The shock being experienced in Washington D.C. since January 20 is exposing gaping holes in the fantasies we told ourselves were rock-solid truths—lasting for whole (gasp) generations!. It is also important to admit that this is democracy working as intended: a popular majority said yes, and—let’s face it—might well do so again if a vote were held tomorrow.
Several of my recent posts have stressed the virtual reality aspects of modernity and our tendency to take refuge in flimsy mental models disconnected from biophysical and ecological reality. An earlier post cautioned against falling into the trap of aiming for fantasy political perfection. Here, we’ll look at the holes that are opening up.
As the Trump Administration rattles cages and turns things upside-down, I keep seeing headlines that effectively ask: “Is that even legal?”
Isn’t the mere fact that legal status is uncertain a glaring indicator that our legal system is little more than a bolus of small rocks held together by a few strands of spider web? No? Does that image fail to work for you: too random and specific? Whatever. You get the point.
Trumping Reality
On the question of legality, the Trump Administration attitude is: “If you have to ask, then we’ll just say: yes—it’s legal when we do it. While you’re spinning wheels in legal mud, we’ll just go about irreversibly changing the country. Have fun!” The point is: no one really knows, because it’s all make-believe. That’s how empty-shirt our house-of-cards, Potemkin village of an artificial system is. Unlike a richly-woven ecology, it came out of meat-brains, hasn’t stood the test of time, and is held together by spit. That’s what my dear uncle would say about the Ferris wheels and other attractions that would roll into his small Georgia town overnight and set up in a parking lot (basically: “No, I’m not going to let you ride them.”). Our legal system reminds me of Ptolemaic epicycles: byzantine patches on patches; contrivances upon contrivances.
Judges are meant to rule on the legality of a matter, as if unambiguous. Notice that a judge never has enough intellectual integrity to say: indeterminate; can’t be decided; beyond the limits of the law or our mental facilities to decide. We agree to pretend that correct decisions are not only possible, but legitimate—when they’re often rather arbitrary.
The United States Supreme Court illustrates this very well, because a panel of nine judges weighs in on a matter, frequently splitting very predictably along ideological lines. What does that tell us? Interpretations of a manifestly imperfect artificial system will itself be manifestly imperfect and artificial. It is easy enough for clever people to weave a veil of fancy language to obscure the naked emperor. That’s a skill honed by college experience. Two can play the “originalist” game of literal interpretation of the Constitution to come up with diametrically-opposed opinions. It’s an emptiness that we pretend to be solid.
Fiat Reality
This is a good example of what I have meant when I’ve said repeatedly that brain-derived constructs—grossly decontextualized from the myriad relationships comprising an ecology—will be essentially guaranteed to fail in the long term. Brain-farts rapidly lose their potency, on ecologically-relevant time scales.
In the present case, when a democratically-elected leader of the executive branch claims something is legal by fiat, and the legislative branch does not bother to clarify with new explicit band-aids (ahem, laws), and the court system rules—after many contradictory decisions, appeals, reversals, and delays—that the action is indeed declared to be legal, it shows that the whole system is one of fiat.
In fact, how could a currency, a nation-state, or a legal system be based on anything but fiat? These things were never anything more than rickety, notional constructs made strong only by collective agreement, acquiescence, or even apathy. We’re starting to learn how superficial and insubstantial the whole thing is (while being existentially destructive). We stand in a hall of mirrors, admiring distorted reflections of distorted reflections—our sight-lines to the real external world eclipsed and re-routed by our superficially-imposed layers that we mistake for reality.
The Pledge
I may as well use this space to offer a translation of the Pledge of Allegiance in the U.S. For those unfamiliar, many states in the U.S. require school children to recite the pledge daily—generally standing with hand over heart (at one point the accompanying gesture closely resembled a Nazi salute). The words are:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Now my translation:
I pledge fealty to a symbol of a fiction, and to the abstraction on which it floats, one notion under an imagined deity, indivisible because we say so, with detachment and unachievable ideals for select members of the human species only.
How we love a bit of theory! Delicious brain-work, without an iota of contact to ecological bedrock. Flyin’ high!
Ultimate Court
In any case, if a government arbitrates that something is legal, what higher authority is recognized by said government to tell it otherwise? Of course, I know of an ultimate authority that will eventually pass judgment. No amount of “but I thought…” will matter. Our misguided notions are irrelevant: inconsequential shoe-squeaks in the larger dance.
The enormous and impressive display of plate-spinning that modernity puts on is manifestly unsustainable and will not be permitted to continue indefinitely. The plates will not keep spinning. Now, I would prefer an approach that calmly and deliberately sets each plate gently down over the coming decades (or centuries) with words of gratitude (a hospice gesture). The Trump approach may be closer to charging the stage, body-checking the plate-spinners, and smirking as plates crash and shatter all around. I can’t say I’m a fan of the approach, but neither can I pretend that the show was capable of going much longer—given how unsustainably-elaborate the spinning arrangements had become.
So, I ask the newts and the nesting chickadees what they think about the current government shenanigans. They possess a wisdom beyond my own, and I take a page from their indifference. However destructive and threatening to all Life, modernity is a brief flash, perhaps best ignored by those who intend to stay for the long haul. Ride it out.
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Thank you, Tom. This is awesome, accurate, and the reality we have been living in for a long time with our heads in the sand. As a retired fed and history/anthropology major, it's so important for me to read your blog and learn from your science-based and eons-long term perspectives. I'd like to vote for the newts and the nesting chickadees, but I don't know how to get them on the ballot. My husband and I are raising our two granddaughters and it's very hard to drop them off at school in the mornings knowing the BS that is being crammed down their throats, but grandma is tired and she needs time to read and pontificate and sit outside.
When they are old enough, read Ishmael to them, and they will at least become aware that the system crams a lot of BS down their throats. They'll have a context for why it happens, and learn to recognize it (then lose their friends…).
Few are able to craft a sentence as you do, let alone express the foreboding mood as the tide pulls out before the tsunami of crumbling Western Civilization. Scary times, these. I decided to to cast my 79 year fate to the East's millenia's old cultural successes. They have not been sustainable entirely, but repeated in dynastic waves.
Respect your elders, especially in the growing shadow of AI.
I like your version of the pledge. However, the possibility to publish this without risk of getting punished can not be taken for granted. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, political rights etc are just matters of not being forbidden since it doesn’t take much to change the laws in the US and elsewhere. In the US there was a right to abortion for 50 years until the supreme court overruled it.
Not related to this post, but in line with previous astronomical scale examples: https://xkcd.com/1276/ It's sizes of space objects projected on earth's surface. I haven't verified the correctness though. I like your book very, very much. Especially the margin notes.
It's a slow comment forum, and I'm a fan of Munroe's (quality) work, so why not! As to margin notes, people feel strongly about them in both directions. Students weren't big fans (speculating: interrupted their algorithmic process with unwanted context that would almost certainly not be on the test).
My partner (who has shared the burden with my journal of hearing my many thoughts about modernity and desire to see it crumble) once expressed surprise that I wasn't a Trump supporter, since they supposedly also want to "see it all burn down" and "drain the swamp" and so on. I was bewildered, as I thought the differences were obvious. My take was that Trump and his ilk feign rebelliousness but are the biggest plate-spinners and carnival barkers of all, loading everyone onto the rickety spittle-filled old rides, whose true agenda is MORE civilization, MORE human supremacy, MORE hierarchy, MORE techno-idiot fantasies, to "drill baby drill" until there's nothing left, and they're going to keep smashing things like toddlers until they get what they want. And sure, I've had to do my share of reckoning with the fact that the other side was maybe just pretending to be any better or very slightly delaying modernity's death march, but the fact that all it took to get people to kiss the ring was the promise of a marginally cheaper carton of eggs looming mirage-like in the future was still depressing (though, it was also part of the internet quest that eventually led me to this blog, so there's that!) Like I knew in my heart most modern humans don't give a hoot about nonhuman life, but I'm not sure it makes me feel better that it's all out in the open now. Maybe it should? Like maybe all this shaking up will lead to unexpected exposure – I think of the line from the sci-fi novel Hyperion, about how "events no longer obey their masters". Could it eventually get people asking questions about the reality of these fictions they've subscribed to, as you do here? I'd like to believe that, but then again, the drastic, bombastic approach of the current administration seems designed to scare people into clinging harder to modernity, not to fall out of love with it. I wish I could be more newt-ish about the whole thing. The link to that earlier post was quite timely.
An excellent point that Trump and his ilk are "the biggest plate-spinners and carnival barkers of all." I missed that angle, but it's beautifully put! Yes: it's not that they believe the "show" to be misguided. They just want to be the ones running it. They don't care about smashing "boring" plates like education or aid to get their profit-oriented and tech-fantasy plates spun up.
Your comments on this blog are uniformly excellent (and insightful), so the journal work has paid off. If you start a blog, let me (us) know!
I feel more and more apathy about it all… It's just another stage (a denouement) of the energy pulse were sustained growth amongst nation-states can only now be reached through a higher and more explicit level of depradation against each other, ending up in (even more) pain and destruction, a purgatory that given the initial boundary conditions we unfortunately were bound to go through anyways (from my point of view). The best one can do is to be kind (always) and work on creating trust bonds with those surrounding you to create redundancies in benefit of everybodies' well-being.
This post covers one my all time bugbears – this common inversion of importance between reality (of utmost, near-infinite importance) and the fiat models we worship (important to the extent they influence behavior but totally irrelevant beyond this). I think money is the best example – a religion by any other name – worshiped by all from atheists to the most devout monk. We will gut ecosystems and burn excess crops to maintain the stability of this fiat number and pretend with near 100% earnestness that the global game we're playing is real while the forests we level and species we wipe out are just and necessary actions/obstacles on our journey to future abundance – when we'll all be gloriously rich, living large and reaching for the stars (and definitely not future serfs/slaves toiling in a degraded world a-la Elysium – the movie, not the Greek idea of heaven the title is taken from).
Some food for thought.
How did we end up in a position where we place legal fictions above physical reality itself?
What would a constitution or legal system based on sound ecological principles look like? It would be quite different than what we have right now.
Civilisation itself is not based on sound ecological principles.
Or at least: we know of no civilization that has been sound. I would hesitate to rule it out categorically, but it would have to look so different from modernity that we (today, with our worldviews) also might hesitate to call it civilization.
Ruling something hypothetical out categorically is difficult and perhaps impossible. However, in thinking about civilization on a fundamental level, a few things stand out. First, there's the aspect of population density in cities which tend beyond the local carrying capacity and thus adopt both expansionist and militaristic dispositions (seems historically consistent). Second, throughout the Holocene, the high population density city-state model appears to be predicated on the utilization of unsustainable technological practices, – such as the Sumerian heavy plow ~3,500BC and Roman iron-age heavy plow, turning breadbasket Egypt into a desert via slash and burn agriculture. The historical human anthill population density model relies on augmenting human-ecosystem interfacing with ecologically unsustainable technology, and because of multipolar trap human competition dynamics, the more ecologically unsustainable civilization models are selected for because they win the arms-race of wheat due to higher short-term yields, overpowering more sustainable and less extractive models militarily. And finally, a scaling up of the human enterprise to the global level seems to me to be bound to fail because, as you've pointed out at least a couple times, humans are faced with fundamental cognitive incapacities. For instance, we've categorized some 2 million species while there are an estimated 10 to 50 million on the planet. We cannot, as a species, hope to ascend beyond infancy in our understanding of the hyper-complex system we call the biosphere, and have no hope of learning how to run it, and thus I would argue that it a universal mistake to scale the human enterprise up to the level of planetary domination and turning the earth into an island, regardless of our political, social, legal, institutional, economic, etc., machinations. Neither democracy nor tyranny will lead us to the promised land, we simply don't know what we're doing at this scale and it's going to end tragically. I think that there's a lot to suggest that the human-anthill model is structurally unsound, and as you point out, there's no empirical evidence to the contrary.
Spoken like a true Schmachtenberger (and I'm in agreement).
For some reason I can't reply to your comment, maybe it's nested too far. I like Schmachtenberger and think that he adds some intellectual value to the space. However, his 'threading the eye of the needle.' and suggestions of solving civilization's ills via higher levels of complexity are I believe dead-ends from the Tainter perspective of diminishing returns of complexity-based solutions. Let's evaluate a Schmachtenberger statement, "What are the necessary and sufficient criteria that a civilization that doesn't self-terminate in the presence of the emerging power? We can actually identify what those criteria are." – Can we? I guess I disagree. "As technology is giving us the power of gods, we have to get the love and wisdom and understanding of gods or we self-terminate with that power." It reminds me of my favorite musician Jimi Hendrix's "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." – Beautiful ideas, but there is no historical or contemporary precedent, and thus they sound a bit naive or maybe even hippy-dippy to my ears. I think in fact that 8.1 billion technologically-enhanced fire-apes are running around with crayons in their brains (10mg microplastics on average) causing mischief in the context of a competitive nation-state system and an industrial civilization approaching biophysical limits, I don't believe that world peace or next-level love and wisdom are in the cards with our species' current trajectory and dispositions. Rather, we are invoking catastrophes, wars, and a sixth mass extinction that some humans might make it through to the other side of, though I'm agnostic on that as it will depend on how much damage we do to the biosphere. I guess I'd be more depressing to listen to than Schmachtenberger.
I tend to agree that Schmachtenberger can be a victim of his own searing brilliance. I've seen a lot of that. Bolstered by a powerful brain, it is easy to suffer the delusion that brains are up to the task of figuring it all out. I've somehow used what brain power I have to conclude that brain power is no match for complex, emergent, ecological reality, and that grand schemes—however benign in motivation—are doomed to fail like Icarus.
I agree. And while I recognize the deleterious disconnect between love, wisdom, understanding, and power, one of these has scaled exponentially while the others appear to lack commensurate scaling mechanisms, especially in our modern context. Perhaps these things will come back into equilibrium some day, though to me this looks more like a dramatic scaling down of our power via the failure of techno-industrial civilization rather than a dramatic scaling up of the other three. However, given the travails in front of us, if there are those who make it through, they will no doubt gain some hard-won wisdom from the painful trials endured. Perhaps wisdom will scale up a bit, although such devastation to the web of life is a tragic price to pay to impart the ethic of self-restraint to our species.
One other fiction, which you didn't mention, is the idea of "rights." Variously tagged as "human," "god given," and "universal," "rights" appear to stand for "everything I think I should get that you are preventing me from getting." My favorite is the "right to life," which, in practical terms, comes down to the idea that if someone kills me, all my buddies will kill him or her. That is so great because, clearly, killing another person will guarantee that I come back to life. Right?
I agree. Here is something I wrote in "Our Ugly Magnificence":
We concoct rights to justify wants, then argue over them: they have no biophysical basis. Ants—or any other species—have at least as much right to the planet as we do—which very probably is: none at all.
Rights are fictions: another fiat construction.
Our ability to imagine things that don't actually exist in the physical world, unfortunately, is what makes us human.
Even sounds that represent actual physical things or abstract thoughts/concepts are fiat. (Language)
Not sure I would classify language as fiat – although they do seem tightly coupled: the idea of thoughts expressed through language being the ultimate source of power – from Harry Potter casting a spell to "let there be light" and "the word made flesh" to contracts and laws and judgements – as if the declaration makes it so.
Language is a very organic way to convey information among individuals and may be the most transparent image we can have of a culture (a dynamic system with lots of feedback loops). I find language fascinating and very much ignored by the "hard science" community as if its devoid of use, even for epistemologic reasons (wouldn't it be nice to stop for a while and think about how data is sent and processed internally so we may realize that something is not being given enough attention because our culture -very intrinsically linked with our language – has heavily biased us already without we even not noticing it?). We give name to things and assign them a category and automatically bias ourselves by circunscribing that word to a set of potential functions. This can enormously blur our proper understanding of how actually things work, quantum physics come to my mind, were people end up mistaken by thinking that some things are something or must behave in a way when that's not necesarilly like that…
@markus Szillat
I've never really thought about the role of language until now.
Can the abstract concepts that we humans "dream up" exist/created without prior language?
We understand the world primarily through words.
Love, hate, jealousy, equality, democracy, fraud, compassion, dark matter, trust funds…………
Can thing exist for us, if we don't give it a name?
A name/word has at least 3 versions.
The sound.
The visual representation of that sounds and
the fuzzy place in our brains where the word/sound/images plays out.
Perhaps language is the cornerstone of our consciousness?????
Food for thought 🤔
People who have had crippling left-brain strokes loose access to their words, but still clearly can have a thought. Would you say that Helen Keller, prior to being trained, was unconscious, and incapable of thought? I think that's clearly not true. Animals also manage states we call consciousness without language.
@ tmurphy
People who have strokes don't lose their access to words, they lose the ability to articulate them.
Helen Keller (never heard of her till now) is an interesting case. Did she use sign language before she learned to read and write? How did she communicate/catalogue/ make sense of the world before she had access to the written word to give things names?
Interesting thought on deaf people. How do they interpret what they see? Sign language/gestures/body movement?
Objects being given specific body/hand movements?
It's all the same process.
Once a deaf person learns to read, then they are assigning a visual pattern/word to an object or concept. (Language.)
Our consciousnesis so tied up with this process.
I can't say with any confidence how other animal's/species' consciousness plays out though.🤷
Tom and Alex, So well collected, both in the article and the comment, which for me at least, almost dovetails into two ideas I have been swirling around in my meat brain: (1) Why have the Kahokians in what is today North America abandoned their city, was it by mutual consent? – (even if it was not the kind of city that we in modernity might conjure up hearing the term, according to the fabulous "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber & Wengrow). By the time Baron Lahontan recorded his famous discussions with the Huron chief Kandiaronk, the succeeding generations firmly established their "law" of the land: rejection of coinage for payment; free and loosely connecting federalist societies, where nobody would be compelled by any edict unless they felt it benefited them; the delegation system of representatives from the council of elders to successively higher and broader levels of councils; and the use of public cruelty with captive enemies also to counterpoint the stamping out of any kind of domestic violence whatsoever. These 'laws" delivered themselves without the need for policing them. Within these bounds, they regularly discussed and adopted different forms of governance, inheritance, etc as needed. (2) The Maximum Power Principle of Odum and Hall, which now would extend the idea of Prigogine that all life systems are open and dissipative, to the notion that they also must acquire maximum power from all available resources to compete successfully for survival. If so, those who try consciously and conscientiously to economise and live within long term limits will always be overrun and survived by those whose policy is to acquire maximum power even beyond long term limits of the available resources. For me at least, both are pretty sobering – and who knows? There may be a working composite somewhere when making new attempts bound by the two vectors: a natural human "law" as best we can formulate them, and an interpretation of the thermodynamic law as maximum power acquisition and therefore maximum entropy production by living systems understood to be open but also dissipative to their local heat bath. I am hoping for this to be accepted as new comment such that you find it interesting enough to consider reflecting.
@otto n
I really enjoyed TDOE as well. But it is a very political book.
I like the idea, promoted in the book, that people/societies can make choices. Cultures are flexible, adaptive. It's not necessarily survival of the fittest.
(The Moriori are a case in point though not in the book)
Some on the "right" of politics see inequality, hierarchy etc as a precondition of human nature. It justifies the present status quo.
Have you read Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta? It's an aboriginal perspective on the world.
I'm working my way through it. But it's slow going as a lot of the concepts are so alien to my modernist brain, I have to spend a long time reading and re-reading it 🤯🤣.
I'm on the chapter on violence at the moment. Though provoking stuff!
I think with Latka's maximum power principle we're talking about at the base level ecological thermodynamics and energy-flows through ecosystems and then posit that the same principles that confer advantages to plants with deeper roots persist in human-ecosystem game-theoretic competition dynamics.
Sigurd Esteinsson, the Mighty, the second Jarl of Orkney, a Viking leader during the 9th century, challenged Mael Brigte the Buck-Toothed to a 40-man per-side battle. Mael agreed and came to the designated spot on the designated day with 40 men, however, the treacherous Sigurd brought 80 men. Having more embodied energy in the form of troops, Sigurd won the battle and relieved Mael Brigte of his head and strapped it to his horse’s saddle as a trophy. On the way home, Mael’s buck-tooth scratched Sigurd's leg, and Sigurd died of sepsis shortly thereafter. – If both men had known ahead of time that this battle would result in each of their respective deaths, perhaps they could have resolved their differences in a more amicable way. There is something to the Schmachtenberger idea of binding multipolar traps with wisdom and sentience. Unfortunately, we’ve mostly failed at that at a species-level.
The parallel is, if you have an agricultural system that clear-cuts forests, fragments ecosystems, disrupts the hydrologic cycle, erodes top soil, disturbs biogeochemical flows, and more, then while you might manage boosted productivity in the short-term, your grandchildren will starve, or who knows, maybe the calamity will fall on your own head. The antidote to this lunacy, to some extent, is thinking on longer time-horizons, but it is difficult to get people to care about the future, their lives are short, the future seems abstract, our culture and economic system reinforce discounting, and people delude themselves with naive assumptions, ignorance, delusions, apathy, distractions, and Jesus, among other things. It’s a hard nut to crack.
Ruminating on the thread above about language and consciousness.
Does someone with Alzheimer's slowly forget the words for things/objects/concepts? And if those words are forgotten do those unfortunate people forget what those things/objects/concepts are?
Does the world just become a kaleidoscope of shapes and colours with no meaning?
Like a new born baby, unable to see structure in the world?