More Evidence of a Broken Political System
Of course I mean this last election.
It isn't that I care much about who got elected, that the Democrats and Obama took a beating, that Republicans now hold the majority in the House of Representatives, or any particular aspect of the results. As most of my regular readers know, I am of the opinion that it really doesn't matter who holds the reins, the forces at play destroying industrial civilization are overwhelming and no one could reverse the trend nor mend the damage. Capitalism as it has come to be practiced in the US, and increasingly in many other nations, contains the seeds of our destruction and we are like heroin addicts unable to get off the powerful drug of profit making.
What I refer to is the process of political maneuvering that continues on into the governance phase after the elections are over and the electorate have expressed their desires (c.f. “Mitch McConnell: Dumping Obama In 2012 Is The Only Way To Achieve The GOP Agenda” by Amanda Terkel). Governance steps aside to make room for political machinations. Instead of being able to focus on rational decision making, our elected officials have to worry about the next election. And since elections cost a lot of money, they have to worry about where their campaign chest is coming from. Every issue, every vote is cast into the political calculus rather than the reality calculus.
But what makes this the case is really a reflection on human mental capacity more than on an inherently flawed process that we have all fallen victims to. We the people made it this way because we the people are simply not bright enough or wise enough to see through the empty rhetoric and ask the right questions while insisting on our “leaders” telling us the truth about reality. We are mostly so foolish that we don't want to know the truth. We only want someone to tell us everything will be OK and that they know how to solve the problems.
Moreover, we humans don't seem to care a whole lot for evidence-based understanding of reality. We have developed this notion that all we have to do is find a belief that resonates with us and that that is sufficient for basing our decisions. Our politics and our governance practices are based now on ideologies. And nowhere is there room for questioning our beliefs. They feel good so we cling to them. We shape our supposed values from them (while telling ourselves that those beliefs are based on our values).
And, unfortunately, it is looking increasingly like most prevalent ideologies are dead wrong. They fail to grasp reality in order to govern pragmatically.
Left, Right, and Moderate: No One Gets It Correctly!
Progressivism is based on the belief in infinite improvement (progress) and a belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature. Both are fallacious. The first idea comes from the supposition that because a system has improved (in what sense, one should ask) in the past it will continue to do so in the future. Yet the evidence from systems science is completely in opposition to this. Take the development of a human being over their lifetime starting from a single cell. The new living system becomes more complex and more capable of relatively autonomous existence. This might be thought of as progress. The human infant, toddler, child, adolescent, and young adult is still developing throughout these stages. Most adults are able to continue learning new things well past middle age. But eventually progress slows and comes to a halt. There is no such thing as infinite progress in the biological world. Even evolution will come to a halt in producing increasingly complex brains when no additional free energy is obtainable just from having the greater complexity.
Progress in civilization, too, is only possible while the resources are abundant and especially energy (see Joseph Tainter's “The Collapse of Complex Societies” for an explanation of the end of progress due to resource constraints). Yet progressivists seem to be blissfully unaware of these facts. Motivated more generally by the desire to see everyone have a “better” life, they see the only way to achieve this goal is to have progress continue more or less forever. Unfortunately they conflate growth (of the economic kind) with development. So their deep belief in the need to have a growing economy in order for everyone to benefit blinds them to the evidence now that we have begun to hit the constraints of resources that are upon us.
Ironically, the modern version of a conservative shares the belief in economic growth as the “good” but for a very different reason. For them it is all about opportunity for any individual who is willing to work hard to accumulate a lot of wealth. A growing economy is conflated with wealth production and reward. Conservatives believe in individualism and that most humans are inherently “bad” (for a real eye opener read “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot” by Russell Kirk). This latter idea fits nicely with traditional Christian mores so it is easy to see how conservatives are both politically and religiously tied. The problem with this world view is that it doesn't comport with the evidence either. First, while there are the few, almost mythical, individualists in any population (genetically predisposed to exploration or entrepreneurship), these are very much in the minority. The vast majority of people are highly social and socializable. People operate best in a social context rather than as rugged individuals that pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as conservatives imagine, especially about themselves. We do need a few brave, intrepid, risk takers in society to help explore the frontiers of knowledge, land, and technology. But only a few are needed to help discover new possibilities. We aren't all like that.
Conservatives, in a somewhat contradiction of logic, also believe that that government is best that governs least. It has always been a puzzle to me how one could believe people are basically lazy and shifty on the one hand and on the other that they need less regulation from governments and laws. But the answer to this seeming contradiction is that conservatives rest assured that the free markets of the world will punish the non-conforming and reward those who, in spite of their basic nature, play by the rules and contribute to the wealth producing engine of society. Here too there is a failure to examine the evidence. We have so much evidence that markets freed from regulatory constraints run amok with a few really big winners and lots of really big losers. The nature of capitalism places a bias of reward on capital rather than labor, so quite naturally the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. On top of that, the middle class gets poorer too, these days.
So is the middle road best? Are moderates truly understanding reality and thus make better governors? Apparently Barrack Obama thinks so. But how founded is this philosophy? What it boils down to is this: is the average of two extreme bad ideas a good idea? There is no basis in rational thought to assume this. A middle of the road is no good if the road is going in a completely erroneous direction.
Pragmatism (But Not Political Pragmatism!)
Political pragmatism is often described as the art of the possible, but its deeper meaning is: What can we do to appease all of the various competing demands? In other words this kind of pragmatism refers to what we can possibly implement that won't piss off the most people. Never mind whether what we can get by with politically is what is needed to solve a real problem. Bill Clinton became a master of this approach subsequent to the Republican take over of Congress in 1994. Obama seems to be following that path as well; look at the health care reform bill that actually go passed rather than the one that would have actually done the most good for the greatest number. The excuse is, of course, always the same. At least we got something through! It moves us in the right direction even if we didn't get as far as we wanted.
The excuses sound reasonable. With so much polarity between the two parties (and ideologies) the only reasonable thing to do is compromise and continue to work toward the ultimate objective.
Scientific pragmatism is quite different. It is a philosophy that says when the evidence suggests that the prevailing model is wrong, or not complete/sufficient, then it is time to do more research to get closer to the truth. In other words, science doesn't ultimately operate on beliefs. There may be many individual scientists who believe certain things to be true, especially their own theories, but as often as not, they are ready to change their beliefs when new contradictory evidence is presented. And if any are not, the process of science itself will wash over their reluctance eventually. The truth will out simply because science deals with our best estimation of reality and not some ideological, a priori belief about how reality works.
This world we live in is asserting reality on our ignorance very rapidly these days. And even as the evidence builds that humans are following self-destructive paths those who are guided more by ideology than by evidence (and science) continue to debate about the best way to kill ourselves might be. All of these ideologies share the notion that growth of a capitalistic system operating in a democratic (and free market) environment is the way forward for humanity. They only differ in terms of how to best achieve the ideal system. And as the arguing and positioning goes on the evidence of destruction continues to build. The evidence that when the environmental problems really start to hurt we won't have the energy needed to mitigate or adapt is out in plain view. Yet still the politicos argue about the future of energy supply. They are arguing because they haven't even a slightest clue about physics but they do have their ideologies.
It doesn't even occur to them that they don't have a clue! This is meta-ignorance. They are ignorant of the fact that they are ignorant. They actually believe that because they have their beliefs about how the world works they are prepared to push their approaches to solving problems. For example, the Republicans push tax cuts as the cure for joblessness. They have their rationale, of course, but they have no real evidence to cite (in fact the evidence about correlation between tax cuts and job creation rates contradict the theory!). On the other hand the Democrats push for some kind of jobs bill or a stimulus to get people spending money at WalMart again as a cure to our economic woes.
It simply never occurs to any of them that they should question their assumptions and look for evidence of what is really going on causally.
Schools of Economics
Did you ever wonder about this? There aren't 'schools' of physics or chemistry or biology. There are different hypothetical bases in psychology but these have been evolving with the build up of experimental evidence in favor or against any such hypothesis, as should happen in science. Moreover, in recent years, the incursions made by neuroscience into psychology have aided the start of a convergence toward common consensus on what is going on in the human mind. The evidence is much harder than just asking a patient what she is thinking or feeling. There are still a few psychologists out there (mostly clinical types I imagine) who haven't got some of the recent memos about how the brain really works, but they are much fewer in number these days.
Yet, in spite of claims made about the “quantitative” nature of modern economics (neoclassical economics) there remain distinct and often warring schools of thought about some basic principles. It is much worse than it ever was in psychology. In the latter there was always the branch of experimental psych that adopted pretty standard methods from the other sciences and had a tradition of disproving hypotheses that were not grounded in reality. The demise of the behaviorist 'school' in psychology is a case in point. Behaviorism got pretty extreme at one point, insisting that there were no inner states that could be measured, so only behavior (which could be measured) counted as evidence. Well it is still true that behaviors can certainly be measured. But it is no longer true that we can't measure internal states, so now we have to modify the paradigm to incorporate things like emotions and thoughts (cognitive psychology) with externally observed behavior. Not a problem for science.
Until very recently economics stood on a number of principles that were more or less fabrications in the minds of people who wanted desperately to be seen as scientists. These people were enamored with math as they saw practiced in physics so they constructed mathematical theories about economics that seemed to give it the aura of science. We even saw a bunch of bankers (who are also often economists!) created something that passed off as a Nobel Prize (like the ones in science), properly called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. But of course the mainstream media reports this as the Nobel Prize in Economics (which doesn't exist!)
But economists have been earnest. There are a number of hard working economists who actually do understand the distinction between building a theory based on repeated experiments and confirmation of mathematical relations as opposed to finding a mathematical relation which seems to give credence to a belief. And recently a number of these economist have started to question some of the principles that neoclassical economics has been built on. For example Daniel Kanneman (along with psychologist Amos Tversky) did basic research on human decision making that showed that the principle of a rational economic agent (a utility maximizer) as the basis for transactions was actually a fantasy. He received the Riksbank Prize in 2002 for his work. Today the field of behavioral economics is rapidly growing and actually doing science!
Another group of scientists, these from the field of systems ecology, noticed the way in which human economies could be characterized as natural systems, like ecological systems, and studied using the same tools of systems science that had been developed during the 20th century. Led by Howard T. Odum (see: “Environment, Power, and Society”) these scientists started studying economics from a biophysical perspective (an early version is called ecological economics, but it tends to restrict itself to the issues of human systems impacts on natural systems). One of Howard Odum's graduate students, Charlie Hall, at SUNY Environmental Science & Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, NY, is now the reigning leader in the biophysical economics effort. I have been honored to work with Charlie's group last year for one quarter (too short). They are now providing a biophysical framework for reassessing the nature of economic systems with a special emphasis on the role of energy flow and economic work to produce real wealth (hard assets and food). At last, economics may have a firm scientifically-based theoretical basis rather than competing ideologies. There are no leftist biophysical scientists. There are no arch conservative physicists (though of course their politics might be!) when they are doing physics. Nor should there be ideological economists. They need to deal with reality as it exists. And their job should be to find out what that reality is and report it to the rest of us.
Democracy Schmokracy — It's Hypocrisy
How did we get to this state? This election virtually guarantees us at least two years of stalemate. I suppose in one sense, given the intellectual and sapience paucity of the players in Washington, that might not be such a bad idea. Maybe they won't end up doing even more harm. Unfortunately there are some physical realities that won't wait to see how we resolve our political landscape and start addressing problems. Global warming, water shortages, and peak oil are all bearing down on us all as we argue. And their consequences are already being felt around the world. Meanwhile our democratic process produces one government after another, each worse in many ways than the one before.
It was hard to imagine anything worse than Bush, and he certainly did extreme harm to the United States during his tenure. But that doesn't mean Obama is better. His sad buy-in to the neoclassical economics models and reliance on hard core neoclassical economics advisors has done no more than temporarily hide some aspects of the deep economic stress this country is under. He has shorn up the phoney wealth production segment of the economy, the financial sector, that is nearly single handedly responsible for all the growth in GDP over the last several decades. I haven't investigated this but I would bet that the current so called growth in GDP that everyone thinks signals that we are out of recession will be mostly accounted for by financial institutions continuing their former creation of paper wealth (with no backing in hard asset values) and not by the real wealth generation (mostly manufacturing) sectors. All this does is temporarily postpone the inevitable crash of the financial bubble. Without hard and productive (not purely consumable products) asset production to represent real economic growth, eventually all the financial tricks of the Treasury and the Fed will be used up and the crash will be resounding. [Admittedly, I think the end of growth is a good thing!]
Meanwhile, while Obama plays the fiddle, the real physical problems are just growing worse by the day. Thus I say, in the end, one day when someone looks back on today, they will think Obama turned out to be a worse president than George W. Bush! Not because he was intending to do the kinds of immoral things Bush did (war, etc.), but because he failed to even try to do the right things.
Of course if I am right in my modeling of the macro-macro-economy then he couldn't do anything anyway. We're passed the tipping point, so to speak. But he could have tried, if he even slightly understood the real problems. He doesn't. And instead, he is falling into the same pit that all other elected office holders fall into, in part because our political system is so badly broken. He spends his time thinking about re-election and raising money to make it happen.
But again I say, this is largely our own faults. Democracy depends on an informed electorate. But the electorate needs to be informed about reality not ideology. And our real world is simply so complex that most citizens just tune it out. It is far easier to let Fox News tell you what reality is, their version of it, than to actually get educated. This reflects both our stupidity and our lack of wisdom. Too, it reflects the lack of any mental capacity by Fox News and most other news media that just report the sound bites they've heard. At least Jon Stewart exercises critical thinking, even if in a funny way.
I'm afraid I don't see any kind of solution on the horizon. Even if we could magically take lobbyist money out of Washington, even if we could find a way to establish financial controls that really mean something, even if we could fix just about every thing that is wrong with the “system” we can't fix stupidity and lack of sapience. Those are part of our genetic heritage. Ironically, our mental endowments were perfectly fine for tribal level social organization. In fact they were so fine that our species broke out of whatever constraints originally kept us as part of the natural world. We got clever enough to invent a complex world where we are no longer able to understand it!
So one conclusion might be that it is futile to look for a leader that is both clever enough and sapient enough to lead the rest of us out of this conundrum. Certainly none of the current spate of political players seems even remotely competent to deal with reality realistically. I can argue that having Sarah Palin as president in 2012 (could this be even remotely possible!?) would be good in that it would help accelerate the process of demise for civilization. Put the poor beast out of its agony. They shoot horses, don't they?
The basic concept "the current so called growth in GDP that everyone thinks signals that we are out of recession will be mostly accounted for by financial institutions continuing their former creation of paper wealth (with no backing in hard asset values)" is not understood by those who most need to understand it - not just a pity, but an unmitigatid disaster. As corroborative evidence, one has only to look at commodity prices: they are playing catch up, and their remarkable run-up to date is but a shadow of the changes they presage.
"But again I say, this is largely our own faults." That is why James Howard Kunstler titles his blog
Posted by: Robin Datta | November 06, 2010 at 09:43 PM
In a country [allegedly] "governed" by "majority rule," what happens when "the majority" is nothing more than an ignorant, ill-informed, individually self-absorbed and self-deluded, irrational and unreasonable rabble?
I've been asking people that question for more than a decade. Of course, most people think I'm 1) crazy, 2) one o' them-thar "elites," 3) some [insert-expletive-here], or all of the above... which only adds evidence for my supposition. "Collapse" is NOT something that MAY/WILL happen... it's happening NOW and accelerating exponentially!!
Perhaps what is left of our species will ACTUALLY learn something over the coming thousand years of darkness... but I doubt it!
Posted by: colinc | November 07, 2010 at 07:40 AM
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of conservatism if you believe that conservatives think "people are basically lazy and shifty."
In fact, conservatives believe quite the opposite, that left alone, people will make decisions that are in their own rational self-interest, and that groups of people, all acting in their self-interest, will drive behaviors accordingly, and that those behaviors are generally, good.
If we believed people were shifty and lazy, the basis for conservatism would be completely invalid, and you'd have that dichotomy that you speak of.
Whatever gave you this idea? Watching MSNBC?
Posted by: Jay | November 07, 2010 at 11:24 AM
Excellent post, as usual. And alas, I find your arguments "correct," as in accurate, clear and relatively inarguable. Have recently been reading Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion, and I recommend it with a certain depressed enthusiasm. Among other prescient arguments, he points out that "studying" politics in this strange, profoundly ignorant land, is rather like watching a professional wrestling match. We live in the land of illusion and REFUSE to recognize it as such. Excellent read.
Posted by: Molly Radke | November 07, 2010 at 12:05 PM
Excellent post, one of the best summaries of our situation I have ever read. One thing that bothers me is that I have intuitively understood the concept that perpetual compound growth can only lead to collapse since I was a teenager (I am now in my mid-fifties). After spending years discussing this with people, I am resigned to the fact that you either 'get it' or you don't. Jimmy Carter was the only president we ever had who 'got it', and he was ridiculed as our worst president ever.
Posted by: John Dyer | November 07, 2010 at 03:38 PM
George, You keep saying things like "I'm afraid I don't see any kind of solution on the horizon." I think referring to our societal mass psychosis "belief in infinite improvement (progress)". Have you ever noticed my having pointed to the various critical responses (choices) that natural systems *must make* to survive their explosive origins?
We could consider what making some of them would mean, for example, to consider what surviving our own explosive origins would be like, for one thing. Wouldn't that constitute something in the way of a "solution on the horizon"?
The things on my list overlap with what seems to be on your list a good bit. I too am having difficulty getting the concepts across, to people who seem perfectly intelligent, and surely self-interested in the outcome. You and others show a real hesitancy about trying to understand how natural complex systems succeed in changing form to survive their initial dead end growth process. Everything in nature starts with one if you take the time to study were complexly organized systems come from.
Why not consider the financial choice any market economy must make at physical growth limits, for example? That would be a good start. I've pointed it out many times I think, the thing Keynes discovered, that there is a natural limit to productive investment. It's a perfect logical certainty that the global pool of investment funds will stop accumulating, and either because net returns are spent or because they go to zero. Which one would you choose?
http://synapse9.com/blog/2010/04/01/keynes-widows-cruse-compulsive-capitalism-v-natural-growth/
Posted by: Phil Henshaw | November 07, 2010 at 07:45 PM
Robin,
That is why I do not worry about reaching the masses and convincing them to change anything. They can't. They are incapable of understanding. Only the sapient will do so!
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 10, 2010 at 03:28 PM
Colinic,
They will learn if the survivors are the more sapient and progenitors of a more sapient species of humanity. But the initial survival is the question. How can we ensure that the most sapient among us makes it through the evolutionary bottleneck?
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 10, 2010 at 03:30 PM
Jay,
No, having been a conservative many years ago and the book I mentioned in the text. Also personal observations of many conservatives nowadays. Conservatives do believe in a class system and that is based on the idea that there is a large base of the population who are inadequately prepared to make good decisions (a position I have to agree with but not for ideological reasons.) Read the book if you don't believe me!
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 10, 2010 at 03:34 PM
Molly,
Sounds like a good read. I have put it in my wish list at Amazon. Thanks.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 10, 2010 at 03:35 PM
Hi John D.
Jimmy Carter certainly got the energy picture better than any president we've ever had. His short comings were in the fact that he told the American people (who were and are spoiled) that they couldn't have it all without consequences. They didn't like what he had to say.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 10, 2010 at 03:38 PM
Phil,
Well, I think I have. But then when you say:
I don't see how this is different from saying "We could do something about the problem if only we'd just ..." Fill in an action plan.
The problem that I am addressing is the fact that while we COULD do these things, the fact is that we humans simply won't because we are not sufficiently sapient. Thus any feasible solution crumbles in the face of inability for humans to grasp reality and actually choose to do something about their own failings.
The "solution" for me is just simply evolution. Some small segment of humanity does, in fact, have an adequate level of sapience (genetically wired in) to adapt to the future (rapidly approaching) selection forces and will get through the bottleneck and form the basis of a future species of humanity. At least that is my hope.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 10, 2010 at 03:45 PM
How can we ensure that the most sapient among us makes it through the evolutionary bottleneck?
I've been thinking about that question for at least a couple of years and have concluded, in short, no such assurance is possible. In fact, I've thought of only 1 way that has only slightly more than a 50% chance of success save for one paramount factor. That is, everyone across the entire planet must cooperate rather than compete. That singular rub reduces that probability to zero!
Moreover, there are so many other factors I don't see anyone, anywhere, even mentioning, each "calamitous" in its own right, that I can only see the coming bottleneck being nothing less than "severe," i.e. >99% reduction. For anyone to survive beyond 2050, let alone 2100, will only be a matter of profound and extraordinary luck! Alas, I can't see the consequence of that leading to anything other than greater indoctrination of baseless beliefs and mystical mumbo-jumbo. Down that path lays only darkness.
Posted by: colinc | November 16, 2010 at 07:42 AM
Colinc,
There are some efforts underway to increase the probability of more sapient beings surviving the bottleneck. No on knows for sure if it will work. But if it did...
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 20, 2010 at 04:31 PM