THURSDAY, DEC 28, 2022: NOTE TO FILE

The Pathway Forward

We have few viable options

"Ants on a log, floating down the river (to the waterfall), and each ant thinking he was steering” is an old political saying/metaphor. This was printed in The Daily Gazette (Lawrence, KS) on May 3, 1906:

‘These delegates remind me of a story an old logging friend of mine used to tell,’ he remarked, and everybody stopped to listen as they always do when Vandegrif begins a story. ‘He said that every spring when his logs came down the river, every log was covered with ants, and every ant thought he was steering the log.'

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

Abstract: Instead of criticizing a proposed pathway forward by Jack Alpert, as requested, I rewrote it a bit.

COOS BAY (A-P) — The path forward—we have a few options:

What if we are all a bunch of ants on 195 sovereign logs (some big, some small) in a rushing river bumping up against each other, and we think that if we put the right ants in power that they will steer our log the way we want it to go (via "change we can believe in" that will "make our log great again")? What if those who claim they are steering our log (who may actually believe they are) are not? What if almost everything we think we know is error floating on a river of ignorance in a thick fog of illusion (i.e. is belief-based assertion)? What if there is a waterfall ahead?

Some scientists note that while the decibel level of background roar is increasing, the cause is not absolutely known and that those who attribute the sound to a hypothetical "waterfall" ahead are known doomers. Maybe 95% of scientists can't imagine any other reason for the increasing background roar other than a large waterfall ahead, but Elon Musk, longtermists and ethical altruists (and their scientists) are deeply concerned that a failure to progress towards our singularity (e.g. by contraction of the economy or population degrowth) could threaten the trillions of people yet to be born and shorten the Anthropocene, so the path forward is to keep on keeping on as usual. The prospect of running aground, of hitting the shore, of slowing down GDP growth, is terrifying.

Our global civilization's unfolding injury-trajectory results from the collected behaviors of 8 billion ants that believe they (or their leaders) control the “flows” of mass and energy about them. These behaviors create momentum, lock in a trajectory that is capable of creating injury that for most is beyond their capacity to believe.

We know bumping the shore can happen, but no one has ever told stories of going over a putative "waterfall" because there probably are not any apart from the ones doomers believe in (some claim the people living in the Indus Valley Civilization went over a "waterfall," but why all of them chose to leave the Indus Valley to live elsewhere, and stop reading and writing Harappan, is unknown). [Per Wikipedia: 'Around 1900 BCE signs of a gradual decline began to emerge, and by around 1700 BCE most of the cities had been abandoned. Recent examination of human skeletons from the site of Harappa has demonstrated that the end of the Indus civilisation saw an increase in interpersonal violence and in infectious diseases.... According to historian Upinder Singh, "the general picture presented by the late Harappan phase is one of a breakdown of urban networks and an expansion of rural ones."... there was a general decrease in long-distance trade.... Stone sculptures were deliberately vandalised, valuables were sometimes concealed in hoards, suggesting unrest, and the corpses of animals and even humans were left unburied in the streets and in abandoned buildings. During the later half of the 2nd millennium BCE (1500–1300 BCE), most of the post-urban Late Harappan settlements were abandoned altogether. Subsequent material culture was typically characterised by temporary occupation, "the campsites of a population which was nomadic and mainly pastoralist" and which used "crude handmade pottery."' Note: Downslope = 600 years and no literate Harappan survived.]

The human predicament is that each of the 8 billion individuals on 195 logs, living by the current form of civilization’s rules of the game, are not using a matter-energy system’s view that would select for a new social contract (new rules of the game), one that explicitly sought to minimize injury potentials (e.g. of dying a Malthusian death).

Instead, the current World Socioeconomic-political System (WSS) selects for behaviors based on short-term self interests and limbic reactivity constrained by negative social reinforcement (e.g. laws, fines, force, withdrawal of social approbation) and nature’s environmental productivity (sustainable and unsustainable).

Since our brains have developed enough to stay the course and keep on kicking the can (e.g. tool use and ability to live in large groups exceeding Dunbar’s number) that enabled the dangerous momentum, but not enough to create self-limiting behaviors to manage it. Injury management defaulted to extending access to physical resources, increasing individual lifespans, and implementing additional social rules to manage conflict/criminality (with some success).

To keep our trajectory from creating injury (e.g. chaotic die-off), we need to change the social or physical constraints, i.e. the “rules of the game” that select for an outcome.

In the past, easing physical constraints (conquering nature) meant expanding delivery of supports (matter-energy). However, this expansion may not be possible much longer. Worse, due to our longage of demand, we are facing support delivery contraction (e.g. food, water, a safe place to sleep).

Unfortunately, in the future, extending access to physical resources may not be possible. Worse, these resource deliveries are expected to decline. Attempts to manage decline and the social control system (WSS) adds resource dependent complexity, with diminishing returns on increasing complexity, leading to the collapse of overcomplex societies [Joseph Tainter].

Most individuals cannot imagine injuries that occur when civilization's energy or material resources cannot be delivered. Things have been getting better and better for most denizens of modern techno-industrial (MTI) society for 8-12 generations. That the future will be more of the same is a given fact to 'normal' MTIed humans, hence:

1. There is no "injury" to avoid.
   
2. No motivation to find the behaviors to avoid injury, nor to accept additional constraints that appear painful (not in one's short-term self interest).

The only non-injury to minimal-injury producing path forward may depend on the design and implementation of extended social constraints, a new social contract that some ants may agree to.

Nature determines what the constraints shall be (what works), so the first amendment is: Listen to nature who has all the answers (by not listening to primate prattle, e.g. political cant). The other amendments to the social contract follow.

Implementation of Nature's laws would be a given. Proposing to do so autocratically or democratically through consensus is to quibble over how. If democratically, the blind constituency must become sighted. Maybe not to an understanding of the dynamics of mass and energy flows, but at least to an understanding of humankind's coming exposure to serious injury (i.e. most dying a Malthusian death).

If a bit more than 4 billion can attain this view, they can impose the new constraints on the 4 billion that don’t want them. This mechanism, to add new constraints to the social contract, follows the path used to implement the prohibition of alcohol (which mostly failed), abolish slavery, granting of civil rights and legislating of women's rights.(mostly successful) elements to the social contract.

Our challenge is to get enough (a regional majority) to understand that injury resulting from civilization’s momentum (The Cult of Civilization) is greater than the injury resulting from constraints on behavior (including verbal behavior, e.g. narratives of freedom, dignity, rights, privilege, exceptionalism...) that control it (select for injury).

While assembling such a constituency in the time available may be improbable, the challenge remains:

1. Present the best-guess injuries foreseeable if we remain on the present path.
2. Demonstrate that the additional social constraints are less injurious than business-as-usual in the long run.
3. Show a plausible transition path that those having enough foresight intelligence can see offers a potentially viable outcome for posterity (e.g. not going over the waterfall).

Part of encouraging this consensus path relies on communicating what a failure of implementation likely means:

1. During this century, 8-10 billion people may die from starvation and conflict (some as late as the 22nd century) as our overshoot debt is being called in, and any survivors will be trapped living in a dark age or (maybe 80% probability) of terminating in a darker age lasting forever.
2. A lesser lifestyle, e.g. forming transition towns, won't save civilization from its fall.
3. Taking to the hills won't have a viable long term outcome:
   1. Those who do and live within local environmental productivity in small communities will not save the teaming billions.
   2. They having resources for the taking will likely fail to protect themselves from the marauding hordes on a likely 200 to 500 year downslope period (the average not so bad dark age was 290 years and a worse darker age, failure to recover/rebuild ever, takes longer, so envisioning recovery after maybe 70 years on the downslope as part of an adaptive cycle leading to a bigger and better civilization is pollyannaish).
4. To mention a few of perhaps many potentially viable outcomes, aka 'real' solutions:
   1. A small group of concerned elites implement a global culling and then enforce the additional social constraints on a remnant population.
   2. China, as an autocracy, implements its constitutional commitment to an ecological civilization by setting aside a region (or several, those containing hydroelectric dams), defining the new 'rules of the game' (social contract), and allowing those who agree to the new rules to apply to emigrate (leave their current work of serving the economy), then the technocrats will populate the region(s) with those assessed to know what they are agreeing to (those who happen to be living in the selected regions who disagree with the new social contract are helped to relocate).
   3. Define a potentially viable social contract and allow those who would agree to the new rules (e.g. zero 'right' to reproduce at will, no ownership of property, fixed sustainable per capita energy consumption, intergenerational wealth dilution, no consolidation of political power, baseline medical/dental care (a kidney transplant if you need one may or may not be considered baseline), access to information provided, a path for individual achievement provided, anabolic processes by natural law exceed catabolic processes...) to apply, then, if selected, to vote with their feet to go to potentially viable regions to become the majority by buying property at top dollar (and help those in the minority that disagree with the new social contract to relocate by giving them an amount of money beyond the dreams of avarice of most who, for a time (sorry about that), can live in luxury elsewhere (and the few who refuse to leave, marginalized, allowed to persist provided they do not attack neighbors).
      1. The '1' solution above is a hail Mary reset of the population to a viable level, but without selecting for a change in the form of civilization needed to avoid repeating the pattern of overshoot and collapse in the future.
      2. The '2' and '3' solutions involve selecting millions (who could auto-organize to resist the marauding hordes), who agree to the new world order and are likely able to change (e.g. are not substance abusers or psychopaths, and if 4-8 billion agree to a new social contract, that's even better).
         1. Some will guess that building a hydro-empowered megacity (three distantly connected) is posterity's best chance at a viable future as the millennia pass.
         2. Some will guess that living like animals in low-intensity forager-gardener communities of 20 to 50 trusted others in a watershed management unit of 20 to 50 communities, is the only proven to be viable pathway towards renormalizing humans, and in a few millennia those living in the three megacities will have confirmed or disconfirmed the best guess of the adaptive, who avoided the waterfall.
            

The above is one of many potential views of the human predicament. Understanding biophysical and social constraints will limit our perceived pathways to those that Gaia is trying to tell us may be viable. If we can listen and thereby be forced to act in a manner that is potentially viable, that limits who is injured by what behavior, some, if not all, may sidestep potential human extinction (going over the falls).

If 80 million to 8 billion humans agree to get out of the fossil-fueled matter-energy flow that is rushing them towards the waterfall (Seneca cliff), they might also agree to form a viable civilization on shore, understanding that to avoid or mitigate injury, all must agree to rapid population reduction over the next 50 years (possible only while they consume resources embodied in their log) by birth-off to avoid/mitigate die-off.

SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/17/2023

Dr. Tom Murphy, of Do the Math fame, has a map of a pathway to modernity. And a couple of days ago Medium writer Indi.ca offered his comments on Murphy's pathway: The Long Road To Ruin How civilization took a wrong turn thousands of years ago [member-only, if paywalled, right click on link and open in incognito window].

Tom's Pathway to Modernity:

 

Rather than comment on Murphy’s view, I decided to, as usual, steal his idea and rework it to resemble my idiosyncratic view of the human past, present, near future, life, the universe and everything (worldview).

The following summarizes a story of the predicament of modernized humans who will assess it to be outside of any consensus narrative they can approve of. Therefore it is wrong.

 

The Man the Hunter expansionism transitioned to the expansion of complex societies in the form of Empires of Belief 
prior to the coming of Empires of Conquest dependent on and served by True Believers providing social control.

That humans (not dogs) were the first domestic animal (bottle gourds were the first domesticated plant) is as noted by John Livingston in detail in his book Rogue Primate. 

If “the most you can hope from [life] is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late” [J. Conrad] is the norm, a “know then thyself” story is to endeavor to tell (a likely story) of human origins and our recent (last 50k years) trajectory to the fall.

That we moderns, the Lord Man expansionistic form of human, one that eliminated (typically by killing the adult males and breeding the females) all other humans (exceptions being some San, Hadza, and Pygmy) and hominins along with many other forms of megafauna), is not a story our bones and artifacts tell clearly enough for us moderns to see in front of our pug-nosed primate faces (apart from the faces of some archaeogeneticists starting 2009 who told the story of our “Great Expansion” by 2012 which none of us Liked and Shared for some reason (or lack thereof).

 

 

 

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