plans, but by impoverishing the less competitive ones. \u00a0That’s the problem with taking growth to the point it becomes a zero or negative sum game.<\/p>\n

As the whole system meets natural complications in finding and accessing new resources, helping people become more efficient at competing over them creates a rising tide of demand for ever scarcer resources, a storm of mutual conflicts. \u00a0 It’s the end of “more” as a sufficient purpose.<\/p>\n

Increasing productivity changed meaning as ever growing resource demand started reducing rather than adding to supply, reversing the meaning of one of mankind’s most reliable purposes. \u00a0 Our common idea that sincere effort would help others compete, now instead adds to the global strains, that the people being aided are being harmed by. \u00a0\u00a0It confuses all our social values and purposes to have become too productive in consuming the earth. \u00a0Working to improve productivity\u00a0doesn’t solve that problem.<\/p>\n

I don’t have an actual catalog of all sustainability plans, though I’ve been “in the business for four decades and in touch with many of the leading advocates. \u00a0They all do seem to aim to be profitable in today’s economic markets, and to increase development by helping people be more efficient.<\/p>\n

I’ve built long relationships and tried tried to use them to explain the “dark side”, but invariably treated “not talking their language” or “being out of the loop”, even if I was also well recognized as one of the more knowledgeable, experienced and capable individuals around in every other way. \u00a0Ultimately the “language” difference seems to be that people tend to generally thing of their environment as a concept in their heads… \u00a0which is simpler than the reality.<\/p>\n

What we seem to have now, though, \u00a0is another utterly massive societal tragedy brewing. \u00a0 It multiplies the tragedy that it betrays the warm hearted, energetic and wonderfully creative efforts to\u00a0address it “holistically”. \u00a0It just doesn’t help to make growth more efficient at this point.<\/p>\n

That the leading “problem solvers” are all doing that makes them also the worst problem creators. \u00a0They’re pouring our resources into raising false hopes, not intending to but actually creating greater\u00a0dashed hopes. \u00a0\u00a0It’s everyone’s fault, really, that we’re still trying to prosper by using up our shrinking resources faster and faster.<\/p>\n

Growth needs to discover a purpose other than promoting itself. \u00a0 Whether we make our lives worse for fail to find it, or not, seems to rest on whether people “get the signal” to look for it. \u00a0 \u00a0We have huge resources of heart and mind to apply to good ideas, if people think to look for them, to give the growth of our society a goal other than spiraling out of control.<\/p>\n

We might find that our social and institutional networks are good at the complex conversations that will be needed, like learning how to generally turn investment funds into endowments (1), and what to do with them. \u00a0 Given how tricky the problem is, many other advanced societies apparently\u00a0succumbed\u00a0with no one understanding the\u00a0problem. \u00a0 So, it’s obviously both naturally confounding and dangerous. \u00a0 If all we do is learn what the problem is, it’ll be an clear\u00a0evolutionary\u00a0moment for mankind, it seems. It’s up to you.<\/p>\n

jlh<\/p>\n

ed 5\/25\/12<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0Adopt natural system principles to keep economies profitable at their limits<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve found that it eventually pays, to let my moral dilemmas hurt my feelings if I actually want to know the answer. I don’t ever dwell on emotional pain. \u00a0I just know I can learn from it if I attentively listen to what it’s about. \u00a0Our world is spiraling out of control, yet again, as … Continue reading A circle ever more broken<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15,1,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","category-trans","category-uncategorized","category-whattodo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2448,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions\/2448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}