Question Everything

Happy (sic) New Year

Heading into the New Year - 2019

As we prepare to welcome a new year, some of us with hope that things will improve compared to 2018, I'm afraid I have some sobering news to share. I've been tracking the major world trends, the dynamics of our social systems as well as the conditions of the natural world, for more than three decades. Ever since I became aware of the threat of carbon emissions on the atmosphere (and oceans) and the rapidly accelerating depletion of fossil fuels with commensurate increases in the cost of extraction, I have continued to ask what is going on here? What are we humans doing wrong that is causing these major potential catastrophes? And why are all of our institutions seeming to fail? I devoted this blog to these questions. The mainstream media and politicians and the like have tried to paint a rosy picture of the situations. They have projected that in spite of one problem after another, in the long run life would return to "normal", whatever that is. The standard pablum is that once we get economic growth back on track all will be fine again.

But what is the reality? Growth in the economy, year-over-year increases in the GDP, has not really materialized, though the official government reports do their best to make it seem so. The middle class in many countries has been shrinking as families at the bottom end fall into poverty and those at the top end fall toward the middle. The actual statistics of income and wealth distribution in the US make it clear that this kind of economy, the neoliberal capitalist-free market economy, is failing to live up to its promises. The rich are getting (supposedly) richer while the rest of us are getting poorer.

If you thought 2018 was a bad year all around (weather extremes, politics, economy, etc.) I'm afraid you will find 2019 to be even more terrible. We have finally reached an inflection point in the trajectory of decline. Throughout the previous 20-30 years (since the start of the decline in free energy per capita) the decay and collapse of society had been marginal and slow to progress. Only if you were sensitive to the trends and understood the systemic nature of them would you have realized that we had entered a whole new regime of social dynamics. For example, up until about five years ago, climatologists were unwilling to attribute any one storm (huricanes, floods, tornadoes, etc.) to climate change because the statistical variances fell within a range that they considered "normal". But the trends were already taking shape. The record highs and lows were already beginning to show. Each year new extremes were being experienced and so the reality of climate disruption was already evident. Only scientific conservatism prevented calling the kettle black.

By 2012 or 2015 more evidence that things had permanently changed in terms of climate had developed to a point that many climate scientists had started to rethink their approaches to attribution. By 2018, with coral reefs dying, forest fires taking maximum tolls in lives, acreage, and properties, with major hurricanes and typhoons decimating population centers around the world, with droughts and floods reaching unprecedented levels it has become clear to nearly everyone that something fundamental has changed. Now those same climate scientists are becoming very vocal about how climate change is contributing to record weather variances. Scientific conservatism is cast aside.

On the economic front, too, people are finally recognizing that something is amiss with the standard narrative of neoclassical capitalism. The past ten years has seen an increasing number of texts by recognized authorities on matters economic that are calling capitalism as practiced in the western "democracies" into question. Even die-hard free marketers are starting to acknowledge that something fundamental is wrong with the standard model (e.g. Alan Greespan's admission to congress that his faith in capitalism had been diminished!) Greed and personal self-interests cannot long be the basis for an economy that serves the whole population. We are now starting to see the consequences of holding such a belief. Coupled with the depletion of free energy per capita, the basis for producing goods and services, we are witnessing the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of the western economies.

Basically, 2017 and 2018 marked years in which the previously slow and imperceptible declines in institutions and economic activities started to accelerate to the point of notice by even the generally ignorant masses. The political fallout, the trend toward nationalism and xenophobia has become all too obvious. People are scared and confused. They will resort to protectionist thinking in an attempt to restore what they consider the normal order. But it is a futile effort. From this point forward the rate of decline and collapse will just increase. If we think the last several years were bad, say in the nature of mass migrations, just wait. As droughts and floods continue to make life unlivable in regions near the Equator (Middle East, Northern Africa, Central and upper South America) the violence will escalate beyond imagining. The mass exoduses from these regions into the US and Europe will intensify beyond reckoning. If we thought the tensions these migrations had stirred up already was bad, just wait.

I must admit to being surprised with the rapidity with which these events are taking place. I thought that I would be long gone before the more serious consequences of our social and physical failures would come to pass. I think now I was very wrong. The causal mechanics of these phenomena are clearly (now) non-linear and amplified by positive feedback loops that have become more visible in the last ten years. I will yet witness the implosion of the human societies, it seems.

Watch 2019 and see for yourselves.

Winter Solstice 2018

Happy Solstice everybody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Longer days are coming.

Finally people are waking up to how bad it is!

 

As hurricane Michael bears down on the Florida pan handle as a Cat 4 storm, I wonder how many people who are going to be directly affected by its devastation are thinking about anthropogenic climate change. This week a new report (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/) from the IPCC finally paints a bleak picture and calls for radical reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in order to avoid a worst-case scenario.

For a number of years now I have been predicting a dooms-day scenario due to the twin impacts of climate change and peak fossil fuels. The former represents significant costs to societies. The latter represents significant decline in generating the income needed to pay the costs. In other words, for example, just when we will need to address things like moving whole cities inland (costs) our ability to generate the needed income will have vanished. No fuel, no work, no product, no income. It's actually pretty simple.

And for years I called out the primary causes of this predicament. First and foremost is the incredible lack of wisdom in human beings' cognition. No forethought. No caution. Just barge ahead with any technology that provides individuals with more convenience. All humans share in this deficit. All humans, given whatever chances they had, have consumed and wasted resources unmindfully. But our so-called leaders are especially to blame for their inability to tell the truth (and in many cases even understand the truth). Even Obama really blew it. He had a bully pulpit even if he didn't have a Congress that would help him out. Now we get Trump who outright denies climate change (calls it a hoax) and is attempting to ease even the weak restrictions Obama put on the fossil fuel industry, which could have the effect of raising the US emissions even more.

So human foolishness and stupidity, which seem to apply to a majority of the population in the US anyway, is at the root of our problem and that isn't going to go away on its own any time soon. The rest of the world seems to have many more people who are more thoughtful about the situation and are able to accept the scientific consensus about climate change (though many of them are not as up to speed on the problems with peak energy). But even so they are still not understanding that the proximal cause of our situation is the whole neoliberal capitalistic socio-economic system with its emphasis on profit maximization and growth. These things, this philosophy and world view, are just plain wrong. Speed, convenience, private wealth, novelty, these are the habits of thought that now infest a world of 7+ billion people. Every country in the world harbors a population of people who see what the developed world's people have and they want it too. So, for example, even though China's leadership position is to fight climate change, it still maintains a desire to grow its economy. These two objectives are diametrically opposed (see Naomi Klein's book: This Changes Everything).

We need to be absolutely clear on one thing regarding what can be done to solve the immediacy of the climate catastrophe (according to the IPCC report) and that is that market-based mechanisms will simply not work to reduce carbon emissions in any meaningful way. Even a very steep tax on carbon, a policy measure rather than a strictly free market approach, probably won't do the job either, especially if the scheme involves rebating the money to the consumers. Any cost of carbon scheme needs to hurt both consumers and producers equally and sufficiently to force them to change their behaviors. Taking money out of my wallet and putting it into my pocket is not going to accomplish anything.

Only one thing will give us a chance to survive - and then only some of us. We have to stop burning fossil fuels period and that is going to make us extremely poor. We have to abandon capitalism, for profit (and especially profit maximization), growth oriented firms and relocalize, i.e. reform local communities able to collectively meet their basic needs. We have to abandon cars and trucks and airplanes and probably even trains.

We probably won't take the initiative and there are no leaders on the world stage that would risk being booted off of that stage by telling people that they will have to give up most of the trappings of civilization. So what is most likely to happen, as I have predicted before, is that we will continue to cling to our old ways until it is obviously too late (which may already be the case) and the loss of fossil fuel energies (they will be too expensive to extract and refine) and the damage to our social fabric done by climate catastrophes force us to do these things.

I've not been blogging much these days. At some point I realized that I was basically preaching to the choir for the most part and getting repetitive. What prompted me to write this was the issuing of the IPCC report and especially Trump's and other Republicans' responses to it. The report suggests that a solution is feasible but also some of the committee members admit that it is highly unlikely that any of its recommendations will be taken up in time precisely because of the postures and attitudes of the far right ideologies. The US's best hope for any kind of change in policies and taking real leadership is to vote the Republicans out of Congress in November. And then follow through in 2020 with a real change in the presidency. Personally I would prefer to see a Social Democrat (maybe not Bernie per se) run. But at least we should try to find someone with those leanings in the Democratic party and I completely support that person being a woman (just not Hillary!) The rumors about Elizabeth Warren are interesting.I honestly do feel that men have made a mess of everything in governance and that it would be really great to give women a shot at doing better. I'm betting they can. And the current climate of the #meToo movement and the energy pumped into the women electorate (and many of us males who sympathize) may just be right to propel a larger proportion of the government to be controlled by women.

To be clear, though, a change in the political landscape of the US is not a solution. At best it can only serve to possibly slow down the acceleration toward destruction. Whether that would be a good thing or not I cannot say. But like clinging to life in a desperate situation gives a chance that a miracle might happen, slowing down the destruction might offer some last minute help.

The IPCC only deals with the global temperature issue; recommending using non-fossil fuel sources is meant as a way to reduce emissions. It does not provide a complete model of the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change with respect to other dynamics vis-a-vis EROI impacts on our ability to mitigate or adapt. It does not factor in the decline in fossil fuels from excessive extraction and the fact that as of this moment it is the consumption of fossil fuels that subsidize the solar and wind industries. We are already getting poorer due to the declining return on energy invested and climate change will make everything more expensive - a positive feedback loop ensues that will shortly blow up the financial system and with it, civilization.

I continue to advise people to consider less what they can do as individuals to combat climate change (but do that also) and begin laying plans for how to survive in a totally chaotic world of 2-3 degrees C and no oil.

Autumnal Equinox - 2018: On the way down

To be completely honest I am not sure what more I can say; certainly nothing that would really help our situation. Here we are at the autumnal equinox, heading for the darkness of winter, and, frankly, it seems appropriate.

The collapse of our neoliberal, capitalistic, technological Western culture is well under way in my view. And, in truth, not just my view. I have been seeing more and more commentaries on the failures of our institutions and noting the fear that our financial system is about to collapse at the very least. Moreover, the pessimistic view is leaking into the otherwise mainstream thinking. Even writers for such venues as The New York Times and The Economist have begun to raise the red flags on a number of fronts.

The socio-political front, of course, is a complete mess on every continent. Pockets of semi-sanity can be found, for example in Scandinavian countries. But even there we see breakouts of far rightest tendencies that are likely a response to the severe refugee migrations that are flooding Europe and straining the ties that bind the EU in general. Brexit was possibly just the first action in this regard. The situation in the US is absolutely abysmal. The specter of fascism looms over the government in a way most of us of my demographic would not have thought conceivable thirty years ago. Now it seems imminent.

With the revelations of the extent of the sexual abuses carried on by Catholic priests and the coverups by church officials it is clear that many (maybe most) of our moral institutions have failed us. This does not surprise me particularly. Religion is an antiquated notion but the less-than-fully sapient population clutches onto faith even when there is so much evidence that the stories told in the holy books are at best fantasies.

But that is the point, really. Our species is facing this cataclysm precisely because we are really not deserving of the species name we bear. We, a substantial proportion of we, are not sapient (wise) and so cannot truly learn from past mistakes. In fact most people don't even recognize prior behaviors as mistakes from which they should learn.

In my view the pace of decline is increasing. In part this comes from realizing that the rate of climate change and impacts such as sea rise and extreme weather events are much greater at this point in time than were expected based on the climate models used by the IPCC. Or, in some cases, are following the worst-case scenarios instead of the expected-case ones. Moreover, the rate of CO2 emissions of many countries parties to the Paris Climate Agreement have not gone down, indeed many have increased since they signed on. The likelihood of us achieving reductions necessary to keep under the 2 degree C target is growing smaller with each passing year.

The energy situation is not greatly improved either. I do note a lot of propaganda being put out about how the price of electricity from wind and solar could actually be less than that from fossil fuels. But let me remind you that prices are not really any indication of true value. The key question is: how many joules were needed to build, install, and maintain these systems compared with the number of joules being generated over time (power). EROI is still the main test of viability. And to date, no one has demonstrated a believable EROI for solar, for example. The only pathway toward lowering emissions is by cutting way back on our energy usage. Unfortunately this goes completely against the grain of the dominant socio-economic model of neoliberal capitalism. I've said it many times in these blog pages: You cannot make profits in the long run. All of the rest of nature is based on a circular, steady-state economic model. Everything gets recycled and is driven by the power of the sun and some from geothermal processes.

The human socio-economic-political system is so far from the stability and sustainability of natural complex systems that I'm amazed we are still here now. But the signs of decline are all around and becoming increasingly visible even to those who just five years ago refused to believe that business as usual wouldn't just keep going.

We're heading into winter now. The season and the society.

 

 

Summer Solstice - Peak Light, Maximum Darkness

If you feel as if chaos is accelerating you are not alone. I'm sure that most still reading this blog are completely aware of what I mean.

The irony to me is that Trump is right to call out the major institutions of our world as being dysfunctional. Yet his 'fix' is not really a fix, it is an acceleration of destruction. Perhaps, in the long run, that is actually a good thing. Perhaps humanity needs a major reset. But my fear is that it won't necessarily lead to a better path. The problem is that we humans seem incapable of learning from our past mistakes, even when we acknowledge them as mistakes and vociferously claim we will do better. We will not make the same mistakes again in the future.

I remember growing up reading about the rise of Nazism and Hitler and the Holocaust and wondering how on earth that could ever have gotten traction. The story line goes that the Germans were in a world of hurt after WWI and were ripe for his kind of 'leadership.' People needed to blame someone and the Jews were a convenient target with historical precedence. But I took great solace in the fact that knowing how that scenario played out, we human beings would never allow ourselves to go down that road again. At least not in the United States of America! As our role in WWII showed, we were the good guys.

What happened?

My theory is that we human beings are caught in an evolutionary purgatory, between our experience of self- and future consciousness that is just nascent and wisdom that uses that consciousness to project long-term consequences of our decisions. We evolved the beginnings of sapience but are not fully sapient in our current species. And like the old saying goes: "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Back in 2009 I put forth a theory of the state of human evolution and of our capacity for wisdom that suggested we were not yet capable of true wisdom (sapience) for a number of reasons having to do with our brain's limitations. You can find the start of a series of posts on the subject at: sapience-introduction.html. This will actually take you to my personal repository where the whole series is stored and give you links to the later posts in the series. I have since expanded these posts into a full-blown book but it remains unpublished for the simple reason that, by definition, there is no audience for it. Who among the merely pseudo-sapient beings on this planet wished to know they are kind of defective? The publishers I approached, including my own for the systems science books, were loathe to publish something that basically concludes there is no hope for you mere mortals and here is why!

Honestly I think my message is more positive than that. I do believe there are true sapient individuals in our populations, though they are probably quite rare. I have been trying to convey the idea that the rest of us could take the brave stand of supporting them (if we knew who they were) and seeing to it that they would be able to survive the collapse of our civilization (an absolute certainty in my mind) and provide the seed stock of a new species of Homo. I have dedicated my efforts to encapsulating and codifying systems science as a seed knowledge bank that could be used to guide future populations of eusapients and provide the basis for a future science (e.g. systems biology) so they would not have to start from scratch. Thus far my efforts have gone well. My first book, with Mike Kalton, is very well received in the systems science and engineering communities and my second book, still in process, has received rave advanced reviews from many in those communities. I'm trying to fulfill my commitment.

How about you the reader? Know anyone who you think is eusapient and of breeding age???? Somehow, we need to find these people and get them together. That problem eludes me so far. If you have any thoughts let me know.

Meanwhile the day will be the longest of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) and tomorrow we start the long descent into winter (passing Fall along the way). It is hard to grasp that with so much light from the Sun we are mired in deep darkness of understanding. Well, we are only human.

 

 

Winter Solstice 2017 - Cycles

The occasion of the Winter Solstice has me thinking about a major fundamental aspect of all system processes. They all involve cycles (which include quasi-cycles or quasiperiodicity, hypercycles, and other variations on the theme of cyclic or almost cyclic behavior). In nature as well as human-designed systems cycling between multiple states is the rule without exceptions. Mountains are built up only to be weathered away into sand that then turns eventually into sedimentary rock in preparation for the next round of mountain building. Living organisms are propagated, develop, reproduce, go into senescence and die. Economies emerge, grow, develop, run out of adequate resources, and collapse. Out of the left-overs of prior societies, new ones emerge, generally because of newer technologies that allow extraction of previously unexploited resources. And the cycle starts over. Most cyclic behaviors in nature are non-periodic, not like a sinusoidal. But the systems pass through states that resemble one another again and again. Another kind of cycle that is often found in systems where energy is gradually declining is the spiral. Each time around the cycle the states come closer and closer to maximum entropy.

Some are tempted to think that the current world civilization will not run out of resources because the emergence of new technologies has seemingly always allowed a new spurt of economic growth and development. But writers like Robert J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)), and James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency), have identified trends in the invention and development of new technologies suggesting that the economic impacts of the most modern ones are relatively small. Gordon analyzed the phenomenal growth in American productivity and growth of the national wealth and income during the period post-WWII through the 1980s (his total analysis went from the end of the Civil War to the present) and found a strong argument that that growth was anomalous in the long-run, and largely due to the introduction, starting in pre-WWI years, of the most impactful technologies, i.e. communications, air transport, trains, etc. Even the Internet does not have as strong an influence on growth as did these 'seminal' technologies. Similarly, and deeply connected the advent of the age of oil was responsible for tremendous growth once the infrastructure for massive extraction and refining was in place, stimulated mainly by the needs of fuels for WWII. Now that the cost of extraction and refining are climbing relative to the energy supplied to society, the net access to high-power energy is declining at an accelerating pace. That trend does not bode well for our civilization. [Those still insisting that alternative energy sources will permit continuing business as usual should really try to wake up from your dream. A society that might be powered by alternatives would have to necessarily be a much-reduced version of today in the developed world.

The current news about how the economy (of the US anyway) is improving and growing at an increasingly "healthy" pace is based on faulty analysis and deeply flawed theory. It is propelled into the discourse by wishful thinking more than carefully reasoned arguments based on facts and sound theory. The situation is not dissimilar to conditions in 1929.

But just on the principle of cycling in systems dynamics we can confidently predict that the current world economy will collapse. We don't know when precisely, though some trends are starting to emerge that imply it won't be long. This is the way the Universe works. Whether or not a new, very different kind of society will emerge from the ashes is impossible to predict except to suggest that it is a reasonable expectation. This is the way evolution seems to work. The collapse of global civilization may provide a powerful selection pressure on survivors that favor the wise over the foolish (which I suspect represent the vast majority of the population at present). I suspect (and hope) that severe climate change will require extreme wisdom in order to survive and procreate. For better or worse, the core theme of human evolution has been based on cooperation (group selection) and that seems like the path that will most likely succeed for future generations.

Of course, systems do go extinct. Stars may explode sending their elemental components into space for recycling. Planets can enter runaway feedbacks that lead to unlivable conditions (like Venus, perhaps). Dinosaurs (except Aves) no longer roam the planet. Runaway positive feedback in cycles lead to total disruption of the system. In a few of these cases the systems simply disintegrate into simple component parts that might get recycled in new systems (a meta-cycle). In others the parts are just randomly distributed through maximizing entropy. What will the fate of humanity and societies be is anybody's guess. I'd like to believe there is a future for our distant future progeny. But who knows?

The current political situation in the US is a portend of what is to come. But it is also a measure of what processes are playing out. It gives us insight into what happens when a system runs out of energy and internal regulation. Our political process is so completely and unrecoverably broken that it is hard to imagine anything other than some kind of revolution (possibly preceded by another civil war) tearing down the last remnants of a government. None of the branches of government in the US are functional anymore, except of course to serve the interests of the super-rich.

For the Northern Hemisphere the days are going to start getting longer. We will have more light by which to witness the continuing degradation of societies. I don't think the drive toward Spring will bring renewal of the social system. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this Spring Equinox shows us the cycle of despair.

Nevertheless, rejoice in the change of seasons.

Heading into Winter - Equinox 2017

Will our civilization survive and thrive or collapse and descend into chaos? That is the essence of a number of e-mails I have gotten over the last few months. The number seems to have picked up with the election of Donald Trump. I wonder why? The letters and e-mails I used to get were more along the lines of "how do we save our society?" to "how can our society survive?" to "can any kind of society and civilization survive?" Today the dominant question seems to be: "when will society collapse and how bad will it be?"

There has been a definite trend in the mood of these questions which I attribute to the continuing pile up of evidence that none of our institutions are really working anymore, a subject I have observed in the past. So it seems that more people are coming to the conclusion that something is definitely wrong with our social system if not our collective minds. For much of the history of this blog I've commented extensively on both.

My own opinion (for what it is worth - about as much as you are paying to read this) is that our whole social system (globally) is on the brink of a major and dramatic transition. The argument I make is based on systems theory, but then so have been all of my previous observations and I suspect long-time readers are apt to realize I've got a pretty good track record when it comes to pointing out large-scale trends (in the downward direction).

The transition of which I speak is one in the sense of the major transitions in evolutionary history, from pre-organic chemistry to life, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, from single cells to multicellular organisms, etc. Human society is itself the result of such a major transition, the evolution of hyper-sociality in our genus that has led to tribes, towns, cities, and so on.

Transitions of this kind are not radical, sudden revolutions so much as gradual reorganizations of existing systems that makes a collective of previously independent systems more fit as a collective, cooperating structure. That is not to say the transition might not be triggered or pushed ahead by the event of some catastrophe. The transition from reptile dominance to mammalian and bird dominance in the megafauna was hastened along (in geological time scales) by the extinction event that wiped out the non-bird dinosaurs. As I have describe several times in these pages, I suspect that a general collapse of our current neoliberal capitalistic system (or variations on capitalism as we find, for example, in China), which I think will result in a collapse of most institutions will bring civilization to its knees or lower. It is likely to result in massive decline in the populations around the world (which is a euphemistic way to say massive dying).

But the collapse of this society is not as bad a thing as it might seem, except, of course, to those of us who end up being part of the population collapse. I know this is cold, but the fact is that the way this society works is exactly what is causing the problems.

The collapse of the economic system may actually be brought about by forces associated with climate change (coupled with decline in free energy resources). It isn't hard to imagine such a scenario. We may even be witnessing the beginning stages with the horrendous costs in lives and property due to this hurricane season (and just so far). Climate change, in the form of major disasters, will be extremely costly. It will be even more costly when we finally get that we have to adapt - as in moving Miami hundreds of miles inland and north. Where will the resources come from to accomplish this? With net free energy resources already on the decline how will we accomplish the work needed?

While not dismissing the possibility completely, I don't think humanity will disappear completely. I don't even think some kind of social structure will disappear. It will just be an extremely diminished version of what we see today. But therein lies the opportunity.

Complex adaptive and evolvable systems (CAES) collapse when their governance infrastructures fails to regulate their behavior. Humanity's governance system is wide of the mark when it comes to meeting the criteria of sustainability. Our governments are incompetent in part because they are very poorly designed to manage the complexity of the modern world. But also they are incompetent because the individual decision agents making them up are themselves incompetent. They are simply not sufficiently sapient. Exhibit A: Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). What a complete idiot. Exhibit B: Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas), head of the House Science Committee!!!! These guys and most of the Congress are totally out of touch with reality. How did they get to be elected - Oh wait, I forgot the President too.

There are lots of examples of CAESs that have managed to evolve relatively competent governance subsystems. Cells do it. Brains do it. It isn't impossible. But it is hard and as a result of long-term evolution it has to be tested repeatedly in the world stage of selection. There are some examples of corporate or non-profit organizations that have been long-lived because they take their governance seriously and the top management are not out to rob the place blind and make an escape.

The design of government is the result of a long evolutionary process that has been going on since the Stone Age. We've tried just about every kind of configuration and function. Most have reflected a social hierarchical structure, but in the absence of real sapience these hierarchies have devolved to power relations rather than service relations. A wise structure is based on the executives and supervisors taking the position that they work for those who do the actual work. They are supposed to provide them with the vision and tools, not boss them around. Ordinary human beings just don't get this.

Modern democracies are built around the neoliberal idea of individual autonomy (a secular version of "free will"). In the west this means blatant individualism, in the extreme, libertarian sentiments - another failing of low sapience. Hyper-sociality, a characteristic of high sapience, is based on cooperation, altruism, selflessness, and a sense of belonging to something bigger and more important than the individual. Democracy among low-sapients cannot work. It doesn't work. Just look at the evidence in front of your eyes. The average human being today is out for "numero uno". How much of this is because there are simply too many of us and we all feel we are in competition with each other? I offer arguments that suggest that while population density tends to bring out the worst in us, the fact is that the worst is IN US.

What about the transition? I have argued several times that high sapient people (and there are a few in this world despite the madding crowds) will tend to be more adaptive to changing conditions such as climate change and a collapsing society. They will also have the capacity to find one another and form social units that can actually work. They are the hope of the genus. They form the basis for an incipient new species of Homo that stands a chance to survive the collapse and construct a better governance subsystem.

The collapse of human social systems will mirror the collapse of the reptilian dominance 65 million years ago. Something positive will emerge from it.

So, as we go into the darkness of winter we take heart in knowing that there will be a turning point in the solstice and an emergence into the light of spring. We humans can make a transition to a better social organization. It will be a necessity. We now know that the system that has evolved thus far can be improved greatly.

 

On the Occasion of the Total Solar Eclipse

I'm sitting in Newberg,OR at my sister-in-law's house, just ten miles from the edge of totality. It is nearly 8:30 am and as soon as breakfast is over we will, perhaps, drive a little further south so as to catch the "full" effect. That effect, of course, is a darkening of this part of the Earth for several minutes.

The path of the eclipse across the US reminds me of those international "NO" signs, the circle with a diagonal bar put in front of some other symbol, telling you not to do whatever that other symbol stands for. I imagine such a circle-bar overlaying the US as the path of totality runs from the Northwest to the Southeast across this country. It seems, somehow, appropriate for the times we are in that the Cosmos is telling us and the world "Do Not - US". Under Trump our country has become the number one pariah state in the world. It is such a contrast to the feelings about the US after WWII. Our country didn't just save the world from fascism and dictators, it turned around and pumped resources into the defeated enemies to help them recover. There was a real sense of nobility about the US.

Then, of course, we started playing god with the rest of the underdeveloped world. We, along with our allies, in the west, and the Russians in the east, started carving up the spoils, creating nations out of tribalistic states, and getting a lock on resources. We became social dictators and the world we live in today has been the result. Personally, I am sorry rest of the world. I'd like to think I would have done things very differently, but that experiment will never be run.

The darkening won't last long. I had the pleasure of seeing the total eclipse over Belgium in the late 1990s. It is a weird sort of darkness, accompanied by the silencing of birds and other beasts. The sky color reminded be of that under a tornado cell (which I saw several times during my stay in North Texas while studying computer science). A purple-greenish hue to my eyes. I'm anxious to see if that holds for this one.

The light will return. The bar painted across the continent will disappear as quick as it came. But the image of "Do Not - US" will continue to haunt.

Anticipating the End

A democracy works only if the electorate are 1) intelligent¹, 2) knowledgeable², and 3) informed³. None of these criteria are true of the United States of America today (or actually of any country). It should be no surprise that the governance of the country is in such a shambles. We have low intelligence, are ignorant of how reality works, and are poorly informed people both in terms of electing officials and those elected and running the country. For the most part we are motivated by personal greed, senses of entitlement, and inability to grasp the big picture of how we are suffering a diminishing capacity to do work and produce (what they think of as) wealth; a physical fact of reality. We are running on emotional charges. We believe that we are entitled to increasing material wealth and do not realize that the growth in material wealth was a fluke of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s due to a huge influx of free energy. That concept is totally beyond our capacity. All we know is that once we had it, now we don't. And we were promised, by unbelievably stupid politicians and economists, that we would have it into the future.

The implosion of the human social system is near at hand. It is beginning to look to me like the blow up of the Trump administration will likely be the trigger event, though only GOD knows how it will cascade. Which, of course, means no one can predict what is going to happen. Nevertheless, I predict that a major cataclysm is imminent.

I hope the eusapient individuals out there are ready for the challenge.

1. We have accumulated a lot of evidence that human beings are far from rational creatures. See: "The Enigma of Reason", https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Reason-Hugo-Mercier/dp/0674368304/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501286635&sr=1-1&keywords=the+reason+enigma
2. Most humans have an incredibly tiny understanding of how the world works. See: "The Knowledge Illusion: Why we never think alone", https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Illusion-Never-Think-Alone/dp/039918435X/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501286364&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=the+llusion+of+knowledge
3. Fox News - need I say more?

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.