No matter which candidate won the U.S. Presidential election, about half the citizens were set to fear the end of the country. Rather than argue about whether each side’s concern is similarly credible, I’ll address a broader question. What, exactly, does a voter/citizen imagine the goal to be, and—given modernity’s transient status—is the goal anything more than unfounded fantasy?
I have difficulty listening to political rhetoric of any stripe, carrying as I do the conviction that the entire modernity project is an incoherent amalgam of stunts that is inherently incompatible with ecological health, and thus fated to self-terminate. Besides offering promises of more houses, more jobs, more money, more material comfort—which only moves us closer toward ecological collapse—the dream being sold is such a self-deluded fantasy as to sound like Santa Claus and Easter Bunnies to my ear. It has a similarly infantilizing effect on the population.
Political dreamers—perhaps especially on the left where I have spent most of my adult life—board many trains of thought with the words: “if only.” If only we had full participation in the democratic process. If only voters were well informed, without misinformation. If only people voted in their economic self-interest and not as cultural warriors. If only people were better-educated. If only the racists, xenophobes, misogynists, and homophobes could be called out and properly shamed either into adopting suitable attitudes (and pronouns?), or else pushed into the margins.
Notice the common theme: if only people were not what they actually are… The subtext is: In a perfect system, people would shape up to be a better fit to our marvelous political creation. The system could realize its intended glory if only the people would get with the program. Basically: for most folks, modernity isn’t the problem. It’s those gall-darned people who have always prevented it from achieving its theoretical potential. It amounts to the elevation of an artificial and elusive ideal over actual living beings.
The right tends to be more suspicious of institutions, bureaucracy, regulations, impositions on personal freedom, and understandably resents the implication—or even overt statements—that it is they who are flawed in relation to a perfectible system. In this respect I find myself, surprisingly, sharing a bit of anti-government sentiment—although different in scope and motivation.
Generally, the left tends to be attracted to egalitarianism: everyone given equal opportunity and privilege. The right is more comfortable with hierarchy, even to the point of authoritarianism—preferring strong leaders (at least perceived/projected as such). Since I hold pre-agricultural cultures in high regard—as they had figured out patterns for long-term sustainable living in ecological reciprocity—I find the egalitarian model of the left to be a better match to small-scale bands of people sharing and working together toward a common goal. It’s just that such ideals are basically impossible to pull off in a world of 8 billion strangers—or even a town of 500. In our original ecological context, such unwieldy collectives were not relevant.
What prevents me from defending political sides any more is that all parties are committed human supremacists. Any political rhetoric, then, sounds like promotion of the Human Reich to me. I don’t blame the parties per se, as they are simply reasonably-accurate reflections of the populace in a culture of modernity: democracy at work. Our entire culture is sick, jeopardizing the health of the entire living world.
But enough about the tortures of having no political home in today’s landscape! I want to turn to the phenomenon of political fantasy, and how that connects to the entire fantasy of modernity.
Shortcut Brains
I have spoken recently about brains and their limitations. Brains are organs evolved and adapted to coordinate actions of an organism for fitness. An aside: fitness does not mean outcompeting all other life, but fitting well into a complex web of life—which is necessary for long-term existence. It is perhaps obvious that brains of increasing neurological complexity are able to construct mental models of increasing complexity. Yet, even the most sophisticated mental models are pared-down representations of inherently messier realities outside the brain. By necessity (and definition?) they are incomplete, and do not have to be even close to perfect in order to confer advantages in an adaptive, probabilistic sense.
Because human mental models are exceptional in the animal kingdom, we’re quite proud of them. We begin to live in our models. We mistake their nifty, tidy designs for the reality they attempt to capture—the classic blunder of treating the map as the territory. That can work fine in many situations, and in a sense is the whole point of a brain: a speedy shortcut-machine that often serves well enough to stand in for reality.
As pointed out in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, our tendency to “live the model” has become ever-easier to practice, in a self-reinforcing way, having reshaped our environment to conform to our shortcut mental models. We impose a monoculture field hosting tidy rows of grain in place of a complex, biodiverse community; a single, “owned” dwelling and fenced parcel of land in lieu of a whole territory to seasonally explore; dimensional lumber rather than quirky natural trunks and branches; gun-barrel straight roads on grids rather than terrain-conforming, intertwining paths; specialized, narrow jobs instead of broadly general occupation; rigid clocks and calendars to replace more intuitive connection to diurnal and seasonal rhythms.
In fact, Daylight Savings Time is a great example: people complain when the lighting profile of their day abruptly changes, even though the day hasn’t changed perceptibly at all! Ask the squirrels. It’s our artificial overlay of time that suddenly lurched. We’re so hard-tied to our artifice that it becomes the reality—not the sun, moon, and stars. Absurd!
The point is that our culture has a long track record of working to replace natural, complex environments with simpler, artificial ones that better conform to simplified mental models. Rather than stretch our brains to grapple with complexity, we shrink and standardize our environment to coddle and thus nurture our cognitive limitations. In feedback, our cognitive limitations only become more pronounced within our virtual world.
Back to Politics
The same happens in politics, of course. The political frameworks populating modernity are fabrications of the human mind—notional constructs that have no ecological, evolutionary vetting. They reflect the culmination of a 10,000-year trend toward ever-increasing separation from the community of life. Unsurprisingly, these systems have never been perfect in practice. Yet, so many of us hold onto a fantasy of eventual perfection. The arc must bend toward perfection, for the simple reason that the notion is lovely, poetic, and fits comfortably within our meat-brains. And otherwise, what’s the point?
Our affinity for perfection is a little bizarre when critically observing the result. Our tendency is to address the growing host of problems (imperfections) with—of all things—more “solutions.” Only, the solutions have the unintended effect of adding to overall kludginess, which introduces new interactions and unforeseen consequences. Fast forward, and the inevitable result is an unwieldy tangle of brain-farts. That’s what modernity boils down to, folks: a motley collection of hair-brained notions divorced from ecological reality—with almost no chance of actually working as well as it was imagined to work when safely ensconced in a stripped-down mental model. The real world always messes up our pristine ideas! The problem must be the universe: certainly not our superior mental concoctions! An apt line from Douglas Adams in Mostly Harmless:
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof [is] to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
The list of complete fools can include people, other animals, plants, microbes, or the universe in general—which can often contrive to wreck best-laid plans. And where might the fault lie?
While on cultural references, in one episode of The Simpsons, a car company wanted Homer—judged to be an extremely typical American—to design the perfect car. It had every conceivable brain-fart feature that popped into Homer’s shiny globe. The result, predictably, was a hideous monstrosity (yet somehow more pleasing than the cyber truck), and a total flop. Now project that image onto modernity.
Of course modernity’s political schemes are not going to work, in the end. Why do so many people think they can, when they never have in all of history, across many experimental instantiations around the globe? Why would anyone think we’re so close, when polarization has never been worse, and a sixth mass extinction is underway as a result of our obsessive solutioneering? I’m not sure we can survive many more solutions. Please stop!
Naïve, to a Human
Having bashed the left’s tendency toward condescension, it’s my turn to commit the same sin on a grand scale. It all seems rather naïve. Whether discussing the political right or the political left, we must keep in mind that the alluring end-point is a complete imagination: a fantasy—something that has never existed. Brains simply are not constructed/evolved to be able to form mental models sufficiently complete and contextualized to conceive an artifice capable of long-term success. That’s because long-term success is inseparably embedded in an ecological context, whose full contours were established via relentless experimentation over inconceivable stretches of time, and will always elude our poor meat-brains.
If anyone is put off by this proclamation that we are incapable of designing a political system that finally “gets it right,” I ask them to prove me wrong. Is it simple faith, or personal hubris (i.e., believing themselves to have the correct answer)? If a matter of faith, well, bless their hearts. If hubris, maybe the appropriate response is: seriously? (Also be sure to check out the Dunning-Kruger effect.)
By characterizing basically every modern political ideology as being naïve, I might be misinterpreted as being egregiously hubristic myself: beyond the pale. Importantly, I am not claiming to have the answers myself. My meat-brain is no better than any other. I am every bit as prone to being naïve. I simply don’t pretend that I am (or that anyone is) capable of imagining a successful political framework to support a grossly unsustainable construct such as modernity—any more than any of us can toss a rock up and have it ignore gravity by power of thought, or refuse to ever die through an act of will.
Foundation
What I do know is that the community of life is far older than humans, that humans are far older than modernity, and that modernity is effectively a massive brain-fart increasingly ignorant-of and divorced-from ecological reality. Today’s political ideologies are products of modernity, in service to its human-supremacist, unsustainable, impossible continuance. It’s all empty.
What I also know is that for hundreds of thousands of years, people adopted various locally-tuned cultural structures that functioned within a complete ecological context, and worked for people as they are—not people as we idealize or wish them to be. What’s the point of enacting a system for imaginary people, then blaming people when it never works? Why prioritize an unrealistic ideology over reality? Don’t let our brains try to design the world. Because we suck at it.
Instead…
The good news in all this is that whatever fraction of your time, energy, or anxiety goes toward politics can be reclaimed for other concerns. This can have a positive effect on your life. It’s part of falling out of love with modernity, and finding love elsewhere—among the people in your life, the local community, and the broader living world. After all, once recognizing that the simple political dream is predicated on modernity’s continuance and perfection, and that it can never happen, then what’s the point?
Some might recoil at the idea of just giving up on politics, imagining something like anarchy in its place. Sure: the characteristically-simplistic mental model is that if 100% of people suddenly disengaged the resulting vacuum would bring mayhem—but come on—we all know that’s not how things happen. Disaffection will creep in gradually, and mostly as today’s indefatigable political warriors die to be replaced by newcomers who just don’t buy into the old ways and dreams. Suitable, local replacements will naturally ease in to displace failing institutions. A fraction of people, like me, can choose to focus on the longer term, and ask what we can do now to help humans succeed once modernity winds itself down. The Department of National Intelligence is not part of that future, so why fret about it, or who runs it (into the ground)? In a sense, the Trump administration might serve to hasten distrust in institutions and result in people having to find their own way—thrown into the deep end to sink or swim. I am conflicted about whether it’s my preferred way to go about it, but because I no longer cling to a fantasy future, I am not as distressed as many in my circle. We have to let go of the wolf’s ear sometime and somehow. There is no “right” way to do it, without some pain somewhere. Pretending otherwise is part of the prevailing fantasy, and I’m ready to grow out of it.
Anyhow, I hope you might also find a more healthy mental state by questioning the degree to which your own political anxieties are rooted in unachievable fantasy. Life can be better without all the claptrap.
Views: 4261
Me ha gustado tu artículo Tom, quizás porque coincido plenamente. Leí un artículo de David Graeber que tenía muchos puntos en común con este. Se que fuiste muy crítico con su último libro, crítica que agradezco, pero estoy convencido que, de seguir vivo, os habrías llevado bien. Un gran placer, como siempre, leerte.
[Edit: appending Google Translate] I liked your article Tom, perhaps because I completely agree. I read an article by David Graeber that had many points in common with this one. I know you were very critical of his last book, a criticism I appreciate, but I am convinced that, if you were still alive, you would have gotten along well. A great pleasure, as always, to read you.
Whether lost in translation or not, the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. The Graeber+Wengrow book (Dawn of Everything) indeed stressed the egalitarian tendencies of small-scale tribal modes of living, but to my mind doubled down on "fantasy realization" syndrome. All we have to do is dream it, wish it, and let it flourish—forget about dynamics, interaction, complex realities. Part of my negative reaction was their partiality to mental models. They didn't imagine it to be impossible to "get it right" in a modernity lifestyle with billions of people. To me, they represent more of the same dreaminess characteristic of the left.
Correct translation:
I liked your article Tom, perhaps because I agree with it. I read an article by David Graeber that had a lot in common with this one. I know you were very critical of his last book, for which I am grateful, but I am convinced that, had he still been alive, you would have got on well. A great pleasure, as always, to read you.
Tom, yes thanks for your sober take on the human saga. We are freaks of nature. An interesting mutation gone awry, deep inside our considerable imagination. Love Rick
We only *really* went awry in the last 3% of our time as a species, so all hope is not lost for us, in terms of being freaks and all. Every life form is a freak in some way, but only those freaks that mesh with the web are tolerated to survive. We can do and we have done, but will we again?
We didn't go awry, though. At least not in an objective sense. We are acting like a species and always have. As you've observed, mutations that don't work in the long run die out. I'm sure many other mutations must have followed that route. We aren't the first and won't be the last.
It is true that the election results have made it easy to completely disconnect. Nice essay that gave me peace.
On a comment forum, this Ed guy may seem just like any other person. But what I know from years working together is that Ed is an amazing human, and it delights me to have given him some peace.
From the lyrics to Crass's "Bloody Revolutions":
You talk of overthrowing power with violence as your tool
You speak of liberation and when the people rule
Well ain't it people rule right now, what difference would there be?
Just another set of bigots with their rifle-sights on me
This is a side issue to the matter of modernity's looming expiration, but the lyrics that "crd" quotes remind me of a wisdom uttered by (the otherwise appalling, in my view) Saul Alinsky: “The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.”
My codicil to Alinsky's idea is this: The people you’re trying to help aren’t any better than the people you’re working against, and if you interchanged them, you’d wind up with the same struggle on your hands.
I'm not sure I agree with the thrust of your argument here. We can agree that civilization/modernity is an ecological aberration and doomed to self-terminate, but isn't this why politics are required, and indeed of laws etc. Tribes don't need political movements and they don't need law courts or police forces either. But here we are… enmeshed in modernity for the foreseeable. Sneering at the pointlessness of political ideologies is a luxury for people living in liberal western democracies. Try being a slave working on a plantation or an untouchable in modern India and then tell me that there aren't political movements worth fighting for. Yes it's all pointless in the context of deep time, but so is all life. It's just a matter of the length of your tape measure.
Name one politician who thinks modernity is an ecological aberration doomed to self-terminate. That's not why politics is 'required'. It arose concomitant with expanding human populations (expanding outside their ecological context, as is now clear) as a means of control.
We are indeed enmeshed in modernity, but does that mean the status quo should be given carte blanche to continue on its ruinous path? It isn't 'sneering', to be disillusioned (or angry) with where thousands of years of democracy (aka mob rule) has led us.
'Liberal western democracies' – history shows they were wholly predicated on the exploitation of other lands and people. Nothing to be proud of. All 'democracies' are only *for* those *within them* (war and slavery, for those not).
As Tom rightly says, politics is a reflection of the culture, and our entire culture is sick, jeopardizing the health of the entire living world.
No one knows the route, but ultimately politics, bureaucracies, institutions etc will all be consigned to the dustbin of history. In the context of deep time, all life is *not* pointless, and will escape its technological prison to be free again.
No politician says it openly, but I wonder if there are a handful who do know that modernity is inherently unsustainable.
That just highlights the absurdity of the situation – if a politician told the truth (that modernity is a destructive, unsustainable nightmare), he or she would never get elected. They'd be condemned.
Thus, democracy ensures that only those who support modernity get into power, and the ****show continues (to its inevitable demise).
So there is no cause you would fight for then? No point voting for the least worst option on the ballot? Let the populist mob rule then. After all, it will accelerate the end of modernity and then we can enjoy the aftermath… except the 1% of humanity that will survive to become neo hunter gatherers will live in a depressingly depleted world if indeed they survive at all.
I prefer to believe that we can smooth the path and that it's worth fighting for better. Probably self-delusion.
You'll have to explain to me what the point of life is though? To evolve?
Point ? There is no point. We're puppets. The puppet masters are the genes. Puppets in a carnival of wonders. Only humans think the carnival of life must have some elusive "point ".
Genes, epigenetics and environment. Remember that we have no free will.
"So there is no cause you would fight for then?" Sure, I would fight for a cause.
However, I don't consider voting for a suit-wearing System lackey, 'fighting'.
"Let the populist mob rule then."
Yep, that's democracy.
Buy maybe you're right. Perhaps things will change for the better after the *next* election. If you just vote harder…
"You'll have to explain to me what the point of life is though?"
So, there's no point to life but there is a point in voting? Lol
Politics is and always has been the art of compromise and negotiation. The problem as you have so elegantly demonstrated is that people no longer seem able to disagree agreeable. Argument becomes destructive point scoring rather than constructive debate. Hence the polarisation we are seeing.
I still feel my critique of Tom's argument stands. Abandoning politics is not the only answer. Working constructively to slowly change the narrative will help, even if it's just voting for the Green candidate. The more people who do, the more the major parties will be forced to shift positions, albeit at a snail's pace. In the UK the Green party had its best ever result last time round. I see this as a sign that more people understand the predicament than ever before.
Even if I agreed with the position that voting is pointless, I would find it hard to tell my two children that the political process is broken and pointless. I can't really explain why that is. Maybe it just feels too nihilistic a position to hold in my head, when the act of raising children necessitates a belief that the future will be OK for them.
I always used to vote for the Green candidate and the Green Party. Recently, though, I've realised that the Green's, at least in my country and probably globally, also want modernity to continue and even push for growth, provided it's of the right kind. The Greens in my country, NZ, I recall them pushing for NZ to be the leaders in green technology, exporting it to the world. I used to think that, even though I knew they weren't interested in dismantling modernity, at least they put more focus on the environment, which must be good. But there is a disconnect between wanting modernity to continue (plus a comfortable life for all) and protecting the environment. So my voting, these days, is tactical, or to vote for an independent or even smaller party than the Greens, or simply abstain.
Thanks Dan. Yes – furious agreement. Abandoning politics is hyper-privileged nonsense. Furthermore, the ecological world is also political. Not ideological as such of course, but certainly political and can be witnessed with our own eyes if we sit quietly and watch.
As I walked home (from a job I hate) through miles of deafening traffic and choking pollution, to my tiny, rented flat with its leaking roof, I thought: I am many things, but privileged (let alone hyper-privileged) is not one of them.
Am I supposed to be *grateful* to live in the inhuman bureacracy known as modernity, because someone in some faraway land has it worse (probably due to colonialism, or its legacies – which you might think of as the 'externalities' of wonderful democracy)?
Western 'values', 'justice', 'human rights' etc etc – and yes, 'democracy', is all a charade. Other countries are bombed, invaded or destroyed, all to uphold these 'values' – which are… what, exactly?
Asylum seekers (maybe from countries who've had some 'freedom' delivered to them) – you're not wanted, stay out of our democracy! 'Human rights', 'equality'… but not for the children mining cobalt for your smartphone, eh?
Your comfy lifestyle, mediated by politics, comes at the *direct expense* of the Natural world.
So please don't tell me I'm privileged, merely for observing that democracy (and, by extension, politics) is not all it's cracked up to be.
This essay turns a corner, and the redirection is much appreciated — such as:
"ask what we can do now to help humans succeed once modernity winds itself down" (and all that implies); and, wisely, turn away from "specialized, narrow jobs toward broadly general occupation". The end of the Limits to Growth/Oil Drum journey is not a grandiose solution to extend modernity. It is instead something realistically humble – without all the blanketing delusions.
I recall Tim Garrett saying something on X about those who are interested in civilisation's demise must surely applaud the election of Trump.
Then he's wrong when it comes to me. No clapping here. Although I suppose "interested" (which I am) is different from "advocating." This puts me in a strange place: I see modernity as a sickness that must end one way or another, and would prefer it to be by a gentle path. It feels different than actively trying to tear it down.
I'm not applauding, either but it's hard to imagine how we take a gentle path when every leader out there has no intention of attempting a controlled contraction of the economy, nor would anyone (effectively) vote for such a leader. Rather the reverse. Sometimes I wonder if a quicker demise of modernity would be better but I'm definitely hoping it happens well after my demise (and preferably after my grandkids'). But it seems to be getting closer.
It's hard to imagine most things that come to pass (limited brains, again). Global fertility decline might set up an unexpected gentler path, in that it won't matter that politicians (i.e., their voting base) have no intention of enacting a contraction. That contraction is coming like a freight train, and stands to overwhelm "intent." It won't be up to the leaders that economies fail in the wake of depopulation.
Just before the recent British General Election on 4 July 2024, I analysed the positions of the two main political parties (Labour and Conservative) on the seven issues which mattered most to me. There was hardly any difference between them, and mostly they ignored the issues.
https://toxicplantsblog.blogspot.com/2024/06/uk-general-election-special.html
The political sides are indeed tiresome, and I wish we'd move past them. The left seems hopelessly lost in a cult of utopian posturing (we are the correct and compassionate ones! and anyone who disagrees with us is a nazi and a bigot) and the right is also lost in the cult of MORE (development ad nauseam). Sigh.
A lot of political issues these days strike me as a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Either the issues are fairly irrelevant compared to the metaphorical iceberg situation (e.g. most culture war type of issues), or people fail to approach them from the context of the iceberg situation (e.g. abortion rights). Some parts of the political left do have excellent ideas about degrowth and the right priorities, though.
Social liberalism/conservatism are just kind of tangential to issues I consider truly important. I think the Amish are onto something, whatever I might feel about their religion and conservatism.
Thanks again, Tom, for another thoughtful essay. Here’s my (admittedly) left-hemisphere reduction. I realize that complexities and complications abound, but…
We (and the planet) can deal with the complexity of 50 to100 humans living together at a time. We are mental-model-making apes capable of agriculture and technology, both of which postpone many of life’s negative feedbacks. Population soon grows beyond 50-100. When this happens, things get more complicated, and our brains are deluded into ignoring our right-hemisphere big-picture capabilities and default to a left-hemisphere mode that imposes simplistic worldviews and naive, myopic, destructive ‘solutions.’ We ‘live in the model.’ Following Tainter, each ‘solution’ manifests itself as an increase in complexity, which comes at a cost. When we reach a point of diminishing returns on our investments in complexity, society collapses. Politics (and religion and certain other ideologies) in this scenario become tools of our left hemisphere and reflect and reinforce its limitations and delusions. These social structures (politics, religion, et al) grow, persist and compete with one another pretty much as Dawkins describes in his discussion of memes and memeplexes. What is unique about this particular predicament is its scale, which is, unfortunately, global. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, baby!
"Єдиний спосіб виграти – НЕ грати"
Дякую за резонуючий допис:)
[edit: Google translate says] "The only way to win is NOT to lose"
Dyakuyu for the resonant addition
Incidental note: "Dyakuyu" means "thank you" in Ukrainian.
Hi Tom,
Speaking of human brains and their limitations…
The idea that the advent of agriculture was the (or a) major point where humans went wrong makes sense to me, but some suggest/hint that the emergence of language as part of the development of human consciousness was the beginning of the road to ruin. Abraham Peper, a biophysicist from the University of Amsterdam, has called the advent of language the "human catastrophe", as outlined in a series of three recent papers:
http://www.abraham-peper.com/papers/Peper%202020.pdf
http://www.abraham-peper.com/papers/Peper%202022.pdf
http://www.abraham-peper.com/papers/Peper%202024.pdf
[editor removed copied abstract of third paper for brevity; the link above gets you there]
They are are a fascinating set of papers in which he outlines what he thinks distinguishes human consciousness from animal consciousness (animal consciousness expresses itself in sensory images, while human consciousness is largely verbal), and the problems that this causes for us as a species. I'd be interested what you make of his ideas, though I understand you are busy and therefore might not have the time or inclination to read them.
Cheers,
Bim
I can see the rationale behind the premise that language is a "killer app" that spells trouble. But humans have used language for a very long time—likely predating Homo sapiens. I don't like imposing a hard divide (duality) between animals and humans (supports supremacy), and indeed whales have sophisticated language. Orcas stayed away from the site of a tragic capture/massacre for 54 years, somehow passing the story along. In any case, we didn't demonstrably divorce from ecological context until agriculture. Was it an inevitable consequence of language? Maybe. But plenty of cultures had full linguistic capability and used it to set norms of restraint for living in ecological context. It seems it is not always bad news, and certainly not instantly.
Many thanks Tom.
Yes, this all makes sense to me.
I greatly respect indigenous cultures like those of the Australian Aboriginal peoples, whose worldview is framed in terms of the land being sacred, providing the "restraint for living in an ecological context". The Aboriginal philosopher Mary Graham explains that, for Australian Aboriginals,"the two most important kinds of relationship in life are, firstly, those between land and people and, secondly, those amongst people themselves, the second being always contingent upon the first. The land, and how we treat it, is what determines our human-ness. Because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land".
(https://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2008/11/01/some-thoughts-about-the-philosophical-underpinnings-of-aboriginal-worldviews/)
I guess the problem with modern society is that it is based predominantly on a mountain of theorizing/abstractive thought (underpinned by language) that has been carried out in the absence of something like the Australian Aboriginal's "The Land is the Law" as the primary axiom.
Bunch of different points I've been referred to during my overshoot journey as the place where it all went wrong. Agriculture, the plow, language, the written word… some idiots even say fossil fuels, LOL.
If denial and MPP are a big focus in your journey, you have a chance of ending up at the correct answer; Fire. Human overshoot is the only type of overshoot (in the history of life) that can destroy all life. This is because humans do the only thing that nobody else does.
Thanks paqnation. So I can better understand what you meant by "if denial and MPP are a big focus in your journey, you have a chance of ending up at the correct answer; Fire", could you please clarify what MPP is? Forgive my ignorance.
What do you think underpins "human overshoot"? Why is it unique to us? Very interested to hear more of your thoughts or be directed to somewhere where I can read about them. Cheers
Hello Bim. MPP stands for The Maximum Power Principle. I'll leave you with three essays. First one is about MPP. 2nd one is more about the thermodynamics. 3rd one is my essay about fire. Both of these sites are good sources for MPP (and denial). Cheers.
https://un-denial.com/2023/09/28/by-preston-howard-the-maximum-power-principle-and-why-it-underscores-the-certainty-of-human-extinction-in-the-near-future/
https://megacancer.wordpress.com/2024/11/11/splodge-goggles/
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/20/by-paqnation-aka-chris-humans-are-not-a-species/
"you have a chance of ending up at the correct answer, Fire."
I thought it was 42?
Thanks, Tom, for another well-expressed analysis of things, with an outlook that I *feel* deeply, but find hard to articulate. It's always a pleasure and a relief to find someone that clearly thinks in the same kind of way as I do, having spent decades essentially wondering if I was alone in seeing 'the human world' (better expressed as modernity) as essentially absurd and predicated on a mass delusion.
Thanks also to the commenters for the discussion above. It's a deeply engaged and yet civil forum, which is a rare pleasure and relief to find these days.
On the 'point' of politics, it's hard for me now to hold the cognitive dissonance of being much concerned with the (ultimately doomed) mission to perfect (or even much improve) the world through politics. But I appreciate the efforts of some of those (broadly of the left / green approach) who do. I agree that some in politics must see the end of modernity inevitably coming and find themselves unable to tell the truth, which must be incredibly painful. And yet, in the pretty short term, the effects of politics on our lives can be significant and worth pushing for.
I worry about a point when the truth can no longer be denied, and a significant number of people get it. The temptation for some or many may at that point be to give up feeling the need to conform to the rules of the system and so we may hit another tipping point hastening collapse through a kind of social breakdown.
M
Trouble arises from our tendency to hold a single mental model for the nature of the world, so that when threatened or falsified, the automatic reaction of many is nihilism. If not modernity, then all is lost. If not God, then a world of chaos. If not soul, then we are reduced to mere, meaningless machines. I view the nihilist reaction as the failure of a brain too attached to a particular (usually simple, tidy, comforting) model. The error is in putting too much stock/meaning in our shortcut mental models in the first place. I think this phenomenon will be on display when it becomes more clear that modernity ain't it.
Tom,
A very good article. I found it to be a useful philosophical salve after the US election. Once again I would encourage you to merge your recent articles into a small pamphlet like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. It won’t do anything to change the trajectory of modernity, but it could offer some comfort to younger folk who will experience the beginnings of the fall.
The main point is correct, but also sort of uninteresting. Of course, if you take a long enough point of view, nothing matters, everything we now know will cease to exist, and of course we and everyone we know will be dead long long before that happen. That's trivial, and does nothing to change what is happening right now and for the next few years we are going to be alive.
While in the abstract it makes perfect sense to say "we'll all be hunter-gatherers, that or extinct, anyways in a few hundred or few thousand years", in practice, from the point of view of us mere mortals it makes a big difference what kind of politics we'll experience in our lifetime.
In respect of a political system that get things "right" I would respectfully suggest people check out Murray Bookchin's "Ecology of Freedom", which describes a system of communalism which attempts to avoid the domination of nature and instead integrate with the ecosystem. It was published in 1971 so it's freely available now.
Bookchin's theories have been developed by Abdullah Ocalan (leader of the PKK) and applied by the autonomous communities of Rojava in Northern Syria who operate a system of direct face-to-face democracy mediated through community assemblies with all decisions being made at the local level by the people affected. Similar political systems are in operation in the Chiapas region of Mexico under the umbrella of the Zapatistas, who derive their value of nature from the indigenous communities.
I don't know if you are familiar with the so-called 'Jungle' novels of B. Traven. The first of these books titled 'Government' (1929) presented a similar form of government by the Chiapas aboriginal people.
I first ran into Traven in a Ramparts magazine article by Judy Stone (dated from 1967.) Traven's popularity seems to ebb and flow, being popular in the 60's and later in the 90's. Does anyone read him now?
The section on daylight savings time and our artificial overlay of time reminded me about the debate over leap seconds. The basic idea of leap seconds is that there are slight irregularities in the speed of Earth's rotation and occasionally a second needs to be added or removed to keep our clocks and calendars in sync with astronomical cycles. The problem is that leap seconds cause problems for computer systems that need precise time keeping because leap seconds are added on an ad-hoc basis, rather than a simple rule like leap days and leap years.
Leap seconds used to torment me in my job. I had to revise our prediction software each time (not on a predictable schedule; and I was always doing it last-minute in a rush) or we would utterly miss the reflected signal from the moon in my lunar ranging experiment. In a sense, this is our time system bowing to reality (unlike DST) to keep the (mean) sun on the meridian at noon. That's fair (I side with Earth, here, who can do whatever it wants), but then our rigid systems have a hard time coping with messy reality. That last phrase might characterize the unwinding of modernity quite well.
“So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference between them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario.
Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once.”?
https://un-denial.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/lars-larsen-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-13th-edition-2024.pdf