Question Everything

Happy Autumnal Equinox

Are We Seeing the Economic Inflection Point?

I missed the Summer Solstice because I was intensely focusing on my book writing last June. But as a rule I try to reflect on our situation every seasonal inflection point. This is because the seasonal changes remind me constantly of the nature of cycles and the stochastic nature of nature. Cycles repeat. But combined with the nature of a non-ergodic universe (non-stationary processes) within the pattern of repetition there is difference. Remember the idea that no one can step into the same river twice? That is the same with cycles in the real world. Each time around there is change and difference and novelty superposed over the familiar patterns. La Nina was supposed to fade according to prior cyclical history. But this time its different!

But the economic events of the last few days have jogged my attention to the nature of inflection points in logistic curves! And, thus, reminded me of my ritual. Here are my Autumnal Equinox thoughts.

In July I mused, Are You Witness to the Beginning of the End. The beginning of the end is an inflection point. Naturally, given the economic news of the past few days I can't help wondering if I'm prescient.

Of course I am not. For over four years now I have been saying that the economic conditions around the globe are going to get worse. They have. But I don't really see into the future. The other day a colleague approached me. In the not too distant past he thought I was a crackpot because when the ‘economists’ were seeing “green shoots”, and this included some of our esteemed professors at the University of Washington (one of whom chastised me in a public forum!), I kept claiming things would continue to get worse. I had been vociferous that the economy would still go further in decline. He has, he sheepishly admitted, finally acquiesced to my prior predications and asked me what I was using for a crystal ball. I told him I didn't have a crystal ball. I had physics and systems science. Physics deals with the nature of net energy flow through the economy. Systems science deals with how to consider the the physics in the context of economic activity. Aggregating the entire economy as a work engine that converts natural resources into desired human usable goods (and services) the prediction is simple. Reduce the energy input to the economy and the result is downturn in economic activity of all kinds and monetary price inflation. Systemic physics rules all of human economic endeavors!

Energy is in decline thanks to the twin phenomena of peak oil and declining energy return on energy invested (EROI), which has a direct impact on the prices of energy, especially barrels of oil. As stupidly simple as this sounds it is all you really need to know. The global trend in weighted average oil prices along with oil production numbers really tells much of the sordid story. Even if you don't know the actual net energy, say in BTUs, delivered to the economic engine (we don't keep records of that) you can infer from the price of oil what the effect on the economy will be. Every day that the weighted average price of oil is over, say, $85 there is more drag applied to the global economy. Drag on the economy translates into non-growth. And here is the kicker. The global capitalist economy based, as it is, on debt financing and consumer spending simply cannot handle this drag. It absolutely needs growth in spending to sustain it. Unfortunately, the weighted average global price of oil has been over $100 for many months (the West Texas Intermediate, WTI, crude price on the NYMEX is much less, but is also not really representative of global oil prices).

The reason the economy has been so sluggish is that energy has been costing so much that all supply chains have been suffering cost increases. Right now we are seeing those costs start to percolate up the supply chain line and affect all products and services. Food and gasoline prices continue to rise in spite of short-term reductions in oil prices (at least in the WTI crude market). The Fed's responses, essentially printing money that ISN'T backed by real wealth production simply contributes to the inflationary pressures. Prices will continue to rise, at least relative to most peoples' abilties to pay, and wages, already stagnant, will diminish further leading to many more people sinking into the ranks of the poor. It will get much worse. And, I am sorry to say, based on the systems physics, it will not be getting better. Please believe me when I say it gives me no joy to be the bearer of bad news. Do with it what you will.

We have passed the “beginning of the end” inflection point. Remarkable how close it is to the Autumnal Equinox, the halfway inflection point in the solar day. We are on our way to the Winter Solstice. One can't help but wonder what that will bring. Happy Equinox.

The Goal — Episode III: Fulfilling the Higher Needs

From Prior Posts:

• Setting the framework for a journey into the future, having a sense of what the destination could be: How Might Humanity Survive a Radically Changing World?
• The first steps in understanding the destination: The Goal — Episode I: The Basic Requirements
• The Goal — Episode II: Support for Security Needs

Aspects of Higher Needs in Relation to Sapience

The higher needs are:

• Love and belonging
• Esteem
• Self-actualization

as discussed in Episodes I & II.

In the previous posts I focused on basic needs and security because every human being shares essentially the same basic levels of need in these areas. In this post I will speak to the so-called higher needs, which are a little different in that there seems to be less commonality between individuals with respect to the level of need experienced, the importance of fulfilling that need and the cognitive strategies used to do so. These levels in Maslow's hierarchy are more conditioned by personality traits and types. For example, a rugged individualist may not feel much of a need for love and belonging, much less esteem. And they might, instead, seek disconnection from most social networks, even families. Similarly an introverted personality may not have strong needs for esteem. Conversely, a extroverted, gregarious individual may crave esteem from others and go to great lengths to be thought well of.

One thing I believe I have noticed about people is that the constellation of what psychologists call positive personality attributes are often found in clusters in people I have known who have struck me as wiser than average. I must stress that there is no current way to measure sapience per se, but of the more mature people that I have known, those who have seemed to me to be wisest also seem to express the more positive aspects of these higher needs, and in particular, their wisdom provides them with ways to fulfill those needs. I have a strong suspicion that more sapient people not only experience greater levels of these positive-directing needs, but also appreciate their subjective experience of them and appreciate it greatly when they are being fulfilled.

The first two of the higher-level needs, love and esteem, have great relevance to the prosociality of human beings. Most humans generally like being with other human beings, especially those with very similar interests and personal preferences. Humans like to share their inner thoughts with one another, or at least like to feel that they can. Relationships that involve a great level of trust between individuals provide a way for that sharing to take place. This might very well be related to the security needs I last wrote about. An individual needs to feel secure with another individual in order to share intimate thoughts and physical experiences. That milieu is experienced as a loving relationship. But, in order to have the opportunities for developing loving relationships, one needs to be in a group large enough that there are choices available for mates and friends. In other words, one has to be part of a large enough group.

So it is also with esteem. Everyone wants to feel as if they are well thought of. They like to feel that their actions and productive works are held in high regard by the others in their group. This means that there needs to be a group around the individual that can reflect that esteem (assuming it is warranted).

Not only is the esteem of others an important need to be fulfilled, but self-esteem is vital. We get self-esteem when we get feedback from others in the form of being treated with esteem! Of course one can also monitor one's own performance in various endeavors — achieving a new personal best, for example — to provide immediate feedback through self-awareness. But much of our sense of self-esteem is the result of the complex feedback loop established in our social relations. We need the feedback from others to calibrate our own monitoring. We feel good about ourselves and our abilities because others feel good about us and our abilities. I do think that more sapient individuals are not compelled to only work for the esteem of others as their only measure. People with high ego-strength (not neurotic) are often self-directed (related to self-actualization) and do not perform to especially please others as much as they seek to satisfy themselves. Such people enjoy performing well because it pleases others but are not motivated to just please others.

Another observation regarding self-esteem is the apparent transference of measures of performance to the possession of money or wealth, the new measure of success, in modern materially developed societies. High salaries, big cars (or now SUVs), big houses, are all indices of “success” in the modern world. These values seem to be invading the developing world and have been a mainstay in the OECD-type countries for many centuries. Wealth and power underpin the sense of self-esteem because in an over crowded world, where our groups consist of too many individuals such that the level of our intimacies (as described above) are necessarily restricted, e.g. it is hard to know who you can trust when there are so many choices, we fall back on a surrogate — money. This actually plays into our conception of free market philosophy, the market and prestige reinforce one another in the minds of the merely average sapient. The higher sapient individual, who does not only seek to please others just for the sake of reinforcing the sense of esteem, is not particularly impressed by monetary success, nor seeks it for themselves just to impress others. Of course, the downside is that since most others are impressed with monetary success, they fail to recognize the real achievements of the more sapient. The latter are fortunate to have much higher ego-strength to counter what may seem a lack of the esteem of those others.

The main point about having an opportunity to fulfill these two higher level needs is that there be a group structure that provides the variety of possibilities in forming relations and giving others an opportunity to get to know the individual. This is why I argue that community is the key to a future survival existence that is humanistic. We cannot fulfill our needs in the hierarchy unless we pursue doing so as a group. The population size of a tribe or village must be large enough so that there is variety in personalities, talents, skills, and interests. If the group is too small then the viability of surviving, let alone self-actualizing, is at risk. If the group gets too big, a number of other problems arise that are counter to viability in the sense of long-term sustainability (such as the transference of measures of esteem to measures of personal wealth). Remember, we have already determined that sustainability requires a form of dynamic steady-state. There seems to be a “sweet spot” in terms of group sizes where viability is maximized.

Self-actualization is sometimes associated with this idea of ego-strength and self esteem building. The latter, thus, makes it very much a social endeavor. But the strength of ones sense of self (and liking ones self) would seem to be the emergence of a solitary cognitive experience out of the otherwise social framework. In other words, our capacity to pursue our own unique interests, and understand that that is exactly what we are doing, is an individualistic mental phenomenon built on top of the prosociality aspects of the other higher levels in the hierarchy. One can develop ones own sense of self through pursuing ones unique interests, using ones unique set of skills, knowledge, and passions. But this can only be done on the basis of having a society to support one. The painter needs a successful society that produces enough necessities that allow the painter to practice his art. And he needs people to see his products. He might not be what we would call, today, a professional artist, since he would need to go pick vegetables just like everyone else. But in the right social mix, with the right system of support from the bottom of the hierarchy (biological) upward, he can practice and improve and evolve his sense of art. That is what we are shooting for.

I used an artist as an example of self-actualization, but I don't mean that self-actualization is about becoming artistic per se. There are many different manifestations of self-actualization among those who have been lucky enough to reach this level in the hierarchy. Self-actualization is about a quest to know ones self better and to attain a higher level of performance in whatever pursuit one wishes to take. It is about having the opportunity (time and energy) to do so. Someone who is responsible for tending the garden and who seeks better results, more stable harvests, or to try new varieties, etc. is undergoing self-actualization while engaged in their primary work. This is what we mean by being an ‘artisan’. One need not treat self-actualization like a hobby; find time to do something different from day-to-day living. It is a way of being in and a part of the world and the society.

If one feels hurried, harried, rushed, pressured, etc. then one cannot be self-actualizing even when doing what they nominally love most to do. Our modern world puts undue emphasis on speed (hence our need for more powerful machines and fuels). We are ruled by the clock, not just as a way to tell the time of day, but as a dictator of our schedule — a schedule designed to rush us to the next stage of economic growth. Take away the demand for growth of numbers and physical wealth, and you take away the pressure that drains the opportunities for self-actualization. No artist, or artisan, or thoughtful person ever achieved excellent performance by being in a hurry. In a more sapient society, one where the basics are covered through proper systems management, one where there are an optimal number of other sufficiently sapient individuals to achieve security, love, and esteem, no individual need feel pressed for time. Art, music, literature, poetry, and high quality material artifacts result from a group of people who are able to exist in a state of self-actualization.

It Will Take a Village

Hillary Clinton got this right: It Takes a Village. She may have had several other aspects in mind, in light of how things seem to be going in our modern (and dysfunctional) world, but the phrase is incredibly apt. The long-term sustainability of future humans will depend on our prosociality as much as on our fulfilling our biological needs. Survivalists and rugged individualists who insist on leading lone wolf lives will struggle for survival. The village of sapient beings, who maximally express that prosociality, will learn to adapt and thrive in whatever world evolves.

To be clear, I am not talking about some form of commune where everyone lives in dormitories. Everyone needs their own space at times. And their own possessions within reason. I am talking about a society that has more commons than personal property, however, simply because it is the commons that will be the source of fulfilling the basic needs. I am talking about a society in which people do share in responsibilities, but also differentiate themselves with some forms of specialization.

There have been many such villages throughout history. We know that the model works or else we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Of course, throughout history village life was not always what we might call idyllic. Remember the world was filling up throughout history. There were always some people who were always moving and invading and trying to find some competitive advantage. As I have written elsewhere average sapience probably declined as a result of agriculture and permanent settlements, which puts selective emphasis on tactical (protection or competition) and logistical management rather than strategic (long-term and prosocial) thinking. But permanent settlements and agriculture did improve the support for basic and security needs over time. The basic problem was that due to the belief in continued growth these historical villages, towns, etc. put undue pressure on the surrounding environments, the sources of natural resources.

Add back the necessary level of sapience so that there is no belief in, or sentiment toward, continual physical growth and the permaculture village model stands as a potentially viable one.

Understand that the idea of a village does not imply year-round occupancy of a single physical location, necessarily. It will very much depend on climate conditions. But the semi-nomadic tribe model may also be appropriate in some cases. What is important is that some form of permaculture development provide a base for ensuring basic (especially food and water) needs. Many villages have had dual location occupancies, as in spring and summer versus fall and winter places. Under those circumstances, of course, there will be a need to control a much larger territory than the single occupancy model I have described previously.

Future villages (tribes) will need to work out what model of living will work best for them under the climate conditions they find themselves in. A little forethought in choosing locations (assuming options are open) might provide the opportunity to find a single location. Seasonal transfers of a whole village are time and resource consuming, not to mention the need to support two entirely functional and comfortable camps. I would opt for the single location model, but you can't exclude that there might be a workable semi-nomadic model as well.

What is important is that the number of people be sufficient to achieve the above objectives, for the above stated reasons. What is also important is that the quality of life be sufficiently high to allow the fulfillment of the higher levels of need as described. Two hundred subsistence farmers/hunter-gatherers barely surviving is not what we would want to achieve^#.

Sapient Village Life

In 2010 I wrote an education-oriented blog about “The Core of a Sapient Society”, in which I mused about what I called the University of Noesis (school of knowledge). The idea I was trying to express is that the “soul” of any society is its repository of knowledge and seat of learning, in our modern world the role supposedly filled by universities and colleges. I also expressed the desire that such universities would not only teach knowledge but also wisdom (see this piece from 2008, “What is Knowledge: The Noetic Hierarchy” for a description of the difference between what we normally think of as knowledge and wisdom). I think that idea is alive and well in the sapient village of the future. The core of the village life must revolve around the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the group. Moreover, as I will discuss in the next blog in this series, that knowledge must include the most important knowledge that humanity has accumulated to date. I will save the description of what “the most important knowledge” would be for the next post, but for the moment many of you will realize that it involves the systems approach to living, which means what we call permaculture.

Village life will center around preserving wisdom/knowledge of how to live in balance with the environment and whatever that entails. A library (containing suitable media), a schooling facility and teachers (mostly the grandparents), and the main form of village governance and administration will be seated in this institution. At the heart of that institution we will find the most sapient, mature, members of the society, the wise elders. This is exactly how humans have managed their village/tribal lives for most of time. And, indeed it is still practiced in most parts of the less-developed world (including rural areas of even developed countries). Because I am imagining a village of sapient beings, living, learning, maturing, experiencing with sapient minds, I am imagining the focus of values around wisdom. More highly sapient individuals also recognize wisdom being expressed by others when they see it, even if they are younger and do not yet possess the same level of tacit knowledge as the elders. Wisdom had been venerated for most of human history (and prehistory) before the emphasis turned to the tactical/logistical necessities of agriculture (non-permaculture based) and especially since the advent of the industrial age with its even greater dependence of those levels of management. Wisdom will once again take the center stage of village life and vitality. The elders will guide, the younger will perform and learn to become wise in their own right.

All other viability flows from wise decisions and the use of systems knowledge to manage a sustainable permanent culture (perma-culture). The future is likely to be full of extremes not seen by many of past or current humans. It will take all of the wisdom and practical knowledge future humans can muster to become and remain fit for self-actualizing survival (thriving). There will undoubtedly be good and bad years, soft and hard times, joys and calamities, just as there are now. The range of variability may be more extreme. It will thus require even greater intelligence and sapience to navigate through such an environment. But even so, the goal remains that, on average, all people should find the possibility to achieve self-actualization. People who do achieve such are actually more resilient in hard times and adaptable to unpredicted changes just because they have achieved all of the levels of need fulfillment, and know that it can be done. In hard times they can work more effectively toward achieving the goal again.

In the distant future I imagine multiple villages thriving in various locations. By necessity they will need to be widely separated. But that doesn't mean they won't be able to be in communication or even have some form of trade or exchanges. What will be important is that there is a concerted recognition of the need to not have competition between these various groups. Any competition tendency will lead to re-ignition of the growth sentiment which would destroy the steady-state conditions. We would be back to the cancerous model of human societies. Only highly sapient people will be able to remember the lessons of the present (their past) and avoid such a situation; yet another reason why the selection criteria for who goes on the journey must be primarily based on level of sapience. One day long from now variability will again characterize the human genome much as it does now. This is the natural progression in population evolution after a bottleneck. But through the bottleneck (the passage) humans must focus on sending those with a more restricted variability when it comes to mental capacities in order to assure higher quality in those facilities for future generations.

Thus, the Destination is Seen

This is the destination. I have tried to describe important aspects of a future society based on what we know of human needs and fulfillment, that is, to become fully human. I have also asserted that to be successful those future humans will need to be much more sapient on average than the current population. There is a strong inference that higher sapience and the capacity to achieve self-actualization are deeply related. Thus both successful survival (higher fitness) and achieving a higher level of humanization depend on greater emphasis on wisdom, achievable if the individuals in the society are, themselves, more sapient.

I will be the first to admit that this vision rings of utopian dreaming. It may sound (to some) idyllic and the immediate thought is that it would therefore be impossible to reach. Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not. I described this as a destination, a place that would be nice to go, if we have the means to get there. We humans have always tried to find more idyllic places. That is why we occupy every continent on the planet (even Antarctica). There is nothing wrong with dreaming if it leads you to attempt the journey. As with all destinations there are probably going to be less than idyllic aspects when we get there. Yet we strive.

The reader may have noted a lack of mention regarding spirituality or attainment of higher levels of consciousness in the discussion of self-actualization. This is purposeful on my part. The subject if rife with so many interpretations regarding the meaning of words. I also wish to avoid any discussion of the supernatural or metaphysics beyond what is known to ordinary science. I am reasonably sure that the future wise elders will address the issues of human spirit in a completely appropriate way. I am equally sure that there will be no shamans or voodoo healers or priests as these professions rely on the ignorance and lack of wisdom of the other members of the tribe. I wish to leave this subject to the future to work out as it will. I just don't think it important to consider as part of a “specification” for a sapient society. Highly sapient people seem to have a deep appreciation for that which seems mysterious to so many others, but as a natural part of being human and not requiring a supernatural explanation. Others may disagree!

The important thing is that this vision reflects the process of evolution. The idea that there will be a major selection against many species and selection for some others, that there can be a major radiation of new species after a major die off, is the background against which this is formed. Homo sapiens as we know the species, will go extinct in one way or another. That is inevitable. It could involve the die off of the current population completely, in which case that is the end of intelligent/sentient beings on this planet. Or it could result from this species transforming into a new species sympatrically. It is this latter possibility that keeps me hopeful and out of despair. The world is changing and rapidly it seems. Certainly the world of human enterprise is crumbling in front of our eyes. Without a major new source of high powered energy, gotten very quickly, this world of growth and material wealth must dissolve. The question is what should we do about it?

The next blog in this series will try to address this question. That will be where I discuss the actual journey itself. That is where the map will be described and the pathway(s) selected.

---

^# Remember, I am describing an end point, not the transition. It is more than likely that the latter will involve groups faced with survival and sacrifice long before this end point society is reached. In the next post in this series I will begin to speak to the actual journey.

The Goal — Episode II: Support for Security Needs

From Prior Posts:

• Setting the framework for a journey into the future, having a sense of what the destination could be: How Might Humanity Survive a Radically Changing World?
• The first steps in understanding the destination: The Goal — Episode I: The Basic Requirements

---

Security — A Sense of Safety

People think and act differently when they believe their wellbeing is threatened. Those of you who remember what it was like in the US before September 11, 2001 and what has happened to the American psyche since will appreciate this fact. When people are scared, or even just apprehensive, they do not function very productively. Our fear responses are an evolutionary inheritance from our biological predecessors who were often faced with survival decisions or worse, flight or fight necessity in the face of predation. Fear is a good thing under the right circumstances. But when there is little or nothing to fear as far as, for example, personal safety is concerned, then being afraid, nevertheless, produces suboptimal performance on ordinary tasks.

The traditional approach to maximizing security is to provide several different buffer conditions between ones self and the potential threat conditions. Some of the threat conditions that will need to be buffered against by an appropriate community design include:

• Food security:

  Humans can and do think about the future. And one of the main concerns we have about that future is knowledge that we will have access to sufficient food resources. It isn't enough to see that, for example, this year we had a bumper crop of XYZ. We have to be thinking about the year after, and the year after that. There is no location on earth (except possibly parts of the equator, desserts, or high mountains) where the climate is so stable that good harvests can be certain. Now with the destabilizing effects of climate change already being felt, the likelihood of larger variations in annual climate swings is growing. The traditional buffers for crop variability have been based on food stuff storage over longer time scales than just, say, the winter. In grain growing regions granaries are used to hold grain stocks over longer time scales, but not much more than a year. Canning, salting, and other preservation methods are used to extend the shelf life of many food stuffs. The sapient society will show wisdom in learning these techniques and paying close attention to food preservation management.

  The climate variability problem can also be mitigated by planting a wide variety of vegetables and fruits that do well under different conditions. It is getting harder to predict a season. This year, for example, the climatologists were predicting that the La Niña episode was winding down. This phenomenon brings drying conditions to the southern states and cooler, wetter conditions in the Pacific Northwest. This year, as with last, our cool weather crops, such as cabbages and lettuce, did well while our warmer weather crops, such as corn and summer squashes, did poorly. Now we hear that the La Niña appears to be reforming. Normally we would expect an oscillation between a La Niña and an El Niño, in which the conditions flip and we get a warmer, drier spring and summer in the Pacific Northwest. Clearly something major has shifted and we will not be able to count on even the long time scale variations that we've seen in the recent past. And in the future we won't have the climatologists making any kinds of predictions.

  Each year it will be prudent to plant with the recognition that some of the crops will not do well, either from temperature or moisture conditions, or both. You will need enough land to allow this over planting strategy. And you will need to find a set of crop plants that do well in a wider variety of conditions as staples. We have been having a lot of luck with beets, sweet peas, and bush beans in both hot and cool years, for example. I plan to do some more in depth research on the hardiness of these varieties to add some depth to my personal experiences.

  Another buffer you should be thinking about is for water in case you need to irrigate some crops. The water catchment will ideally be a small lake from a stream directly descending from the water shed (hills, mountains). An elevated secondary catchment can provide gravity fed irrigation. The lakes will also be sources for fish protein.

  Finally I will just mention the need for a good seed conservancy program. In the not-too-distant future you will not be ordering seeds (or starts) from a seed store. You will need to prepare for the time when you will be responsible for collecting and husbanding your own seed collections. Seeds can remain viable, while dormant, for many years (see: Seed Dormancy).

  These buffers will raise the likelihood of success in most years of achieving food security. To recount, the buffers are: larger than minimal land area for planting, planting larger varieties across ranges of temperature optima, preserving stocks for more than just winter consumption, water catchments for irrigation, and banking seeds. These buffers increase your chances but they are no guarantee. If you have chosen a territory that is subject to larger variations in climate conditions then you will have to build larger buffers. Should you be lucky enough to find that the climate variation is less than anticipated then you can reduce your buffer sizes in later years. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. And manage the process. You and all members of your community will meet this part of their security needs knowing that these factors have been taken into account. Parents will feel more secure knowing their children will still be able to grow food years from now even if the climate continues to change.

• Location (territorial) security:

  One of the most common criticism of my concept is that once society falls there is the danger of roving bands of marauders who will most certainly steal the community's wealth and destroy its productive capacity (or take it over). This criticism is duly noted and I must confess I can't come up with any reason why the collapse of society might not have a Mad Max phase. I do think, however, that the same factors that led to the collapse of society, mostly the availability of fuel, will put some more severe constraints on these bands in terms of their mobility and range. For the most part the major sources of food in the OECD countries as well as the emerging economies will be in urban areas. I suspect that marauders will focus on these areas first and as they do, the window of opportunity to reach more distant rural areas will shut down. In underdeveloped countries, bands of marauders are already forming and doing their worst (look at Somalia, for example). I expect that will develop further because people in these regions are already self-sufficient at a lower energy level. However, their ultimate resources are also very limited and I imagine they will be isolated to their current regions, not posing a great threat to those areas where a permaculture settlement such as I am describing would be located.

  Nevertheless, taking my own advice about expecting the worst, it will still be prudent to prepare for some form of potential attack. Once again the buffer notion comes to the fore. The territory chosen should be of extreme distance from settled areas and major roads as possible. It already has to be rural land (given the physical requirements) so finding the right land away from the madding crowds is a first step.

  That will provide some deterrence, but not completely assure noninterference from unfriendlies. Therefore a defensive posture needs to be part of the plan. Here you are not going to be happy with me for being circumspect regarding what sort of defenses I am talking about. The reason I am being less clear is simple. Loose lips sink ships. The people I have been discussing these matters with would not appreciate me giving away their secrets! Suffice it to say that defenses should not be based on guns and cannons (unless you have a way to make gun powder!) There are other, historically proven ways to protect the settlement, including ways to camouflage or hide the main settlement itself. Just recognize that tactical planning and preparedness, as well as having a village population of more than a hundred (fifty healthy men with the right instruments is also a deterrent), are necessary components of a wisely fashioned future. I don't expect the marauder phase to last for long. They will run out of resources to a point where any remaining bands will be small, scraggly, and unorganized. And then they, too, will die.

• Health security:

  I myself have misgivings about a number of herbal medicinals, or what are claimed to have medicinal value. Nothing I have seen in the herbal world is about to replace my Zocor (and yes I have tried diet with minimal success, vis-a-vis, even with near-zero fat diet my cholesterol started climbing again!) Be that as it may, I have been told many times that there are at least mildly efficacious herbal medicines that should not be discounted.

  I bring this up for the obvious reason that in that future world there will be no pharmaceutical manufactures producing wonder drugs to keep us alive or treat our infections, etc. There will be no MRI or ultrasound. No X-rays, no endoscopy. This means that the plan has to include provisions for doctoring, dentistry, and medications not too unlike those of the late 1700s and 1800s (especially in the Wild West!) There is little doubt that our ability to repair damaged or diseased tissues in the future will be severely reduced from the present.

  Thus the strategy that needs to be adopted is prevention of accidents and disease as much as possible. Accidents are most often caused by thoughtlessness. I know. Last year I broke my right leg when I thoughtlessly stepped into a snow void near a log that appeared to be laying flat on the ground. I was exhausted from the hike up the trail in the snow (without snowshoes - thoughtless act #1). And just didn't have the presence of mind to poke before stepping. Oh well! Of course not all accidents are preventable, but I bet many are. The reason I even felt comfortable going on the ill advised hike was the knowledge in the back of my brain somewhere that there was such a thing as search and rescue in the event of trouble. I'd like to believe I would have exercised much better judgment (been just a tad more sapient) about going on that hike if I knew that there was no such possibility of rescue.

  Choosing the right territory, having adequate food, water, and shelter, etc. will do much for maintaining good health (along with healthy manual labor). But it won't be enough. We do possess considerable understanding about diseases and their basic prevention through good public and personal hygiene. Managing wastes in thoughtful ways will be needed. So will taking immediate quarantine steps when some members come down with communicable diseases. It is likely that some of the more common ones, such as the flu, will actually diminish since these now spread by mass transportation carrying sick people from one community to the next. In that future, there will be minimum (if any) such migration for a long time. Even so, diseases spread in part by animal vectors will need attention.

  Communities need to be large enough that several individuals can function as medical practitioners. There isn't a need that these practitioners have medical or dental degrees. But they should have training and be supplied with adequate library and instrument resources to handle the common health problems.

  A major source of good health is nutrition. The food plants (and any animals) chosen should provide all of the micro as well as macro nutrients needed for human health. We know what these are. And there are simple ways to test the soils to make sure they are available. Recycling humanure is also needed to make sure that humans don't represent final sinks for these (as unsettling as this sounds it is also necessary to make provisions for recycling the dead).

• Psychological security:

  As mentioned above, having physical security leads to a sense of psychological safety. Not being worried about where the food is coming from, or whether or not we are going to be able to defend ourselves releases the mind from tensions and fear. This allows each one to be more thoughtful in other activities.

  When each person is operating with ease of mind another more subtle effect will be found. Each of us possesses what psychologists call a “theory of mind”, or built-in folk psychology in which we model the minds of our fellow beings based on our understanding of our own minds. Most of this is innate and subconscious. When we are anxious we do note that we often make mistakes and are unreliable to others. So we also are concerned when we see others being anxious. This sets up a positive feedback loop (not positive as in good results). When we see others anxious (or other emotions — called empathy) we become anxious and then they see us anxious. We all know we are going to make mistakes as a result. This is one of the reasons that soldiers hate to see nervous members in their units. These are the guys who could accidentally shoot you in the back during the charge up the hill. On the submarines that I served aboard when in the Navy, the regular crew had a ritual hazing of new crew members (even officers), fresh out of sub school, to see if they would break. It was vital to have no weak links in the chain.

  Psychological security, then, includes knowing that your fellow villagers are psychologically strong and won't fail you in times of need. Also, knowing that they are not worried about the future (because you have taken care of the above issues) helps you not feel worry. Now we have a ‘positive’ positive feedback. For this reason, the choices of who gets to be in the community from the beginning have to be made with great care. This is, naturally, where my thoughts about higher than average sapience comes into play. A sapient society needs to have very sapient people as members. Until or unless there is some reliable psychological or genetic test for the sapience quotient of younger people (who will not have had an opportunity to build wisdom if they are still of reproductive age), the choices will need to be based on the judgments of older, already sapient individuals. The wise shall inherit the Earth.

• Social security:

  I don't mean the type that the Republicans want to get rid of! Well, in a way what I am talking about has the same sentiment, just implemented on a more personal level. What every person needs to have is a sense that when they grow old, or are incapacitated by accident of disease, that they will not be abandoned or left to die uncomforted. The community has to be large enough to have enough slack such that some members in each generation can provide support for those who are aged or ill. Some indigenous peoples have had traditions whereby when an elder realized they were no longer able to provide value to the tribe they would drag themselves off into the wilderness to die and relieve the tribe of a burden. That is about as far as you can get from life-extending technologies to keep the infirm alive no matter what. I suspect that more sapient people will have that same sense. It would be painful, psychologically speaking, to know that you are a burden on the well being of younger generations (in whom you have already invested).

  Another aspect of psychological security has to do with the comfort one gets from being in a large group of compadres. This is not exactly the same as the love and belonging needs to be discussed in the next installment, though it is obviously related. What I am referring to here is the comfort one gets from being surrounded by a population buffer. That is, the more people that surround you, the more you feel safety (in numbers). But of course this only works up to a certain limit. Psychologists have estimated that the comfort zone is around 100 to 150 people (in a tribe), but that we are good with larger numbers. The 500 number that I proposed as an upper limit for a community is tolerable but might only be optimally workable with all persons having higher than the current average level of sapience.

  Finally I will mention the need to maintain a level of mutual altruistic sentiments among all members of the community. I have posited that higher sapience is correlated with higher levels of cooperation and altruistic sentiment. In any current population of Homo sapiens there are going to be some subset who tend to be much less altruistic. Called ‘cheaters’, these are people who will try to get away with non-sharing, selfish, behaviors, especially if they think they won't be caught and punished. Our moral sentiment of outrage for members of society who violate our rules of behavior, and the desire to punish them, derives from the same basic brain mechanisms as our sentiments to be upright (i.e., moral) citizens. We need this sentiment so that when cheaters do emerge from the background of mostly cooperators we can detect and delete them. My conjecture is that if the community starts with higher sapient beings in the first place, the frequency of cheater emergence should drop considerably (though obviously as with all genetically influenced traits, some regressions will doubtless take place).

  The most common instrument for ensuring social security is the law. Making our social contracts explicit and agreeing en masse to obey them is likely to be just as important to our future communities as it is to us now. Groups will want to have some form of covenants that all agree to abide by, as well as a mechanism to provide (if it need be mild) enforcement. Each group will have to work these out for their own selves and purposes. I am not about to suggest what laws should be enacted. But human kind has thousands of years of experience with civil legalities from which to draw. It shouldn't be too hard to generate a workable set of covenants and laws for the community.

Security in Systems

Undoubtedly you have noticed how some of these security issues intertwine and interact. Once again I argue that the systems approach is the key to making this work. The above are probably not the whole story with respect to security needs. But from this sample you should now get the idea that planning and execution of the plan must entail providing for these kinds of issues.

As stated, we humans cannot pursue higher level needs if we are worried or anxious about our very existence. A permaculture-based community forms a network of factors that greatly increase the assurance of safety such that every individual can thrive. For example food security provides assurance that a large enough (stable) population in the community will comfort each individual who then contributes either directly or indirectly to the growing of adequate food to ensure food security. It is, as pointed out, a positive feedback loop where factors reinforce one another to the good of all.

None of what I have written here is really new stuff. Communities of settled farmers have been working out these systems for ages, ever since humans invented agriculture. So we have models for filling the needs. What will be different for future communities is that they will have a wealth of technology (albeit low-tech), methodologies, and general knowledge about how to live more comfortably than our ancestors did. They will have a planned, intentional community that uses systems thinking for management and sustainability even in the face of very uncertain climate conditions.

Of course this is not a guarantee. There are no guarantees in the real world. There are only practices that can increase the probability of success. That comes from knowledge and strategic thinking ability. This is why I believe that the most likely candidates for fitness in the future world will be the most highly sapient among us. For starters, they will be the ones thinking these kinds of things through right now and making the necessary preparations. Many groups may fail for any number of reasons — things they just didn't think about, perhaps. But many groups may succeed as well. The Earth is still a big place even though our species has touched nearly every corner, there are still many that are relatively unscathed precisely because they are hard to reach. Good luck and good systems planning to all.

The next installment will attack the higher levels of needs in the hierarchy, or how to provide for their pursuit in that future community. After that, in a future installment, I will provide some comments regarding the actual journey. That is, how will we get from where we are now, at the beginning of the end of civilization as we have known it, to the new kind of civilization, the sapient civilization? The only social enterprise that we can call ‘civilization’ is one in which all persons have access to fulfilling their highest cognitive potentials - to reach self-actualization.

Mommy, where do jobs come from?

"Oh my dear, that is simple. Jobs are created by presidents of the US with a little assistance of the congress. When presidents and congress people love each other very much, they spend a lot of money that doesn't actually exist, and that is where jobs come from."

That is right up there with the stork story.

Actually the real story is very simple. Jobs came from human ingenuity with respect to how to do stuff that wasted energy at the same time that energy availability was growing (as too, the population). We have figured out all kinds of trinkets to make and how to give each other haircuts, and entertain ourselves silly. And it didn't matter because we were always getting more net energy to burn off.

That is we were.

The question now is where did jobs go? OK, some US jobs did get shipped overseas, but that excuse is wearing thin as the Chinese economy is cooling. Again the really simple answer (if you know any physics at all) is that with less energy to throw away on trivialities and novelties jobs simply disappear. Every time energy costs have peaked we see an impact on spending on those trivialities. No consumption, fewer jobs. People lose jobs, they spend even less. What really got us this last time around were the siamese twin problems of the housing bubble and the debt bubble. They had grown so out of proportion with any real economy that the sudden loss of a few jobs, especially among those who were in over their heads (e.g. sub-prime mortgages) led to a cascade of unemployment. What our economist "experts" have been calling a "recession".

Back when the flow of net energy started to diminish we had shipped many jobs to China and India to take advantage of the cheap labor over there. Why was the labor cheap? Because the populations there were living on far less energy per capita. Both of those countries are seeking to change that now, promising their peoples that they will be able to consume just like the westerners have been doing. I imagine it is going to get pretty ugly when they fail to deliver on the promises. The global net energy flow will affect them every bit as much as it has hit the OECD countries. As I said, it is just plain physics.

So what do you think Obama can say, or do, next Thursday that will turn things around? Is he a magician? Is he going to pull cheap energy out of a bodily orifice that will let us go back to mindless consumption of stuff and "services" that then means someone has a job providing that stuff? I can't wait to see this. I was disappointed to have to wait one whole more day to hear his "plan". On the other hand the clown act of the three ringed circus known as American politics should be entertaining.

Maybe Obama should just join Rick Perry in prayer for jobs.