What Does Lack of Universal Perspective From Society Imply?

 

Buchanan, Virginia

No sooner than I finish one article and I often find a new topic I want to discuss. My last article delved into the realities of technology and its use and the common misconception of what technology is capable of. Technologies can have a very positive effect upon our lives, but there is a negative aspect that is frequently overlooked. Technology use causes ecological overshoot. Many people often forget that technology can be as simple as our ability to speak to one another or read the writing such as this article I am composing right now. Communication allows us to organize and combine our efforts. For those who want to discover how we got to this point, please see my article, How Did We Get Here?

Sadly, more often than not, what many people think of technology and science involves a considerable amount of magical thinking. Take a look at what Tom Murphy, an astrophysicist, has to say about his efforts as a scientist. It's quite clear that he understands technology use to be the cause of ecological overshoot. Ugo Bardi chimed in after reading Tom's article with this entry here, and he appears to feel the same way. I'm no scientist, but I feel no differently about my transformation from a person who loved technology and the wonders it has done for us to someone who now has a much more balanced view of what technology is and how our behavior of using it has gotten us into a considerable amount of trouble. It is important to note that technology itself is not the issue - it is our development and use of technology where the issue is. This means it is our behavior that accounts for the predicaments we find ourselves enmeshed in. 

All too frequently, many people want to assign blame to external items rather than accept personal responsibility for their part in this collective behavioral problem. Our collective problem is an addiction to the technology which allows us to live within civilization. So, if this is a problem (which by definition has an answer or solution), what is the solution and why can't that solution be applied to the predicament of overshoot? Any behavioral problem can be solved by behavior change, but this makes the issue sound simple when in reality it is far more complicated than simply changing a behavioral issue. The real issue is that the entire way we now live is unsustainable and has been for several thousand years. All the infrastructural systems we live within are unsustainable. So, it is no longer just limited to our behavior, but to the unsustainable systems we use every day to sustain our lives. We cannot simply abandon those systems because there is no way for the number of people now living on the planet to survive in the manner that we previously lived, hunting and gathering for a living, meaning a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence for many. 

Quite some time back, I featured a video from Arthur Keller, a systems analyst who explained that collapse was the only realistic scenario. Recently, I viewed a new video from him titled, Becoming Resilient in a World Exposed to Unprecedented Systemic Risk. I actually like his first video better from the standpoint that it is much shorter and equally explanatory and doesn't include the nonsense about hope. 36 minutes into the new video, Keller goes into "escaping from this predicament..." which is ultimately the trouble with society today - attempting to escape from reality. Nobody wants this reality to be true, but there is also no escape from it. How would one escape from civilization? This is the fantasy that so many people espouse and they seemingly cannot see that returning to hunting and gathering isn't an option for 8 billion people. So, the predicament remains a predicament and the outcome of the predicament is the die-off of billions of people. There is ultimately no way to prevent this from happening; it is the natural course of any species that goes into overshoot. I did like his explanation of the degrowth movement, which more or less mirrors my own understanding of it. He equally ridiculed the Just Stop Oil movement, which is far more deserving of ridicule from my perspective, since it is nothing more than wishful thinking and almost entirely removed from reality. Since this presentation was to a group of company executives, I understand the appeal to hope (hopium), along with the concomitant musings of emergence. 

There will most likely be survivors of this mass die-off which will most likely also be a long-term process over a period of decades. There are some situations which might render this paragraph a moot point, such as a nuclear war or an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) explosion, taking society back to the stone age in a relative instant. However, barring such an event, people will still be forced to learn how to live with less energy and material throughput. So, Keller's video above encompasses the spirit of this learning curve taking society slowly back to far more sustainable ways of living out of necessity. This will not be easy and a huge number of people will not make it out of this transition.

This post comes from Michael Asher, quote:

"Nomad Ways is a course we have designed for school students, as a co-curricular programme, intended to introduce them to the values and skills of indigenous nomads.

From the Nomad Ways manual:

"What made an abundant and sustainable life in the desert possible was the story nomads were told, and told their children – a narrative about who they were and what they were doing there. This story was very different from that of most city people.

First of all, the story said that they were not separate from nature, but within nature, just as animals, plants, mountains, dunes, wadis, winds and rain, sun and stars were within nature. The story told them that their lives were aspects of a powerful natural force that was present in everyone and everything, a force that was beyond their control, influence, or understanding. Whether the seasons brought ease or hardship, they accepted it with humility and worked hard to adapt to changing conditions with immense courage and endurance, taking only what they needed to live.

Nomad values grew out of their sense of connection with everyone and everything (tawassul - interbeing). People were respected, not for what they had, but for what they gave. They lived by a code some called muhanna (kindness), and others miruwa (virtue) which stressed generosity, hospitality, mutual aid, and mutual well-being as the most important qualities of human life.

These values – sharing, cooperation, a concern for the well-being of the community, of others, and of nature, and a sense of meaning, of belonging in the world, were the keys to nomad survival; and the means by which they lived happy and fulfilling lives in the desert. Alone, there is no survival. We would do well to revive these values, and the knowledge and skills that went with them, before they are lost."

The students we are addressing, years 8 to 11, will be in their late 30s-40s by mid-century: the future is theirs."

Notice what isn't part of the manual - companies and company executives. Much of what is considered part and parcel of society today will disappear before 2050. I wrote What Will We Miss the Most in 2021 which contained a rather stark video of Tad Patzek explaining the scenario revolving around the stepping down of civilization to 400 exajoules/year from 600 exajoules/year (rates of energy use), and the implication I gathered at the time was that this was about 5 to 8 years away from the date of that article (meaning that we are now about 2 to 5 years away from that scenario). Despite all these facts contained in my blog here, most of society is completely ignorant to most all of this.

As a consequence of this lack of knowledge regarding where we are at this point and where we are heading, most of society will likewise see no real need to change our behavior all that much anytime soon. Even if most people did see a need to change, what would they do to significantly change their behavior in order to reduce overshoot? How many would see the necessity to reduce technology use? What would be the consequence of such a movement if reality actually did strike society-at-large? From my perspective at this time based upon the constant stream of reductionist thinking that I see, rather than attempt to slow down and reduce technology use, I see a general tendency to go the opposite direction - to ramp up technology use, deploy more technology, and develop more complex technology; all of which will take us in the wrong direction and speed collapse up rather than prepare for a softer landing. Once again, our general behavior can be more or less accurately predicted by the Maximum Power Principle, and opinions to the contrary do not pan out in the annals of history. 

All of that brings us to the reason for this article. The same reason that global unity cannot be achieved is also responsible for the various ideas surrounding "solutions" and even the uptake or rejection of those ideas - precisely because there is no universal perspective from society on these predicaments and/or acceptance or denial of them. Each person holds their own opinions and beliefs on these predicaments and many of them do not reflect the actual facts surrounding said predicaments. This makes agreement on the predicaments themselves wildly difficult before even taking into consideration any particular course of action revolving around mitigation and/or adaptation efforts. Notice how many people focus their attention on climate change despite the fact that it is just a symptom predicament of ecological overshoot. Many people are still focused on daily life and not overly concerned with what will transpire a quarter century down the road or longer, and I wrote about this increasingly familiar phenomenon of reduced attention span last year. I truly wish there was more I could actually do about these predicaments, but as I frequently point out, the outcomes won't be changed much if any on an individual scale. Individual change does not equal societal change, and despite those who claim that individual change can inspire societal change, this is only true for those who are already interested in making societal change in the first place. There are still plenty of people who will fight to keep the status quo as it is now, despite the reality that it can't stay that way. 

My efforts are focused to now provide this knowledge to those who want it. I try to imagine if I had known the reality of all this a decade ago. Then again, we all say this about one thing or another, never realizing that we did not have this information at the time we made the decisions that led up to these realizations we now have. So, in other words, we would have made the exact same decisions, based upon the same limited knowledge we had at the time we made those decisions, which was the best we could do at that point in time. It is extremely important to let go of the illusion that it could have been any different. See instead the bars around you which chain you to the systems we are embedded within. Open your mind to a whole new reality to comprehend that most of the fantasies, myths, and fairy tales (see also the first two articles of this series here and here) being hyped and spread far and wide are really nothing more than illusions. 

Until next time, enjoy the holidays and Live Now!