Question Everything

Summer reading list

I thought I would share some of the books I have been reading lately. All relate to the theme of watching the world fall apart.

The End of Normal, by James K. Galbraith (son of John Kenneth Galbraith), the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin. Simon & Schuster, New York (2014).

The question of why is the economy not growing the way it used to is very complicated. In truth the economy was not really growing all that strongly after the 1970s but we had come to expect that the right policies (by the Fed mostly) should lead to 3-4% growth in GDP y-o-y. Why did the Great Recession happen? Why has the recovery been so weak? Why can't the Fed seem to stimulate growth (as we would expect)? And what does debt have to do with all of this (both private and public)? He has some very worthwhile (that is systems-oriented) insights, it seems to me.

 

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Cologne, Professor of Sociology, University of Cologne. Verso, London (2016).

A compilation of mostly updated essays. Note he doesn't ask IF capitalism will end, but HOW. Of course he is talking about the modern version of capitalism, neoliberal, in which profits and growth are above all else. He does an excellent job of deconstructing the mechanisms that give rise to the instabilities inherent in this form, such as the income distribution problem leading to widening wealth gap. And then there is that pesky problem of debt again. He tackles the difficult subject of the inherent conflict between capitalism and democracy and how it leads to the death of the latter (think how money has taken over politics and politicians are now "brands").

 

Earth in Human Hands: Shaping our Planet's Future by David Grinspoon, Senior Scientist (astrobiologist), Planetary Science Institute and adjunct professor of astrophysical and planetary science, University of Colorado, Grand Central Publishing, New York (2016).

This book made me do a lot of rethinking about the concept of 'geoengineering'. My initial thoughts about the subject, where things like proposals to seed the ocean with iron to stimulate algae growth to absorb CO2, or seed the stratosphere with sulfate aerosols, in order to combat global warming seemed to me like really desperate measures, especially since I thought no one knew enough about such ventures to understand how it would work (or if it would work). Grinspoon brought a lot of light into the room on this subject. He has actually convinced me that we may already have inadvertently re-engineered the Earth to a point that our only hope is to enter into the role of thoughtful (intentional) managers of the whole Ecos. He argues that there could be a way to change the world on purpose rather than as we have already done by accident. What I really liked about his thoughts is his recognizing that in order to do something like that is going to demand a lot more cooperation and coordination. Humans are going to have to become more sapient or suffer the consequences. Have an open mind about the topic and you may find yourself thinking about the subject less based on emotions and gut reactions after reading his thoughts.

 

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman, Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychology, Brown University, and Philip Fernbach, Professor of Marketing, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado (a cognitive scientist). Riverhead Books, New York.

The subject of this book is actually why I found myself rethinking my position on geoengineering. The fact is that I did not know what I did not know and didn't know that there was much more to it than I did know. In other words I was really quite ignorant of some of the facts in the matter that do matter. My initial thoughts about the problem were based on very shallow understanding of what was being proposed and the rationale for it. I did not have the same initial reaction to GMOs, in part because I was a biologist with a pretty deep understanding of how DNA, genes, and protein production in cells works. Not that I would throw caution to the wind; there are still some unanswered questions about GMOs and research is needed. But the objections that most people make are based on what is called the Frankenstein fear rather than actually knowing what genes do and how they work.

The fact is that all of us are really very ignorant about most things and we rely on social networks and opinions of our communities to form our opinions about a great many things. Consider the biggest current example of a community forming a set of opinions about a 'leader' and how it is reinforced inside that community. We're all subject to group think - nothing new there. What is new in this book is the way in which all of us tend to think we are knowledgeable even when we are not. We don't know what we don't know and then tend to think we probably do!

I think the authors go a bit far in downgrading individual knowledge playing a significant role in life. They seem to want to place the greater role in the hive mind. They constantly remind us that the world is too complex and no one can know everything. I don't think that platitude is helpful. I have argued that there is a general template of knowledge - systems knowledge - that is at the base of all other specific system-kind knowledge. If one learns general systems thinking early, one is able to learn a great deal about many different knowledge areas. Since everything is a system and a subsystem, systems knowledge acts like the ultimate in reusability; simply substitute domain specific terms for system-general terms and use general systems semantics to grasp what the domain specific system is doing. You don't have to learn domain specific knowledge as if it is isolated from other domains. I suspect that many more people would be able to participate in more in-depth transdiciplinary work if they started out learning systems science.

 

That's it for now. I have a few more books on my summer reading list and will share if I find anything really interesting.

George

 

 

Watching the World Fall Apart II

First the MENA collapse. Now the EU collapse. What is next? The Trump administration provides clues.

Depletion of fossil fuels. Climate chaos. Leadership failures. You are witnessing the end.

Its all downhill from here - Happy Summer Solstice

I'm at the 8th almost annual Biophysical Economics meeting, this year in Montana (Flathead Lake Bio Station). The subject of discussions continues to be the energy issues that are an ever growing threat to humanity. There is such an incredible disconnect between the scientific data being discussed here versus the stories told in the media regarding energy availability. The ordinary citizen thinks that because gasoline prices are relatively low (but they do seem to be creeping up) and they hear so much about fracked oil and gas, that we must be swimming in energy resources. Nothing could be further from the truth. And the reasons for low gas prices are counter intuitive so I doubt that the average consumer would be able to understand.

Many of us who have been following the twin problems of peak oil and falling energy return on energy availability were caught off guard by the sudden fall in oil prices. Of course they are still high by historical standards and since most of the new oil is coming from unconventional sources with costs higher than the market value of the oil, the oil and gas companies are losing money like crazy. The smaller ones are going bankrupt, the bigger ones are borrowing like crazy to stay in business and preserve their market shares. Things are really going crazy.

I have nothing to say about the political circus or the financial bubble(s) that are hanging over our collective head right now. I've said it all before. You know the story.

For me, I will just enjoy summer and keep working on my new book and hope something good eventually will come to pass.

University of Washington Scientist: Fake News is Real News, Somewhere

AP, Dateline: Saturday, April 1. Seattle Washington

Computer Scientists Discover a New Realm of Information, An Alternate Reality

In a news release today from the University of Washington, the Institute of Technology located on the Tacoma, Wa. campus, announced the discovery of a previously unknown realm of reality, as described in the release, in which the laws of physics and psychology do not work exactly the same as they do in the realm we generally experience. Computer scientists at the Institute were working on a new method for creating virtual reality experiences when they discovered things going on in the computer that they had not programmed in. They immediately started analyzing the 'reality' to find out what was happening.

Almost immediately they ran across news articles from organizations that resembled real ones, like the New York Times (but named the New Wark Times). One particularly interesting article carried the story about how the FBI had determined that president Donald Drumpf's phones in Drumpf Towers were, indeed tapped by the prior administration.

Graduate student, Hugo Sewing, told the AP that he was assigned to go into this non-virtual, but different reality using the new interface that had been developed there at the UWT Institute. Once inside he discovered a world completely similar to the Matrix (of movie fame) where things in general seemed fairly normal but the news stories that had been deemed fake news in the real world (our world) were being reported as facts by the media in this alternate reality.

Lead researcher on the project, Professor Carry-Ann Lichen, explained that they found this alternate reality had been encountered through the new virtual reality equipment opening a portal into another dimension. She did not explain how. But a part of her description included a device that resembled a cell phone. Mr. Sewing, while inside this alternate 'matrix' had arranged to have news feeds from inside tweeted to our reality so that he and others on the research team could monitor the news going on there.

Some scientists are now speculating that some of those tweets may have gotten to a wider audience. In particular there is now speculation that somehow president Donald Trump's Twitter account became a recipient which might explain where he is getting his information. It would help explain why it seems like he exists in an alternate reality.

The research team at UWT did not comment on that possibility. However one member of the team, who asked not to be identified by name, suggested that president Trump's account might have already been tapped into the alternate reality where what we in this world call fake news is real news. More research will be needed to fully understand this phenomenon. Meanwhile the White House declined to comment on the story.

Spring Equinox - 2017: The End of the Beginning of the End

The elections are over. The new president is installed and has already brought chaos to the world, not just the US. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it does prove we humans have gotten into cycles of the same stupid mistakes and for all of history since the first civilizations of Mesopotamia, and, indeed, all other parts of the world where civilizations arose, humans have been repeating the same pattern of expansion, complexification, and resource depletion to the point of exhausting their source of wealth. And the rulers invariably respond to the unrest in the ways we are seeing today. Some, like Assad, who were already in power when the s**t hit the fan, respond with brutal crackdowns on rebelling populations. Others like Trump are put in power by promises to fix what is wrong with the status quo, but turn very quickly to trying (and most often succeeding) to subdue the potential unruly crowds by continuing promises to fix their lives, all the while undercutting their meager sources of income or wealth. Look at the repeal of Obamacare and replacement with a plan that is widely recognized as greatly inferior - except for the already rich.

The old saying goes, "the people get the government they deserve." And I think there is a great deal of truth to this. We have become a nation of profoundly ignorant people - ignorant, tending toward stupid, and incredibly selfish, narcissistic. When somebody pops up and promises to make the world the way it was when they were "happy", well this is what we get.

As the days get longer the pressure will be building toward an all out breakdown in civil society. As millions lose their healthcare, or unemployment (the real unemployment) rises when good jobs were supposed to be increasing, somebody is going to wise up and call bulls**t on the current government. I expect the same to happen when Brexit produces more hardships or when the far right parties in Europe gain control and proceed to screw up royally.

The problem is that even if some of, say for example, Trumps prescriptions were correct with respect to the intended, and promised outcomes, he would still fail because his predecessors (and at all levels of government and business) have left an unfixable system. The sheer complexity of the modern state, along with the sheer lack of consciousness and knowledge of the general governor, ensures massive failures as have happened so many times throughout history. Nothing fundamental has changed in this pattern since the days of old. Only now the collapse of civilization is global. And there is no sanctuary for those who seek to flee. Look at the plight of the Syrian refugees as they struggle to find places in countries that are on the brink of collapse themselves (hint: Greece).

Several thoughtful people I know who have been concerned about the future are now voicing a kind of despair for the future. The evidence for the build up to collapse is now so evident that anyone with half a brain and a bit of knowledge about the history of civilizations can see the end in sight.

On the other hand, and to leave you on a high note, the collapse of the current cultural system (neoliberal capitalism, profit maximization, revolving debt financing, the impacts on the education system, etc.) is a good thing. When I say unfixable, I mean just that. Some systems are fixable, or adjustable so that they work better in time. This one we live in is neither. It is so full of positive feedback loops that reinforce destructive behaviors that there is very little that can be done to break out without that very act destroying the interlocking processes and thus, itself bringing about collapse. What we need to do is see the bright side of this. For one, it will significantly slow down the human-caused forcing of the climate (other natural feedbacks aside this will be a very positive development.)

Once the rotten old system is debris it will be possible to reset human values (many of which are learned) and start fresh. We won't have the high tech gadgets to help us back to the kind of life many of us live now. But, so what. We will get a chance to start over, and hopefully do it better next time. At least that is my hope on this day of turning.

Some Thoughts on the Winter Solstice 2016

Opening on a Hopeful Note

I have been named Editor in Chief for the International Federation for Systems Research (Vienna Austria) book series, published by Springer, “Systems Science & Engineering”, previously managed by George Klir. I am deeply honoured to have been asked by the IFSR to head up the re-launch of their book series. My hope is to guide the series in the direction of opening up access to systems science and engineering to a much wider audience by making sure that the books published include sufficient prose, along with their mathematics, so that non-mathematically inclined people may also see the insights that systems science has to offer.

SS was developed as a subject during an era when scientists, especially in the various domains of physics, were overcome with pride and zealousness over their mastery of advanced mathematics. The early thinking was that mathematics was a completely adequate language for describing systems concepts. Many books and journal articles, thus, focused on mathematics at the expense of prose. The result was to put off a large audience of people who, nevertheless, intuitively grasped the ideas of systemness but were left without a lot of intellectual material from which to draw. The major exception was a group of people who bridged the worlds of verbal and mathematical description and realized that systems thinking would be valuable in management science but only if ideas could be expressed with a minimal amount of arcane mathematics. They called this track “Soft Systems Thinking.” To their credit they were fairly successful in expressing most of the principles of systemness in plain language using mathematics (usually nothing more complicated than basic algebra and set theory) only to add some amount of preciseness to their ideas.

Today there is a growing understanding that mathematics' proper role in describing the world is as just such an addendum. My work on human thinking, especially in the area of the internal language of thought (LoT) that I have proposed is actually the language of systemness - what I am calling “systemese,” and this language is comprised of four mental modules (actually five modules including the affect, emotional, influence on decision making as I reported in my Sapience book). The first module is the linguistic (verbalization) module responsible for encoding and using names of objects (nouns), relations (prepositions and many modifiers), and actions (verbs), plus the grammatical formation of sentences. This is the language facility most researchers and linguists focus on. However we also have names for quantity, measures (units), and calibrations (comparisons between two or more quantities, for example). These words can be conveniently represented by more terse symbols (signs) such as the numeral, '1' symbol representing the verbal symbol “one” and a built-in sense of counting. Measuring, involving comparison of sensory data from one object, for example, with another object, and calibration (e.g. making sure an arrow head was not too heavy for the arrow) led to various arithmetic capabilities. Math today is the result of an on-going evolution of abstraction of patterns of relations and using those abstractions, along with rules for deriving them, to multiple situations.

The third module in human thinking is strongly related to the mathematics module but was first evolved with the linguistic module and that is the logic module that is used to construct rational arguments. Early humans, as they were evolving language facility needed to use that language to confer on group decisions about future actions (e.g. when to go hunting next). These kinds of discussions required the discussants to put forth veridical arguments for their positions when there was a disagreement about conclusions. Facts and logic were needed to ferret out the proper course of action.

The fifth module concerns itself with visual interpretations. A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. And this has some basis in psychology. Our brains are evolved to use all four of these modules in order to have successful intra-specific communications take place. Successful here means that the results of communications increase the fitness of the species, by increasing the fitness of the tribe (and by doing so the fitness of individuals). The verbal facility acts as an integrating nexus between all of them. We have words and sentences to describe what we see, how we reason, and how big or small things are and how they compare to one another.

It takes all four of these competencies in order to describe the world (it takes the emotional module as well in order to communicate knowledge about individuals' states of feeling, e.g. desires, but so far as scientific descriptions are concerned we try hard to eliminate the effects of emotions). No one is sufficient by itself. It is somewhat possible to translate any of the three extra language facilities into verbal descriptions, but often at the risk of losing some precision or context. A well balanced use of all four is what makes the sciences so successful in producing increasingly veridical descriptions of the world and how it works. The reason mathematics has tended to dominate, especially at the lower levels of organization (e.g. physics), is that the various specializations in the sciences means that those who work in a particular field become deeply antiquated with the subject and the math used to model systems within that field. They can talk mathematics to one another and feel like they have done an adequate job of communicating with their tribe. However two factors are intervening in this comfort zone. The first is that systems science deals with systems in general, regardless of medium (physical, biological, social, etc.) The second is that the problems that the sciences are tackling are increasingly involving complex systems and require transdisciplinary approaches. Meaning that scientists must communicate with other tribes, often speaking different languages.

I will be developing my system language more thoroughly in the new book. My hope is that understanding better how our internal language of systemness works (with all modules) will provide us with a universal way to achieve transdisciplinarity and communications between all of the science disciplines. My object with the IFSR/Springer book series is to similarly guide the whole field toward a more balanced approach to communicating systems science to everyone.

And Now Some Not So Hopeful Observations

This year has demonstrated to us that nothing is permanent, not even democracy!

The evidence that the world as a whole is coming undone is abundant. The circuitous manner in which Trump arrives at the White House shows us that institutions meant to ensure the proper working of democratic governance have broken down, failed. Unless there is some revolution in the electoral college that denies Trump the presidency (and we will know shortly) the fact that a sufficient number of people in the US voted for him, sufficient to bring him close even if losing the popular vote, is, to me, adequate evidence to show how incredibly pathetic our education system has gotten. People (and not just Trump supporters) are generally abysmally ignorant. They are, I am starting to think, equally stupid. Even PhD-educated people are showing signs of a lack of any intellectual capacity, a dismal lack of any kind of understanding about matters outside their particular profession, and certainly no ability to exercise critical thinking skills. Even if the electoral college denies Trump the office, there is likely to be a revolution since his supporters are so emotionally broken that many of them have already shown violent tendencies.

The next few years are going to be especially difficult for the world and I think it is safe to say the rivets are already starting to burst from the boiler. From this point expect the chaos to simply increase and likely at an exponential rate. People, both republicans and democrats alike, voted for change. They wanted to eliminate the status quo and they will get their wishes. But given what I said above about the level of ignorance and stupidity that seems so prevalent in the population, even the so-called educated population, the kind of change they wanted isn't even feasible in the current state of the biophysical economy. So the changes they will get will be quite different from what they expect.

Democracy is a nice-sounding idea. As a form of governance it has appeal because it addresses a basic human desire to be autonomous, translated into the concepts of freedom and liberal human rights. It conveys some sense of equality and opportunity to participate in the decision processes of managing the economic, ethical, educational, and cultural subsystems of the human social system. Democratic governance has evolved over many generations to the kind we witness in the US and many western nations. Coupled with economic freedom, in the form of neoliberal capitalism, it has seemed to everyone that mankind had finally found the right formula for managing our affairs with equity and dignity. But...

A representative democracy is supposed to compensate for the little problem that most people have very limited memory and understanding capacity relative to the complexities of governing large social systems like a country. Even at the founding of the United States of America, the complexities of state and internal affairs were such that the Founding Fathers realized that the common person would be unable to know everything needed to participate fully in the governance process. Ergo, the representation in congress and the electoral college creation for the election of the executive. Even at that, the people being elected to represent the rest are tending of late to the stupid and ignorant side of the mental distribution. I think of someone like James Inhofe (R. OK.) and simply hang my head and cry. Of course stupid people are getting into elected office because the voters are even more stupid and ignorant and are even resentful of anyone who is clearly more knowledgeable and intellectual than they are. They vote with their emotions and a feeling that such people will understand their problems. It hasn't helped that the occasionally smart politician has used those smarts mostly for personal gain — influence, power, and riches. There seem to be as many selfish democrats as there are selfish republicans. And so the common person is left feeling like no one is really looking out for their interests.

A big part of the problem, however, is the difference between what they believe their interests are or should be, versus reality. Americans in particular have been sold on the concept of the “American Dream.” But so have so many other people around the world, pursuing material wealth in the belief that it brings happiness. It has simply never occurred to most people that wealth comes from converting natural resources into goods and services and that those come in limited supply. Thus, now that we have reached the limits imposed by reality, they simply cannot understand why they are denied the American dream. Worse yet in places like Syria and the whole MENA region, they cannot understand why they can't even try to attain something like the American dream. Not even their governments can tell them the truth. Mostly they themselves don't understand the situation. It has taken something like global warming to start physically changing the climate and weather patterns to finally get some leaders to recognize a little piece of the puzzle.

Democracy in any form suffers from this one fundamental flaw. It depends entirely on the mentality of the populace — the whole populace. It depends on people being sufficiently smart that they can use critical thinking and logical reasoning along with possessing adequate knowledge about how reality works to be able to make informed decisions. There are likely to always be differences of opinion because of emotional attachments to world views that vary from culture to culture and ideology to ideology. As long as there is a forum (the political process) for working out differences amenably, and an intent on all parties' parts to do so in a peaceful manner, then democratic process has a chance to work. But as you think about it, when has that description of people ever been true?

Closing on a Hopeful Note (somewhat)

I strongly believe that systems science can provide guidance toward creating a form of governance that would succeed in terms of providing for an acceptable level of welfare for the citizens. That welfare would be considerably less oriented toward physical wealth as we understand it today. But every citizen would have an opportunity to participate in meaningful work, helping to secure the social milieu against disturbing forces from outside, and being supported by the society in terms of assurance of physical needs and comfort.

Problem one is that this is only feasible for a significantly smaller population, one that is not depleting natural resources faster than the renewable ones can be renewed and the non-renewable ones can be recycled. The current population of 7+ billion people on the planet is not just non-sustainable, it alone (never mind continued growth) will kill the planet's ability to supply resources to humans and to most other members of the biosphere. How we get down to a sustainable population is the continuing problem being discussed in population overload circles. To date, no clear consensus has emerged, except that the likelihood of supporting 7-10 billion people is understood to be irrational. The most likely scenario for humanity in the near term is a planet-wide population crash and an evolutionary bottleneck event. This would be a self-correcting aspect of the population problem. But obviously a very brutal solution.

Problem number two is that even if we could get the population down to a supportable number, the physical environment, in particular the availability of more natural resources and the dramatic changes in climate, are going to provide significant hurdles to get over. Future human beings are going to face incredible obstacles in forming any kind of reasonable civilization, even at a tribal level. They will not have the resources, especially high power energy, to do the work needed to build and sustain civilized living conditions.

Problem number three involves preserving all or most of the hard-won knowledge about the world that science has accumulated to date. Not all of this knowledge would be immediately useful to future humans but it would serve as a reminder of the mistakes our current species have made (I imagine preserving the parable of the iPhone as a cautionary tale warning of overzealous technology advances). It might also serve as inspiration for eventually building a reasonable civilization. My own thoughts along these lines is that what will be needed is a way to encode knowledge into a preservable medium, but essentially compressing the expanded knowledge in all fields into a form (message) that could be transmitted through the ages and used to recover all of the detailed knowledge when it becomes possible (and I have to believe it will in some distant future time). I believe that knowledge of systems science is exactly that compressed form of knowledge for everything. If systemness is the fundamental organizing principle of the Universe, then it should be possible to rebuild the specific sciences by applying systems thinking to the phenomena that future humans will certainly witness.

Problem number four, then, is simply providing strategies, tactics, and logistics to people who grasp reality well enough to follow through so they can survive in the future drastically different world they will occupy.

Over the years that I have been writing this blog I have tried, in some small way, to provide some pointers in the directions of, first, understanding these problems, and second, offering some suggested ways to address them. Of course, over that time my own thinking has been evolving and continues to do so today. My involvement with the book series project mentioned above is part of my work on hopefully solving problem number three. I am counting on a wider dissemination of systems science knowledge and thinking to help ensure some preservation. Even if no more than by word of mouth as a kind of oral tradition.

Over the last few months I have turned my attention to ideas about systems based governance of human social systems. Owing to the capricious nature of human emotions, human agents make lousy decision makers on their own recognizance. So the question of designing an architecture that can overcome the weakness of human beings acting as decision agents has begun occupying more of my time. I will be outlining my findings in the new book but also plan to write about them here as they evolve. The good news (of sorts) is that after studying natural governance in living systems I think I can see where our evolved ideas about governance took a wrong turn (as with the evolution of deepening sapience the turning point appears to be around the advent of agriculture!) Moreover, I think I can see how we can learn from natural governance and apply those ideas to create a better form of human governance that will meet the criteria of welfare for all citizens. I can promise it will be nothing like we have now nor particularly like we had back in the tribal days more than 10,000 years ago, though it will incorporate the human meaning that was the basis of tribal cultures. It will describe a system that is in balance with the whole Ecos owing to internal regulation that keep it from growing beyond realistic boundaries or using resources unrealistically fast.

I realize it is too late for our current populations to adopt such a governance system. They can't even understand it or why it is needed. But I hope that as part of the knowledgebase of systems science the ideas will be available to some future society for adoption.

Happy Solstice.

Some thoughts on future postings

Dear Readers (those still reading!),

My deepest apologies for not responding to prior post comments for a while now. I appreciate the many thoughtful comments and regret that I haven't had the time to go through them carefully and responded where questions were asked. This post is to update everyone on what is going on in my world and offer some thoughts about what I might be posting in the future. As you have ascertained from my last series of posts, I have essentially concluded that humanity is on a course that is irreversible owing mostly to the fact that the vast number of people in the population are simply incapable of seeing the larger and long-term picture of reality. They think neither strategically nor, apparently, systemically. The strongest proof I can offer at this point is the political season that just played out in the US, and the results of the election itself. True enough that the Democratic candidate got a majority of the popular vote but that majority was extremely slim given the nature of the opponent. Moreover, those who did vigorously want Clinton (and not just because they didn't want Trump), in my opinion, were duped just as badly about her capabilities as Trump supporters were about his.

I consider the situation in the US now as just stronger evidence of the decline and fall of global civilization. It is just one more step down, though it may lead to a significant acceleration of the whole process. Incidentally, all of the media talk about an improving economy is complete hype. The real economy is still in decline and that is why Trump won. The people on the ground, the ones living the reality, have been seriously hurting for a long time and it got really worse under Obama. No wonder they rejected someone who only promised to be more of the same in favor of someone, no matter how reprehensible, who said he would change everything for their benefit. My simple prediction, which you could probably have guessed, is that Trump will be no more capable of making things better. He'll make things worse by wasting much more of the remaining energy resources that are semi-affordable.

So my last series was just a summary of where we have gotten to and where we are likely to go. And I really don't have more to say about it.

As for my situation and future:

I have recently gotten a contract with Springer to write a follow-on book to Mobus & Kalton (2015). This new book will be about how to use the principles of systems science covered in that book to obtain better understanding of real systems. The title is in flux but the contents will cover the basic ontology of systems, a new language of systems (that I have posted about previously), holistic systems analysis using this language to deconstruct systems (both existing and desired) and put the discovered details into a structured knowledgebase (structured according to the formal definition of system that I have also posted about), and the generation of models and designs (for systems engineering, broadly defined) from the knowledgebase. Its a good sized project and I will be the sole author this time (Mike Kalton is a philosopher!) so I'm kept pretty busy with that.

On top of that I have been invited by the Board officers of the Intl' Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) to become the chief editor for their book series (also published by Springer) "Systems Science and Engineering" (former editor, George Klir). You may recall that I attended the IFSR Conversation in Linz Austria last April as a consequence of having been involved in the first really comprehensive book on systems science! We're still negotiating about the workload requirements, etc. for the book series job. But I will end up playing some role in it. The importance of this is that I hope to have some influence on the future direction of the series and thus that of the fields of systems science and engineering in general. Both are currently undergoing some soul searching since they have been in formal existence for more than 50 years and there seems to have been little progress over that time. One indication of this is the near complete lack of systems science education programs in the US and that systems engineering is usually an add-on program on other disciplinary engineering programs. Things are only marginally better in other countries. But the increasing complexities that are being experienced in organizations, products, ecosystems interactions with humans, and governance, are making it obvious to many that humanity cannot make any forward progress in understanding and managing complexity without a rigorous systems approach.

These writing and editing projects have been keeping me busier than I was when I worked as a full-time teacher/researcher! Good thing I retired from the former.

I will try to post a bit more frequently in the future but I will mostly be posting about some of my more esoteric thoughts about the meaning of systems, not only in science and engineering, but in terms of why and how the Universe works the way it does. What has struck me about the nature of systems (systemness) is just how universal it really is. And this must mean something profound for the human condition. We are able to perceive systemness and conceive of being systems ourselves, but most important, being in the larger systems that exist in the world. This latter fact needs deeper examination.

Our human created world, as it is, may come to an end before too long. But I still hold that the chance for some higher sapient individuals to survive and form the nucleus of a bottleneck population is quite high, and therefore worth attending to. To whatever degree the knowledge of systems science and systemness can be preserved and passed on to that population it will mean that they do not have to completely start over. Knowledge of systemness is the hardest won knowledge there is. It includes not just ordinary knowledge, but wisdom as well - the knowledge of what ordinary knowledge to gain and how to use it. This will be more valuable to some future population than computers or solar collectors because from this knowledge all other technical aspects can be regenerated.

Once again, forgive me my lack of interactions. I hope you can appreciate that at my age I am a bit slower in many regards and have to spend much of my time pushing these writing projects forward.

Regards to all.

George

A New Human Society - Part 5

Humanity Needs a New Social Arrangement and New Understanding of Reality

What follows is an exercise in fantasy or at least futility. Note that while all of the below are conceivable in principle, give some thought to what it would take in practice to change things from our current mind sets. Given what I believe is the current level of sapience in the average brain, getting people to make the changes needed in thinking is nearly imponderable. Back in 2011 I wrote this on the subject.

So what kind of age would we have if somehow we were able to transcend the current modernist world view and form a new social order? [I will avoid using the term “post-modernism”, primarily because of some of the more extreme anti-realist sentiments held by ardent proponents.]

Let me presumptuously name it the Age of Systems Awakening. But perhaps it should be called the age of Sufficient Sapience! Sapience involves not only systems thinking but strategic thinking and strong moral sentiments along with a much higher capacity for tacit memory and learning veridical models of how the world works. Until the majority of human beings display these capacities, the possibility for a sapient society is greatly thwarted.

A successful social system for humanity, that is one that is fit for survival in the Ecos, will look extremely different from what we have now. Some of what I will mention will sound extremely socialistic or collectivist and may make many readers uncomfortable. I would suggest those readers not read further. But this is exactly the world view that humans will need to develop in order to have anything like a civilization in an era of constrained resources and climate chaos. Humans have to learn or become far more cooperative and willing to live with coordination. A market system of economics only works on small and local scales of time and space. It only works when all parties have access to information about the intrinsic values of goods and services. Libertarians will hate this idea. But then, they are the dinosaurs of today. An ideology based on individualism and self-interested decisions/actions is completely contrary to the trajectory of evolution. And our culture must evolve.

What sorts of things would have to be considered in this age? First it seems that we need to have a better idea of what kind of ecological footprint the human species can afford to have. I will bet that it will be significantly less than is currently the case. Not only do we need to have a much lower population but a much lower per capita demand on the planet. Our current high tech, high power societies (in the western world, but growing in the Asian world as well) are so clearly unsustainable that it is painful to think that the majority of people believe that business as usual (BAU) could go on indefinitely and everyone should, in principle, be able to live as large as westerners do. Of course a growing proportion of people in the world now realize that our burning of carbon-based fuels is going to have to come to an end. But those same people, still driven by their ideological mind frames, assume (and believe) that all we have to do is swap out our carbon-based economy for a solar-based one. Easy. Aside from the horrendous ignorance about the nature of alternative energy sources (and the extent to which we can convert to electricity), this attitude doesn't really represent an increase in consciousness at all. It is still part of magical thinking.

Starting with how individuals will need to see the world and think about their place in it, I want to then consider the consequences for communities, their collective behaviors, economics, and relation to the Ecos. This amounts to constructing a culture that will succeed in living on Earth truly sustainably. Whether humanity decides it wants to successfully live on Earth is another matter. But here is what I think it is going to take — a whole new world view.

Individuals

If all of the issues I've written about before (and many I have not mentioned but are still cogent) are problematic for human survival, then what kind of life would we have to live to be in balance with our home, the Ecos? The first order of business is to recognize that individual human beings are really subsystems within the human social system (HSS), that in turn is a subsystem of the Ecos. Understood in this light, and applying the principles of systems science to grasp what this means, leads to a very different conceptualization of what it means to be an individual human being in tight interactions with all other individuals. And by the rules of transitivity the collective of human individuals are tightly coupled with the elements of the Ecos.

The implication is that people must turn away from thinking they have a “right” to accumulate excess wealth and take as much profit as they can, even when they are innovative or particularly resourceful. Any societal profits gained, say by increased efficiency due to someone's creativity, must be reserved for the future or shared among all of the people equally. The claim that people will not endeavor to create new things or ways of doing things unless they are rewarded financially for it is simply not true. Naturally creative people do what they do without need for material rewards. That old claim has simply been used as an excuse for the dishonest and selfish would-be industrialists to rationalize their taking more than they really need to live.

The reality of human existence is that the individual does not actually exist! Of course each of us is an individual but we are in no way informationally individual. Our minds are the result of the development of a human brain in the context of a social environment. Thus our attitudes and beliefs about individualism have to come into accord with evolutionary reality.

Individalism is out. Collectivism is in. Individualism has always been a philosophical stance at odds with evolution and particularly the evolution of human consciousness, which is the result of group selection over the course of Homo history. Human beings have never been solitary animals. Our existence has always been predicated on being part of a social unit and doing what was best for the group was in the best interest of the individual. What moral philosophers who promoted the elevation of individuals have done is make the mistake of confusing individuality with autonomy of individual minds, the ability to support subjective experiences and thoughts. Individual autonomy simply means that each individual in a collective has the ability to come up with different ideas and engage in speech acts that advance the ideas for consideration by the group (discussion and debate). This capacity is unique to human beings as eusocial creatures. It is equivalent to the variation in genetic alleles due to mutations that are the source of variation in the population that are subsequently subject to selection. Different ideas, shared with the group, provide variations that can then be selected by group discussion (this is what happens in the “council of elders” meetings in indigenous peoples even today).

Autonomy does not mean selfish action. It never did. Individualism as a philosophy and a political concept is a direct fallout from the ideologies of capitalism and market economies (thanks in part to personalities like Ayn Rand!). It is a total distortion of the observations made by Adam Smith regarding individuals seeming to do only what was in their own best interest yet somehow society was better off. Smith made his observations long after capitalism (even small-scale capitalism) was already in full swing. What he observed was the profit motive at work but in what was still a small marketplace environment. Buyers knew sellers and vice-versa. Sellers' reputations could easily be tarnished if they did not deliver quality and value for the exchange. Compare that with the situation today when a major global automobile company can attempt to cheat on emissions controls to fake mileage gains just to boost sales. Smith's observations in Wealth of a Nation were only a tiny part of the picture. He also wrote a treaties called The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he pointed out the social obligations that come with being a human being! Smith mistakenly believed that humans do not have inborn moral sentiments, but he correctly noted that the development of moral sentiments depended on humans being in a social network of similarly motivated individuals. Sapience theory asserts that moral sentiment, and hence conscience and hyper-sociality is a natural function of the brain of human beings.

Human beings, unlike ants in a colony, are autonomous thinkers but not autonomous doers (of course there are anomalous cheaters, but they are the exception, not the rule, and human evolution has produced mechanisms for identifying and dealing with cheaters). Through mechanisms of negotiation, debate, and discussion mediated by language, human beings in groups come to resolutions of differences and decide on actions to take. This is normal politics, not the dysfunctional kind that we observe today, but the kind that has been the basis for successful decision making for human beings for the majority of their existence. The kind of political process we see today is an extremely poor reflection of normal collective decision processing. It is the combined result of non-scalability and the remnants of individualistic selfishness (due to the general low level of sapience). In the natural form of political process not everyone need be particularly happy with the final decision, but they are motivated by moral sentiment to support whatever the group has decided. Dissension and passive resistance hurt the group. There was and is a strong selection pressure for that kind of attitude to be subdued for the good of the whole group.

The phenomenon we witness today in the US political process has become motivated by hatred, distrust, and ignorance. But it is not the norm for human beings operating in a natural society limited in size to that in which each individual can know all of the others. What we see is the result of mental illness brought on by the stresses of over population and over complexity of modern life, aggravated by the decline in free energy. The latter factor is contributing (causing) the slowing of economic growth and hence triggering responses of competition for shrinking resources. Everyone “feels” this background condition even if they are ignorant of how energy flows and wealth production actually works. And it brings forth primitive emotions — the non-sapient mammalian, if not reptilian, brain.

The current state of human evolution suggests that we were well on the way to a collectivist mind set, which we call hyper-sociality, going into the Agricultural Revolution. However, there remain remnants of individualist thinking left over from our early Homo predecessors. And those ways of thinking remain with many of us today. If these people cannot change their minds and realize that we all progress together or all fall as individuals then they will be a major drag on any attempts to realize a future for the species.

So every indication in our evolution and current state suggests that the solution to our conundrum is in the community. That is, we will succeed as communities of autonomous thinkers but will always be collective doers.

Communities

Human beings (Homo sapiens) and their generic predecessors have always been communal animals. Our survival has always depended on being eusocial. Our success as a species, compared with those predecessors, has been based on the degree of eusociality that we have followed. We have language to help us cooperate to make collective decisions that have led to our out-competing all other species of Homo. We have basic moral sentiments that compel us to cooperate. We also have more evolvable brains that allow us to participate in coordinated behaviors. That is, we are capable of organizing hierarchical cybernetic governance structures that permit much larger groups to act as a unity (see below).

Successful societies in the future are most likely going be comprised of loose aggregates of small communities living in regions that are the least subject to chaotic weather. As the amount of CO₂ emissions continue unabated (indeed seemingly accelerating) the range of such regions is getting smaller by the year. The carrying capacity of the Ecos for humanity is also shrinking rapidly. As I have written, the amount of human habitat needed to live in relative steady state is something like four hectares of mixed use land per captia (see: What is a feasible living situation for humanity). This is considerably more area than is needed under industrial agriculture, including forestry and mineral extraction, because the assumption is that those activities will not be subsidized by fertilizers and fossil fuel-driven machinery.

Communities will need to learn how to be more self-sufficient. I have been advocating for years that anyone who is paying attention should learn and adopt permaculture living (systems principles applied to holistic living). I think the most successful communities of the future will be based on this approach. Food and water security is, of course, the number one priority, followed by shelter, clothing, and fuel. People can live in subsistence of course. But if successful with permaculture there is an opportunity to do more than subsist. It is possible to address the full range of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs right up to and including self-actualization. [Interested readers may want to take a look at what I wrote way back when: The Path].

Why small communities and loose aggregation (e.g. trade)? Humans are naturally inclined to feel their cooperative attitudes in small groups of people they personally know. The feasibility of large organizations and large “states” comes from another natural propensity in humans, to defer to wiser elders, or, in other words, authority (see Governance below). In prehistoric times, in small groups, authority was vested in age, in experience, in wisdom. We are genetically programmed to acquiesce to perceived authority. Living in small groups allows every individual to become familiar with every other individual and to form bonds, the basis for cooperation.

When groups get larger it becomes difficult to really know everyone. And if individuals are autonomous thinkers there are likely to be difficulties in communications. Natural languages are chock full of ambiguities so that mere conversation with someone that you know only slightly is bound to raise issues that are not easily resolved. Not even market mechanisms (below) are sufficient to assure cooperation. Larger groups can exist only when there is a hierarchy of authority that can act to coordinate activities and resolve disputes.

Economics

The economic subsystem of society is an extension of the somatic physiology and resource acquisition of individuals integrated into a community process. Or at least that is what it should be. An economic system is one that helps the community acquire the needed resources from the environment, manages the work processes that operate on those resources to produce specific products or support the provision of services, allocates the produced wealth equitably, efficiently, and effectively, and sees to it that wastes are appropriately expelled to sinks that can handle them. This is exactly the same thing that happens inside single organisms (even single cells) to maintain life and health. It is just now implemented by exosomatic processes that use on energy and material resources beyond just food. It is the physiology of the community and should be organized accordingly.

When the society is comprised of the loosely coupled aggregates of communities previously described then the situation reflects a similar pattern to what we see in multicellular organisms, wherein the communities play the roles of single cells or tissues, and the larger, intercommunicating society is the whole organism. Communities can specialize in larger scale processes, one can specialize in fiber production, another in vegetable production, and so on, assuming there are regional variations in basic resources. This is exactly the kinds of communities and societies that humans have participated in ever since the onset of agricultural lifestyles and possibly even before. It was that way, and needs to be that way again, because this is the natural organization of social systems. When viewed as extended physiology it is easier to understand as whole systems. Imagine for a moment what would happen in your body if some small group of cells decided they would confiscate as much of the resources as they possibly could to the detriment of others rather than there be a fair distribution of resources to all of your cells. This, of course, is the disease we call cancer in the body. And it is exactly the same when small groups of individuals and organizations decide they are going to obtain ludicrous profits to the detriment of others.

Currently our lives are ruled by corporations and the neoliberal capitalist mindless system based on growth and profits. Most of us can't even imagine a different world except for the historical precedents of serfdom, slavery, sweatshop workers, etc. Ergo, we persist in thinking the modern age of capitalist corporations is not only normal, it must be the best. It is true that in our generally low sapient consciousness we are getting our basic needs met with convenience and speed by the way corporations produce consumer goods and services. Not even the CEOs of modern financial institutions have a clue as to how much damage they are doing to the environment and the psyches of billions of people. They can even rationalize that they are “doing God's work.” [Of course God promised not to bring another flood to wipe out evil men, so maybe bankers were invented by God as an alternative means of destruction!]

The main mechanism employed by modern economies and ideologically believed in is the market. The market is the matrix in which any set of material or service trades are made. Markets exist within living systems and are the basis for what is called the on-demand production/consumption process. Products are produced by specialist subsystems in response to demand signals generated by other specialist subsystems that use those products. For example mitochondria produce ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in response to the concentration of ADP (adenosine diphosphate - an ATP missing one phosphate radical) in the cell's cytosol. The latter is an indication of energy usage in the cell as a whole and the mitochondria are programmed to pump out more ATP (assuming the availability of carbohydrate inputs to the metabolic process) in response. Similarly, the stomach will secrete more hydrochloric acid into its interior in response to the amount of dense proteins present for digestion. Living systems produce only as much product as is required to maintain overall process. They do not work for a profit and they do not market their wares in hopes of selling more!

In a simpler, local market a buyer that needs something can ask a producer to make it and offer to pay an amount of money to cover the cost (including income for the producer) on an as-needed basis. Imagine a blacksmith who can make horseshoes waiting until a cowboy requests some for a horse. If there is high overall demand for horseshoes the blacksmith will be kept busy and receive a steady income from production. If the demand is filled, the blacksmith can turn his talents to other productions where needs exist in order to maintain his income.

Our current goods and services markets have become exceedingly complicated. For one thing, because of the way we aggregate capital, the facilities for production seem to need to be continuously employed making product. One argument for this is that if there has been a historical on-going need for the product, then production in anticipation of a near-term sale is warranted. Products can be stored in inventories until sold. The problem with this is that the pressure from capitalists to produce on-going profit shifted the perspective from sensitivity to demand to creation of demand. Marketing went from simply providing potential customers with information about availability and quality to messages meant to entice people to buy products for psychological reasons, e.g. prestige, sex appeal, etc. The more distance between buyers and sellers in social space, that is as social groups got larger and more detailed knowledge of the seller by the buyer was lost, the more difficult it became to make judgements about the actual value of products and services. Complexification due to higher technologies didn't help either.

The problem with markets as mediators of value and moderators of distribution is that as buyers and sellers become more distributed in social space, and as products and services become more complex and specialized, the information flow becomes distorted. Knowledge, the basis for making sound decisions, becomes less certain. No one really knows what anything is truly worth in terms of a price relevant to real costs based on value added. The market becomes a free-for-all and the prices are set by a feeding frenzy psychology; whatever the buyers are willing to pay!

Economists and capitalists love this. It guarantees full employment for the former and maximum profits for the latter. Unfortunately, society is worse off for it. Unfettered, or so-called “free” markets are simply not able to handle the information load or support honest evaluation of goods and services when the social milieu gets beyond a certain level of complexity. Markets as sole arbiters of economic activity are not tenable when societies reach the level of complexity we have today.

In fairness I should point out that the buyers are just as guilty of getting us into this mess as are sellers. Buyers respond to the herd mentality too easily. They are willing to accept as a mark of value whatever they believe everyone else thinks that value should be. They are then willing to pay it. And this just perpetuates the problem.

This does not mean that markets are useless, even in very complex societies. Quite the contrary. I believe markets are essential to the healthy operation of an economic system, for the same reason that natural markets in living systems are essential. They are about the communication of need and supply through channels that operate at the level of production and use. This makes the whole system extremely efficient. But they only work if there is another layer of mediation of information flow that insures the validity of information in the market. That is what is largely missing today.

While I claim that effective mediation is missing it is not that there haven't been tendencies to address this. Our social system is in the throes of evolution. What we currently think of as government regulations on market activities (hated by libertarians and conservatives in general and completely misunderstood by liberals) are reactive attempts to ensure the mediation needed after recognizing that distortions (lies) are part and parcel to complex markets. Government policies are enacted to close barn doors long after the horses have escaped. What proof do I have? The existence of Wall Street rich dudes for starters. [Financial markets are the most esoteric and complex of markets in the world. They do not deal in actual goods or even normal kinds of services. Rather they deal in wholly invented “products” and attendant services that have no longer got a basis in physical reality. Once upon a time, financial instruments were largely based on real asset holdings, like a production plant or a house. Today they are based primarily on promises and algorithms!]

The entire concept of consumption needs to be refined to recognize that the only short-term consumption applies to food and water. Clothing and tools of various sorts may get worn out from use, but they should persist over the intermediate time scale of years to decades. The idea of manufacturing something that is meant to wear out quickly to keep sales up should be viewed for what it is, sinful (in the social sense). Long-term assets such as homes should serve for several generations. They will likely revert to abodes for extended family occupancy. The concept of “trading” up in assets will have to go completely.

Personal or family income is just that needed to pay for the basic needs of families. The major portion of income will in all likelihood come from the family members being directly involved in food production and preserving. That is a basic income. If someone is talented at manufacturing goods or providing services they may get paid for those, but paid a fair cost-based price. In fact all non-food income would most likely have to come from a pool of group income.

Governance

Every complex adaptive system employs a governance subsystem to ensure that all of the component subsystems are behaving according to the overall schema of structures and functions required for the proper behavior of the whole system. That behavior is determined by the system's fit in its environment. That is, in order to not be selected against in the world, the system has to perform according to a purpose that is imposed by the environment or larger meta-system's needs. The system needs to produce products or services that benefit one or more other entities in the environment or negative feedback loops will develop that can disrupt. The governance subsystem has evolved to manage that behavior to obtain that end.

Systems that don't have to move around, like plants, are generally governed by internal signals that are pre-balanced and do not require extra information processing. Systems like animals that need to move (as a general rule) require much more in the way of a governance subsystem, which includes brain, ganglia (and associated communications wiring), and endocrine functions. Higher order animals that have more complex life cycles and thus more degrees of freedom in behavioral choices require multiple levels of governance. The fundamental problem of all such systems is the overall coordination of internal processes among themselves (logistical), the coordination of the whole system with other entities and conditions in the environment (tactical), and having a long-term “plan” for behaviors that will lead to fitness (strategic). For all species below the level of human complexity the latter is largely determined by evolutionary “decisions.”

Animals that live in colonies or groups require a higher level of governance than just that for the individual. Colony or herd animals most often have evolutionarily developed inter-individual communications systems that allow individuals to “cooperate” with one another. Think of a school of fish or flock of birds in flight. No master fish or bird controls the activities of the others. Simple rules of maneuvering in response to others moves are hard-wired into their brains.

Social groups are those that require some additional governance mechanisms for more complex behaviors. In all such cases, e.g. a group of chimpanzees, the programs for cooperation are still hard-wired, but the degree of autonomous thinking has also risen such that different individuals can have different wants or needs and disputes can break out. It is not uncommon in order to maintain equanimity in the group that there is some kind of hierarchy of dominance wherein the alpha male or female takes on the role of authority to break up fights. Of course they may also use that authority for personal gain!

With human groups we see a quantum leap in complexity and degrees of freedom of behavior of the individuals. In small groups a relatively simple form of group governance is feasible. For early Holocene groups of hunter-gatherers this came in the form of wise elders making strategic decisions, those most knowledgeable about game and vegetable food were in charge of organizing forays, and those most talented in making tools, clothing, and shelters took care of those duties. Specialization, while still a bit weak, allowed humans to distribute the kinds of decisions (tactical, logistical, and strategic) to persons most qualified to make them.

When groups started getting bigger and after the advent of agriculture and settled living, the decisions became more complex in all three categories. Witness the emergence of what we start to recognize as civil governance, a hierarchy of authority evolved to maintain the fitness of the group (village, town, city, state, etc.)

Any human group that has a purpose has a need to have an explicit governance structure. Humans, as eusocial creatures, have reached their current level of group dynamics through natural selection by group fitness. And what makes humans so successful has been the degree of adaptability that groups of cooperators have. Humans were able to spread out of Africa and adapt to many different environments by working together. Cooperation, however, is insufficient when the group gets large. Hence the hierarchical authority structure/function emerged.

The nature of the hierarchical cybernetic governance subsystem (more below) is not only applied to social groups but to artificially organized groups such as organizations, like corporations or NGOs. The layered distribution of decision types, and the attendant information channel infrastructure supporting them, is the most natural way to manage the organization so that it is maintaining its capability to perform properly to maintain its purpose. This pattern of governance organization is found in living groups, designed organizations, and in combination, in large territorial groupings, states and nations.

History has recorded a plethora of groupings and organizations (e.g. religions) that have all followed the pattern. Today we have nations and international corporations/NGOs that all follow the pattern still. There are, however, two problems with the way governance is evolving so far. First the architecture and implementation of the governments of nations are poor shadows of the kind of architecture we find in natural systems below nations and states. The impetus to have a hierarchical cybernetic system is there because of the way such systems auto-organize. But the organization process is still in its infancy for this scale of complexity. The second problem has to do with the decision-making competence of the component decision processors operating in every node of the subsystem. We human beings are not yet evolved enough in our sapience to base our decisions on wisdom as opposed to self-interests and ideologically biased concepts.

The United States of America, Russia, China, India, are all very large countries in terms of population and geographic size. They are the antithesis of everything I have covered above. But, in reality, most countries are too big, too complex, and too diverse to manage as single units using current political and governance theories. The reason is the latter are based on trial and error explorations of how to decide how to manage and how to implement said management (auto-organization in process). And they are all wrong (so far). Or rather I should say they are all very partial understandings of what a large social system requires for harmonious and equitable (to its citizens) management. In other words, all of the current government models being followed in the world today are simply not up to the task.

What makes me so sure of this claim? It turns out the answer is quite simple. Every single governance theory that has been advanced throughout history, and the political process theories that enact them, are pale shadows of systems theories of governance; they are but explorations of the evolutionary space of possibilities. Systems theories of governance are generalized theories that apply to all systems regardless of complexity. They are abundantly exemplified in nature and their principles are clearly identified in living systems from cells to groups of organisms [some “organizations” such as corporations, small businesses, and the military have implemented many aspects of the hierarchical cybernetic theory]. But no actual government, historical or current, has managed to implement them fully. What one can see, I think quite clearly, is that all societies have been undergoing evolutionary processes toward such implementation. There is little doubt in my mind that, for example, the current form of representative democracy in parliamentarian and congressional systems is an evolutionary step toward a governance structure that fulfills the requirements of a natural hierarchical cybernetic governance system. All of these experiments have properly segmented decision types and functions within the hierarchical layers into executive (execute the decisions), legislative (make the decision), and judiciary (monitor the execution and provide corrective decisions when needed). Given more time to experiment with governance (and political processes) I suspect humans might discover more successful forms. Unfortunately time is up now.

The essence of a governance system is the hierarchy of decision types that constitute managing the work processes of the system as a whole. Above I covered the market subsystem that mediates communications between work processes. This is the basic matrix of communications, but is subject to many distortions (including outright lying by human, less-than-sapient agents). A governance system, or hierarchy of authority and management is required in order to mediate complexity. As social systems grow in size and complexity they require coordination in order to compensate for weaknesses in cooperation. The latter are inevitable, as noted above, as distances in social space between agents increases.

The governance subsystem provides levels of coordination to the market substrate. Within living systems additional layers of control are provided so that the simple markets do not fail. For example, in the ATP example given above, cells have more elaborate checks and balances through enzymatic processes that monitor the ATP/ADP proportions relative to other energy demands (anticipated demands) and can modulate the normal regulation if needed. This pattern of supra-regulation can be found throughout metabolism and multicellular physiology so we know it is a requisite mechanism. Unfortunately this has not yet been recognized at the level of governance of whole social systems. [Part of this problem is the abysmal lack of knowledge of people who study law and politics of the laws of biology. Lawyers and politicians tend to see the world through very limited lenses in my opinion. And that is what we have to change!]

There is an additional consideration to take into account regarding governance subsystems. The larger and more complex a system, like a nation, the more resources are needed to support the governance infrastructure itself. That is, more overhead has to go to governing by expanding the coordination level, in particular. This means increasing the number of logistical and tactical coordinators (span of control problem) but also increasing the depth of the layers with coordinators of coordinators (middle managers). The cost of all this extra governance (management) can possibly grow nonlinearly with the size of the operational layer of the society. It is why countries that are complexifying need to continually up the tax rates. Complicating this is the fact that more complexity means that the average citizen has less visibility into the workings of government and thus do not understand exactly why governance costs so much more. Tax revolts are common for large nations (and states). As an example of this in the animal world, the brain is the core governance structure for the body. In reptiles the brain consumes not much more than about 2% of the energy consumed by the whole animal, for most mammals and birds it goes as high as 8%. For great apes it goes to something like 13%. Humans' brains, however, consume roughly 20-25% of the total energy. This is because our brains are doing a lot more information processing than even our closest animal cousins. The human brain is larger and has a lot more work to do.

Aside from the ignorance of the populace to understand the overhead issues generated by more complex societies creating problems for governments raising revenues to cover the increased costs, if overall resource inputs to societies are constrained or diminishing then it is physically impossible to maintain a level of governance infrastructure needed to manage the social system. If the citizenry of a country are feeling the pinch of declining free energy per capita, for example, then they are even more inclined to rebel against tax increases. Governments, and Greece is an excellent example, are forced to go to outside sources for loans just to operate let alone increase their functionality. [This is essentially Joseph Tainter's argument in Collapse of Complex Societies.]

The current state of affairs with respect to humans as decision agents is the second major problem for well functioning governance structures. We humans are still motivated as much by animal spirits as by rational thought. We are still capable of serving our baser needs serving ourselves before others. We are still enough individualistic and manipulative that when making decisions that impact other members of the group we are likely to consider our own benefits before those of the group. At least, there are enough members of our species who are of this ilk that it creates significant problems for a well functioning governance system. The rest (which may be the majority) are followers and, it pains me to put it this way, too ignorant to question the decisions made by those in government. In much of the world today the self-serving, narcissistic personalities have invaded the halls of government and corporations (think CEO pay). They have been successful in their takeover of governance because the rest of the population sits passively by and lets them get away with it.

That is where the higher level of consciousness comes into play. Without it, human civilization is doomed because the current forms of governance with ill conceived architectures and incompetent decision agents cannot make human civilization fit for survival in the Ecos. What proof do you need? What is your understanding of global warming and climate change? What is your understanding of biodiversity loss? What is your understanding of population density effects? If you have any understanding at all of any of these you will also understand that there is abundant evidence that our governments are failing horrendously. They are failing to lead the citizens toward non-destructive behavior. Or they failed to do so, or even recognize the situation, back when it could have been possible to do something that would mitigate those destructive behaviors. Of course a few of the countries or regions that are directly experiencing the threats of climate change already, such as Tuvalu a small Polynesian nation that is disappearing beneath the rising sea levels, have come to recognize the threats directly, so are turning attention to the problem. Twenty years ago their main concern was how to grow their per capita incomes like everyone else.

The Ecos is starting to show us just how unfit we are as a subsystem. The purpose we have been working to fulfill is not that of the Ecos (what can we contribute to the whole world), but rather how can we exploit whatever we want from the Ecos since we have generally viewed ourselves as above nature? That view came from the epitome of ignorance. It was reinforced by our cleverness allowing us to invent what we needed for convenience and speed. We lacked wisdom to question whether our collective view represented reality or not.

The Age of Systems Awakening, if it is to come about, will need the majority of the population to become sufficiently savvy about governance to practice a true democracy. What we have now is a sham. The blind are being led by the dishonest. Unless we can come to realize that we will need a much better design for governance and find a way to assure that the decision agents are superior in terms of sapience we are doomed to being selected against, as individuals, as a species, and possibly as a genus.

And in Conclusion...

Hence the big question. Can human beings as they are presently constituted rise to the level of consciousness needed to enact these kinds of changes? My research into sapience suggests not. On the other hand, the human brain is an evolvable system. Through the process of learning it is capable of changing its set of beliefs. It is capable of learning new beliefs. Is it possible that the average human mind can come to hold beliefs that are more in accord with reality? This I honestly have to say I do not know. The evidence I have looked at so far suggests not. Yet I am strongly motivated to hope that there is some part of our humanness that is capable of transcending these mundane beliefs. There are those humans who are able to cognize the reality of what our condition really is and they might lead the transition to a more sapient society.

What we do know about human learning suggests that even something as complex and deep as a world view can be changed by trauma. Existential challenges are known to cause a few people to completely change their understandings and motivations. So, perhaps, that is what it will take for humanity to chart a new course. As I have written for several years now, I see the path as winding through a complete collapse of civilization — a very traumatic experience for any survivors — and an evolutionary bottleneck. With some luck and a little bit of foresight the survivors might be higher sapients or better capable of attaining higher consciousness through learning. Let us hope that a surviving human population has the capacity to adapt not just to the conditions of a very different world, but to the needs of organizing themselves for becoming fit in whatever environment they are in. That organization will necessarily include figuring out the real purpose that the human social system can fulfill in the Ecos. We cannot just be a population of consumers/polluters and expect these functions to provide a service to the Ecos so that we will be rewarded with a judgement of fitness. Our society needs to have a purpose that is helpful to the Ecos as a whole or it will eventually be selected against. It is conceivable that part of that purpose may be to become a strategic decision layer in the hierarchical cybernetic governance of the planet (stewardship). But that seems unlikely given the current state of the average human as decision maker.

A future, new society will have to be based on quite different principles than those that guide our current ways of living in the world. Human beings will have to abandon many current beliefs and ideologies that are popular or attractive, but for the wrong reasons. They will have to adopt many attitudes and understandings that are currently only poorly received and not at all understood properly. Do we have the capacity to learn these, or do we need to undergo further biological evolution in order to accomplish this? That to me is still an open question even though so much of my research suggests the later. I have always said, I hope I am wrong.

A New Human Society - Part 4

Higher Levels of Consciousness

Defining Consciousness

Let's start with a relatively simple definition of consciousness. Let us say that consciousness is the property of a system that allows it to be aware of its environment. Moreover, consciousness allows a system to encode what it perceives into memories that constitute mental models, which it uses to interpret what it perceives and use the information to make intelligent decisions. It follows that higher orders of consciousness are then capacities to be aware of larger and “temporally longer” scales of the environment and make smarter decisions. I wrote a series on consciousness to attend my series on sapience. I'm afraid the simple definition gets complicated rather quickly. Even so, the fundamental idea is still simple. We human beings are capable of attending to elements in a complex environment only to a certain capacity. Our environment in the modern era has grown incredibly complex and extended. The average human being is seemingly incapable of dealing with (think about) issues that cover the globe or extend in time to a future century. If they were, they would grasp the significance of climate change for their grandchildren and the degree to which the refugee crisis in MENA will impact the rest of the world. Instead the typical response is xenophobia.

The human brain is limited in what can be considered within working memory at any given time, hence the limitations on active awareness of broader scopes of time and space. But the brain evolved to have an additional capacity that does not depend directly on awareness. A vast majority of thinking actually goes on in what we have come to call the subconscious mind. When we are not called to attend closely to some thing or another, our brains are busy at work running multiple complex models of what parts of the world we have had some experience. When we sleep at night, our brains are resolving conflicts and dumping useless memories that don't integrate with those models. Over a person's lifetime they build up a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge about the world that provides a basis for what we now realize are out intuitions and judgements. If we have been good in constructing these models during our lives, then they are reasonably good at anticipating future states of affairs and our intuitions and judgements are reasonably good. This is what we call wisdom.

Wisdom isn't the same thing as rational thinking when done in conscious working memory. For example, when one is trying to decide on a course of action based on some set of facts and conditions, they are using their best rational thinking (which, however, is still constrained by the facts they have and their perceptions of conditions, which may be faulty even if their thinking is relatively sound). Wisdom works on a very long-term time scale and produces background guidance to our rational thinking through judgements and intuitions that are barely perceived in conscious thought. The same is true for affective states of mind that operate to nudge rational thinking as demonstrated by Antonio Damasio's work. Emotional guidance works to speed up rational choices by pruning the decision tree based on positive or negative valences for the choices themselves. Wisdom can slow down rational decision making, but generally helps speed it up but based on the “expertise” encoded in the elaborate and largely veridical models operating in the subconscious. That is the thumbnail sketch of sapience.

Though humans have this capacity for subconscious thinking it appears to be relatively weak in most people. That is why we are in trouble. Wisdom should improve our rational thinking by providing good guidance to our conscious thinking and even damping down or modulating our emotional inputs. But if it is weakly developed then our decision making will not be as competent as it should be in tackling the kinds of problems we humans face.

Consciousness, then, not only consists of the capacity to be aware of what is in working memory (the stuff we see and think in language) but to process information subconsciously as well. It takes sapience as well as cleverness and emotions to produce a fully competent mind.

Consciousness and Ideologies

In the broadest sense of the term, we will always have some form of ideology because these are in the mind. The central question is how valid are the ideologies we have? In Part 3 I called into question several commonly held ideologies. Up until the modern age the basis for ideologies has been reflection and invention; create a story that seems to explain observations based on what we know of the world. During the development of the modern age our understanding of how the world works and, thus, explanations for what causes the phenomena we observe, has grown exponentially. Moreover, many of the dots have been connected across wide spectra of phenomena so that we can observe the internal consistency of these understandings. In other words, the kind and amount of reasonably veridical knowledge that could be brought to bear in constructing valid ideologies makes it now possible to re-examine older, traditional ideologies and throw out the parts that are clearly not valid, keep the parts that retain some truth, and remold the ideology to reflect reality as we now understand it.

Previously, ideologies such as covered in the last part, arose without a great deal of understanding regarding the systemic nature of phenomena observed. Hence they could be taken as true as long as there was some level of internal consistency within their subject framework. For example, we saw how the economic theories of markets arose from simple observations of markets and economic dynamics in a simpler time (distorted unfortunately by budding economists yearning to be just like the physicists and have mathematical theories govern their work). With what we know today we can replace those older theories with ones that are valid based on science, like biophysical economics, and reform our concepts of how the economy works. In other words, we can produce new ideologies that assist us in our mental processes.

What we cannot do, however, is let those ideologies attain the stature of revealed truth status. We cannot become religious about what we believe to be true. That is where higher levels of total consciousness come into play. When one is sufficiently wise, one can be aware of how their ideologies were formed and recognize them as provisionally true until new evidence suggests a time to change. Unwise people cannot do this. Once an ideology is formed and reinforced socially it is nearly impossible for a lower sapient individual to change their minds.

What it comes down to is the question of what causes the majority of people to have low levels of sapience? Is it nature or nurture, or a combination of both? If the latter, how much of a boost can come from better nurture?

Raising Consciousness

The question I posed is: “Can the average human being rise to a level of consciousness to see the above issues as currently problematic and then take action to find a new way of living in the world?” That is what it is going to take in order to obtain some kind of sustainable society in the Ecos.

Indiscriminate growth, profit taking, conveniences and speed, all supported by outmoded ideologies and deriving from our deep biological history are now producing completely unsustainable conditions. Global warming and climate change, peak and declining fossil fuel resources, destruction of soils and drinkable water supplies, and the list goes on, are all resulting from humans continuing to believe they have a right to those behaviors (and those beliefs). And thus those beliefs are going to be the cause of our extinction. Can human beings change their beliefs based on the perceptions of reality and let go their historically derived beliefs? It will, of course take much more than merely changing beliefs. Remember those beliefs have their roots in our biological-mandated behaviors.

Consciousness is the “capacity to be aware of reality.” But reality is perceived differently by different capacities. A worm is aware, but only of the soil through which it crawls and the chemical senses that tell it which way is food or danger. Fish are aware of more of the complexities of their environments, like a coral reef, and what other entities are moving around in that environment; which ones are food or which ones will make them food. Dogs are aware of themselves, of specific other dogs and people with whom they interact regularly, as well as their wants and desires (to play or run after the mail truck). And humans are aware of all of that plus their own thoughts formed into narratives of their lives. We are conscious of the future to some extent, of environments not immediately visible, through our memories and reasoning, and most importantly, what others around us want and feel and think (again to some extent).

In my writing on sapience I posit that this level of consciousness, while a breakthrough in biological evolution, is now limiting us in terms of being aware of the really big picture of the world. This means not just being aware of the weather anomalies and relating them to global warming, but actually grasping how each of us individually and acting as a collective, operating on our ideologies and giving in to our biological mandates (which somehow seem to provide justification for what we do) are the cause of these anomalies. Moreover, how we are the cause of the suffering that is going to come as the conditions we've set in motion progress in the future must be crystal clear in our understanding. I do not currently believe that the average human being has the brain machinery to transcend this level of consciousness. I believe this based on what I see as the evidence to date. I want to be wrong.

Doing the right thing takes more than just a higher level of consciousness to “see” the situation, it also takes a conscience, a motivation to want to do the right thing. This too is part of the sapience picture. Sapience includes natural moral sentiment and the constellation of attributes attending hyper-sociality.

Is it possible that some kind of learning can take place that raises the level of consciousness of people in general so that they become aware of the total picture and start to take actions accordingly? I have been spending no small amount of time pushing the science of systems as just such a framework. The thesis is that people who have learned the principles and methods of systems science will become systems thinkers, which is what I believe is part of higher sapience. This is what I hope can be done even though I am skeptical that 1) we can turn the education system around to teach systems science, and 2) even if exposed to systems thinking a significant portion of the population will experience sufficiently raised consciousness to make a difference. Moreover, I do not believe one can learn to have a conscience and become hyper-social. Mark me in the pessimists’ column on that count.

On the other hand, if humans have brains that are more evolvable than I have been giving credit, then something like a new social system might result. This will require a new age and mental framework; a new world view must emerge. What might argue in favor of the possibility is that we have seen new world views emerge in the ages described above. As our collective knowledge of how things actually did work grew, especially following the Enlightenment, our beliefs about the meaning of everything also changed and became more encompassing. We have evolved expanded world views before, presumably with the same brains that we had at the end of the Pleistocene. Moreover, according to Steven Pinker (The Better Angles of Our Nature) there has been a regular dropping in rates of violence from prehistoric times to now. Could this be evidence of an expanding conscience? Is the fact that we are able to operate cooperatively in a global economic network evidence that our sociality has likewise expanded?

What I do wonder about, however, is whether this next transcendence, the one needed to save our butts from our own folly, might require a greater step up in brain power (in sapience) than we could muster by learning alone. One persuasive argument against our being able to successfully learn to be more sapient is the evidence of how many groups of people over history have tried to set up communities based on sentiments that align with those I have just alluded to. Communes have often been tried throughout history since the advent of the industrial age. People tried to not be selfish. They tried to not take advantage of their brethren. They tried to live simple lives. Sometimes they have succeeded to some degree. But more often the communes and their cultures have either failed outright or evolved to become more like the extant cultures that surrounded them. Sentiments and desires aside, we seem prone to become exactly what we have become. To my way of viewing the situation there is little evidence that sapience (and consciousness) can be learned. But what other options do we have? For my part I will proceed with my development of systems science and engineering education on the hope that it might help.

In the last installment (Part 5) I will explore what sort of social arrangements might be possible if the majority of people were to somehow elevate their consciousness and adopt systems thinking as they reorganize societies to become fit. If people are able to learn to think more broadly and deeply, and our social milieu is able to instill this kind of thinking (it can't be just a matter for schools), then we might stand a chance of minimizing the pain of a transition to a completely new age.

A New Human Society - Part 3

Why We Do What is Wrong — Holding Ideologies

Part 1 — asking the question: “How Can the Human Social System Survive?”
Part 2 — looking at some of the things that we are doing that are wrong in this age.

World Views

Some writers have broken history into four or five sequential ages and their dominant world views, depending on when in the historical record they started looking. The earliest age for humanity was the “prehistoric” or hunter-gatherer age before agriculture began to play into the organization of human social structures. Of course, technically this age is not strictly “historical” as there is no writen records to examine. There are however many good archiological and anthropological signs now known that give us a reasonable account of what humans were doing and possibly thinking prior to written records. In this age the human mental framework had to have been basically how to survive from day to day. The second age, developing during the agricultural revolution, is sometimes referred to as the “traditional” age, referring to the mental life of humans in which we began to wonder where we came from, what we were, especially as compared with animals, and what did it all mean. Starting from a base of ignorance of how the world worked (though humans had considerable knowledge of what those workings were) they began to use their imaginations to create stories about our origins and what forces controlled the workings of the world, mostly gods and spirits. This was the beginning of “belief in belief”, or taking as being true stories that we made up in an attempt to explain phenomena where we could not directly experience causal predecessors.

The traditional age gave rise to the “classical” age, a time, roughly three thousand years ago (up to about 300 AD when the so-called Middle Ages, a time of stagnation in thinking, began) when a few individuals began to wonder about the very act of having beliefs and what it meant for a belief to be true of the world. Classical thinkers built upon the mental structures created in the traditional age. Gods were still often implicated in the events that took place in the world, but there was a new sophistication in the formation of ideologies. Thinkers had discovered various “logics” and some early mathematics with which they tried to discern and explain how the world worked. Whole systems (or schools) of thought were constructed in which one test of truth was the extent to which the parts of the system were internally consistent with the logic or mathematics employed. This was the age of “belief in complex and internally consistent beliefs”. Of course there were many different systems, each seemingly internally consistent, so there were lots of “debates” over which truths were really true. This was the beginning of philosophies.

The Middle Ages, from the end of the classical age to roughly the end of the 17^th century are generally characterized as a time of stagnation in thought, dominated primarily by religious doctrine. Except for some efforts in Europe to preserve writings and thoughts from the classical age, nothing of great consequence (except wars) is thought to have been happening. Then we come to the age of reason, the Enlightenment, spurred by successes in empirical studies of natural phenomena that suggested natural causes were responsible for natural phenomena even if they could not be directly perceived with the senses. It seemed that this was a mental framework that would lessen, if not completely displace, ideologically-based beliefs. The scientific process emerged and matured giving rise to the “belief in a true truth”. Unfortunately humans are not computers and much of our reasoning turns out to be motivated and guided by passions after all. Thus belief in science as the only way to gain knowledge became its own ideology, what has been called “scientism.” Holders of this belief, like all holders of ideological dogmas, meant well. They clearly saw the truth (in their minds) and insisted that everyone else should follow their lead. This dogged belief is still with us today in our education system where we insist that every student must learn STEM subjects or else they will not be successful in life.

Thus we come to the modern age, where we have transformed all of that (provisionally) true knowledge we gained from science into machines, have created a social system composed of producers and consumers, and have even suggested that we've come to “the end of history.” The ideologies of our day are focused on the political economy. We harbor certain beliefs about how we should govern ourselves (e.g. democracy), what our God-given (or inalienable) rights are as human beings, and how to manage our resources, produce wealth, and live happy lives consuming whatever we can. The “American Dream” is the epitome of ideology based on stories going back to the traditional age and only slightly modified by the evolution of newer age cultures and mental frameworks. We still believe in magic!

In the last post I mentioned a few items that are action-inducing ideologies, such as beliefs in progress and competition as the only driver of progress. In this post I want to provide a few more examples of the more egregious ideologies that underly our justifications for much of what we are doing that is harming the planet and our own psyches.

Money as Wealth

Money was an invention that took hold sometime after the early empires had emerged. Exchange between individuals and groups had been practiced since prehistoric times when bands exchanged obsidian or other valuable stones (for making tools) for everything from foodstuffs to mates in what we call barter. During the agricultural revolution the trade of grains and goods could not be easily handled in bulk quantities so clever humans turned to abstract symbols etched in clay (first tablets then tokens) to represent amounts of a commodity, first as a means for keeping accounting records of who owned what in the granary, then as an exchange medium for buying and selling the commodities. State-backed coins may have been invented by the Romans who had to make exchanges of all sorts of goods and services among many different cultures they had conquered.

Money has always been just a means of representing the work that went into producing goods and services with a small differential or premium added for relative value in a marketplace of competing buyers and sellers. Money started out as an abstract representation of free energy (exergy), the energy available to do useful work, or emergy, the energy expended in having done useful work. In its use as representing free energy or future work to be done, it could be used to regulate what work would get done in the future. Market decisions about what to buy gave information to producers (and potential producers) about what products or services they should expend their energies on in the future.

Those small premiums (price as compared with raw costs) were the beginning of money-based profits and had the same psychological effect on sellers as the biological-mandated acquisition of excess resources had in pre-money times. Over time, money itself became a new kind of commodity wealth. First because it represented buying power and then, in more recent times, as pure wealth in its own right. In our modern financialized world money has become the end goal and humans (bankers and Wall Street types) have become motivated to do whatever they can to accumulate more of it. They certainly can buy more stuff with what they make (anyone see "The Wolf of Wall Street" movie?) but that isn't the point any more. In the minds of modern neoliberal capitalists, making money IS the point.

The failure to recognize the true purpose of money has given rise to many negative feedback situations. For example, it is the basis for the growing wealth disparity we see happening (yet again) in our societies. The so-called “one percenters” who greedily absorb what little income growth there is today while the middle class and poor all suffer diminishment is an example. Of course, those in the lower classes would love to have more income if they could get it too. “The love of money is the root of all evil,” is often quoted as words of wisdom. Perhaps the lack of wisdom on the part of humans in general is evidenced in the belief that money is wealth.

A significant loss of memory about the original social role of money as a means of signalling value in terms of work to be done or already done meant that human ideology started to think of money as wealth itself. This was probably the most significant loss of consciousness in human history. It made it possible for magical thinking to explode.

Neoliberal Capitalism

Of all of the various economic models that have evolved since the advent of agriculture and settled societies the one that seems to have beaten all others is capitalism. By “beaten”, I mean in terms of providing the most rapid increase in material wealth production. But rapid growth and taking over all of the resources is characteristic of a dysfunctional process we are all too familiar with. The current variety of capitalism (neoliberal) is looking more and more like a cancer than a means to allocate scarce resources.

Capitalism refers to the process of aggregating production resources in order to initiate an expanded production facility. Modern capitalism is the result of an evolution driven by a basic requirement of a growth-oriented economic system. Its roots go back to the days of early agricultural societies when surplus seeds were stored not just for emergency food supplies but to provide stock for starting up newly developed agricultural fields. This was driven, as in figure 1, by the expanding population. More food was needed so new fields were needed to provide it. When the technological advances and money came into play in the early civilizations capital became associated not just with land and seeds, but with tools and organizations. During the mercantile era the need to up-front finance ventures for trade gave an impetus to pooling financial resources (excess profits stored as savings!) in order to invest. Merchants could borrow money from the rich with the promise to pay back in kind and much more upon return and sales of the goods. In an era of belief in economic growth (or growth of economic activity) this made perfect sense. It was easy for people to think, “Not only can we do this but we should do this.” The idea of borrowing resources (that might not be needed to cover tomorrow's deficits) came to be an accepted norm. Since the past had always (generally) proved that investments paid off in extra profits, the normal thought was that this was a good approach to expanding the economic wealth.

Banks got into the business of loaning money for investments. The idea was simple enough. If a bank held assets for a multiplicity of savers and the savers had confidence in the bank's ability to watch over their assets, then it would be possible to skim a small amount from each savings account to package as a loan to a promising entrepreneur. The latter would, if successful, be able to pay back the loan with interest. The banker would make a profit (the interest) and the principal would be returned to the savers' accounts. Fractional reserve banking, as it came to be known, literally created new money where none had previously existed, by a trick of accounting and a time lag between deposits and withdrawals. This also created a new kind of debt, one with risks that had to be taken into account in order to know what sort of interest premium should be charged.

Debt financing has been growing in all aspects of our social system. Governments and central banks created fiat or nominal valued money, which is completely divorced from the energetic realities. They create monetary supply by fiat (think of Janet Yellen and gang at the Fed setting the interest rates). Governments sell “bonds”, a form of borrowing from the buyers, strictly on their “reputations” as reliable payers. The debt created goes on the books, a bond market would seem to validate the credit. But in the end what money is created is no more than a promise to pay back the value of the bond in the future, a future assumed to be in the offing simply because no one grasped that the amount of money that should be in circulation has to be based on the amount of actual free energy that will be available. In theory, a growing economy makes the citizens more wealthy and they pay more taxes on their incomes so that the government has the necessary resources to pay off the bond holders. Except for the last nearly half a century this theory seemed to hold in practice. But since the mid 1970s, as growth started slowing and the potential for paying back principal and interest have diminished governments have kicked the can down the road. They are literally trying to borrow themselves out of debt! Incomes have not increased in real terms, citizens are hostile to anything that smacks of tax increases, and the debt ends up being serviced by new debt. Why? Because the availability of net free energy per capita has been in decline since the 1970s. The economy can't grow any faster than there is energy to do useful work being produced. And it is net free energy not total gross energy (say in barrels of oil equivalents) that is the important difference. As long as economists have focused on gross energy and its nominal costs, they have completely missed this subtlety. Thus they keep believing that government borrowing and spending will somehow turn things around.

The situation is little different for ordinary citizens. As real economic growth started declining in the mid 1970s sellers turned to accepting credit purchasing as a way to keep moving merchandise. Buyers could, instead of putting some money down on a lay-away plan, take the merchandise home with a promise to pay off the debt in a revolving account. The notion of ending up paying interest on accrued interest now being treated as principal was a bit more than most people could figure out. The wheels of industry continued to churn and consumers were going into significant debt outside of the mortgages they used to finance purchasing of a solid asset, a house. Today households run on debt financing of just about everything, including food. The Big Recession of 2009 and the less-than-normal recovery in jobs, income, and wealth have caught the middle class off guard, pushing them down the net wealth ladder. The sub-prime mortgage market was just the most visible poster child for what happens when debt exceeds any feasible means of producing more wealth per capita in the future. And that is the situation we are in today.

As long as there was growth of energy to do useful work, the original relation between money and energy, seemed to be intact. The advent of the age of fossil fuels in the so-called second industrial revolution boosted the availability of net free energy considerably. Combined with advancing technology, which got its boost from WWII, the economies of western countries, and later Japan, grew at a spectacular rate hiding the underlying problem with debt financing. The Great Depression response prior to the war, thanks to Keynes, was for the governments (mostly the US of course) to expand borrowing (selling bonds) and spending that money on public works projects to create jobs to goose the economy. It turned out this only worked because of the jump in free energy from really cheap oil. Oil extraction rates were growing exponentially and US oil companies established substantial control over global reserves, which put the US into the enviable position of enjoying substantial productivity gains, further bolstering their economic and military dominance on the world stage. Very few historians or economists understand the role that abundant oil played in the economic growth of the west after WWII. Nor are they able to understand now the role that declining energy return on energy invested (EROI) has had on net free energy. Starting some time in the mid 1970s the net free energy per capita, globally, started to decline, partly due to declining EROI but also due to continuing growth of the population. The US, much of the rest of the world (including now China and India) began to feel a decline in the rate of growth of GDP, the main measure of economic health in neoclassical economics.

The reason this biophysical reality is important is because of how governments and international corporations reacted to the onset of malaise in the economy. They started relying more heavily on debt financing. More importantly, governments, in a bid to boost GDP growth, began loosening the restrictions on businesses, promoting globalization (find the cheapest labor) through trade agreements, and most importantly, tried to manipulate the availability of money through interest rates on borrowing [I know, the Federal Reserve is independent - want to buy a bridge?] As part of the easing of restrictions on businesses, governments began to ease their oversight of banking and finance. In response, financial wizards began to invent new investment products so bizarre no ordinary investor could understand them. But they were designed to do what everyone had come to understand was most important — they made money. Or at least they seemed to.

Financialization of the economy was the epitome of neoliberal capitalism. Making money by investing in money itself was so stupid it actually made sense to a lot of people. Those in positions where they could actually understand what was going on were loathe to do anything about it. They were the ones who would stand to make the most gains by gaming the money creation system. Government agencies and politicians got to the point of just wanting to keep the wheels on the truck long enough to get their rewards and get out. The the Great Recession of 2009 sent a wake up call that something fundamental was wrong.

The only problem was, no one was either listening or wanting to heed the message. So used to the idea that capitalism was a superior system, so used to the idea that money could make money, so used to the idea that money was true wealth, the people simply could not comprehend that it was all a fairy tale.

The people are asleep at the wheel. They are definitely suffering from an inability to comprehend what is happening to them today. Have we become zombies, walking through the world but unconscious of reality?

Free Markets Solve All Problems

Closely related to capitalism is the notion that the only mechanism needed to solve economic problems is a free market. Back in Adam Smith's day this seemed like a reasonable idea. The publication of Smith's book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 coincided with the start of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence (see below re: individual freedom). Smith had the insight that when merchants, craftsmen, and buyers of goods and services were able to act within a market framework and acting in their own self interest the allocation of resources, if not the distribution of wealth, seemed to happen almost magically, as if an invisible hand were guiding the process.

Of course the marketplace that Smith observed was substantially simpler than we find today. There are several factors in the workings of a market for allocation and distribution that need to be true in order for the market to work efficiently and fairly (see: Could Free Markets Solve all Economic Problems? for more in-depth analysis). Markets work when:

• Buyers have adequate (and truthful) information
• Sellers are restricted to reasonable profit margins
• Competition among buyers is regulated to assure best uses
• Competition among sellers is regulated to assure non-overuse of resources
• They are not expected to provide coordination over larger scales (smaller is better)
• The system as a whole is either in steady-state or growing.

Buyers of goods and services need to be able to see what goes into the goods and services for which they are paying a price. They need to have visibility into the operations of production such that they can judge for themselves if the value of the product is reflected in a fair price. As per the discussion of profits above, reasonable profit, here, means just that premium above costs that reflects the producers' value added and a small premium to go into savings.

There needs also to be some form of overarching regulatory mechanisms to assure that buyers do no waste their purchases. The same concept applies to producers when they acquire their supplies. What this addresses is the costs of externalities, pollution on the output side, and depletion on the input side. Regulation by something external to the market itself is a touchy subject for many who hold the ideologies addressed below. The scale issue has to do with time lags and information distortions that accrue when the market size grows beyond a reasonable point.

The marketplaces we find today, consumer goods and services, financial, real estate, etc. violate all of the above in one way or another. They certainly violate the scale rule, which means they also are overly complex and none of the other rules can be effectively enforced. Our markets are nothing like the ones Smith observed.

Our modern governments, furthermore, recognizing the need for some kinds of regulation have made efforts to make these conditions obtain, but with varying degrees of success. It is clear that the markets themselves provide no solution to the violations that end up costing everyone money. Even so the vast majority of people believe that so-called free markets are all that are necessary to solve all problems. Consider that even people who are trying to solve the global warming problem tend to believe that some kind of market solution is the best way to go, e.g. cap-and-trade of carbon units. They believe this because it is the Zeitgeist of our age. Everyone else believes it so it must be true.

Human Rights, Liberalism, and Democracy

Finally I want to address a collection of related and most difficult ideologies that emerged from the Enlightenment with roots deeper in the Classical age and that we have to face as being wrong for our time. And this won't be easy. There are actually a collection of related ‘-isms’ that work together to reinforce what may be the most fundamental force that will make our task of changing our consciousness near impossible. I am not going to go into a long treaties on any of these because that would require many volumes of philosophical and especially ethical arguments. Rather I will simply name some of them and argue how beliefs in the truthfulness of their claims is ultimately causing our harm. Basically it amounts to the fact that holding these “truths to be self evident” is what gives us licence to believe the other ideological stances above. Once, when the species was young, this and the others served a useful purpose. But now it is going to be the core of our demise.

Humanism in all of its various guises and attachments to different philosophies asserts that we humans are the most important things in the universe. It goes back to a time when we imagined we were created in God's image, that we were special creations that owned the Earth (had dominion over it). Without getting into an evolutionary discussion of why this was a natural way to view things when we were ignorant about evolution itself, I will just say that this was just a bit arrogant. But as a claim about our place in the Universe, it felt good. We were special. It was easy to adopt a view that gave us the impression that we could do anything we wanted. For most of human existence we did not know about the way in which our species came into existence. Even now that we do, a fair number of people reject the concept of our evolution completely, wishing to remain special beings, and in control of our destinies and that of the worlds.

I have no problem with the belief that we are special kinds of animals, from an evolutionary point of view. In my theory of sapience I clearly allow that human beings are special for a number of traits that transcend mere animalness (see: Chapter 5 - The Evolution of Sapience). But I don't think we can believe we therefore can do whatever we want to satisfy our selfish desires and face no consequences. In fact the whole point of sapience is to acquire wisdom to know what you should not do because it goes in the face of nature.

One step further than humanism is individualism, the belief that every adult individual is completely autonomous (free will) and therefore has individual rights that cannot be tampered with. Of course this not only flies in the face of what we know about group selection in evolution, and our origins as a species, but taken to its logical conclusion, as the extreme libertarians are wont to do, it is completely fallacious. Exercising my rights to do whatever I want would trample your rights if what I want belongs to you. Nevertheless it is easy to understand how this ism can appeal to the selfish side of the psyche. Not only does the notion make one feel superior it gives licence to all sorts of narcissistic behaviors. I will say more on this in a future post.

Together, humanism and individualism, frame the modern view of liberalism. If the individual is the most important unit of the human social system, and humans collectively are the most important species on the planet, then obviously everything we do in terms of organizing our societies and cultures that promotes these twin beliefs is justified. Gradually, over the past 700+ years since the signing of the Magna Carta in Britain the evolution of thinking has been toward the idea that all individuals of an age should participate in the decisions of governance, principally by electing representatives to some body that is engaged in law making. Today, in the modern age, the belief extends to the assignment of executive authority to an elected official. Even though there have been lapses to executives with dictatorial powers, the general trend has been toward more democratic processes of governance. Certainly the most successful economic systems in the world have been aligned with democratic governance. This is why the issues associated with democracy actually being part of the problem are going to be very hard to deal with. Undoubtedly half of my readers, at this point, are already feeling uncomfortable with the direction I am taking!

Perhaps a distinction between what I will call “ideal democracy” versus “democracy as practiced” would be helpful. The former, even the representative version where only a few legislators work on legislation that represents the interest of all of the populace, is based on a proposition that has various versions but is basically a recognition that some “men” are smarter, more knowledgeable, and wiser than the ordinary citizen and thus more competent in making important decisions. Its claim to legitimacy is that within any society there will be a subset of people who fit in this category and be in sufficient contact with the needs and desires of the population that they could do a good job of representing them in governance decisions. This was in contrast to the notion that a single executive decision maker should do the work. The idea of a king, emperor, or dictator stood in stark contrast to ideal democracy where the recognition that a single decision maker could make egregious errors as compared with what might be characterized as the wisdom of a subset of the crowd. Democracy as practiced has turned into something quite different.

The original concept of democracy arose in the Classical period, for example in Grecian city states. But it was limited to “citizens of standing”, which generally meant being male, and representation based on a lottery-like selection process (no politics!). The idea that a citizen of standing would or should include the wealthy land owners, who were also male, a condition that extended into the early American version, should be elected by the general body of citizens arose more recently in history. Thus a political process of decisions on who would be representing the general body in a government came to be coupled strongly with the notion of democratic governance. What has been lost in translation through the modern age is the reason for limiting the membership to those who had wealth and property, something understood by the Greeks and, at least, Thomas Jefferson. It was because they were also the educated persons of their time. It is not wealth or land that makes a person able to vote. It is education and a capacity for critical thinking which were highly correlated with land/maleness in those days. Or at least that was the original theory.

And therein lay the reason that democracy as practiced has become a liability to good governance in the modern world. The majority of people in the world have not gotten an adequate education to be good and thinking citizens. They are not prepared to think about the complexities of modern life that need good governance judgement. I am pointing my finger directly at the United States of America, once the shining beacon of democracy in the developed world and now, especially in this current presidential election cycle, the laughing stock of the world. How either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton got to where they are is a case study in the lack of education and critical thinking abilities in the general populace (the polity), or at least a significant proportion of them. The US congress is a further example of the lack of mental capacity of both the electorate and the members of the body. Governance in the US is now a joke. And it is a result of the way our society has failed to provide adequate education and a social milieu that values critical thinking skills.

While the US has turned into an extreme example of how democracy fails in a society that looses their perspective, it is by no means the only democratic society to be experiencing problems along these lines. Democracy is touted as the best approach yet to emerge for rational and humanistic governance of states. Yet as we witness its demise around the world it is clear that the concept is hollow. People believe it because they want to believe it, not because it is true. At least it is not true for the current sapience capacity of the human species of today.

Education

Why do I count the idea of education as an ideology? For the vast majority of people education is one of those self-evident truths. A society must “educate” its young so that they can fit into the social milieu as adults. For me the central problem is that we have come to believe that education is something we must do to our children to make them fit. Nothing could be further from the truth. We do not actively educate our children. Rather, they become educated about social norms and behaviors, including those things deemed important to our societies, by their own natural tendencies. Children absorb information and construct knowledge on their own, because it is the natural capacity of the human brain to do so. If children are exposed to interesting problems and see others, primarily adults, working on solutions to those problems using mathematical or logical thinking, they will quite naturally get curious about math and logic and probe their caretakers for how they solve problems. The worst thing we do as a society is cram math and logic down children's throats in a vain attempt to make them good workers in some supposed future job environment.

The reality is that very few adults actually engage in mathematics in their daily lives and do not attempt to model the use of mathematics to solve problems for their children. So, naturally, children do not experience observing the importance of mathematics to life and culture. The majority of children will not automatically be interested in math (especially as currently taught). The few who do endure math classes and experience a natural affinity for ideas mathematical can sometimes emerge to master aspects of math (or the sciences) in spite of what they experience in school, not because of it. Education has become an outsourced activity in which we imagine schools and teachers substituting for the role of parents and grandparents showing their children how to accomplish things using math (and language and logic) to solve complex problems. This is why the myth of school-based education is actually an ideology and not a reality.

Just like conservatism, or liberalism, or any number of beliefs in how things should work, we have come to believe that education based on schooling is the natural order of things. I agree that something like a school system might be useful to make more economical the process of children learning to live in our society. However, we have distorted the whole enterprise far beyond any practical benefits. Children are rebelling in increasing numbers because they are feeling that the way schooling is done now is completely wrong for them. And they are right. I have a dream of what a real education system would look like. It is dedicated to the fact that children learn automatically. They learn what they are exposed to that seems important to their lives.

Our current way of educating children is to force-feed them what we call knowledge, which is actually a bunch of crap in terms of what is important for human life and the development of self-actualization. Is it really any wonder that we are sinking ever deeper in despair for our “education system”? And given the deplorable lack of sapience in our species is it any wonder we continue to double down on forcing this ideological stance to its ultimate, destructive conclusion?

Can We Understand?

Let us, for a moment, consider that there is some truth to the idea that we humans are special and should take care of ourselves better than we have. Let us assume that the emergence of democratic governance represents an evolutionary progression toward an ideal form that we might more closely approximate with more understanding. Let us concede that our children must learn advanced, complex concepts that will help us all progress in understanding. Where we as a species have failed is our incapacity to recognize that ideologies are just the best guesses we can make at any given time. Our guesses about what we should believe, and act upon, have been getting “better” over our history. But they are not working positively in the modern age when we insist that they are the final truths. We should ask why this is so.

Unfortunately, I think the answer we will get is that something critical and fundamental is missing from our mental frameworks. We rely on ideologies because we lack the critical capacity of wisdom. It remains to be seen whether it might be possible to boost our capacity for wisdom in the general population in time to stop doing what we are doing now and understand what needs to be done in the future in order to survive as a species. Greater wisdom depends on higher consciousness — the ability to be aware of greater scales of space and time, and greater capacity to understand consequences of actions. I will take a look at this aspect next.