Winter Solstice 2018

Happy Solstice everybody.

I don't know what else to say. I had started a piece taking an inventory of beliefs and ideologies that underlie the major pathologies in our socioeconomic system, things like belief in free markets. But it was getting way too long even without explanations of why they were pathological. However, I have written at length about all of them in the past so you will find blogs about subjects like "profits" and "human rights" and read the discussions there.

What I had thought to do was to remind everyone why our societies, western and eastern, northern and southern alike are failing in providing a meaningful life for all humans without destroying the ecosystem. We are in a no-win scenario. Most people on the planet are either already in poverty or many are headed in that direction with the pace accelerating. I have mentioned before the fact that I am seeing more homeless people in the neighborhood where I work as time goes on.

There are too many of us. Our access to free energy is being strangled. The pollution from our prior use of energy is converting our climate into a nightmare. Water is becoming a serious issue in many places. Climate-forced conflict and migration has become plainly visible. And on and on.

Over the last three decades I developed a true systems analysis process (which I will publish in my next book) and applied it to the human social system and its subsystems. And I applied it to humanity itself. What I have found is a species embedded in a cultural cocoon that has broken free of the normal bounds for living systems in ecosystems. But also, a species that has just recently undergone a transition to what I think is the next stage of evolution - from the great apes to a sapient (or perhaps pre-sapient) but clever one capable of creating and developing more powerful ways to extract material goods from the environment. We are an evolutionary experiment that could go either way.

One thing I am sure of. The socioeconomic system we currently have is completely unsustainable. But there will have to be some further development in the human brain in order for a species of humans to regroup and have any kind of society at all.

Meanwhile I have a book recommendation. Tyler Volk's "Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be" is one of the best systems books I have ever read. He describes the process of becoming systems (emergence) he calls combogenesis which is essentially the same as my ontogenesis (generation of ontological elements from chapter 10 in my Principles book) and the grand sequence of levels of organization (from quarks all the way up to cultures of human societies). Enjoy.

Longer days are coming.

Comments

[Ugo]

Hi George, it is a difficult time to send greetings, but a Merry Christmas wish never harmed anyone. So, Merry Christmas! And I bought the book you mentioned and I am also waiting for your new book! Keep in touch. Ugo

[Shawn]

These changes do not need to occur in the brain. Imagine how much more efficient a large group today, using tools such as email, social media, and phone calls, can accomplish a task vs a large group in the past that had none of those tools.

The changes that will make a difference are communication tools that are more efficient than we have now. As those tools become better, so to does our ability to act as a whole. This is a simple relationship, more efficient communication tools, leads to tighter group coordination.

We blame psychology of individual humans for our inability to work together, yet we never think about the tools that allow us to scale our biological forms of communication to larger and larger groups.

[George Mobus]

Folks, Ugo is Ugo Bardi who's blog is listed in the side bar - Cassandra's Legacy. Check it out.

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@Shawn,

I suspect you didn't read the papers at the link I provided. In fact we have gotten all kinds of new communications technologies over the past 100 years, linking lots of minds together and look where it has gotten us. Tools are only as good as the minds that use them.

George

[Molly Radke]

Re: Our current socio-economic system....I have been arguing, fruitlessly, for years that the capitalist notion that infinite growth is not only desirable, but POSSIBLE, is a logical absurdity.....infinite growth in a finite system is truly a logical impossibility....

[John C]

I was wondering if you have seen the torrent of recent reporting on the collapse of insect populations around the world. Any thoughts from you would be welcome on this topic. Thank you for your work.