TUESDAY, DEC 25, 2018: NOTE TO FILE
I, Pathogen
Denial, distraction, obfuscation
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: LIVING THE PATHOGENIC LIFE, FROM THE WIRES, BELATED SOLSTICE OFFERING, NOT CLAUDIUS
Abstract: The author is a product of a complex society eMpowered by unsustainable fossil-fueled growth (as a metastatic cancer's growth is unsustainable), who is thereby living a pathological life on multiple levels. The increasing complexity of the social control SYSTEM is also unsustainable as dysfunctional, maladaptive behavior (e.g. suicide, addiction, mental illness) increases in the Human Zoo (analogy of Desmond Morris) we live in. Calhoun's rats of NIMH illustrate a "behavioral sink" effect of complexity humans have yet to adapt to even if scarcity were to never increase conflict nor if issues with environmental limits to growth were avoidable.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Having confessed to being a pathogen, to be one who has led and continues to lead a pathogenic life, I will explicate as only I can. Being a product of a pathogenic SYSTEM (complex society), just another "rat of NIMH", I was born a pathogen to unintentionally live a pathogenic life like others in the now global, techno-industrial, empire-building growth society, but I was capable of no such thought for most of my life. The educational system, formal and informal, together with intelligentsia generated and approved punditry (aka the primate prattle we swim in and that distracts us), makes foundational self criticism (or collective) unthinkable and if thought by a very few (e.g. Ted Kaczynski), unspreadable.
To consider the possibility that from the POV of the nature of things, that I'm a pathogen (in relationship with the planetary life-support system), took about fifty years of mostly self-education. All may conclude that self-education is hazardous, as one has a fool for a teacher (or Nature and those who seem to listen to Nature). I would like, of course, to be wrong, as 99.99+ percent of humans would agree I am, but none has bothered to argue, based on the evidence and reason thing, why or where or in what way I'm wrong. They just "know" that I can't be right, that Nature can't be saying what I hear her saying, and perhaps there is a 99.99+ percent probability that they are right. Unfortunately I don't have such knowledge.
If I had been born with six fingers on each hand, then I would be abnormal. Would it matter? Maybe, maybe not, but that I was not normal would be true by definition, or at least one definition of normal. As a newborn with six perfectly formed and functional digits, a surgeon might question whether the "extra" one should be removed as the concerned parents demanded. This references the first definition: normal with respect to societal/population/tribal norms. If having a sixth finger was believed to be the sign of the devil, a deeply held religious belief, the surgeon would remove it, or another surgeon (or back-alley surgeon) would be found and it would be removed. If believed to be a sign of superiority, the frequency of the responsible gene(s) would increase in the population via sexual selection.
If the sixth digit was connected to the knuckle of the middle finger without musculoskeletal attachment, then that it was abnormal with respect to the nature of things, to what works, would be clear. It would be dysfunctional, abnormal, and the ability to safely remove it would be a service a surgeon could and likely would provide. So it is entirely possible to be abnormal (or normal) with respect to population norms, and be normal (or abnormal) with respect to the nature of things that work long-term, that Nature selects for or at least not against. If, in the Land of the Knee-walkers, all humans crawled about their entire life, then knee-walking would be normal, universally approved and advocated. All right-thinking intelligentsia types would agree that standing up was impossible, or otherwise an unthinkable offense punishable by death, as the educational system would teach.
Is all of this (the words, words, words) some clever way to suggest that I'm really not abnormal? No. An inability to deny, distract, or obfuscate is clearly abnormal. Period. I swim in a sea of error, ignorance, and illusion. I tell stories as do all who surround me. We cannot know or tell 'true' stories as all stories are not the what-is, the noumenon the stories are about. We perceive only phenomena as through a glass darkly, filtered through our concept forming minds. We understand and know nothing with certainty, apart from tautologies, but can iterate towards having a better grasp of reality, towards being less pathological, for the price of an effort. The ability to consider one's pathologies is less pathological than not being able to consider the possibility one might be wrong, or otherwise living in error, ignorance, and illusion.
"We are trapped in the perverse dynamics of a civilization that if it does not grow does not work, and while growing, destroys the natural bases that make it possible. It is necessary, then, to escape this dynamic before it is too late."
—Moving Away From the Pro-Growth Economy: An annotated bibliography, April 2017
Compare to:
• Our global economic system is NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE.
• We are captured and being dragged along by a complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic that automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it.
• If we don’t put time and energy into understanding it, we are doomed to go with it, right to the final curtain.
—The Economic Implications of The Maximum Power Principle For a Sustainable Society, Garvin Boyle, 2016, who helpfully adds that the dynamic automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it. We are all part of the dynamic.
In 1949, Aldo Leopold noted, "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." The world is now in the ICU facing multiple system failures, so the penalties of an ecolate education now is that one lives alone (effectively) in a world of pathologies, which are self-inflicted and inflicted on others (multiple species extinction, four percent of all mammals are now wild...). Yet 99.99+ percent of clever apes deny that they are pathogens, cells of a global tumor, spending their working lives to serve the growth SYSTEM when not sleeping, recreating, procreating, or consuming, which also serves the SYSTEM.
That my step-daughter does not consider me a source of information is understandable. My son, who left home to become a well-paid yuppie, was informed that my recent years of typing was my legacy to him and has yet to say a word in reply. He clearly sees that the IT nerds he works with and for, some even smarter than he is, are sources of information/verities. That he does not consider me as a potential source is more difficult to understand. That he doesn't see me or my so-called education, my self-attributed "ecolacy," as a source of information about the nature of things is obvious, part of the price of an ecolate education I failed to pass on.
A Suicide Aside
In 2017, 47,000 people [in U.S.] died by suicide, and there were 1.4 million suicide attempts. U.S. suicide rates are at the highest level since World War II, said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on June 20, when it released a study on the problem. And it’s getting worse: The U.S. suicide rate increased on average by about 1% a year from 2000 through 2006 and by 2% a year from 2006 through 2016. Although suicide is the starkest indicator of mental distress, others abound. Drug overdoses claimed 70,000 lives in 2017, and 17.3 million, or 7%, of U.S. adults reported suffering at least one major depressive episode in the past year. Life expectancy, perhaps the broadest measure of a nation’s health, has fallen for three straight years, in part because of the rise in drug overdoses and suicides. That’s the first three-year drop since 1915 to 1918. (ref)
According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 6.3 percent of the [adult U.S.] population suffers from severe mental illness, defined as longstanding mental illnesses, typically psychosis, that cause moderate-to-severe disability of prolonged duration. (ref)
Speaking of pathology, are suicide rates an indicator of social psychopathology? Part of a growing "behavioral sink" or a canary in our coal mine? If civilized humans living in a self-organizing complex society are suffering unintended consequences (as usual), i.e. an unintended Calhoun rat/mouse type of experiment involving humans that is secondary to our individual and collective pursuit of short-term self interests (contingencies of reinforcement as in a complex, self-organizing Skinner Box), then at some point (if not during the exuberance of growth) social pathologies should be observable. Considering all evidence of all social pathologies would involve multiple book-length treatments (referencing Greek/Roman literature and Dickens/Thoreau... recent data) and would perhaps serve only as a distraction. Focusing on the most telling indicator may help concentrate our minds wonderfully. Humans are easily distracted storytellers.
Perhaps, as Steven Pinker is arguing, given that many indicators of progress have been on the up and up (e.g. per capita consumption and population growth, extraction of energy and resources [the economy, stupid], the knowledge/know-how of specialists serving the SYSTEM has all greatly increased...), and that indicators that we may not yet be living in the best of all possible worlds (neo-panglossianism) are on the decline (homicide and suicide rates viewed over the "long-term" of a few hundred years of the 3,000 hundred years humans have lived on this planet), then surely the future will resemble the past (three hundred years) since the better angels of our nature have just gotten better and better during the exuberance of our empire-building growth phase. Like Pinker and I suspect, as the future becomes better and better, despite occasional backsliding, more and more humans will convert to ecomodernism (though after breakfast I'm not so sure).
Suicides have fallen globally by more than a third since 1990, though since 1999 the suicide rate in the USA has increased 30 percent. If we have another world war, suicide rates may drop still lower, certainly reversing the current USA increasing trend that is now a bit above average.
For every suicide that succeeds, 25 estimated attempts are made. So if a minimum of 800,000 people succeed each year, about 20 million denizens of industrial society attempt suicide each year, or 263 attempts per 100,000. Suicide is linked to perceived dysfunctionality. If one's life is dysfunctional with no apparent hope of becoming a functional human being in a functional society, then suicide is (relatively) painless. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death worldwide. About 1 percent of babies born will die by self-slaughter. Suicide is perhaps the most obvious measure of societal dysfunction. If there is a better one, inquiring minds want to know.
The ups and downs of the graph are perhaps a distraction. Why did suicides in the USA and UK peak in 1905? Why did suicides in the UK decrease in the late 1970's? Why have they increased in the USA over the last twenty years? Manufacturing fled the US for China and India whose increasing prosperity and lack of readily available guns has lowered the global rate. But fluctuations within a 10 to 20 per 100,000 range are a distraction if the norm within pre-anthropocene bands of hunter-gatherers was "extremely rare," as in low single digit or even fraction of one per 100,000 per year if "self-euthanasia" or the solider throwing himself on a grenade to save his band of brothers is not considered suicide. That anthropologists have written no books about how true indigens deal with their suicide pathology could be because humans living the life-driven purpose in an environment they evolved in don't sacrifice virgins to the gods or commit suicide. The suicide rates among the "indigenous" around the world are exceptionally high. They are among the peripheral populations of industrial society outliers who are no longer living the indigenous life their ancestors lived more recently. The favored within industrial society are they whose ancestors have been within industrial society a bit longer. In most cases, the formerly indigenous were not living the hunter-gatherer life, but were members of prior complex societies who had within the last few thousand years occupied land formerly occupied by nomadic bands for several hundred thousand years.
Updated from 2010: Overdose death rate 21.7/100,000 in 2017, mainly opioid, a 9.6% increase in one year. CDC
At 10% the number of deaths are doubling in 7 years. Steven Pinker (and the 99%) don't cite graphs like this.
Conjecture: If the rats of NIMH had had drugs, increasing numbers would have used and normalized usage.
Death by drug overdose (USA above) may be considered a form of feel-good suicide, a manner of slow suicide, although death by alcohol (e.g. binge drinking) and nicotine is seldom via overdose. Drug use confers no obvious blessings (such as increased reproductive success) that is selected for, and hence is a social psychopathology, perhaps to be viewed as evidence of a societal slide into a Calhoun type behavioral sink, a basin whose drain we circle. In addition to death by overdose, other forms of death (misadventure, accidental, vehicular) are secondary to the wages of slow-suicide.
Another big-picture view that the nattering yeabobs of positivism don't want to think
too much about,
who view change, good or bad, as foundationally political with "bad" having political solutions, and, yes,
the 10 million Bangladeshi spike in refugees in 1971 fleeing genocide and mass rape by going to India,
plus 30 million displaced internally was political (as was the 10 million spike of Hindus leaving East
Pakistan in 1947), but the trend is not. Proximal causes often are political, but distal rise and
fall
trends may well be biophysical in nature/cause. Current "events" serve to distract from
understanding the big-picture as viewed
through the macroscope of systems thinking.
That here is no evidence for the rate of suicide (and other pathologies—nearly one in five Americans currently suffers from a mental illness, and roughly half will be diagnosed with one at some point in their lives) being very low (or high) among pre-agrarian humans is unfortunate, but is it an extraordinary claim? That assorted behavioral pathologies were low among the "uncivilized" may not be an extraordinary claim, may be comparable to the claim that rats and mice, living in the environment their ancestors evolved in, show virtually none of the social psychopathologies that manifest when they are placed in a finite space with abundant material resources (food, water, shelter, nesting material, sanitation) beyond the dreams of their avarice. For humans, perhaps with a few exceptions like Elon Musk who plans to retire on Mars, the Earth is a finite space. While a curious experimenter didn't provision the Earth with as much food, water, commodities, shelter, health care, pollution control, or sanitation as humans could possibly want, a few hundred million years of stored solar energy has enabled, for a time, humans to live within a similar set and setting. When John B. Calhoun provided his rats and mice, 1947-1973, with their environmental eutopias, they did what rats, mice, and men do. For the audio-visual, watch a largely ignored 2012 documentary, Critical Mass, about population, urbanization, and mass-consumption, or read the transcript of Critical Mass that features Calhoun and other concerned scientists. Calhoun's work inspired a 1971 book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) which inspired a 1982 animated Disney-like film, The Secret of NIMH as well as sequels to both the book and movie. Both books and movies were for children, but what the secret of NIMH, as revealed by Calhoun's rats and mice, might actually have been seems to have been overlooked. The secret of NIMH is that we are the rats of NIMH. That some rats could be more intelligent than humans, those who separate from industrial/urban human society and move to live in harmony with Nature, to create an ecological civilization as non-supremacists—as non-pathogens, is a hopeful story.
Calhoun's science was well-known to the world's intelligentsia who did thoughtfully consider its implications, as they did those of the Limits to Growth study, but a near unanimous consensus soon arose among the inecolate that his science is non-topical, since humans are not (really/just) animals. That all prior complex societies failed or "faded away," having served merely to pave the way to the first global extraction-consumer empire, is also not of concern. Our future will surely resemble our recent past, unlike the post-peak descent of all prior would-be civilizations who failed to give Nobel Prizes to economists.
Failure to reproduce is biological suicide. After about nine generations, Calhoun's mice failed to reproduce, some being too busy fighting for their place in the rat race to the bottom, and some too busy peening themselves as "Beautiful Ones." Among Millennials (born 1983-1994 whose biological clocks are still ticking), 61% don't think that starting a family is very important. Among today's teenagers ever fewer are having children, which many see as a good thing. The birth rate among American teenagers fell 7 percent in 2018 alone. If this rate of decline (degrowth) could be maintained, teenagers would have no births in ten years (but all would have smartphones). Some would see this as a very good thing. Perhaps the "demographic transition" is less a measure of increasingly enlightened progress than evidence of (given that it is unintended) an increase in our collective biological and social psychopathology (Calhoun's behavioral sink) that evermore hu-mans are circling. If with each passing generation people in industrial society become better hu-mans of NIMH, better adapted to a pathological SYSTEM (per WHO one quarter of people in industrial society are/will be "affected" by being mentally ill), that could be seen as a good thing. Or not, as only thinking makes the struggle between for and against, like and dislike, good and bad seem important (rather than the cognitive pathology it is: i.e. "The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease."—Jianzhi Sengcan [aka Seng-Ts'an, sixth-century CE]).
The Modern Hu-man Landscape
An early industrial society rats of NIMH was the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). In the pre-industrial agriculturally eMpowered Feudal SYSTEM there were nobles and commoners. The SYSTEM favored nobles and almost everyone, the 99 percent, wanted to be one or to have been born one, or, as arranging one's birth is difficult, to be among the priestly hierarchy that were doing quite well serving Mammon. Anyone who didn't serve with enthusiasm, noble, priest, or commoner, was selected against. Those who are ahead of their time are also selected against.
Marquis de Sade was a French nobleman, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; most were written in the 32 years spent in prison as all did not approve his political or philosophical views. Sade is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, suffering, criminality, and blasphemy against Christianity that he allegedly put into practice. His ultimate crime was to not be a hypocrite.
When not in prison, the Marquis de Sade "had it all" which is what the vast majority of both the moral and immoral within complex societies (as rats of NIMH) want. He did his own thing. He is the as yet not widely acknowledged patron saint of the Consumers of the Society of NIMH who came after him. As one French novelist said, "Sade is, in a way, our Shakespeare. He has the same sense of tragedy, the same sweeping grandeur" The "Divine Marquis" would not have been a product of a band of hunter-gatherer humans, or if he had been born into an equitable society, as all empire-building societies are not, he would not have been suffered to live, given his pathologies.
The increasing urban population and social psychopathologies of the nineteenth century were the stuff of Dickensian fiction. Poe wrote, albeit imaginatively, from experience. Conrad chronicled "The horror! The horror!" and T.S. Eliot wrote of the SYSTEM serving Hollow Men Krutz was modeled on. As a would-be outlier, Henry David Thoreau spent much of the first chapter of Walden detailing the pathologies on display about him (he found non-pathology within Nature because...). Those within the rat race are distracted by the buzz of too many encounters with others they know little of, as was not the case with human ancestors prior to the emergence of complex societies about ten thousand years ago, the mostly clothed last three percent of the Naked Ape's habitation of the planet. Those living in a band of sisters (related females) trusted nearly a hundred percent of those they had repeated daily contact with, while in modern technoindustrial society the percentage of trusted is approaching zero, which selects for Cheaters.
But the SYSTEM helps those who help themselves, so self-help has been a growth industry. The first "self-help" book—entitled Self-Help—was published in 1859. In 1935 anonymous alcoholics organized to battle demon rum. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936 sold the promise of success to those who would embrace unbridled self-confidence, so his books have sold over 50 million copies. Others sold the power of positive thinking (1952) to allow all to tap into "Infinite Intelligence." In the last third of the twentieth century the self-improvement culture's postmodern subjectivity constructs lead to self-reflexive subjects-in-process that articulated the crisis of subjecthood that enacted ever-expanding self-help book sales (Non-postmodernists will not understand this sentence and half of postmodernists will claim the opposite). But self-help is such a downer, and be assured that Mary Poppins never read a self-help book, nor did anyone who is actually OK, with the possible exception of a few scholars.
The alternative to endless self-therapy/help/improvement is denial. Just believe in yourself. Realize that if one's self-esteem is faltering, just assert that you are fine, really fine. I'm OK. You're OK and if you don't think so, just read the book (1967, NYT Best Seller list 1972-1973, 15 million sold and those hundreds of millions who didn't read it, like me, got the meme from multiple sources drifting in the wind on TV and in print). By the late 1960's the need to think well of your Self was imperative (T.S. Eliot 1949: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.").
We need to think well of ourselves because of all the reason/evidence that we shouldn't. We need to be OK because we're not. We increasingly normalize our pathologies with plenty of help from wordsmiths [e.g. an "income" disparity of 1.2:1 among hunter-gatherers, where a chief or shaman got 1.2 times more meat than others, may have been tolerated, but today's economists easily normalize 10,000:1 income inequalities. Normalizing inequality was the job of the first priests. The first and last job of the intelligentsia is the same. Recreational drug use is being normalized as is smartphone use. Most wordsmith informed people, especially men wanting to normalize promiscuity (real or imagined) think 10 to 30 percent of children (other than in their family) have biological fathers other than their mother's husband, but married women actually conceive children by men other than their husband at a rate less than 1 percent]. The Borg and the Morlock think well of themselves. It is possible to blame and justify to the point of becoming an MPP (Mary Poppins Person/People, aka one of the Beautiful Ones) who is practically perfect in every way because being an MPP is what feels good. There are now two types of people inhabiting cities: those who think they are practically perfect, and those who are. That everyone is crazy, except for me and thee, is increasingly obvious. Being OK comes down to me and thee, and sometimes I'm not so sure about thee (to paraphrase an old Quaker woman).
The university schooled who were not born elites like the "Divine Marquis" may go into debt so they can be schooled to better serve the SYSTEM that is not remotely sustainable. I recently watched university campus foot traffic between classes and among 800 passersby, 60 percent were using their smartphones for reasons not evident. Future rats of NIMH all? Enquiring minds want to know.
Depend on it, hu-mans, if a people knew they would hang in a fortnight, it would concentrate their minds wonderfully (or at least some minds—those who would rather know than believe—would be clarified). Real solutions could then be considered.
The Dysfunction in the Details
So, to explicate further, if I'm a product of a pathogenic society, then any claim or suggestion that I'm not a pathogen would be an extraordinary claim. No extraordinary evidence is offered as my life has been manifestly one of a pathogen. The evidence is that I matured at a slower rate than my chronological peers so the gap between my functional age and the norm widened until I was about sixteen or seventeen when my continued rate of development began to reduce the gap as the rate of developmental growth among chronological peers slowed. My family moved frequently and such disruption was my norm such that being a stranger in strange lands became repetitive. Being considered backward and uneducable, I was not expected to do homework, as I was a beneficiary of the policy of "social promotion.") My parents would ask if I had done my homework and I'd lie and say I had. My failure to turn in homework was viewed as par for my backward course, so my schooling little interfered with my education.
I recall once taking an interest in a class, an average (perhaps above average) math class, but the new-to-me school soon corrected the placement error and I found myself dong arithmetic again. In mid high school I continued to develop while my chronological peers began to slow, so I began to catch up. In my senior year I took an interest in an earth science class and actually excelled for the first time. I went from one thin edge of the Bell curve to the other in a matter of months, getting my first F (in chemistry) and first A. I was so discombobulated that I was given a referral to the school psychologist who gave me the full battery of psychiatric tests, from thematic apperception tests to the Rorschach inkblot test. I agreed to be seen again after summer vacation, but we moved again.
I took an interest in remedial education and went to a junior college which, in the early 1970's, was virtually free. I managed to acquire a 1954 Ford pickup for $200 and build a camper shell on it which soon fell apart while driving from the force of wind, but I put the pieces back together using more nails. I managed to get mostly Cs the first year, Bs the second, and mostly As the third year. But my limitations were manifest. An anthropology professor pointed out that humans were different in kind from all other animals. I failed to understand why. I even begged to differ and despite a heroic and prolonged effort to explain that humans are exceptional, I failed to understand how or in what way. I mentioned that, per B.F. Skinner, humans differ from other animals in the complexity of their verbal behavior, which didn't seem like a difference in kind to me. I failed to understand why he was wrong. Even later, after Noam Chomsky tried to explain the error by writing a book for me to read, I failed to understand.
So for about seven years I ended up doing migrant farm labor in the summers and living on the streets in my camper shell in student ghettos, mainly in Isla Vista, moving occasionally to avoid the appearance of the vehicle being abandoned. I spent most of my time in the library trying to redress my educational deficit. Not being a real student, I never presumed to socialize with any. Coming back from the UCSB library, which was open until 11 pm, I noticed other young people partying, especially on weekends, but I never considered attempting to go to any. I once lost my voice from disuse. I would likely have been diagnosed, per today's DSM-5, as being "on the spectrum."
Thoreau had found he needed to work six weeks out of the year to support himself the rest, and so did I. I did a bit more than six weeks of farm work each summer and so saved up some money as the years passed. In the late 1970's and early 1980's I went to university for three years. It was cheap then, so I could pay my way at CalPoly State University where I majored in crop science. I imagined becoming an agricultural expert and working overseas to bring the blessings of modern agriculture/Green Revolution to developing regions and thereby see a bit more of the world.
There wasn't enough science in crop science and so I double-majored in soil science. I became the expert I sought to become, 3.8 something GPA, but before graduating in crop science I used my senior seminar presentation to faculty and students to share the insights and implications of H.T. Odum's systems ecology, such as the fact that the increased yields of the Green Revolution had to do with vast amounts of fossil fuel inputs into the agricultural production system and that our know-how, that I and others had spent some years learning, while a precondition for high yields, was not sufficient as without fossil energy to turn into food our clever ape ways would produce little or no extra food. I made the points in more scholarly terms, but I had come to realize, with no thanks to the professors, that without industrial inputs as indirect fossil fuel inputs (e.g. fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, educated overseers) and direct fossil fuel inputs (agricultural farm equipment, transportation, processing), that virtually nothing I had learned would help increase solar-only agricultural productivity. I realized that such productivity was limited to the fossil-fueled era and that to go overseas and help others to temporarily convert from solar to industrialized and unsustainably degraded agro-ecosystems would be to seek short-term success while failing to ask, "And then what?" If I had spent my life spreading the Green Revolution, I'm guessing I'd have been paid well and celebrated as a benefactor of Mankind. I would die without knowing that posterity had a different view.
So I shared Odum's science and the Director of the Crop Science Department spoke to me afterwards to express his dismay that all efforts to educate me had failed. I realized that even if I had sought ways to serve the system of corporate agribusiness, that any employer would be informed of my short-comings. So I ended up with two degrees I never used. I received specialist information, but I went back to my autodidact ways, failing to make myself employable.
I did acquire one of the early personal computers (a Commodore 64), taught myself to program, and eventually produced professional software. At age 36 I had made enough money, without any intent to do so, to be considered something of a "success" by the favored sex (I was president of the local Commodore Systems User Network so a relatively high status male), and thereby came to have sex. As I suffered from the sexual dysfunction of obligate monogamy, I also became married at age 36 to do the family thing. By all accounts and family history, my parent's generation was less functional than my grandparent's (e.g. mental illness, alcoholism, though my parents were the exception), and my cohort, especially me, myself, and I, was still less so, which would have surprised John B. Calhoun not at all. While I managed to get lucky in love, my wife and son were not fooled for long (and my step-daughter was never fooled). Both came to realize that I was not a source of information, nor an example to consider, but merely a pathetic pretender as any "success" had been unintended and incidental. Unlike the denizens of Facebook, I'm an ignorant know-nothing who just doesn't get it. I don't even know what "it" is.
I swim in a sea of error, ignorance, and illusion. I claim to be an optimist, yet it is obvious to all that I'm a doomer, a double doomer in fact. Unlike mere doomers like Guy McPherson (a single doomer of the Malthusian sort), I'm also a Calhoun doomer who doubts that the coming Singularity will carry humanity to the heights it is destined to achieve. The enlightened Steven Pinker shares his ecomodernist anthropocene enthusiasm to benefit all, while I offer unthinkable thoughts typed in an endless stream of unreadable prattle whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
The Inuit way, like some of the Kogi ways, may work but seem pathological to us. But by one definition, what works is not pathological. The Inuit don't believe in anger, but in telling lies, unlike we civilized empire-builders. We believe in anger, blame, justification, for-and-against thinking as that's what works in the short term. Short-termism is the norm. Anger is merely one of my many pathologies of everyday life too numerous to drone on about.
Despite the influence of Huston Smith, the likes of Aldus Huxley turned me away from organized religion and towards perennial philosophical prattle which led to U.G. Krishnamurti, Jean-Michel Terdjman, Thomas Metzinger, and on to the teachings of Zhen. All capacity to believe in myself was forfeit, so I am all but dead. With help from the Four Horsemen, I went from being an areligious infidel to being anti-religious. Worse, I went from being apolitical to being anti-political, becoming convinced (it's a mountain of evidence thing) that all political machinations of right, left, or center fail to deliver "real solutions." I am a pathogen living in the pathological society that produced me, yet I am so exceptionally pathological that I cannot SERVE the SYSTEM I depend on with enthusiasm, the SYSTEM I'm being dragged along by and am enmeshed in that all others serve better than I do. I am neither fit to live in Nature nor Society.
Could I come up with a narrative that, if only in the privacy of my own mind, made me out to be practically perfect, another Divine Marquis, if an infidel to you? We are the storytelling animal. I can believe up to six unthinkable thoughts before breakfast, though my certitude fades thereafter. But sufficient unto the day are the pathologies thereof. Why paint legs on a snake?
The only stories that interest me are the ones I cannot tell, nor can others. We subsystems are not sources other than of claims. The what-is is not only more complicated than we know, it is more complex than we can know, so we can but listen. Listen. Better to cast off all narratives and throw yourself as subsystem into the humility of Not Knowing to thereby let go and dance with the system that thou art.
Thus Spake Steven Pinker
1:22:53 Questioner: Do you think, Steven, that in three or four hundred years that—resources are not infinite, are finite—that nation states might get at each other's throat—what are your thoughts on that?
1:23:12 Pinker: I think that resource shortages are a red herring, and I talk about this [in his book, Enlightenment Now, Bill Gates' "favorite book of all time"] even though there is another kind of, what Gregg Easterbrook [sports writer, author of It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear] calls "collapse anxiety," namely the fear that no matter how good day to day life seems to be improving we should still be on edge because it all may collapse tomorrow.
But the idea of resource shortages have loomed large in that kind of discussion, and we've never run out of any resources, and the reason is we don't need resources [emph added], we need ways of getting around, lighting our homes, heating our homes, eating, and which resources we use to satisfy those needs depends on our state of knowledge which changes. And as a resource becomes scarce, its price rises, incentivizing people to figure out how to get at less accessible deposits or more often to switch to some other resource. We've seen a, we're in the midst of a rather dramatic process of dematerialization; that thanks to electronic media, especially smartphones, we consume less stuff, we've reached peak stuff, we consume less paper, less newsprint, a lot of resources, not less carbon, which is something we need to do, but the problem of course with carbon isn't that we are going to run out of the stuff, out of oil, the problem is we have too much of it. So I think that resource shortages are a red herring. In terms of conflict between, armed conflict between countries, there is an unmistakable trend, we don't know if it will continue, but war between countries is becoming, is obsolescent, a point made by John Muller as early as the 1980s that the classic kind of war where Nation A declares war against Nation B, they face off with massive tank formations, naval battles, bombing each other's cities is becoming rarer and rarer. The wars that occur are civil wars, some of which can become quite nasty if they have outside intervention, but conflicts between nations are fewer in number, so it's not Utopian to think that in three to four hundred years they could go the way of slave auctions and human sacrifice. There are only 192 nations increasingly realizing that war is a stupid way of resolving disputes and it is entirely possible that they could go the way of [1:25:44 audio missing, lip reader needed] customs.
Video: Sam Harris and Steven Pinker Live on Stage in Converstation [sic], June 4, 2018, 136,069 views, 1,500+ thumbs up, 85 thumbs down, 467 comments.
Pinker self-describes as a cognitive scientist and public intellectual. He's about as much a scientist as Noam Chomsky whose mantle he is poised to inherit. He is on Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today lists. He attends and presents at Ecomodernist conferences. For a better view of Steven Pinker, consider Ingo Piepers' perspective who thinks a paradigm shift is urgently needed to improve the quality of historical research and policy advice currently given in the absence of a scientific framework. Peipers and I do seriously differ: he uses 'System' and I use 'SYSTEM'.
Sam Harris offered to "do an intervention" for Pinker by taking him into a room of terrified AI specialists. Both, however, along with virtually the entire gaggle of SYSTEM servers , need an intervention. We humans need to organize a conference. I propose the title of "Thinking in Systems" and to invite everyone on the top 100 lists to attend (not present, attend). Few will, but the rest might feel more inclined to consider the possibility that they don't know enough about biophysical reality [natural science] to have an opinion that matters and be more likely to consider information offered at the Systems 101 conference. Charles Hall could be theBPE 101 speaker. William Rees could talk about overshoot and the human footprint, E.O. Wilson on species diversity (4% by biomass of mammals on the planet are 'wild'), Joseph Tainter should have something to say, and so on.
Reminds me of:
"It is quite possible to graduate from Stanford—arguably one of the best universities in the world—without knowing anything of significance about the impacts of population growth, the second law of thermodynamics, ecosystem services, total fertility rates, how the climate works, externalities, exponential growth, the food system, the biology of race, nuclear winter, the limits to growth, Federalism, the history of fascism, or many other topics of critical importance to modern citizens." —Paul & Anne Ehrlich. This is so because it is possible to teach at Harvard, Oxford, Yale.... without knowing anything of significance.
I transcribed a bit more, so gluttons for more can read:
1:17:22 Steven Pinker: To step back, I think that there is a risk that has not been faced by some of the purveyors of these doom scenarios that if people, and by people I mean everyone, are just given more and more scenarios in which our civilization is doomed, together with those that I think should be taken seriously like climate change and nuclear war, you pile on what I consider the rather exotic and extremely improbable ones, it could be a good thing if a huge percent of the population firmly believes that our civilization is doomed, as many do, poles say that as many as 25 to 30 percent of Americans believe that our civilization is going to come to an end within a few decades. Is that a good thing for people constructively engaged in with the problems we have? I don't think so and in fact other poles that among people who think that our way of life is going to come to an end, a majority say well we should just look after ourselves and our families because when our way of life comes to an end there is nothing to do about it. I think that is itself is a risk and that as we scare people to death, I think, remind them, and we know also that the human sense of probability runs by the number of imagined scenarios, but as we start to pile on those scenarios, then people can become fatalistic, and not work—like what to consider on carbon emissions, if the global warming isn't going to kill me, then the runaway AI is going to turn me into paper clips, or make me a guinea pig in cancer experiments or follow up the command to make me happy by rewiring my brain and putting me into a jar and brainwashing me into thinking I'm happy, and all these other scenarios. I think that there is a real risk to undisciplined disaster mongering that has not been factored into this line of thinking, and I think that the sober thinking shows that most of these scenarios are ill conceived. [applause...]
Those who listen to Nature (who has all the answers) need to do an intervention. Those who may know enough to have an opinion have to tell they-who-will-not-now-listen about the what-is so that when the teachable moment comes they can say, "We told you so." The intelligentsia can and will sing a different song as usual, in a matter of months if not weeks, when belief in the current narrative falters when the bread and circus are no longer forthcoming. The faith-based pretend science of conventional economics is currently center stage and needs to be dethroned. Systems scientists may be posterity's best if not only hope.
