Happy Holidays
That season is upon us when we gorge ourselves with feasts and try to outdo one another with gift giving. This coming Thursday thousands of ‘shoppers’/‘consumers’ will camp out overnight to be first in line for real bargains in what has become known as “Black Friday”, meaning retailers hope to get into the black ink on their books by this ritual of acquiring more mostly useless stuff. There is a sad irony about this. What, on the surface, seems a burst of finding happiness following the American way of life, is, in fact, simply accelerating the consumption of now precious resources in a frenetic gasp to preserve our God-given right to hedonic pleasure. And over the years there has actually been a feedback loop that has been increasing the number of shoppers in lines on that day. We are getting poorer with each passing year. As a result, more people find they really need to find bargains in order to keep up the charade of ability to afford all that gift giving. This year I have actually talked to several people who are going to try to take advantage of the Black Friday bargains in order to get things for themselves that they feel they really need. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to afford them during the rest of the year. Those kinds of products don't generally go on sale after the holidays because they can be sold all year around. I guess marketers have discovered that lowering the prices on these items (like refrigerators or furniture) during the holiday shopping season will bring more customers into the stores and their overall sales will go up.
Americans are by far the worst when it comes to gluttony, I think. But many parts of the developed world are really not that far behind. The American way of life has long been the model of what capitalism produces in the way of lifestyle possibilities for so many people around the world. When immigrants get to these shores they very quickly adopt the consumption habits of non-immigrants, at least as soon as they can afford to. For certain their children have no problem adopting this consumption-based culture. The people of developing nations are busy as we speak attempting to have what are to them luxuries, that we take for granted, and see their societies one day having the same stuff at affordable prices. And, of course, their governments do nothing to persuade them otherwise. Quite the contrary.
This season the happy news is that we are awash in oil and natural gas. And by 2025 or so America will be energy independent. That is cause for joy. Except that when you actually do the numbers you find that the cost in energy to get all of this non-conventional fuel is substantially higher than generally acknowledged. Another great irony is that we probably will be energy independent but only because the current supposed glut will evaporate and drive prices (in dollars) sky high so that demand will drop precipitously. Ergo we will buy quite a lot less fuel, and only for absolutely essential (cost is no object) needs. Ah well, economists who know how to interpret a conventional balance sheet and income statement have not yet realized that the same kind of accounting process that produced those instruments should be used on energy units so you could see that we are no longer in the black in energy terms. Indeed our energy costs are rapidly approaching our gross energy gains (e.g. the recent supposed increase in oil and gas extractions). It turns out that fracking and extracting tar sands oil takes considerable energy. Moreover the production dynamics of fracked wells, both gas and oil, are such that they tend to produce higher volumes than conventional wells, at first. And then the volumes fall much more rapidly with a total volume often less than the presumed recoverable reserves numbers suggested. The glut of gas, for instance, has led to a lower price on the market. But how much of that glut is due to the early rapid production curves wherein the growth in drilling has been in hydrofracking plays (shale). Even now operators are shutting down wells and not increasing their activities in new drilling. Why? Could it be that they are already discovering that the marginal costs are greater than the marginal revenues? Could profits be falling or at least not growing? Only those companies will know from the impact it will ultimately create on their standard accounting books. Meanwhile they will do whatever they can to keep up appearances and preserve their cash flows. So the real news here isn't really happy after all.
What is marring this holiday season, however, is the so-called “fiscal cliff”, the automatic kick-in of actions that resulted from Congress's (the super committee) inability to find a compromise on a package of spending cuts and tax increases aimed at slowing down the growing deficit. As of right now, the posturing on both sides is leading most business leaders to have such a sense of uncertainty, and a consequent dread of the business climate going forward, that they are continuing to sit on cash and failing to hire workers. Or so the story goes.
There is a lot of uncertainty in what is ahead of this country. But for that matter this applies to the whole world. There isn't a country in the world, not China, not India, not Germany, where there isn't a great deal of uncertainty about the future. Some countries, mostly northern European, seem stable at the present, but they have been buffered by central European economies that until recently seemed in much better shape. Once the bite is taken out of Germany, and it will with the destabilization of the Eurozone, even those countries will start feeling the pinch. This is especially true since the North Sea oil production has gone into steep decline.
The claim is that if the country goes over the cliff (and nothing is done to fix the matter soon afterward) that it will push the US economy into another recession. That is kind of funny since there are plenty of people who don't believe we ever really got out of the 2009 recession. Recessions are defined by growth (or non-growth) in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It turns out that after Hurricane Sandy GDP will rise due to spending increases on repairs. The way the government figures GDP (basically just counting things that look like incomes) and fails to take into account costs, the official reports would seem to show that the economy has been growing, even if only weakly. Look deeper and not so much. Economic wealth is the net of income minus costs. Standards of living go up when wealth increases, for sure, but not just when income seems to go up.
Getting back to the holidays and consumer spending. The country and the world will breathe a sigh of relief if the Christmas shopping season puts retailers in the black. If they report record numbers of shoppers and sales you can bet the media will be all happy and joyful to report the economy is growing again. What nobody will probably report is the increased costs that the retailers will bear to get those sales. They won't be reporting yearly profits for a while yet and that is the numbers we need to really see.
But I will cheer if the season produces poor results. I'm nearly sure it won't, but I wish it would. That's right. I wish that the economy would not be touted as growing again. I wish that, in fact, it would continue to shrink. The sooner people understand that growth is not coming back the sooner they may start to pay attention to reality. It isn't that I want people to be out of work and not have incomes to support themselves. But I have made several suggestions as to how to handle a transition to a non-profit, contracting economy in which the unemployed could be employed doing useful (really useful) work rebuilding our soils and establishing localized secure food production. There is still a chance that we could lessen the harm that will befall civilizations by doing this. We still have an opportunity to fund such an effort by first taxing the wealthy at a rate that would preserve the government's ability to keep offering sucker bond investors those borrowing instruments. The government would also have to nationalize the energy business to make this work. That's right. You heard me. The government would have to take over the extraction of fossil fuels and management of the power grid in order to coordinate the proper channeling of resources to support the transition to a contracting economy with the least pain. While they are at it they should also nationalize the rail systems and most distance transportation. Local governments would be responsible for the management of local agricultural lands. Of course, permaculture is the way to accomplish this. Unfortunately not all lands are optimal for sufficient local production. So the transition must include moving people out of those areas and into areas where local food production could support them.
But then that always raises the elephant in the room, of course. The population has to also be managed. And by that I mean it has to stop growing and start shrinking. No easy choice, but absolutely necessary to make the rest of it work. I've already written extensively about this, so I won't rehash the problem and solutions here. Just take note that it has to be done.
In the end, of course, none of this will be done. The US government won't take on the responsibility for managing de-growth. The ideological libertarians would freak out beyond belief and the ideological progressives would probably do so as well. They solidly buy into capitalism as the means to make progress and they deeply believe in progress as the route to salvation for all humanity. The political middle is clueless and mindless as well so look for no rational response there. In short the so-called political will to do anything that would actually matter is not just not there. It seems hell bent on doing nothing.
And that brings me round to the ‘death wish’. You and I know that humanity, and especially the portion that occupies the North American continent is not likely to do anything along those lines. Indeed humanity seems to want to commit suicide! There are any number of smart people who actually do get the nature of exponential growth and diminishment of natural resources, especially fossil fuel energy. But they have not shown any inclination to think the problems through to their logical conclusions. Whether they are afraid to do so or just really don't have the wisdom to do so is not clear. The point is they won't act in a sufficiently timely fashion as to affect the kinds of changes needed. The rest of the crowd clearly do not have the wherewithal to do that kind of thinking. They don't want to even try. The fact that nearly half of the people in the United States don't even understand evolution well enough to realize it isn't a question of belief should show us that there is a fundamental intellectual deficit in this country.
But, as I said, that deficit is actually a global phenomenon. People around the world who clamor for what the Americans have had and don't actually bother to look at how negatively those possessions have affected the American psyche, are just as guilty. Materialism and consumerism, wrought by various forms of capitalism is killing our species and many others to boot. And almost no one seems to care.
Of course the really big picture is that this is just the cycle of species evolution. A species comes into being because it is more fit than its predecessor in some environment. It continues to evolve through, for example, genetic drift as the environment changes gradually. But then one day the environment is too different and new selection criteria obtain. The species cannot adapt fast enough to continue being sufficiently fit and then it goes out of existence. For humans, who did all of the creating of our current environment, this was a self-inflicted destiny. So perhaps what we witness in the human proclivity to not recognize the dangers is, in fact, a kind of death wish built into the species, just as senescence is built into cells and tissues. We Homo sapiens were meant to die. Since we created the conditions under which we have become unfit it is only natural that we are the agents of failure to somehow adapt.
PS. Based on what I have seen so far, after the election, I don't think President Obama will be saving us either.
Iis it possible (even in theory, let alone practice) for a central power (the almighty government in this case) to actually decentralize? It seems a conflict even in the logical definition of the terms, not mentioning if it "could theoretically", let alone practically, be done.
Any solutions, even in theory, must come from the bottom up, methinks, central powers don't decentralize themselves, not even in theory.
Posted by: p01 | November 18, 2012 at 07:35 PM
An interesting and somewhat similar explanation comes from transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof. According to him humanity has a deep wish for an inner transformation of consciousness, a kind of death and rebirth experience regularly encountered in deep psychotherapeutic and spiritual work (which he explains in great detail in his books).
Anyway, humanity at large is suppsoedly being driven by this force BUT we're projecting our need for this inner species-wide psychological death and rebirth into the outer material world. We are creating an Armageddon scenario in real world, which can only lead to our final demise and not through a spiritual rebirth we belive it might. That can only happen through an inner psychological experience of each one of us.
http://stanislavgrof.com/pdf/2012.HumanDestiny.Rev.pdf
Paul Chefurka also came to similar conclusion at his interesting blog Approaching the Limits. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/
Posted by: Mark | November 19, 2012 at 05:06 AM
Once we cut away the emotional limitations of greed, egotism, anthropocentrism and, most of all, existential fear, what you say George rings absolutely true.
Of course, those very limitations mean that your conclusions will be dismissed wholesale by the myopic wishful "thinkers" who, through their conduct and inaction, clearly number the overwhelming majority worldwide, including the president and his string pullers. (That's if they ever allowed their eyes to read your words in the first place.) This number must include just about any American who cast a vote two weeks ago.
The conundrum is that for those of us who already agree with your conclusions, there is little we can do but observe the ride, as you have said before. I for one see no possibility of my being able to affect the outcome one iota. Even if I could personally inspire a local surge in permaculture, which would be hard enough given the majority myopic inertia, all this would do would be to provide a teasing target for nearby violent do-nothings once the international food chain crumbles.
Our destiny certainly is self inflicted. Anyone with the ability to rise above the limitations mentioned above can't expect anything other than major recalibration of life on earth.
On the rational basis that we can only die once, I am at peace with this.
Posted by: Oliver | November 19, 2012 at 07:01 AM
Humans don't have a death wish. What we have is a hyperbolic discount function.
It's not that we want to die, we just have this wonderful ability to diminish problems that will happen later.
It's a useful quality, except it lets us do things we want to do right now without worrying about later consequences.
From an evolutionary perspective this sort of prioritization of immediate, concrete concerns over future, abstract concerns makes a lot of sense. If one is eating a freshly killed rutabaga and sees a saber-tooth across the valley, it makes sense to keep eating one's meal and not worry about the tiger until it's close enough to be a real threat. After all, the tiger might lose interest or find other prey between now and then.
To see this discount function in action on a personal level, think of smoking cigarettes. On a global level, think about smoking coal.
It's not about greed or any other moral failure. It's not even about stupidity. This response is hard-wired. We would need a lot more species-wide self-awareness to short circuit an evolutionary mechanism like this.
Posted by: Bodhi Chefurka | November 19, 2012 at 11:22 AM
Bodhi Chefurka - Your final sentence is exactly the point. After millennia of collective experience and the onset of education, we should have more species-wide self-awareness by now, but we don't, and that is why "death wish" is a useful term to describe the outlook.
The keep-consuming-don't-worry-about-long-term-threat is a cute description for savages, but it's a statement of failure for 21st century Homo sapiens. IMHO.
Posted by: Oliver | November 19, 2012 at 03:57 PM
Oliver, I see virtually no difference between "savages" and 21st century Homo Sapiens. The wiring is identical. We really haven't evolved that much in the last 20,000 years - we've just had a little longer to plaster a layer of conceit on top.
There is no death wish, there is simply a natural tendency to deal with the most immediate issues first. Redefining it as a "death wish" is part of the conceit.
Posted by: Paul Chefurka | November 19, 2012 at 04:56 PM
I feel that there is a build in by default death wish in our group mindset. That unless this changes we are doomed. The change itself would be rather straight forward but all appearances show rather long odds on it happening.
It is so simple really, change the group mindset from a competitive (win/lose) to a cooperative one (win/win).
Posted by: ryeguy | November 19, 2012 at 05:35 PM
Mark, I didn't see your comment before. Thanks for reminding me ;-)
I don't know if all of humanity has an inner desire for transformation, but many of us do. I've noticed what seems like a correlation between active searching for personal inner transformation and the willingness to accept what's happening in the outer world. It may be that the practice at being truthful about who one is lends itself to the search for truth in all things.
Posted by: Paul Chefurka | November 19, 2012 at 06:05 PM
"Who" "one" "is" is a mound of identifying labels, some of them exceedingly subtle. To find out who one is, one has to undertake the task of peeling off the labels, a process that can be quite painful. The task is not finished until there are no labels left.
Posted by: Robin Datta | November 19, 2012 at 10:44 PM
Paul C - Is your assertion proven that "the wiring is identical"? I tend towards ryeguy's position, i.e. I am by choice cooperative, not competitive. If I can make this choice, how can my wiring be the same as the typical Alpha male (proto-plutocrat) who deeply offends me with his me-me-me approach to life?
Posted by: Oliver | November 20, 2012 at 12:53 AM
PS - "Dealing with the most immediate issues first" seems like a death wish to me. Where are the smarts to avoid future catastrophe that really endangers survival?
Posted by: Oliver | November 20, 2012 at 01:01 AM
By "the wiring is identical" I mean that our genetic makeup hasn't changed appreciably. It has always been expressed in a range of behaviour and ability, though.
The aggregate behaviour of the species in this case seems to be ruled by those within 1 or 2 sigma or two of the genetically defined mean. That means that people who get all excited about future problems are rare enough that they don't influence group behaviour.
Alphas lead, Deltas follow. If the Alphas don't care about climate change, the Deltas assume it's not a problem. Until it hits them in the face, anyway.
The smarts we would need to avoid future catastrophe appear to reside in individuals who are not inclined to lead large chunks of civilization. And none of the rest are inclined to listen to them.
Posted by: Bodhi Chefurka | November 20, 2012 at 10:18 AM
Regarding the death wish, I was reminded some short while ago by a psychologist friend that among the inbuilt human urges the sex drive and the death wish are the strongest. Since I didn't believe him regarding the second, he explained that if I had the choice between being eaten by a lion, to fight or to jump over the cliff, the cliff jump might be the choice I feel driven towards most.
Unfortunately he didn't give me any sources but I can ask.
Now imagine, whole societies having a death wish, throw in some nukes and you have a recipe for disaster.
Posted by: kt256 | November 20, 2012 at 11:46 AM
George - On this day when modern Americans gorge themselves with feasts, I wonder what Native Americans make of the 'death wish' concept discussed here.
I have always thought it's a strange kind of celebration that gives thanks for the moment in history when immigrant zealots seized the land and its bounteous resources at gunpoint from the current inhabitants, and consigned the latter to concentration camps with the Orwellian name of "reservations".
The rest, they say, is history. The descendants of the land-grabbers with their beautiful dominant genes have created a global system that codified theft by imperial conquest, reaching its apotheosis with the Grand Larceny of Wall Street post-2007.
Those of our fellow planet dwellers who have always been shut out from the feast may feel just to have been born is a de facto death wish.
Posted by: Oliver | November 22, 2012 at 12:34 AM
Paul, I too have noticed the correlation between quest for personal inner transformation and the willingness to accept what's happening in the outer world. I do what you can, and the rest is - as always was - in the hands of something higher than myself (God or fate or what ever one prefers to call it).
I still belive humanity at large has an unconscious wish to transcend itself in its current form and not necessarily commit mass suicide. Even people who planned to kill themselves and instead had an inner psychological death and rebirth experience later reported that on unciousnesss level this is what they were truly looking for -- their suicide wish was in that light found to be an unrecognized misunderstood and distorted need for transcendence. Grof talks about this a lot based on his clinical work. Jung in some parts too.
kt256, sex (libido) and death drive form the basics of Freuds theory in psychoanalysis. See any of his earlier work.
Posted by: Mark | November 22, 2012 at 12:53 PM
All,
I just posted a comment in the 'who will win' blog summarizing my perspective on universal evolution and why we humans are maximizing energy dissipaters in our current state of development. My reference to a 'death wish' is actually based on this perspective. I meant it more as an allegory for why our species seems hell bent on full steam ahead, devil take the hind most, even when we know what the inevitable outcome will be. In a sense, all species of living things have this propensity to use up resources because that is a mandate from our biological being. Under ordinary biological/ecological circumstances we would have been held in check by some limiting factor long before it got to this point. But owing to our elevated cleverness sans elevated sapience, we broke that mold and are forging new ground.
It's an experiment in evolution.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | November 22, 2012 at 12:59 PM
Great essay and wonderful comments.
Watching this slow motion train wreck in the making without any ability to steer away from it (or even "prep" for some kind of survival) has freed me from worry about the mundane and financial doings of the present. Knowing full well that there isn't going to be a miraculous "fix" at the last possible minute and that this industrial civilization is incapable of change (in time to reverse or stop what's going on) leaves me in a state of calm. Of course i keep trying to stop the shale gas drilling and fracking in my state (PA) and others, and continue with expanding my garden, but it won't matter once this on-going collapse grows into the bottleneck event that will severely diminish the global population (via violence and deprivation, disease, natural earthquake and volcanic action and probably nuclear radiation too - from all the Fukushima's-to-be around the world that won't be decommissioned in time).
Anyway, i give thanks for this site and others (that i see some of you commenters frequent) that have grasped the truth of our human adventure, about to come to an end. Nice to be among kindred spirits, even on our way out.
Posted by: Tom | November 24, 2012 at 05:00 AM
Thanks, Mark, for the insight. Regarding Stanislav Grof, the wiki article states: "...He continues this work today under the title "Holotropic Breathwork".
Which immediately reminds me of the local new age crowd I occasionally spend some time with. Remarkably I met a person from the local Transition Town group there as well.
I'll never cease to be amazed how such a parallel universe can exist in our society besides the mainstream. Beyond that, Paul's suggestion that the truth seeking leads people to seek sort of everywhere rings a chord with me. I started with energy and promptly I'm pulling up a net of things, more by accident as it seems, and the connections are startling.
Being an electrical engineer (in Germany) I'm out of depth in the field of psychology, but I do entertain a sense of wonder, so thanks again.
Posted by: kt256 | November 24, 2012 at 01:50 PM
About 5 years ago I was in the depths of a classic Dark Night of the Soul, precipitated by my realization of the converging predicament in all aspects of the human endeavour, and a dark vision of the coming collapse of civilization. I was even starting to think about an early exit.
A friend talked me into attending a 3 day New Age/Buddhist/Depth Psychology retreat. On the second day we did a session of holotropic breathwork as developed by Grof. At the climax of the exercise I had a vision lasting maybe one minute. During it I saw clearly and objectively the mistake in my thinking that had led to my despair, as well as the correct way of viewing what was coming.
The despair and depression that had gripped me for four years vanished in that minute, and has never returned. This has allowed me to continue deepening my understanding of what we're facing, without any fear, resistance or denial.
I owe Stan Grof a very deep debt of gratitude.
Posted by: Paul Chefurka | November 24, 2012 at 11:50 PM
Paul thanks for sharing that. I've read about your Dark Night of the Soul experience on your blog, but I was not aware you were able to find a breakthrough using holotropic breathwork.
Very interesting. If you ever feel like sharing that experience in greater depth on your blog, I for one would love to read about it.
HB is one of the practices I too personally use, although I find Stan's originals work even more useful (although unfortunately now illegal through most of the world). And although it helped me tremendously, I'm still kind of waiting for my (final) breakthrough.
Posted by: Mark | November 26, 2012 at 07:38 AM