WEDNESDAY, DEC 4, 2019: NOTE TO FILE

The Doomer Dynamic

Telling tales no mortal dared to dream before

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: DOOM SOON, FROM THE WIRES, DON'T MAKE ME WAIT

'The “doomer” label belies the labeler’s inability to grasp the complexity of the person or position he/she is labeling.... Moreover, “doomer” labeling demonstrates a lack of capacity for  comprehending paradoxes such as: Yes, civilization is collapsing, and that is an opportunity for rebirth.... Paradox, two apparent opposites being true at the same time, complexity, holistic rather than black and white, either/or thinking appear to elude those who simplistically slap the unwarranted “doomer” label on whomever they choose. Most egregiously, however, “doomer” labeling replicates the style of superficial mainstream and sensationalist journalism which refuses to deal with complexities and applies labels so that readers will not have to grapple with multi-layered reality. The prime motivation in this style of journalism is speed and brevity. As a result, readers are unable to view the rich and convoluted tapestry of an event, a story, a person, or a concept. Hence the old paradigm endures with no willingness to construct a new one!... The world as we have known it is ending, only to regenerate and appear in some other form which we cannot yet imagine....the most adult response is neither denial nor doom.' —Carolyn Baker

For the first time, over half the world (humans) are 'middle class' or above consumers. —Brookings Institution

Abstract: The belief in Progress, in things getting better and better—the poorest of the poor getting richer (and the rich getting richer too), is a common -ism, not unlike theism was in twelfth century Europe. And for 300 years the poor have been getting richer. There are now some who believe in atheism (those believing in degrowth are insignificant), but others are abelievers who view a belief in the non-existence of an entity as of no interest. Cornucopianism is one belief and doomerism is the other side of the same coin. Once someone, who from childhood has taken in cornucopianism with their mother's milk, comes to no longer believe in Progress or Growth, they may go to 'the dark side' and become doomers. Alternative is abelief: to adjust for error, prior conditioning, and dispense with believing (or not believing) anything or anyone by actually questioning everything. Doomers come to focus on their belief in their narrative (and confirming it) and endeavor to undermine the contrarian beliefs of others, or convert the wayward to believe in their narrative. Belief-based thinking, whether 'for' or 'against', is a cognitive pathology.

COOS BAY (A-P) — Among climate scientists there is a joke: 'What’s the biggest breakthrough in climate science since 1979?' The punchline is 'there hasn’t been one', that we pretty much know now what we've known for the last forty years. So what's the biggest breakthrough in understanding the human predicament (or problematique) since Catton's summary of 1950-70s systems science thinking in his book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change in 1980? Well, let's see, there really hasn't been....

Humans have a history of failing to deal with unthinkable (not feel-good and disconfirming), inconvenient science-based concerns since Malthus. Or before as it took 200 years for most to concede that Copernicus had the better view. But 'Copernicanism' only took 200 years to replace human cosmo-centism among the 'educated', because some better views are more difficult to deny and because in the 19th century theology gave way to economics as feudalism gave way to industrialization whose narrative was not threated by the claim that the earth and it's supreme inhabitant (Lord Man) was not the center of the universe. God's Mandate gave way to Growth's Mandate.

Are the intelligentsia of the 21st century different from those of the 12th to 15th? We have different belief-based narratives from theirs that we also fail to question.

Climate Conservative Consumer Headlines

By Earth Day 1970, environmental concerns had become hopelessly politicized, as climate change has today, which displaces any science-based, reality-based ability to think. 'The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease.' [Jianzhi Sengcan (aka Seng-Ts'an, ?-606 CE)]

There really are doomers (e.g. Guy McPherson, Hambone Littletail, Doomstead Diner), and then there are those who see with biophysical eyes wide open that we humans are in overshoot and that that implies descent who may or may not also be doomers. What is the best-guess science as to how much longer we can keep on keeping on growing the economy? Oh, let's say this century (climax to be followed by descent, fading away, collapse, degrowth, decline, zombie apocalypse, a great simplification, a great selection, the unthinkable... that can't and won't happen because we are exceptional and the universe loves us). But some who may actually know enough to have an opinion may guess that we will climax in the early 22nd century. Okay, but that 'growth will continue' is probably delusional (unless we become Borg-like expansionist who fill the Milky Way with Us before spreading to all other gallaxies for the taking), even if a law is passed that you can't fail a science class if you give that answer on a test because you deeply believe it is true. Nature, however, doesn't care what you deeply believe.

I have no interest in doomers. On the back burner I have an article to be titled 'When Good Professors Go Bad' and that Guy McPherson will be one of those featured is enough said. Then for the less demanding and erudite consumers of doomer narratives there is Hambone Littletail and his thousands of YouTube videos (4.8 million views) where each current-events-based offering ends with 'we are so fucked'. I imagine his thousands of Humptydumptytribal followers are thrilled and filled with fantastic terrors never fell before each time he intones this, as evidenced by their not being able to hear it enough. So, yes, there really are doomers who save up to travel to McPherson's next lecture or seek his counseling, but there are people who love to watch dystopian and horror movies. Good or bad, it matters not.

That some scientists and professor dudes and dudesses are called doomers by Anthropocene enthusiasts because they lack enthusiasm for growing the economy (or pet, livestock, crop, human populations, increasing per capita consumption and industrial sprawl) also matters not, or wouldn't if they were not the 99+ percent. Think you are the exception? I'm not.

Are you a traditional Hopi or Kogi living in the heart of the world? Or do you know what money is, value it, likely have some, and thus serve or have served the SYSTEM (growth hegemon)? Some Anthropocene enthusiasts live in ecovillages, have gone vegan, drive Teslas powered by solar PV on their 400 m² (4,300 ft²) home, carry stainless steel straws in bamboo cases, and support the Green New Deal (aka BAU in sheep's clothing) to save the world.

But there really are academics, scientists, technocrats and autodidacts who know what 'overshoot' is, that we are well into it, and what that implies. Will they save the world? Well, it turns out they will not, cannot as doing so is above their pay grade. Their job is to guess well and inform policy makers, planners, governments, NGOs and corporate powers that be. They are specialists who serve the SYSTEM.

Some endeavor to inform (by book, article, video, newsletter, or blog) the public and hope they or their leaders (in government and out) will save the world according to their best guess and the referenced information they provided as this is their job. They may even be right, but they won't rebel to save the world. That leaders, in and out of government, will not save the world is not really (they like to imagine) their failure. And meanwhile 'the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed' (David Suzuki per email he sent on his 80th birthday, March 24, 2016).

It has not always been thus. A hundred years ago a Technical Alliance was formed (no one was paid to do so) and in 1931 M. King Hubbert instigated its re-formation into Technocracy, early Great Depression, to offer their best guess as to real solutions to what was looking like collapse (but only the financial system collapsed, not the biophysical system, hence recovery was all but inevitable). If there had been no recovery, the technocrats offered a reasoned and best-guess alternative to the ideological-based 'solutions' demagogues would have come forth to offer. They would have dissolved nation-states and managed the world system as a technate. North America would have been the first. But a hundred years later (2019), there seems to be no capacity, at least in the West, to 'step up to the plate' and think unthinkable thoughts.

How so? Well, we are all products of Calhoun's 'behavioral sink' (how could we not be?) that is some 8-12 generations into our Industrial Revolution, now globalized. Actually we are up to 160 generations into our empire-building ways and there has never been a full recovery between the pulsings of our too complex societies (with the possible exception of the Tairona). The pattern is one of a loss of functional behaviors, and not just among commoners. We lost our K-culture norms (and K-strategist way of life) when we became an expansionist r-culture form of human 50k to 60k years ago, so we have been 2,500+ generations in the denormalizing without full recovery between pulsings unto overshoot (i.e. we never learn to not over-pulse because doing so is what works, for a time, for a Borg-like invasive species).

I fondly recall a benefactor, a chemistry professor none of the other students 'liked' because the average student, for some reason, could expect a grade of 'C'. Every test started with the words, 'Relax, this test is to help you evaluate your progress in the study of _______ chemistry' at the top. And, yes, the questions were challenging. If they weren't, I wouldn't know my limits. I happened to get him by chance for organic chemistry. I didn't have to take biochemistry, but I did just to be in his class. His every word and mark (using colored chalk) on the board was carefully planned to opimiize the time available to share why understanding chemistry mattered (oh, and I got an F in high school chemistry because I didn't like the teacher). He also had a thick volume of his lecture notes in the library, containing more information of interest than he could fit into his lectures. I appreciated every page, including one he must have inserted some years before I came along showing a couple of grunts in Veitnam bashing through a jungle with an added caption: 'Look at it this way, you could be doing something worse'.

Perhaps the high point of my life as a student (real, not as autodidact) was a mid-term where I missed one question but got the bonus right, giving me a 50 out of 50 score. On the top he had written 'good', with no explanation mark. I felt I understood completely that 'acing' (sort of) one of his tests was merely good, as understanding biochemistry is what one should expect as a student, so some indication that one was making progress in understanding chemistry was good. That no one else happened to get such a score (the average being 25/50) was irrelevant.

I recall him lamenting that in the 1970s he could not teach as he had been taught. His professor, first week of class, had given each student a bag of coal and said, 'make benzene out of this'. The location of the library was noted and that there would be a lab assistant to offer equipment and oversee their safety, but who would offer no hints. This was a stand and deliver assignment, and my professor was the better for it. He noted that before him there was a time that students were expected to excel their professors. The quality of education had lamentably declined in the past one hundred years. Perhaps education has declined further over the last 50 years.

That it has continued to decline is not unthinkable. Indeed there is a mountain of evidence that it has, that students are a product of an increasingly broken educational (actually a schooling) system that is little more than a quivering mass. I know recently retired professors, who taught long enough to be on the receiving end of the no-child-left-behind teach-to-the-test cohort, who retired early because expecting students to actually think was disallowed.

For a couple of years I was a K-12 substitute teacher. I knew that up to maybe the fourth grade American students were comparable to those elsewhere in industrial society, which may not be a good thing, but after the fourth grade comparisons became increasingly indicative of under achievement. So we home schooled our son after the fourth grade. He went to a high school rated as one of the top ten in the USA for one day (we moved to the big city so he could attend), but the other student's behavior so appalled him that we let him not go to school. We had two foreign exchange students live with us (from China and South Korea), who went to the local high school, and our son decided to go with them 'as an anthropological study' and so he did get a semester of education.

We had him take the placement test at a local community college at age thirteen, and he placed high enough he was accepted. At college he spoke with a British accent and claimed he was small because he had had rickets. His story was never questioned. My wife, as a joke, gave him a tee shirt with 'Jail bait' on it to warn the young ladies.

I have never served the SYSTEM with enthusiasm, so making money was incidental, but my parents offered to fully fund his university education. He decided it would only slow him down. I had no basis for disagreeing, autodidact that I am. I warned him that he would have a fool for a teacher, but by 25 he had become a yuppie making six figures, so it is not clear to us that our possibly prodigal son is living the good life serving the SYSTEM as corporate whore (sort of like Nate Hagens who, however, came back from the Dark Side, unlike our son).

Still, that the educational system is 'broken' seems evidence-based to me, as would be expected in a humans of NIMH world. A few years ago I happened to be on a university campus and in a half hour observed 800 students and faculty pass (I was taking notes). As tallied, 60 percent had a smartphone in hand or earbuds with microphone deployed soon after leaving a classroom. Some appeared to be walking together and I'm forced to imagine the possibility they were texting each other.

That today's professors are a product of the educational system they serve is a given. That they are less functional than prior generations should be assumed, as any expectation that they excel their professors ended in the 19th century. Those who were ready to make technocracy work were not such specialists and were not working for money. They were prepared to save the world (save humans from failing to persist).

As a 'doomer' I foresee climax followed by descent in the near (10-50 years) future and I could be wrong, maybe we'll climax the global SYSTEM in the 22nd century or this year, but unless we come up with an energy source 'too cheap to meter' and end up building a Dyson sphere, which would allow for maybe two millennia of growth, turning Earth into a Trantor with no life other than to serve humans, then I can but hope we collapse our hegemon this century and sooner will be better.

The limitation that comes with believing in doom is that belief in 'we are so fucked' excludes taking an interest in, much less making a commitment to, 'real solutions'. I can consider a spectrum of possibilities including that I will end up eating others or being eaten. But that a 'zombie apocalypse' utterly destroying techno-industrial society could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity, should some few respond by founding a United Federation of Watersheds that in due time leads to us to knowning about the Deep Ones, is also just as thinkable. I attribute my optimism to not believing anything, including any images I have of the future. Hence I am neither a doomer nor a cornucopian, except before breakfast when I am both, and I remain focused on real solutions that might actually work, perhaps because some of my ancestors did.

All of my ancestors, save for the more recent, may have focused on potentally viable outcomes, and thereby perchance became ancestors. A band of sisters is caught in a blizzard. Ug and I have to evict the cave bear. Will we? Will the cave bear kill and eat us? I don't know, but into the cave we optimistically go. Such is the life-driven purpose our ancestors had, that we humans of NIMH, servants of the consumer society, aisle walkers of Walmart, seem to lack. Yet some may discover life anew, know a time of r_xevolution, and stand and deliver before they die, the best thing that could ever befall a mortal.

Do today's mental workers have the right stuff? I could guess maybe, so I tested the waters again, but more explicitly this time. In November of 2019 I sent out a group email, titled 'Saving the World', to 50 distinguished scientists and scholars whose 'biophysical eyes' are open. Some of the 10 who replied to the group CCed others, so 66 received the email. The email was a 'call to action', for someone to do as M. King Hubbert had done in 1931 when he instigated the re-formation of the Technical Alliance (that had formed in 1919) to become Technocracy Inc. as an informal think tank to consider real solutions. Those CCed could join in, potentially saving the world as Technocracy might have if the economy had not been primed in the 1930s to recover.

The Technical Alliance had disbanded in the Roaring Twenties as the SYSTEM seemed to be working and interest in alternative ways of 'running the show' had wained. Probably everyone on the list realizes that the SYSTEM isn't working and isn't primed to grow after crashing. It was not too late, a hundred years later, to again consider real solutions, even if doing so is as politically unthinkable in 2019 as Technocracy had been in 1919 to the teeming multitudes. Perhaps by 2029 an alternative to BAU (business-as-usual) would be in demand, one not offered by ideologues/demagogues promising political solutions, as usual.

The email had featured two links. One was to an article by Paul Chefurka I had restored and commented on, so mostly not self-serving. My comments ended with a call to action, that of forming a Naturocracy Alliance before the end of the year. This plea also ended the email that also included a link to my article on Naturocracy.

Alice Friedemann had shared Paul's 2013 article that was missing the original graphics. So I had used the Wayback Machine to recover them and the most updated text to recreate and host the article so I could cite it. I initially added a few CCs to an email to mention to Alice and Paul what I had done and share the link.

Forming something like the Technical Alliance, one hundred years after the first, had been bouncing around in my brain for a couple of years and time waits for no one. Using the email to also test the waters for an interest in 'radical ideas' occurred to me, so I spent a week polishing the article and email and gathering email addresses, pretty much a dream list of all who know enough to have an opinion about whether 'naturocracy' and related ideas might be part of a real solution, and alternative to yet more BAU after the SYSTEM hits the wall of biophysical limits leading to chaotic collapse as usual.

The email became my 'high-stakes endgame'. I had been writing of my concerns and proposals to address them for nearly five years. Bringing one 'big' idea to the attention of such a distinguished list of 'top-drawer' people was the most I could reasonably hope for. So when I couldn't think of anyone to add to a list of 50 nor ways to improve the email or articles, I hit 'Send'.

The 11/22/2019 email, Saving the World:

I'm hoping you're still keeping on keeping on. I'll assume you are.

I've been thinking about the 'doomer dynamic' and may end up typing about it. Some information from 'collapsologists' has value, but while Anthropocene enthusiasts, like my son, see me as a doomer, it is not clear to me that I am one.

Alice Friedemann shared an article by Paul Chefurka whose research 'good doomer' George Mobus cites, but the source was broken, missing images, so I used the Wayback Machine to fix it. Nerds do stuff like that. This lead to adding content and concluding with a call to action that may be considered if I share it, so I am sharing this swan song of an email with two links to follow to save the world—someone might as well, and I nominate you.

Carrying Capacity, Overshoot and Sustainability  

Some who replied were among the most distinguished, not mere professors at top universities, but at least in some circles household names that most who claimed to be educated knew of or at least had heard of. There was no indication that the email was other than welcomed. Still, there was zero indication that anyone had read any content I had added as comments or the featured article on naturocracy I linked to.

The call to action was totally ignored, so far as I could know. One possibility is that saving the world is above the 'pay grade' of most academics and working scientists. Their job is to inform policy makers, and perhaps the public, but 'saving the world' is outside their field of expertise. Saving the world is the job of_______? All, of course, are products of the modern education (schooling) system most also serve/served.

Within a week the email thread was dead, though occasionally revived as others offered their latest missive. Some high value information was shared, so I could claim success. The experiment was over, interpreting the results was left as an exercise for the student. I had no expectations other than to consider the range of possible outcomes, so nothing to be too pleased with or disappointed in, and overall I don't feel I erred in sending it.

The replies were all data. Only no data would have been a failure as no response would not have been possible to interpret. Some may have yet to check their email. There could still be further outcomes, but a lack of interest in considering what I have to offer seems confirmed. All no doubt receive a tsunami of email. To keep on doing the same thing, while expecting a different result, would be double-plus questionable.

I have considered that what I'm typing about might be of interest to someone in 15 to 50 years, so I just have a bit more reason now to consider that possibility. The fate of the human race is unaltered by my email. But I now have more information to understand limits. All received an invitation to consider my offerings. I'm guessing that one or maybe a few did. That there is no response is enough feedback to draw tentative conclusions. If I were to invite 66 engineers to consider my design for a perpetual motion machine, no response would be understandable as would someone sending a link to a Wikipedia article on the Second Law with a suggestion I also read all the references at the end.

That I am a certifiable crank, however, is not clear and I have not overtly been considered to be one. Resistance is different from dismissal, though to me they would look the same. Few on the list knew me, only that I knew, as the email implied, one of them, which suggests prima facie credibility. A simple likelihood could be that most were way too busy with multiple demands, and reading missives from unknowns seems less than compelling. So until someone 'who knows enough to have an opinion' vets my claims, I won't over interpret the data.

A reasonable interpretation is that in 2019 what was done in 1919 will not happen again as the nature of scientists, engineers, academics, and knowers has changed significantly. H.T. Odum mentored many, but of his spawn none, I will opine, have excelled him. Odum connected more dots, had a 'better view' that other scientists failed to be shocked into; a better conceptual macroscope and not because he was smarter, but perhaps because he wasn't as far down the behavioral sink as his students. A stand and deliver moment is at hand. I expect some will talk about what is happening and likely to happen in the near future at some conferences. Meanwhile, 'the pace of...'.

But I could be wrong and, of course, I hope I'm wrong about everything. All I know about is the state of Western culture and its dysfunctions. There is evidence and reason to view developments in recently westernized China to be a wildcard. They are thinking about turning China into an 'ecological civilization' (naturocracy) starting by replacing neoclassical conventional economics with ecological/biophysical eco-nomics. Confucians serving empire-building is not their only heritage. They could realize and manifest the wisdom of Laozi and Chuangzi who listened to Nature.

They could be Federation. Will they be? I don't know. I don't know Zhen. Could humans learn to understand the planet and live with it properly? I don't know. 'What is this True Man with no title?' I won't live long enough, but posterity will come to see what cometh. Time waits for no one and Nature has all the answers. Will we come to listen? I don't know.

As a fideist I must believe that posterity will come to understand and live properly, prosperously, with Nature on an abundant Earth, as no biophysical laws of the cosmos would be violated if we did. Will we? I don't know. 'Nature is unkind.' —Laozi

Yes, those who survive the scarcity induced conflict to come may end up eating each other and the last warlord may have no one to mate with. Or maybe humans will come to understand the world system and learn to live with it properly. Designing and putting into practice a viable ecolate civilization might someday, perhaps before it is too late, seem like a thinkable possibility. After just 500 years of environmental restoration, Earth could start to look abundant again and in 10 million years (less if there are ecolate humans living on the planet) actually be abundant again. Gaia is a tough bitch, bitches. That's why, as a visionary, I'm an extreme cornucopian optimist. Earth could abundantly provide for our needs (maybe 7-35 million of us) as the millennia pass.

[Whatever you do, don't endeavor to think well.]

1:43:33 '...we're not going to have a place in the universe.' [Update 7/19/21: The film that was above, 'What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire', was on YouTube. It is still viewable as a torrent file. The first few seconds treathens 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if I share it. The film is exhibit A in the video category of doomer thinking, or failure to think. It is about humanity's current situation, and yes, we do have one. It is written, directed and narrated by 'A middle-class white guy who comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American lifestyle'. It is about a semi-science literate upper-middle-class over-schooled white guy who has fears, anxieties, and concerns that he and we are so fucked. He reads a pile of books, utterly uncritically, unable to sort out the chaff from the wheat (e.g. William Catton Jr., Richard Heinberg from the barking mad). Then he goes on to cant and opine, wth the certitude of the true believer, that 'we can choose our future' even if we utterly fail to understand the dynamics of our problematique.]

All the books that went into this film's narrative end, however, with a 'happy chapter'. 'After an entire book of dire prognostications and appalling facts comes the chapter at the end that says that if we do this, and this, and that, we'll find a solution. While there is much to give us concern, there is much about which we can be hopeful. I don't like happy chapters, they lull me back to sleep.... I'm sorry, folks, but I think time's up. I have no happy chapter to offer you....'

Okay, no way for the train we are all on to keep on keeping on its merry way, but the last 16 minutes of the film is a happy talk relentlessly told as only master storytellers can tell it. The film should have ended 15 minutes sooner, before I fell asleep, by telling the truth to power, ourselves. We don't understand the dynamic we are all products of and serve, and that includes me and thee dear storytellers [who believe in copyright law and are utterly enmeshed in the monetary culture].

Therefore endeavor to understand. 'Understand or die.' —Ludwig Wittgenstein. But, no, this verity doesn't feel good. Let me tell you a better story.... Meanwhile the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed. Call me Ismael too.

SUB-NOTE TO FILE: 3/27/21

We normal humans can envision a possible, gradually growing increase in scarcity, of a decrease in the rate of growth for all in the coming years/decades/centuries that does not go away. We join the Transition Movement and demand a Green New Deal. Billionaires may make fewer billions each year on average. Electricity for charging cars and trucks may be limited such that only increasing efficiencies are possible. Preferred foods may become fewer. Some who are merely hungry at times today will starve if food is not equitably shared. There will be increased conflict as usual. We'll transition to a steady-state economy.

What we normal humans cannot envision is that the increase in scarcity/conflict will be non-linear, i.e. that even a small, merely perceived, non-life threatening shortage of toilet paper can result in competitive buying. If food were actually scarce, humans will be able to use their brains, that are almost the size of a planet, to blame someone and do what they have to, e.g. burn, loot, pillage, plunder... and eat each other. Poor lives matter, so a slight shortage (long age of demand), or a perceived injustice, can have (will unpredictably trigger) a response that is orders of magnitude larger than the cause, real or imagined.

With some regional exceptions, things (stuff) have been getting better, more and better for three fossil-fueled centuries with a firmly held belief (expectation) that (for clever apes) it always will get better and better forever and ever. Actual and ongoing scarcity will trigger reactive behaviors far out of proportion to the situation that will worsen the situation and increase scarcity that will increase the reactivity in a downward death spiral, a 'race to the bottom' or chaotic collapse/dissolution of complexity, to a great simplification vastly out of proportion to the change and hence unthinkable.

This is non-linearity. Conflict will be between groups (e.g. nation-states, corporations, factions, putative races) and neighboring households. Then members of a household may have issues. Someone inherits the rubble. And then what?

SUBNOTE TO FILE 12/13/21:

Per Erik Michaels (friend and mentor is Michael Dowd ), Why is Civilization Unsustainable?, quoting Bodhi Paul Chefurka.

When it comes to our understanding of the unfolding global crisis, each of us seems to fit somewhere along a continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into five stages:
1. Dead asleep.
2. Awareness of one fundamental problem.
3. Awareness of many problems.
4. Awareness of the interconnections between the many problems.
5. Awareness that the predicament encompasses all aspects of life, everything we do, how we do it, our relationships with each other, as well as our treatment of the rest of the biosphere and the physical planet. [With this realization, full-on doomerhood is achieved], no problem is exempt from consideration or acceptance. The very concept of a "Solution" is seen through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.

[Doomers may agree and I may agree that humanity has a problematique, but to declare that civilization (complex society) is unsustainable is hubris on high, as is the assurance that there are no solutions. Standing down from the pulpit is salvation. This is why the doomer dynamic is part of the problem, hence those who are the problem cannot see themselves as true believers and thereby become abelievers in science, religion, and other certitudes, apparently they cannot but believe in belief.]

SUBNOTE TO FILE 7/27/2022:

Sometimes it takes religion, or more commonly today, politics. But sometimes it takes business. The following excerpt appeared in CounterPunch. The author, since 2014, has written 11 articles published in CounterPunch. He is currently "the managing director of Mero Iran and is currently establishing Pivotal Cleantech of Iran so as to transfer technologies which are sustainable and help solve environmental problems." Mero Iran fabricates and designs space frames for large free span structures such as aircraft hangars, sport halls, warehouses, exhibition halls. The author notes that as a top slows down, it wobbles and that humanity's global enterprise system is beginning to wobble (due to climate change which may or may not have anything to do with 'overshoot' whatever that is). This implies:

The Great Wobble Problem is likely, or even worse, the first wobble is in progress, we must direct all our resources towards correcting this first and most critical wobble.

How to go about this is the issue because currently the assumption is that scientific evidence, reasoning, and common sense will prevail and the deniers, skeptics, and climate catastrophe criminals will come around and the problem will be solved. This is wishful thinking and has a very low chance of success because human greed, stupidity, political tribalism, and system wide built-in environmental destruction is pushing us over the cliff.

The fossil fuel industry has been making three billion dollars profit EVERY DAY for the past fifty years! Instead of pulling our hair out and ranting about how this has been a disaster for the planet we need to focus on how to quickly create a system where reversing climate catastrophe can be even more profitable, especially for corporations like the fossil fuel industry.

Instead of attempting to cure human beings of greed we need to use greed to save the planet. We need to use greed to clear away the microplastics that are now in our air, water, and body. Instead of writing laws and regulations with the assumption that enlightened individuals and corporations will comply and we will end up saving the planet we need to instead lead them to the trough and indirectly save the planet. We need to make greed-driven people like Trump turn green, and have him boast about it, and have him convince all his piggy supporters to turn green. Can you think of a quicker and more effective way to stop the wobble?

If you really think about this you can soon come up with all the ways that the system can be changed, and as an outcome environmental destruction can be reversed. Preserving the Amazon rainforest can be made to be more profitable than its destruction. De-growth can be made to be more profitable than growth – maybe a bit hard to make happen, but not impossible. Not spraying cancerous toxins on our food would be very profitable. The bee has been declared the most valuable creature on the planet, well let’s write the necessary laws and regulations to make this a reality.

At the moment causing climate catastrophe is highly profitable. Destroying the bees is very profitable. Poisoning ourselves with a deluge of unregulated chemicals is profitable. Essentially ecocide and our own extinction is extremely profitable [i.e. is the outcome that monetary culture selects for].

There is only one word to describe this: stupidity. And we have legislated this stupidity and created a system of self-destruction. The question that needs to be asked is: Are we really this stupid?

Once again, and for emphasis, here is Robert Hunziker’s [another CounterPunch writer] key response: “And, yes, you are correct there is nothing published in the public domain that approaches your suggestion of the reality of the climate change imbroglio and of how soon it could evolve into universal pandemonium, and in part, that’s why it will occur, unannounced and with a viciousness that upends many traditional aspects of normal life behavior and patterns.”

As a top slows down due to declining energy (as its kinetic energy is converted to heat via friction) it wobbles increasingly until it can't. Changing this outcome by adding spin increasing energy has nothing to do with increasing the profitability of spinning or decreasing it. Energy is the wealth of nation-state subsystems (as dissipative structures operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium, for a time). Making money, in a global monetary culture, has nothing to do with the driving dynamics of the world system (energy) as it is the externality, not nature nor nature's laws. The author and readers of CounterPunch are evidently cluelessly unaware of not knowing how the world really works. All who serve the modern techno-industrial growth hegemon are products of the schooling systems that serve it. They are 'too clever by half and not nearly smart enough' to understand that they have met the enemy and he is looking at them in a mirror. Are we really this stupid?

Wobbling Towards Our Own Extinction by Daryan Rezazad, whose article is the answer.

"I’ve reached the conclusion that things will only change when saving the planet is very profitable."

How could this come about? [Luis T. Gutierrez]

The proposed solution is to make degrowth profitable. Such would work in a monetary culture if it could be done, but if energy is the wealth of nations, less energy is not profitable such as we MTIed (modern techno-industrialized) ones conceive profit. But saving the planet from the monetary culture that selects for its dissolution involves dismantling the monetary culture (and its schooling system), which doesn't mean human extinction, but the end of modern techno-industrial society, a condition that will come anyway whether we work to cause or prevent it.

Alternative to extinction or persistence as a benign (but non-evolvable) tumor on the face of Gaia is to recognize that we are all products of and serve a form of civilization (MTI Civ 3) that is not remotely sustainable, a now global culture that is yet a house divided. Over the last 400 years a culture of inquiry was rekindled that is valued by all who serve the belief-based monetary culture "for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them." [Meister Eckhart]  

I’ve also reached the conclusion that things will only change when saving the planet is very profitable, i.e. when there is a human on the planet that understands that 'very profitable' is maximizing the empower of the system one is a subsystem of, and that 'long term as the millennia pass' is implied. Such humans would understand that any maximizing of short-term self interest (which the monetary culture selects for as does a malignant cancer) is antithetical to the MEP/MPP/MePP condition of evolvable systems.  

Our condition is one of living in "Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture." (see summary, by M. King Hubbert, of a seminar he taught at MIT Energy Laboratory, 30 September 1981). If the 'matter-energy system' worldview were the basis of a civilization, that would qualify as a change of condition that could select for a different outcome. Has it ever? No. Could a form of civilization that was viable emerge based on inquiring minds endeavoring to think well within limits? I don't know, but I can't say a transition to a viable civilization is not possible, merely that it hasn't been done yet and may never be.

Adapted from Mark Brown, Beyond Growth: Economics as if the Planet Mattered, 2/5/2019.
"Monetary culture" vs matter-energy system worldview. —M. King Hubbert
'Li' is Chinese for the laws—organizing principles—of the cosmos.
Technocracy and ecological economics were/are transitional.
Naturocracy: Technocracy for the 21st century.

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Luis,

No short or long article, but for 20, maybe 30 seconds, I considered writing one. I'm such an idiot, it took me that long to realize that trying to explain why growth is the best thing ever until it isn't to those who are products of and serve, with varying levels of enthusiasm, the growth/extraction/conquest culture (Indo-European expansion culture) that has been trucking on for at least seven thousand years (to have culturally subsumed virtually all humans by the 21st century if not also their language, e.g. Semitic peoples religiously via Zoroastrianism and Sino-Tibetan cultures ideologically and economically in modern times to succeed where the Mongols failed) would be to piss into the wind. 

What they (E.O. Wilson's 'Anthropocene enthusiasts') need to be told is that their form of civilization selects for its own failure (and the biosphere will take a lick'n too, but will persist), and hence the socio-politico-economic system they serve is not remotely sustainable. And to clarify, add that everything they think they know is a house of conceptual cards and mirrors firmly built on a foundation of error, ignorance, and illusion. To actually be considered a nutter tell them that for a bit of sapience one must question and rethink everything while presuming to know nothing (as Lovelock (PBUH) noted we cannot know truth, but at best iterate towards knowing using best-guess-then-test inquiry). 

If the two intellectual traditions are not compatible, if a coherent form of civilization cannot be founded on both Hubbert's 'monetary culture' (aka modern techno-industrial Indo-Europeanized civilization based on knowing/believing/human-centrism) and a 'matter-energy system' worldview (based on inquiry into the nature of things, i.e. on not knowing) are incompatible, then this form 3 civilization ain't big enough for the two of us, so time for the peripheral ones (providers of milk and cheese and profit but only during the exponential growth phase) to saddle up and get out of Dodge to form a viable civilization (maybe). 

Luis, I'm guessing your friends think you're maybe a little nuts at times when you try to tell them things they don't want to think about, but you mostly talk their talk compared to the real nutters out there. I'm not a source, I'm an outlier, so even if I wrote something you liked, your readers wouldn't. Somewhat like Lewis Carroll's White Queen, I sometimes think as many as six unthinkable thoughts before breakfast (I actual did, once, mentioning each to my wife as I was still in bed, but didn't write them down as most are also wrong).

This morning it occurred to me that if reforming the Old Education system is not possible, replacing it as H.G. Wells envisioned by instigating a New Education system in the near future is possible. Call it the United Federation (U-Fed) Academy (short for United Federation of Watersheds Academy). It would be based firmly on Hubbert's matter-energy system worldview, and so neo-classical economics as a pretend science would not be of interest other than to historians. Are there 8k young people out there ready to rethink everything? Will there be a World Scientist's Warning 3? Or will scientists who endeavor to listen to Nature who has all the answers realize that doing so again and expecting a different outcome would be evidence of not being nearly smart enough to persist?

Perhaps skip warning humanity again and suggest that young people who would rather know (iterate towards knowing) than believe (in comforting illusions) consider not getting schooled to serve a monetary system that is not remotely sustainable. Maybe then 8k (or even more) might consider not being schooled if such would interfere with their education. [Mark Twain: “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”]

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Archaeogenetics is revealing details of the Indo-European expansion, which is of special interest to me this week, resulting in another info-graphic I hope contains more information than misinformation. I will share to be corrected.

SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/13/2022:

Someone read my presentation at the First North-South Conference on Degrowth in Mexico City in 2018. So far as I could tell, none of thirty or so present listened to my presentation (okay, one did and explained my usage of the word 'voluntary' was incoherent). So any feedback is of interest. A comment:

'I had some time, and went through your presentation. You are an optimist as you state despite having disdain for techno-optimists. At least that’s what I concluded… Jay Hanson was political for some years, but after a decade or so realized that his actions weren’t fruitful. His research and discussions were valuable as educational memes. That’s sort of my position, else I wouldn’t continue this.' —Steve Kurtz

As usual, I must quibble. Jay Hanson's research and discussions are valuable as educational memes. Of course he saw no way out of our predicament, nor do I, yet. The 'yet' is what makes me an 'optimist' which I do claim to be. Specifically, I'm an 'extreme cornucopian optimist living on an abundant Earth'. About fifty years ago I read 'where there is an impasse there is a way out' (Chinese proverb), which is paradoxically true and false. Most impasses have no viable outcome, as evidenced by remorseless failures to persist, yet sometimes there is a way out, a resolutique, but failure to relentlessly consider a 'yet' locks in failure, so for evolving organisms it is operationally true to assume there is a way out until you die.

Optimistic conjecture: 0.001% of impasses (wicked problems, predicaments affording no obvious escape) have a potentially viable outcome/solution. Unknown to most, 80 thousand humans are currently working to build a viable civilization (all are wealthy, are buying land in the three areas Jack has identified as viable, and are filling warehouses with all they'll need when the technocrats, a short list of about 35 million (including their dependents) who have been identified and who have provisionally agreed (when collapse cometh) to a new social contract when they move. All plan to build the three mega-cities that will preserve knowledge, the fruit and flower of 7k years of hard-won acquisition. All 35.08 million also agree that they must give raise to a new form of civilization, one foundationally not an MTI form 3 civilization. And nearly 8 billion don't and likely won't.

Provisions, of course, include measures to keep the marauding hordes out of the construction area while they kill each other. Some would say this plan is not optimistic because it doesn't save 8 billion humans and transition them to a viable civilization (possible if all agreed to a rapid birth-off), but saving 80k humans with the potential to renormalize could be enough. But that 35 million, maybe even 50 million, is thinkable takes optimists smoking hopium.

Speaking of paradox (as an excuse to share a quote):

'The “doomer” label belies the labeler’s inability to grasp the complexity of the person or position he/she is labeling.... Moreover, “doomer” labeling demonstrates a lack of capacity for comprehending paradoxes such as: Yes, civilization is collapsing, and that is an opportunity for rebirth.... Paradox, two apparent opposites being true at the same time, complexity, holistic rather than black and white, either/or thinking appear to elude those who simplistically slap the unwarranted “doomer” label on whomever they choose. Most egregiously, however, “doomer” labeling replicates the style of superficial mainstream and sensationalist journalism which refuses to deal with complexities and applies labels so that readers will not have to grapple with multi-layered reality. The prime motivation in this style of journalism is speed and brevity. As a result, readers are unable to view the rich and convoluted tapestry of an event, a story, a person, or a concept. Hence the old paradigm endures with no willingness to construct a new one!... The world as we have known it is ending, only to regenerate and appear in some other form which we cannot yet imagine....the most adult response is neither denial nor doom.' —Carolyn Baker

Of note, replacing 'doomer' with 'optimist' changes nothing. And to quibble with Carolyn, the world as we know it is ending, and human extinction is a likely (50:50?) outcome within the next 500 years, which humans seem to find especially hard to imagine. Vaclav Smil is both anti-techno-optimist and anti-doomer, perhaps to a fault (I must quibble), given that the doomers have the better argument (and evidence). I'm not an atheist, but I've long been surrounded by them (and doomers, I married one, who is also an atheist), as the level of error is more tolerable (I'm an 'abeliever', so belief and disbelief are comforts denied me).

I call myself an optimist to avoid saying I'm not a doomer (or atheist), to avoid reactivity (as in amygdala hijacking of prefrontal cortex) in doomers I tend to be around (e.g. my wife) or nods of approval from non-doomers (who are decidedly not abelievers). Noting what I am not is a doomer nor atheist is also absurd as it provides no information about my position for others to correct.

And having mentioned 'Smil' and 'extinction' (I added the bit about being green):

And so I don't have the final word, I'll note that Henry Miller notes, 'Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?'

SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/11/2023:

I'll be going fishing with Charlie Hall, mentioned above, five days from now, and for the last three years have been active on a by-invitation-only listserv of about 40 mostly retired academics/scientists having an interest in overshoot. My iniosyncratic ideas are ignored, but I have been able to offer them for consideration. I recently created a subgroup with posterity concerns and a focused interest in discussing what a viable future, post ghastly future, might look like and what pathway might lead to a renormalizing of humans and their persistence as a species.One joined (Ruben Nelson) and posted one message. The leader of the information offering/sharing group viewed the proposed subgroup as 'a bad idea' and forced me to recreate the group without any association with his, which I did, and no one joined Towards Replacing Overshoot with Viability. Zero noted why. So, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

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