SATURDAY, AUG 24, 2024: NOTE TO FILE
Ruben Nelson
Thinking Outside the Box 3
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS:MODERN TECHNO-INDUSTRIAL CULTURE, FROM THE WIRES, WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY
Abstract: Ruben Nelson is old school, like H.G. Wells, and so can yet envision the need for a new world order and what it will need to look like to persist. He thereby becomes a person of interest.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Ruben Nelson was believed to have unsubscribed from a listserv at the end of part 2. On August 23 he learned he had not been unsubscribed. Whether he unsubscribed and then forgot he had, or a group moderator had and forgot to reconsider (I was banned for an off-list email to one moderator who removed me without notice, but I was reinstated without notice some time later, perhaps after reconsideration or intervention of another moderator), or some database/systems software glitch had removed him is unknown.
The brief intro to Ruben that is publicly linked to does not include content from two listservs. The same link with a '2' added does contain content from closed to public listservs I did not ask permission to copy parts of interest to me (and possibly posterity), and so were added to an unlinked to version which has become too large for my HTML editor to easily handle, hence a third part, this page, became needed.
More notes as page 3 (this page).
NOTE TO FILE 4/12/2024
Greenpeace is declaring war on Big Oil by seeking donations. Like the David Suzuki Foundation, current leaders are systems-blind, energy-blind, context-blind, posterity-blind, time-blind, population-blind, collapse-blind, pending extinction-blind.... On his 80th birthday Suzuki sent out an email to supporters noting the marginal accomplishments of the Foundation, but as a man of science who would rather know than believe, he added that meanwhile "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed."
Below is Greenpeace historian Rex Weyler's comment on Greenpeace leadership whose only claim is that they are not money-blind. Not good news for 10 year olds.
I’ll be getting this in my mail today. Are they serious about stopping oil? And vilifying “Big Oil”? What’s the difference between small producers and big ones? The leadership of Environmental NGOs must be wet behind the ears, brainwashed, or outright liars if they understand system thinking and energy based economies.
Steve
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True enough that the so-called "leaders" of these big NGOs don't really understand what is going on; they are systems-blind and energy-blind, and mostly focused on their own reputation ("brand") and on raising funds to support themselves and their giant bureaucracies.
On the other hand, Chevron has filed a huge slap-suit against them, and others, and is attempting to intimidate any opposition with their billions-of-dollars legal power. I've been helping fight Chevron and their massive battalions of lawyers for a decade over their destruction of Northeast Ecuador and shameful treatment of the people who live there.
Greenpeace fighting Chevron is a righteous fight, but of course the self-righteousness just also reinforces their blind spots.
Chevron really is an evil force on Earth. The Greenpeace leadership is just naive. Big difference.
The main difference between the big oil giants such as Chevron and most small producers is that Chevron has the financial power to commit vicious crimes -- violence, intimidation, rape, murder, land destruction, etc. all well documented from Ecuador to Nigeria -- and to get away with it using more intimidation and literally billions of dollars in legal muscle, private investigators, and public relations firms.
It would be great if the average so-called "environmentalist" actually understood ecology, overshoot, living systems, and thermodynamics, but they don't because they are just average humans. A few people inside these large groups do understand these things, but they are severely out-numbered and dominated by the fund-raising "leaders."
One more reason why we have not made any significant ecological progress since Rachel Carson or the Limits to Growth.
Rex.
Note the last sentence is the same as Suzuki's. Dreams of destroying the growth hegemon are a distraction. The challenge is:
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called." —R. Buckminster Fuller
No one (modern human) will make the old one obsolete. It is obsolete, a blip in time that can only exist for a time. Some humans possessed of foresight intelligence could create a new model and make it work, maybe, but if the some are countable on one hand, they may be too few. The few are too idiosyncratic to find a common ground, to auto-organize. Not good news for 10 year olds.
NOTE TO FILE 4/17/2024
Statement made on a different group: "Socialism is no panacea. Flawed human nature corrupts any system."
There is no “flaw” in human nature because there is no fixed human nature. So stop looking for what it is or its origins. The flaws you are looking for are not there.
But the question you ask: “How do we account for all the pain, death and destruction caused by human beings?” is a good question. However, the answer you give, “Human nature is flawed” is a wholly inadequate and lazy, if tragically common, answer.
The challenge we face is that we need to seek and develop a good response to the question you ask. We need a fresh and powerful understanding of human understanding and its consequences.
The path to a better, if not yet wholly adequate, response to the question runs something like this:
“Human nature” needs to be seen and used only as a 2nd order (meta) concept. The logic goes something like this:
· It is the nature of reality, writ large, to be so vast and ambiguous that what it is, what it means, what it requires of us is not at all obvious. Rather, in order to make enough sense of it enough to “get a life” (form and live in and by a shared, on-going culture) human beings must make sense of it by using powerful images/metaphors that are embedded in and reinforced by human sub-cultures, cultures and forms of civilization.
· One trouble is that by learning to take/read/construe reality by one powerful metaphor we are also learning to ignore signals that the metaphor we are unconsciously using cannot see and make sense of. In time, we take reality to be that which our metaphor reveals to us. We stop looking for and attending to signals that are anomalous.
· All deeply embedded and powerful metaphors quietly make the claim that they and only they are really the best way to read/take/construe reality.
· No stable and long-lasting culture routinely teaches those formed within it that the way it reads/takes/construes reality is simply one way among several ways of doing so. Just take your pick and stick with it.
· In short, there is no easy or short-term way to judge which deep and formative metaphors have the best grasp on reality. We cannot stand outside root metaphors in a neutral metaphor-free space in which we can make this judgement.
· The only sure test is that of time. Does the culture last long enough that it can be judged to be sustainable, i.e. to last as long as conditions for human life last on this Earth without changing the conditions so much that human life is no longer possible. To date, living as Hunter-Gatherers is the leader by a long shot. It has 300,000+ years under its belt. Agriculture-based settlement has 10,000 years and MTI 1,000 (at best). (Strangely, we who are MTI know this and yet persist in thinking/asserting/living as if our form of civilization is, to quote Francis Fukyama, “The end of history.”
· By this understanding human beings do not have a “fixed” nature. Rather, our nature is extraordinarily “plastic”, i.e. open to the influences of our contexts. It is our nature to be formed by and in the many contexts we are born into. This is the case at every level from the sub-culture, culture and form of civilization, to the biochemistry of the place, of the food our mothers eat before and during pregnancy, the food we are fed, the presuppositions and structures of our mother tongue, the climate of the place, the severity of the incidents of trauma our mothers experience while carrying us, etc. etc. etc.)
· If we are looking for flaws, look at the deep understanding of reality and what it requires of us in each culture and form of civilization. The flaws are in human (mis)understanding of the nature of reality and the nature of reliable human knowing/understanding of reality.
This gets us on to a path that appears to me to be both interesting and potentially fruitful.
Ruben
SUBNOTE TO FILE 5/5/24
Question: How can we reconcile long term planning for social and ecological resilience with short term planning to meet the basic needs of the 8 billion humans currently living on this planet?
I think we need to think both short term and long term, and different people think in different ways. Most people think short term. She has a company that deals with extreme weather events that are already happening. As long as I don't have a good answer for the question underlined above, I think the burden is on us to show that climate change is just one factor of ecological overshoot, and that other factors must be given priority even though they are not yet visible.
What is it that people need to hear, and how can we convey the message so that people who don't want to hear what they need to hear actually become willing to hear?
Luis,
Yes, those are the questions we need to focus on. I think it's pretty clear; the task is to help people to see that a) fundamental system change is needed ...that this one is generating the big global problems and is not going to provide for you and is in the process of self-destruction and we are in for a lot of trouble soon, and b) there is a great alternative, to which many in degrowth, ecovillage Transition Towns and related movements are now bumbling towards. It must be about localism, cooperative, self-sufficiency and self governing small communities in control of their own situation and above all not about accumulating wealth..There's no other option;we have to explain that tech-fixes and "decoupling" cannot make anything like the present social form sustainable or just. The logic of all this is simple and easily outlined and irrefutable. We have to point it out wherever and whenever we can.
The coming time of great and possibly terminal troubles will force people to go in the required direction. They will realise that the state can't save them and they had better get together with their neighbours to see what they need to organise. We can point to the liberation they could enjoy (e.g. having to work for money only two days a week, living in secure supportive communities ...) This revolution is happening all round the world now, most remarkably among tribal and peasant people in poor countries. The odds against it succeeding are not good but it's clear what we have to do..
Ted
SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/21/24
There is an inherent contradiction between MTI society and long term ecological sustainability. This means that elites, who are tasked with keeping a society functional, must somehow resolve that contradiction by keeping MTI going, yet preventing any ecological damage that results. The most recent attempt has been to try to transform the MTI energy system away from fossil fuels, but we don't see any significant results yet and an energy transformation would only resolve one aspect of overshoot anyway.
It might be possible for elites to raise the awareness of overshoot, but since nothing can be done to make it go away, elites can't incorporate overshoot into any plan of action to increase the functionality of society. This is why they mostly ignore it (except at the margins, as with the attempt at a renewable energy transition). Since 'reform' is actually impossible, rising elites won't do any better.
As the damage from overshoot accelerates, I expect that elite failure to prevent that damage will result in a series of elite replacement cycles, with each elite cohort claiming to have a plan for damage prevention and continued MTI success. Each cohort will fail, of course, and it is likely that the replacement cycles could become very turbulent. Eventually MTI will collapse, most people will die, including most elites, and the remaing survivors will splinter into much simpler and smaller societies. Those societies will have their own elites.Trump has always been a member of the neoliberal business elite, but now he's trying to promote a change in elite cohort, a resurgence of an older reactionary elite whose aim is to somehow return the US to the glory years of the 1950s, when men were men, women were in the kitchen and non-whites knew their place at the back of the bus.
I doubt that this will reform MTI civilization into a more sustainable structure. In fact, because of its emphasis on fossil fuels, human dominance of the biosphere (as God's will) and national isolation, it may well accelerate a global MTI collapse [so vote for Trump]. This will be the main benefit of this elite cohort change.
The main disadvantage will be having to listen to Trump and his minions pontificate for the rest of their lives, since one result their takeover will be the permanent suppression of any other elite group. It will be MAGA all the way until final economic collapse, or failing that, until Nature arrives in the batter's box.Joe
SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/24/24
I admire Art Burman’s work. His major conclusions are important.
However, what he describes as a Meta-crisis is actually a Polycrisis.
The meta-challenge we face is quite different. It is not a crisis as such, although crises will be caused because we do not understand the meta-challenge we face.
The meta challenge was stated in Einstein’s quip that we cannot solve the problems we face with the same kind/level of thinking that we used when we caused the problem. When his insight is applied to the whole of our MTI way of construing reality, knowing it, imagining it, thinking it through and activing in response to our understanding, it means that better MTI knowing, imagining thinking and acting will not cut it for us.
This is hard, hard news that our MTI cultures cannot hear. It is simply beyond our imagination that the root cause of our troubles is that which we celebrate as our highest accomplishment – namely our MTI ways of knowing , construing and responding to reality.
On this issue, Art is silent.
Ruben
SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/23/24
The above was copied from the now too large HTML file. Ruben may rejoin GaiaPC listserv, so more content may be forthcoming. This post by Ruben was to a different group, a Degrowth group, a word the founder of the group recently started to capitalize.
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I [Ruben] want to offer a good word about being doomed:
Ken suggested a way through the mess of complex living messes we are in: . It we are realistic about the biophysical facts on the ground, we can proactively adapt, increase our resilience and regenerate biological capacity. The Simpler Way is a living example of this philosophy in practice, and I think Ted would argue that it leads to greater overall wellbeing and community.
Sounds good… except…
As I see things, there are a couple of trouble spots with these assertions. First, as our struggle with climate change has demonstrated, facts alone have little effect on MTI cultures. To make matters worse, we cannot glue either the understanding or the philosophy Ken advocates to the MTI form of civilization that now dominates, virtually controls, the world. Second, NO MTI culture knows it is a culture which exemplifies the MTI form of civilization. Therefore, NO MTI culture knows that it cannot glue new apprehensions and understandings of reality on to the MTI apprehensions and understandings of reality. Third, this means that in MTI cultures everywhere folks are singing the song Ken sings: “If we only get enough folks to accept these new values, we will be fine. We can transform ourselves and our culture.” They do so not understanding points one and two above. Fourth, the net effect is that while mighty efforts at personal and societal change will be made, they will fail. They will not generate the power that is necessary to reach “escape velocity” from the “gravitational pull” of the MTI ways of grasping and responding to reality. Worse, most folks will not understand why they are failing. They have been told and they believe that MTI cultures can be made to be sustainable. In such situations most of us blame others for sabotaging our efforts. Fights breakout. Not the peace were have devoted our lives to creating.
Until this knot is unravelled the bright futures hungered for by so many will not emerge except in “small islands of sanity.” Such islands will only last until they are overwhelmed by the violence.
This is not a call to be hopeless.
It is a call to learn to do what MTI cultures find almost impossible to do – learn to see, experience and respond to reality in ways that are deeply counter to MTI cultures AND learn to understand the processes involved so they can be taught and reinforced in ways that lead to the emergence of the next form of civilization.
Once seen, this path is not mysterious. However, it is extremely arduous especially for those who are highly educated in the MTI ways being and doing. And, of course, it is not now on the agenda of any significant institution in any sector of MTI culture.
My conclusion. Before you invest much energy in thinking about what might be next, come to terms, deep down, with the prospects of MTI cultures being doomed. Only then, I suggest, will you see a path forward that id deeply different enough to have any chance of breaking out of the MTI patterns which we all know and live so well.
Or so it seems to me.
Ruben
SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/24/24
Lord Man controls the narrative — for a time. Believe what you want, it is your right to. But Gaia doesn’t care what you believe or don’t believe, so why should you?
Today I updated a Medium post form June that used the word 'wetiko', a nod to Native North American indigenious culture:
To destroy whoever controls, destroy their consensus narrative; a capacity for doubt is lethal. Modern humans are ruled by wetiko, our r-selected form of civilization needed to believe in technology and human exceptionalism — in zero-order humanism (the ideology of the necessary primacy of the human enterprise), a condition that selects for extinction, and not just of modern humans (e.g. the Anthropocene mass extinction event).
Wetiko is a cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, desire without satisfaction, growth/consumption as an end in itself, and the necessary primacy of war — against other quasi-tribal groups, species, and Nature (Mother, the Gaian system) and even against the individual’s own ancestral K-selected humanity (wetiko: an over-abstracting dualistic mind: Belief→stories believed in→belief in belief→ideology→mindset→worldview=the world→techno-r-acculturation→Modern Techno-Industrial form of civilization).
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By copying and pasting the above into my HTML editor I can view code for paragraph links that allow me to link to a part of a Medium article, e.g. https://medium.com/@alysion42/whoever-controls-the-narrative-controls-the-world-b752f4e810ce#91ba
The #91ba links to a paragraph. Good to know.
SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/26/24
Hi M-,
You sound as if it is news to you that most of the power and money in MTI cultures are devoted to improving and extending MTI cultures.
This should not be news.
It is the actual condition in which we live.
1% of the Global GDP is spent on advertising, almost all of which carries the message that MTI cultures are the best ever, no question, hands down!
1% may not seem like a lot, but it is $1 trillion dollars.
You could buy every voluntary organization in the world for less.
Advertising a quite apart from every newscast, media release, business speech, university degree and government promise. These are in addition to advertising. But they convey the same message – our only conceivable future is one in which we extend and improve MTI cultures. That is what the UN’s SDGs are about.
Yes, MTI cultures today are driving people mad, making them sick and nurturing violence.
But there is no serious public conversation which says, “we need to evolve beyond, to transcend, our formation as MTI persons in MTI cultures.” No significant institution on any sector has this insight as its mission.
Sadly, virtually all of the talk of “transformation” is well within the MTI frames of reference.
Conclusion: we face the slow(?) disintegration of MTI cultures because we who are formed by and within them cannot bring ourselves to even entertain the thought that the very form of civilization which has given us all the good stuff may also be the death of us.
No serious money is being spent to even explore this possibility, much less advocate for it.
Trillions are being spent to improve and extend MTI cultures.
This is the world you live in as we enter the 2nd quarter of the 21st Century.
Sorry.
Ruben
SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/27/24
Notes from a human ecologist:
All species have a natural (genetic) propensity to expand and have the innate capacity to do so exponentially under ideal ecological conditions.
[The species graphed would be a K-selected species recovering from a depopulation event, then transitioning to persist by remaining below the upper carrying capacity limit.]
In nature, when a species population does expand under temporarily favourable conditions, it will soon modify its habitat (food shortages, better conditions for spread of disease, etc.), there will be increased competition for habitat, the dense population will attract predators, etc. In other words, the natural expansionist tendency (exponential positive feedback) will be countered by systemic negative feedback. The population will be driven back down and subsequently fluctuate in the vicinity of carrying capacity -- the 'normal' state of affairs. [r-selected species driven down, but the K-selected respond (an evolved response) via GAS to lower their fertility rate prior to crossing lower carrying capacity limit with evermore braking to avoid overshooting the upper limits to not degrade environmental productivity depended upon. For the r-selected, die-off works, but due to high offspring investment in mice and men, overshoot risks extinction. Sea turtles lay as many optimally sized eggs as each individual can and oak trees produce as many acorns each year as they can. That 99+% fail to reproduce is what works for r-strategists. Modern humans are the outcome of 75k years of r-selection, but no long-term persistence implied. A metastatic cancer may prosper greatly, for a time, but it is a non-evolvable dissipative dynamic also.]
[Modern] Humans are no different except that, with the use of modern medicine, improving public health standards, and fossil fuels to increase food and other resource availability, we temporarily reduced or eliminated many negative feedbacks; our population therefore expanded exponentially for almost 200 years. MTI culture assumes this is the norm and continues to encourage population and economic growth. (Some of us resist = Steve's conundrum). [The MTI cultural dynamic is r-selected for a time within a K-selected form inclusive of all evolvable mammals, e.g. wolves, wild rats and mice, if not domestic rats/mice/dogs/humans. Modern humans (Rogue Primates) are to normal pre-expansionist humans as r-selected dogs are to wolves.]
Unfortunately for MTI societies, negative feedback invariably eventually kicks in [because modern techno-industrialized humans are in a behavioral sink and normal reproductive behaviors are among the first because most complex functions lost] -- energy (resource) shortages, famine, increasing competition for space, war, climate change, falling sperm counts, etc., etc., perhaps even intelligent resistance-- and is beginning to work. [Our pathway to ecological overshoot (local) began 75k years ago climaxing this century, and civilizational overshoot began 12k years ago and climaxed about 1970 or before (1880-1930).]
I believe the global population is near the top of a one-off population boom bust cycle -- hope you enjoyed the boom; the bust is likely to be somewhat less pleasant. [In terms of global overshoot, it is a one-off sigle cycle not to repeat. If a remnant human population persists, the concern is can any, enough, renormalize to end the repeatition of the 75k years dynamic? If we fail to end the Anthropocene, if any form of modern human persists, they must repeatedly degrade the planetary life-support system until they can't. My daughter recently had multiple chemo, radiation treatments and a mascetemy. If there is a remnant population of cancer cells her body of otherwise normal cells cannot counter, her life may end before mine. The human predicament is that maybe 0.0001% of modern humans could be among a remnant population whose race to the bottom ends without destroying the potentially viable form of renormalizing humans likely to need 10 to 500 generations to renormalize (it took 3k generations to denormalize K-selected humans into their opposite, modern r-selected humans).]
More K-selected comments on human overshoot. And a Medium post: The Obfuscation of r-selection and K-selection Theory
9/16 SUBNOTE TO FILE
1) Humans in general and politicians in particular, are temporal, spatial and social discounters. Decision-makers would rather impose uncertain future damage on total strangers in distant countries than impose certain economic hardships on their own family, friends and constituents today;
2) Related to the above, the world is urbanizing; urbanization isolates people spatially and psychologically from the ecosystems that support them and blinds them to the distant damage of their unsustainable consumption. (What, me worry?);
3) Even thinking humans are caught up in the public good/free rider conundrum. If country ‘a’ acts decisively to end overshoot (acting for the public good), then it bears the full short-term costs but receives an infinitesimal share of any benefits. Meanwhile countries ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, etc. get a ‘free ride’ on country ‘a’s sacrifice. Where is the incentive to act first or alone?
4) In many so-called democratic countries, politics is dominated by big money (the corporate sector). Big money has often essentially ‘purchased’ politicians who need millions to get elected but are then expected to reward their benefactors with friendly policies, i.e., policies that protect the status quo.
5) One symptom of the problem is regulatory capture exacerbated by the revolving door syndrome. Friendly politicians, corporate lobbying and the exchange of personnel between corporations and regulatory agencies produces regulatory agencies that align themselves more to corporate values than to the public interest. In any case, studies show that the views and values of ordinary voters have little weight in major policy decisions.
6) Politicians and their advisors know — or should know — that immediate, or even a decade of actions to abandon fossil fuels, (FF) would crash national and global economies which are still 80% FF dependent. Despite all the renewable green energy hype, modern renewables cannot substitute quantitatively for FF.
7) People tend to be optimistic by nature. They want to believe that technology will spare them any sacrifice, that we don’t have to abandon our material life-styles in the face of eco-crisis. Hence enthusiastic acceptance of the green renewable energy myth, EVs and all other characteristics of ‘business-as-usual-by-alternative-means’ aka the status quo;
8) Politicians naturally delay tough decisions until someone else inherits the problem. This creates an additional incentive for them to cave to corporate pressures — it’s the easy way out;
9) MTI cultures have, for the past 70 years or so, purposefully developed a cult of continuous economic growth facilitated by the myth of continuous techno-progress. This mantra is reflected in government policies, the daily news, our schools and universities and is thus embedded in many peoples’ synaptic circuits. This is a major source of human hubris and eco-denial;
10) It follows that H. sapiens is a creature of custom and habit (good or bad) by nature. Consumers in rich countries are addicted to the material ‘good-life’ and the citizens of developing countries are anxious to try the drug;
11) It doesn’t help that the majority of ordinary citizens are ecologically and otherwise scientifically illiterate; students in most disciplines don’t get even a taste of the biophysical context for our unfolding crisis reality;
12) Our education systems have not only failed to enlighten, but actively operate to reproduce the beliefs, values assumptions and cultural norms that have created the eco-crisis;
13) In this context, why would scientifically illiterate eco-ignorant but well-off and well-insulated people want to change in ways that they would see as sacrifice? By the way, it is psychologically harder to give something up than it is to be denied something we never had;
14) Cultural evolution (e.g., technology) and the resultant pace of climate-ecological change have outstripped bioevolution. Our brains are now obsolete — we don’t ‘get’ complexity; thus, H. sapiens (or at least the MTI ‘sub-species’) is no longer adapted to the hyper-complex socio-cultural-eco-environment of its own making and is in danger of being selected out. (Darwin wins again.)
In short, I think that the system is hard- and soft-wired to maintain the growth-based status quo by all possible means. This is society’s ‘default position’.
Cheers,
Bill
SUBNOTE TO FILE
