Sentinel Intelligence

You're Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence. Jessica. Sep 23, 2024.

Some of us can hear the future.

You’ve probably heard about Helen of Troy. She’s blamed for starting the Trojan War. Not many people remember Cassandra.

She predicted it.

In Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon, you get Cassandra’s full story. In some ways, the Trojan War is really about a bunch of dudes who don’t listen to a woman, and it leads straight to the collapse of their civilization.

In later retellings, they ignore her twice.

Surprised?

Cassandra doesn’t exactly ask for the gift of prophecy. The Greek god Apollo falls in love with her. He puts her under a spell in one of his temples. Then he tells his pet snakes to go lick her ears. When she wakes up, she can hear the future. Apollo tries to seduce Cassandra, but she’s just not that into him. He has a meltdown. Zeus tells him no backsies on divine gifts, so he finds a loophole.

He curses her.

Now when Cassandra hears the future, nobody believes her. If you want to drive someone insane, that’s a good start.

Now get this:

Not only does Cassandra predict the Trojan war, but she also warns everyone about the Trojan Horse. Once again, nobody listens. They start calling her names. She tries to smash the horse open with an axe and gets dragged away screaming.

You know the rest.

Many of us have been identifying strongly with Cassandra over the last few years. We watch the media downplay and dismiss one threat after another. We endure endless opinion pieces about everything from climate alarmism to coronaphobia. Influencers accuse us of hurting everyone’s mental health. Strangers call us doomers and fearmongers. Our friends and family treat us like we’re paranoid. When we share dozens or even hundreds of studies, they refuse to look at them. They say, “I don’t want to read anything that’ll bring me down.”

“I’m trying to stay positive.”

Americans and Westerners in general are suffering from a pandemic of denial, wishful thinking, and toxic positivity. It impedes us at every turn, on almost every serious issue. It exacerbates our existing anxiety and contributes to our sense of despair about the future of the planet. Here’s the thing:

You’re not a fearmonger.

You have sentinel intelligence.

Sentinel intelligence refers to a special cognitive ability that allows someone to detect threats before anyone else. Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy talk about this trait in their book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. They review a number of natural and economic disasters throughout history. As they write, “in each instance a Cassandra was pounding the table and warning us precisely about the disasters that came as promised.” Not only were they ignored, but “the people with the power to respond often put more effort into discounting the Cassandra than saving lives and resources.”

It just keeps happening.

If you have sentinel intelligence, your brain can aggregate and sift through extraordinary amounts of information in a very short period of time, especially when it comes to seeing latent or hidden dangers. You don’t get stymied by what Clarke and Eddy call the “magnitude of overload.”

In some ways, it’s a superpower.

Research on sensitive individuals confirms how sentinels and Cassandras think. Social psychologist Tsachi Ein-Dor writes that some of us "are chronically hypervigilant and constantly alert to potential threats and dangers. Other individuals, once alerted to a threat, are self-reliant and likely to take protective actions rapidly and effectively." In other words, we're hardwired alarm systems. Groups are more likely to survive when they have a mix of people who are skilled at detecting, communicating, and acting on threats to their survival.

Some of us can identify threats just by knowing that something's off. One study in Nature Scientific Reports describes this ability as scene gist. As they explain, "Scene gist extracted rapidly from the environment may help people detect threats." The shapes and contours of a landscape can trigger our threat brains even before we know the details of what we're looking at.

The findings suggest that scene gist extends beyond scanning your surroundings for patterns. It could apply to evaluating other types of input, like data. If you have sentinel intelligence, you know what it feels like to always have your threat brain on. You know how it feels when you're assessing and analyzing information and something feels odd, even before you can articulate what.

That's scene gist.

There's an avenue of research in psychology called threat sensitivity theory, where researchers study how individuals identify and respond to danger. As Samantha Denefrio explains, some individuals show an "exaggerated threat sensitivity." On the one hand, it can be maladaptive. On the other, it could save you from a deadly virus or a climate disaster.

Threat sensitivity lives on a spectrum.

As Stephen Ristvedt writes in Heliyon, "People on one end... are dispositionally hypersensitive to possible threat and thus more prone to anxiety and avoidance. Those on the other end... are relatively insensitive to threats and thus more likely... to take unnecessary risks."

Some research describes sentinels as flowers. A study in Translational Psychiatry looked at how college students respond to their environment. They found that around 30 percent react strongly to external stimuli, 40 percent show a moderate reaction, and about 30 percent show a weak reaction. They describe the low-sensitivity group as dandelions and the moderate-sensitivity group as tulips.

They call the high-sensitivity group orchids.

Orchids experience more intense reactions to art and music. They pay more attention to detail. They feel more overwhelmed by too much stimulus, but they simultaneously hyperfocus for long periods of time. They also tend to be quiet introverts. They’re more likely to feel self-conscious, and they’re more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

It all fits.

These terms like orchid and sentinel describe the same overall group, and we find them throughout history. Psychologists sometimes describe them as highly sensitive. They’re often ignored, even persecuted for speaking truth to power. Our culture dumps a lot of judgment on them, along with anyone who falls somewhere on the neurodivergence spectrum. We’re called weak and emotional, and we’re attacked for feeling too much. The actual data suggests that it’s not a weakness at all.

It’s a strength.

It’s not easy to convince someone to take a threat seriously when you’re the only one who sees it. Your mind has pieced together hundreds or even thousands of different data points from research, but also from prior experience and observations. You’ll have trouble unpacking all of that. According to Clarke and Eddy, someone with sentinel intelligence “may at times appear obsessive and even socially abrasive.”

We’ve seen a lot of that lately.

This research also explains why so many people wait until there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence indicating a threat before doing anything. Dandelions and tulips don’t respond as strongly to their environments.

They miss the warning signs.

If you have sentinel intelligence, it probably bewilders you how the vast majority of people can’t or won’t connect all the dots and threads. It’s why you’re often confused with your arch-enemy, the conspiracy theorist.

There’s a big difference.

Sentinels care about people and want to keep them safe, even strangers. They’re inclined to think about the greater good, and they’re more willing to put up with inconveniences for the sake of protecting their group. They’re also more willing to risk the alienation and sometimes embarrassment of being wrong. They would rather be wrong than risk someone else’s life.

Conspiracy theorists do the opposite.

If sentinels display more compassion, conspiracy theorists show higher levels of narcissism and psychopathy. They’re less in tune with their surroundings. They show much less compassion. They place a great deal of importance on their own personal rights and freedoms. They give themselves a special role in revealing the truth. While they portray themselves as highly-informed and rational, they tend to string together random facts and observations into narratives with no internal consistency. These narratives often arrive at violence toward institutions and marginalized groups.

Sentinels usually advocate for simple measures, while conspiracy theorists push for violent interventions or radical solutions, like suspending the constitution or kidnapping governors.

Finally, conspiracy theorists are prone to trivialize and dismiss actual threats like corporate monopolies and disaster capitalism. When the Trojans ignored Cassandra, they indulged in a range of fallacies.

Here’s how Trojan brains think:

That will never happen.
Okay, it’s happening.
It’s not that bad.
Okay, it’s bad.
It won’t last long.
Okay, it will never end.
What’s your solution?
That won’t work.
It’s too late to do anything.
Everyone’s worn out.
There’s no way we could’ve known.
We should just let it happen.
Everyone’s on their own.
Everything’s fine.
I’m trying to stay positive.
It’s not my fault.
It’s yours.

Psychologists also have a name for the tendency to shrug off warnings. It’s called reactance. Paul Ratner talks about it in Big Think. As he writes, “not many are big fans of being told what to do.” On the other hand, “persisting in your obstinance can feel pretty satisfying.”

Jack W. Brehm introduced this idea in his 1966 book, A Theory of Psychological Reactance. His work inspired nearly 60 years of research on how individuals and groups shrug off warnings until it's too late.

Then they panic.

So, look:

Our survival depends on our ability to overcome these psychological hangups. We also have to get better at listening to sentinels instead of pathologizing them and talking about their social anxiety.

If you’re a sentinel, it often feels like the slightest suggestion of a threat sets off a cascade of denial and wishful thinking.

Now we know why.

Combine all of these psychological hazards, and you arrive at the current state of affairs, a Western society that remains largely unwilling to recognize threats and face them with simple solutions.

I don’t think the answer lies in softening our words or coddling fragile egos. That never helps. We just need a little confidence and reassurance that we’re doing the right thing. When minimizers call us hysterical doomers, we can lean on the psychology that says otherwise.

If you see a threat, there’s nothing wrong with speaking up. Someone’s always going to feed their own self-esteem by dismissing you.

Focus on the ones in the middle who might listen.

With enough effort, we can get through to the 40 percent of people out there who show some willingness to pay attention. They can fall prey to Trojan brain, but they’ll listen to sentinels. It’s worth trying.

Maybe this last part sounds optimistic.

If you have sentinel intelligence, maybe it takes all you’ve got just to protect yourself and endure everyone’s ridicule. Some of us are tired, and we need a break from the role of Cassandra. That’s fine.

Just remember, you’re not a fearmonger.

You have a gift from the gods.

You can hear the future.

Murphy, doing the math

Your Order, Please? Murphy, Do the Math. Oct. 8, 2024.


This may come as a surprise, but people are capable of holding unsupported notions…unexamined beliefs and expectations. A common default assumption—often quite reasonable—is that conditions will continue in a fashion that is recognizably similar to the way they have been during one’s lifetime. Suggestions to the contrary tend to be met with suspicion—or even hostility in the case that the suggested outcome is less than rosy.

What if we presented possible options for future human developments—let’s say human population as a solid example—and pretend it’s a menu from which we get to choose. What outcome would most people see as the desired goal? What would make them happy, or satisfied? Which population curve below do you think most would select?

I present the following options:

A: Indefinite exponential rise. This implies no biophysical limits, ultimately demanding expansion to space (as if possible).

B: Moderation into a linear rising state, allowing continued growth but not in crazy-pants fashion.

C: Logistic leveling: no drama: we found our place and aimed right for it with no corrections—like it was meant to be and we knew what we were doing all along.

D: Peak and modest decline to some medium and stable value, indicating a slight boo-boo (overshoot) in our trajectory.

E: Peak and substantial fall to a vastly smaller population before stabilizing. In this case, we had it dramatically wrong in a massive overshoot.

F: A post-peak crash to zero (i.e., extinction; could be due to ecological collapse, nuclear annihilation, sex robots, or classic evolutionary failure of our species).

Now picture yourself and a bunch of others sitting around a table at a restaurant holding this menu and trying to decide on the future. What are you having?


Process of Elimination?

Ha! I tricked you all! I would claim it’s not an open choice! It will be no surprise that I rule out option A. Exponentials fail, and juvenile space fantasies aren’t coming to the rescue. Even then, good luck maintaining an exponential against the cruel realities of expansive space! “I’m sorry sir, the kitchen informs me that this option is not available (and never has been).”

Option B also ignores biophysical limits, in that growth of any form is not a long-term realistic prospect, even if not disastrously exponential. Also unavailable from the kitchen.

I suspect many people in our society would pick option C. Looks tasty. This is the dream scenario: we figure out how to live on the planet and smoothly cruise into stability without any obvious sacrifice, then hold it there indefinitely as human civilization flourishes. Except: the scale of today’s activity on the planet far exceeds the community of life’s capacity to survive. Not only would the sixth mass extinction stay on track, but we have zero realistic all-things-considered plans for maintaining high-throughput modernity at the ten-billion person scale. From agriculture to energy to materials (upon which which energy conversion depends), we don’t know how this could possibly work for centuries or millennia. There’s no credible plan. Another note is that real populations seldom follow the no-drama logistic curve. Treat it as a fantasy, and try to ignore the appeal. You’re probably beginning to dislike this restaurant, for its lack of actual choice.

Option D is the first to acknowledge overshoot. I suspect the chef will get a smattering of orders from this category, just like the gluten-free, dairy-free “pizza” that’s on the menu for the rare bird who needs to go that way. This option admits defeat, of sorts. It acknowledges that we’ve gone too far already and need to dial things back in order to carry on. In spirit, I am on board. But if our current attack on the planet is at the level of rapidly initiating a sixth mass extinction, is a factor-of-two moderation nearly enough to tip the scales? “I’ll check with the kitchen—I’m uncertain whether this dish is available today.”

Option E is qualitatively similar to Option D, but quantitatively differs in that the ultimate steady-state level is vastly lower than the peak. This is not a small factor-of-two correction, but an order-of-magnitude or more. It’s the shoe leather option on the menu. Why would anyone ever pick this one? Well, if the other items are truly unavailable… This might be the only way to survive, by the dictates of evolution, ecology, and biophysics. The kitchen can probably oblige and rustle something up. Why is the chef now walking around bare-footed? Serving suggestion: goes down better with ketchup.

Option F is implicitly on the menu, folks. Dismayed by the lack of acceptable choices, we could refuse to order any of the unsavory options, insist on “living large,” and consequently end up starving ourselves in pointless protest.

Grade Analogy

I also like a grade parallel here. Students might desire an A or B, but can live with a C as a passing grade. D is effectively failure, and F is unambiguous failure. That leaves E: an obscure grade that is off our radar (outside Hogwarts). But we need to think out of the box here and accept that we are heading toward uncharted territory, for which we do not yet have set associations. If my choices are E or F, I might as well try this E-thing, which might turn out to exceed expectations.


Happiness?

This post was motivated by a discussion I had with a sharp friend about the path of humanity. I was making the point, unsurprisingly, that modernity is a temporary aberration that will not be ecologically supported for very long. He rejected the idea of any future path that had even a whiff of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, adding something to this effect:

Look: all you have to know to appreciate that human life was miserable in the distant past is that population was held down by external factors. Life was tough [nasty, brutish, short was the gist].

This is very illuminating. When I responded: “Ah, so the only mode of existence compatible with human happiness is unbounded, exponential growth?” it was immediately clear to him the pile he had just stepped in.

But this is the crux of the matter, and worthy of serious consideration. If the only way for humans to be happy (not miserable) is in a world without limits…well then we’ve come to the wrong shop, folks. If defiance of biophysical reality is necessary for us to be the transcendent, liberated former-animals we think ourselves to be, then I’ve got some bad news. Pinocchio will never be a real boy. Translation: our artificial construct of modernity will never have a permanent, integrated place within an ecological context.


Back to the Menu

Now let’s return to our menu. When presented in this way, I think logic circuits kick in so that most people—I hope—would recognize option A (indefinite exponential growth) as not being possible (otherwise it might seem the happiest choice). Once in this mindset, option B might also be apparent as untenable, and that’s certainly progress. If I am correct to suspect that option C would be most popular, aren’t we back to the “miserable” state of imposed limits?

I think the difference is that to most people, the target steady-state population is our choice—not nature’s choice—in which we have two kids on average, medically-enabled longevity, technological goodies, and opera. This is the “arrived” notion: under our control. What seems to be objectionable is when ecological realities are dictating the terms. Two things: first, ecological realities probably remove option C as being unsupportable to begin with; second, even option C is ultimately limited by biophysical reality, in that births are still constrained (restricted, independent of happiness/desire) and deaths still motor on. Population trajectories are all about biophysical realities of birth and death, so that any steady solution goes hand-in-hand with limits on the biophysical front. To maintain steady state, increasing longevity would have to be accompanied by a reduction in births. We can’t just do whatever we want.

I’ll make one other point with regard to my friend’s “misery” statement. It implies that every other species on the planet—constrained as they are by external factors beyond their control—must lead miserable lives, and that happiness rests on control. What a depressing mindset to hold about our glorious planet of life! I reject the notion that squirrels are miserable, or that early humans were miserable—and frightened—much of the time (see next week’s post). I take that attitude to be projection of our own unfamiliarity and fear over the prospect of losing the infantilizing influence of modernity. I have enough respect for early humans to believe that they faced challenges with grit and equanimity, while finding it within themselves to laugh, joke, tease, sing, and dance.


Overall Lesson

The point of this exercise is that not every drawing we could slap on paper is biophysically, ecologically supportable. In fact, the vast majority are not. It is probably approximately true that the area under the curve—above a certain threshold of sustainable population—is limited, as excess/overshoot leads to accumulating ecological damage, and an initially-healthy Earth can only take so much. This precludes, for instance, the pleasant notion of an arbitrarily gradual decline toward sustainable levels. Gotta keep the area below the breaking point. We can’t just do anything we wish. Does that lack of control commit us to misery? Careful: this is a tantrum-free zone.

Even in a deterministic mindset, where the ultimate answer is inevitable, the result is utterly unpredictable to us. Options E and F, for instance, both seem to be on the table, and I would rather that our species survives beyond the modernity episode than execute its extinction as a result of clinging to the colossal mistake of modernity for too long.

That means, if option F is to be avoided, steps must be taken to set us on the path of option E. Efforts in that direction come with no guarantees, but failure to make the attempt is far less likely to end up there.

Aurelien: against recentism

Things Don't Always Get Better. Aurelien, Trying to Understand the World. Oct. 2, 2024.
And "Against Recentism," while we're at it.


When I was young, there was a general belief that the world had been getting better for a while, and would continue to do so.

This wasn’t an ideology, more of a commonplace, everyday assumption. It wasn’t forced on a sceptical population by the political power, as accounts of endless progress were forced on the population of the Soviet Union. It had little to do with visions of futuristic utopias held by scientists and intellectuals. Indeed, it was something that seemed so mundanely obvious as scarcely to be worth mentioning. When the Conservative Party leader Harold Macmillan claimed in a 1957 speech that “we have never had it so good,” he was expressing a widely, almost universally, held belief. Opponents might grumble about the decline in traditional social standards and the burgeoning problem of rebellious youth, but that was about it. Macmillan himself had made his political reputation as Housing Minister (how quaint the very idea seems now) keeping his promise to build one hundred thousand new houses a year, to replace war damage and the slums of the major cities. And this was what people saw and experienced.

It’s almost impossible now to understand the significance of the transformation in daily life that came over most of the western world between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries. Again, it was mostly mundane, everyday things. If one of my distant ancestors—a farm labourer perhaps or a small shopkeeper—had been told in the 1850s or 1860s that century later their descendants would live in new houses with indoor toilets, electric lights and running water, that machines would be available to wash clothes and keep food fresh, that education and health care would be free, that infant mortality would be reduced radically as vaccinations and a healthier environment vanquished the terrors of smallpox, whooping cough and polio whose shadows still disturbed my childhood, that unemployment would be a thing of the past, that poverty had largely been conquered … well, they would have laughed and muttered about utopias, if indeed they even knew the word.

Security in many forms was largely taken for granted then, from well-lit public spaces to security of employment: there were often labour shortages, and trades unions were strong. Life was simpler all round: public utilities were government-run and existed to serve the public, and if you had an unresolved problem with the sewage you could write to your MP who would write to a Minister to try to get something done about it.

Now none of this—extraordinary as it now sounds—is really utopian, nor was it seen as such at the time. Governments were elected to get things done, to steer the economy so as to minimise unemployment, to provide the services and to develop the country. That was just their job. When Harold Wilson, the Labour Party leader, successfully campaigned against the Tories in the 1964 election, his main complaint was that the government had done too little of this, too slowly. (Nor was this mentality confined to Britain, by the way, the French still talk of the “thirty glorious years” after World War 2, when successive governments did much the same thing.)

So I have always thought that it is legitimate to look back at the past, and identify cases where things were better then than they are now, and could have developed very differently. The alternative view—everything is infinitely better in every way than it used to be—is so absurd that few people ever defend it in those terms. Rather, the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) whose ultimate origins lie in these Years of Plenty, dismisses their memory with accusations of excessive nostalgia, of overlooking the asserted horrors of the era, or indeed of outright reactionary politics (“I suppose you think that women should stay at home and do the housework!). Most of these people, in my experience, weren’t even alive in the 1960s and 1970s, and few of them can explain in what the superiority of the present moment consists, other than through IdiotPol rants. It is perhaps emblematic that, unlike Harold Wilson sixty years ago, when Keir Starmer took over as Prime Minister after fourteen years of Tory rule, all he could offer was gloom, doom and more of the same. (I am increasingly wondering what the point of Starmer actually is.)

Something very interesting and largely unnoticed has taken place in the last fifty years. Up until the nineteenth century, western populations were largely conservative in mentality. (And again, I’m talking about ordinary people here.) The world around them changed slowly, economic growth was scarcely noticeable, and in general ordinary people were concerned with hanging on to what they had. Most social unrest, even violent revolts, was essentially conservative: the restoration of traditional privileges, the abolition of hated new taxes, the dismissal of corrupt or incompetent servants of the monarch. Popular feeling was largely against social and economic change (understandably, in the case of the factory system and the clearance of the countryside) and for a return to a better past. The few genuinely revolutionary or millennial movements of the time are sufficiently unusual that historians write books about them.

Urbanisation, minimal education and the destruction of old social systems changed this to a degree: it was the common people of Paris not the intellectuals, who triggered the Revolution, after all. Equally, the common people of the countryside reacted in horror to the Revolution and some rose in rebellion against it. But slowly, the idea got around that there was actually the possibility of progress. Workers in a factory who clubbed together could form a Union to demand better pay and conditions. Pressure could be put on governments to enlarge the franchise, or improve the generally terrible working conditions of ordinary people. And governments in Europe actually did respond: the nineteenth century was the Age of Reform, as schools were opened, sanitation was introduced, cities were cleaned up, more of the population was given the vote, and ordinary individuals acquired more rights at work, among many other things.

All these changes were welcomed by, and some were inspired by, the Left. In 1970, I remember the Trades Union Congress celebrated its centenary by putting out an illustrated book of its struggles and achievements. Many of the latter have since been undone, and the TUC is no longer a political force. But at that time, and for some years afterwards, left-wing parties were assumed to have history on their side, and it was taken for granted that as time went by, the agenda of the Left would be implemented more and more. The prevailing tendency of the Left at the time was the Social Democratic one; a kind of gradualism which thought that countries could be moved slowly and by persuasion in the direction of a more and more socialist system, and that existing power structures would eventually come round to the idea. This was no doubt why the novelist Evelyn Waugh complained that the British Conservative Party in his lifetime had not put the clock back even five minutes. For much of the twentieth century, this leftward drift seemed to be at least an arguable hypothesis.

Thus, looking back to the past was seen as an essentially right-wing, reactionary activity. True, there were maverick socialists, from William Morris to George Orwell, who believed that some traditions were important, but most had their eyes firmly fixed on the future, as their opponents had them firmly fixed on the past. Inevitably, the same qualified optimism found its way into popular culture, with its stories of space exploration, flying cars and time travel. But the writers and readers (of whom I was one) were not reading them as prophecy: I doubt if more than a handful of people really believed that they would live to take holidays on the moon, but of course that was not the point. Stories of space exploration were the mythology and legends of the technological era, expressing its dreams and fears in symbolic form, and novels of space exploration were no more prophecies of the future than the Odyssey is a reliable guide to visiting the islands of the Aegean.

Some time in the 1980s, this started to change. Ironically, though, the new political forces that slowly came to dominate the scene in different countries did not offer a return to an imagined past, but rather the way to a better future, by a different route. No right-wing party actually promised mass unemployment and poverty, the destruction of social systems, the offshoring of industry and the decline of public services. Rather, they promised that people could keep everything they had, and that the “greater efficiency” of “the market” would give them more than any left-wing government could.

And this argument was successful to a degree. The Conservative victory in 1979 was largely due to the defection of part of the younger working class, seduced by the idea of becoming property owners, and so acquiring, they thought, their own money machine. At that stage, the inevitable problems—such as houses rapidly becoming unaffordable for young people—were warned about, but not taken seriously, in the general excitement about new and wonderful ways of running the economy. The results of this new policy were so catastrophic —unemployment doubled in a year, for example—that the Conservatives would have been thrown out of office had the Labour Party not thoughtfully saved the situation by first disintegrating into internal warfare, and then splitting into two competing factions. The result was an unbroken series of Conservative governments for eighteen years. Yet it was clear there was no master-plan at work: privatisation, for example, which went on to conquer the world, was originally just a quick fix to raise some money; only later was a theoretical justification erected around it. This illustrates rather well a point that will recur in this essay: the conceptual framework of the last two hundred years is of change and advancement, and the assumption is that new ideas are always better and more effective than old ones.

Here, of course, the boot moved to the other foot, and began to generate a momentum of its own. New governments in power looked around and saw that other countries were shrinking the state, selling public assets etc. and moved along with the tide. (Politics is far more a reflection of fashion than most people realise.) Conversely, resisting change (how many of you have heard some dimwit management consultant intone “there’s always resistance to change”?) is always negatively encoded, and people don’t like being called “old-fashioned” or even “reactionary.” Because no system is ever perfect, those advocating change of any kind always have a rhetorical advantage, since, after all, what they are suggesting might make things better. At least, there’s no definite proof that it won’t. By contrast, defending the status quo, let alone the status quo ante, is much more rhetorically difficult.

Yet it seems to me that this is logically absurd. Until perhaps the 1980s, the changes that the Left was proposing—-widening the electoral franchise, for example, or increasing free access to education and healthcare—came out of a clear egalitarian and progressive project.. Not everybody supported these ideas, of course, but the arguments were at least relatively clear. As you would expect from the fussy, fiddly, process- and detail-obsessed Liberal ideology, though, most of the changes of the last thirty or forty years have been Bright Ideas, untestable or at least untested in advance, and which have wreaked havoc generally.

In the circumstances, it is entirely reasonable for the Left to be reactionary, in the sense that it reacts negatively to proposals or measures that will make life worse for ordinary people. It is also reasonable for the Left to be conservative, in the sense that it wishes to conserve the gains that ordinary people made in most countries between the 1940s and the 1980s. For that matter, it is entirely reasonable for the Left to look back with affection to a time when life for ordinary people was easier, and it was assumed this would continue. Of course it is fair to argue that this curious state of affairs only arose because the Left abandoned the interests of ordinary people, but that’s a different subject.

If I may be permitted a personal example, I was fortunate enough to benefit, from ten years’ more full-time, free education than my parents did. For some of the time I was even paid to study. I thought, and I still think, that such a system should have been conserved. (Today, I probably would have finished my education at eighteen.) It’s not hard to react negatively against the grotesque shambles that university education has now become, and to look back with, yes, a degree of nostalgia, on a system that functioned much better. Yet the neoliberal Party which dominates politics in most western countries, has taken over and adopted the discourse of continuous change, and uses it to disarm and neuter its critics. I can’t help recalling, to strike a frequent note once more, that the Party in 1984 had abolished history, apart from a highly distorted cartoon like series of received ideas that enabled the present situation, and any variant, of it, to be presented always as superior to the past. Indeed, Winston Smith wonders sometimes if his own memories of better times in his youth may actually be imaginary. (I’ll return to this point later.)

The Party’s policy takes a number of forms, all based around the curious proposition that any resistance of any kind to Change is at best reactionary and right-wing, at worse proof of actual or incipient fascism. (Bizarre when you consider that fascism called for radical change, and indeed practised it when in power.) In true Liberal fashion we are advancing towards an ever-better future, even if this advance may not be evident to everyone, and most of all we are advancing forward from the darkness and intolerance of the past. Now there is very seldom any attempt by the Party to support this argument by facts or statistics. Whereas governments in the past would boast about building houses, motorways, train lines or nuclear power stations, and whereas the level of unemployment, the rate of inflation or the strength of one’s national currency were discussed endlessly in the media, today’s governments say little about any of these things. Figures for unemployment and inflation have been so heavily massaged and so much revised downwards for decades now that I don’t think even most western governments take them seriously any more. Insofar as there is a debate at all, it’s over which programmes impacting ordinary people it will be necessary to cut to satisfy those who believe, against all the evidence, that the economics of a country and the economics of a family are identical to each other.

Thus, looking back at any evidence of a better past is coded as coming from the “Right” or even the “extreme Right,” thus de-legitimising any complaint about the situation today. This is bizarre, but is perhaps a necessary consequences of the Party’s and PMC’s policy of draining all substance from politics, and turning it into a technical struggle for power. We no longer have genuine political struggles between traditional forces of Left and Right, we have struggles for power and occasional attempts to challenge orthodoxy. These challenges are dismissed by the Party as coming from the “extreme Right” or “the hard Right” or the “ultra Right” or some other tiresome formula, not because they do, or because those terms any longer have meaning, but because it is politically effective to use such insults, as it was once politically effective to dismiss ideas you didn’t like as “Communism.”

This has led PMC-adjacent pundits and journalists into hopeless confusion. If certain ideas, or even certain subjects, are labelled “extreme Right” etc. because they displease the Party, rather than because they are part of any coherent dogma, then manifestly it’s impossible to write anything sensible about politics and politicians, even if that were the intention. So the new government in France apparently represents a “lurch to the extreme Right”, because Barnier has said that the control of immigration needs to be improved. I’ve seen journalists earnestly trying to decide whether Sahra Wagenknecht and her party are of the Left (or even “extreme Left”) or actually of the “extreme Right,” because of the priorities she has set out. Such people are incapable of understanding that any party that addresses popular concerns will inevitably trip some of the artificial snares set up by the Party to trap “extreme Right” ideas.

In the end, of course, this policy is self-defeating, because it turns the legitimate concerns of ordinary people into ideological crimes. In the case of immigration, which has unfortunately become the touchstone for seeking out the “extreme Right,” the Party seeks to prevent even mention of the issue, except in the blandest and most happy-clappy sense. To wish to talk about the problems of immigration is to identify yourself as of the “extreme Right,” and to even to suggest that it perhaps deserves discussion is to “legitimise” the “extreme Right’s” positions.

This can’t go on, because it involves rejecting the lived experience of ordinary people as though it did not exist and doesn’t matter. Thus, a female student was raped and murdered outside the prestigious Université Dauphine in Paris a week ago: the presumed murderer, a Moroccan immigrant with previous convictions for rape, had been served with an official order to leave the country, but in the interim had been freed from custody by a judge. The media, which briefly covered the issue, was mainly worried that the (understandable) protests of female students at the University might be “instrumentalised by the extreme Right.” And here comes the wicked witch of the Green Party, Sabine Rousseau, to assure us in a tweet that it’s all right really, because if the individual had been sent back to Morocco, he would have murdered someone truly innocent, like a Moroccan woman.

As I say, it can’t go on. As a matter of practical politics, you cannot label perhaps three quarters of the population, estranged from the policies and practices of successive governments, as “extreme Right” or at best “playing the game of the extreme Right” and seriously hope to stay in power. Yet this is what a whole series of French politicians have done, for example. Macron has railed for years against the”recalcitrant Gauls” of the country he represents for not getting on board with his neoliberal plans, while Mélenchon has publicly dismissed all French people except immigrants and young progressives as, wait for it, “the extreme Right” and does not seek their votes. It’s a recipe for political suicide, and we see the results now in various countries, most recently in Austria. Indeed, the more opposition is provoked by the Party, the more the dreaded “extreme Right” actually grows in size, since it is an auto-creation of the Party itself.

But what is it makes politicians act in this way, and why do pundits and the media cheer them on? What’s wrong with a little continuity? What’s wrong with policies that benefit ordinary people? Indeed, what’s wrong with listening to their concerns?

We have to bear in mind that Liberalism is a teleological belief, with a strong eschatological component. That is to say it moves ever forward towards some future goal, when the righteous shall be saved and the evil-doers punished. Liberalism is, of course, a Christian heresy, where The Market has taken the place of the Grace of God which passeth all understanding. Thus, apparent contradictions and apparent negative effects will all be put right by the magical hand of The Market, given enough time. This, more than anything else, accounts for the violence and the moral fervour with which competing ideologies are denounced, and even of dialogue or debate itself. The problem, inevitably, is that Liberalism isn’t based on any coherent set of principles or beliefs, so instead, we have a series of competing and often mutually detesting groupuscules all seeking greater freedom and power for themselves, and trying to secure their share of funding and media attention.

Any party which aims at change will inevitably produce splinter-groups and radical fringes seeking faster change here, or more emphasis there. This happened in the 60s and 70s with Marxist groups: you may remember the joke about the Marxist party that claimed “there is no-one to the Left of us,” only for a splinter-group to claim the next day “there is now!” But in fact it applies to any group that seeks change, including groups of the (actual) extreme Right. By an almost mechanical process of escalation, groups form to demand a more radical stance, only to be eclipsed by others demanding a stance even more radical. Whatever change is brought about simply provokes the demand for more of it. There are, after all, grants and jobs and media coverage to ensure. Liberalism is like a bicycle: if you stop peddling in the direction of a more perfect society, you fall off.

And this is why the traditional Left (where I number myself) has such problems with the extreme neoliberal collection of lobby-groups that the traditional parties of the Left have somehow contorted themselves into. 

By definition, Socialism—the Left’s ideology—is about the collective. It’s about the community, the workplace, even the family and extended family, not the interests of the individual against other individuals. It’s not about “opportunity” except in the sense of removing artificial barriers, but about actually doing things and supplying communities with what they want and need. Yet the best that parties which were once of the “Left” have been able to do is to market themselves as being slightly less nasty than the opposition: a kinder, gentler form of neoliberal exploitation. The Left has always understood that in a good and fair society individuals flourish, but that no amount of individual flourishing will make a society good and fair.

It’s therefore instructive to go back to the 60s and 70s to see how governments (including some not even of the Left) handled difficult social issues, by moving from general principles to the particular case, rather than the other way round. Thus, most western governments introduced legislation to outlaw overt racial discrimination and to make it illegal for women to be paid less than men for the same job. This was not the doing of pressure groups, but the result of a consensus that a modern society could no longer permit these things to happen. Likewise, abortion was decriminalised in a number of countries in the same era, and again this was a collective social judgement, not the result of lobbying. In Britain the decision was largely uncontroversial (though some women’s groups continued to fight it into the 1970s) because it was accepted that, with modern contraception, and with modern medical technology, abortions would inevitably be few and safe. The same argument essentially applied to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, where it was felt that a modern society really should be more tolerant of minority sexual preferences.

What these and similar changes had in common was an approach based on consensus and a willingness to look at the facts and the evidence. Of course, no changes of this sort were without controversy, or the use of controversies for political advantage, but in no case either did the controversy last long. By contrast, because much of the Liberal agenda proceeds from a priori assumptions that often contradict each other but are nonetheless held to be self-evident, and because Liberalism knows no greater good than the perfect economic and social freedom of the individual, then debate, reflection and evaluation are excluded: indeed, they are dangerous, and could be used by the extreme Right. I see that some American universities are now openly against debate, which is understandable given that few of the IdiotPol priorities of our day would survive rational examination.

Thus the agenda of the Party, insofar as it has one, is essentially random and irrational, the product of the strength and funding of various competing lobby groups. 

It is scarcely surprising that the electorates of various countries are rebelling against governments who neglect their interests, but seek to enforce an incoherent and often contradictory agenda of continual normative change, without any argument other than power and the ability to demonise any opposition. Indeed, the “extreme Right” tactic has now reached the stage of self-parody and is, I believe, even starting to unravel. If one is not allowed to mention the issues that ordinary people think are important in their lives because the very mention of them “legitimates the extreme Right” or some such nonsense, if pronouncing the words “society” or “immigration” conjures up diabolical forces, as in the theatre no-one pronounces the name of Shakespeare’s “Scottish Play,” then in effect the political system has terminally lost touch with the very people it purports to represent. People are growing wearier and wearier of this tactic, as they find a greater and greater proportion of their lives subject to an omertà. It’s now clear that we have met Their Enemy, and Their Enemy turns out to be Us. That’s a thought.

The escalation effect I mentioned above has no “off” switch, so the various interest groups within the Party are obliged to offer more and more radical proposals to get attention and secure funding, and so increase their power and influence relative to other groups. (By definition, the interests of ordinary people cannot be taken into account.) In the longer term, of course, this system is hopelessly negative and destructive, which is why it will come apart. Imagine, if you will, a sweating Outer Party functionary—a blogger, or minor journalist or parliamentarian with a fragile majority—waking up one morning to find that a better-known figure has just tweeted that schools ought to be legally obliged to have at least one transexual teacher. How to respond? How much power does this person have? Who has declared themselves in favour? How are opponents being characterised? Can I get by without making a comment? Needless to say, the merits of the idea are not the point: the point is to safeguard yourself from criticism, or even from losing your job.

In effect, an entire discourse and system of thought has been hijacked here. For a long time, the Left saw itself making incremental achievements to improve the lives of ordinary people, so it was legitimate to suggest that more modern was better. This wasn’t a transcendental truth, but a pragmatic judgement. But over the last generation or so, the concept of “modern” has morphed, or been twisted into, just “recent.” So Modernism has become just Recentism, the reflexive deference to whatever has just emerged. Conversely, the refusal to defer to ideas and behaviour that are Recent is now dismissed as a sign of, you’ve guessed it, the “extreme Right.”

Just think for a moment. Are the political or philosophical ideas of today “modern” in any sense, or are they just Recent? Indeed where are the significant political thinkers and philosophers? To the extent that there are any, they don’t work for the Party. And what about Culture? Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, considered a key Modernist work, was premiered over a century ago. Olivier Messiaen died more than thirty years ago, and most of his famous compositions belong to the thirties and forties of the last century. How is recent orchestral and chamber music more “modern” than either? Has it developed at all? Arguably not, and indeed the really interesting new recordings today are of little-known works from the past or the recovery of more music from the Middle Ages up to the Baroque era, neither of which is Recent, but some of which is distinctly Modern. Come to that, western popular music is still feeding off the modernist developments of the sixties and early seventies. And in literature, well, Ulysses and The Waste Land were published a century ago, Céline and Virginia Woolf wrote in the interwar years, the Nouveau Roman and Oulipo belong essentially to the sixties. And there’s nothing more transient and unmemorable than a “contemporary” reworking of Shakespeare. A torrent of new art appears every year, and much of it wins prizes, but it’s a long time since it looked more “modern” than whatever emerged the preceding year, or even decade. It’s a pity, since genuine innovation and modernism would be welcome, but there we are.

In the circumstances, a reaction against endless Recentism seems entirely reasonable. Once we realise that neoliberalism has hijacked the historical leftist discourse of incremental progress to help de-legititmise its critics, then things become clearer. It is entirely reasonable also to look back and conclude that in the past things were done better. Unless you find mass unemployment and mass poverty attractive, unless free education and free healthcare are unappealing to you, unless you find alienation and social breakdown enticing, unless you believe that it was sensible to export manufacturing industry and to build an economy based on financial services and pizza delivery, then you are bound to accept, albeit grudgingly, that things were better organised fifty years ago than they are now. Indeed, the world then was probably more “modern” than ours is, for any value of “modern” that makes sense. And of course a world further developed along the same principles would be very different from the one we have.

PMC critics have tried various tactics. At the beginning it was the Promised Land of the Market. That was abandoned in favour of Inevitable and Irresistible Change, which was falsified by glancing at other countries going in the other direction. Now, the best they can do is to encode the sense of missing positive things from the past as the influence of (sigh) the “extreme Right.” The problem is that the Party has nothing tangible to offer in opposition. For a while all the talk was of a “more tolerant” society, but that didn’t work, and it’s recently been decided that tolerance is actually not a virtue at all. So apart from hand-waving and mumbling about norms and values, all the Party can do is to demonise the past. To listen to some people who were not alive then, you would imagine that in the sixties and seventies immigrants were periodically lynched in the street, homosexuals were locked up in special camps, and women were chained to the kitchen sink rather than being allowed self-fulfilment through working shifts at a supermarket checkout. But it’s not hard to conclude that a society where a return to the mass unemployment and poverty of the ‘thirties was considered unacceptable was actually a better society than the one we have today.

Ironically, there are a number of political forces that actually are being strengthened by all this nonsense. One, probably, is the actual extreme Right. The Party desperately wants to conjure this tendency into existence, but it won’t like the consequences. Try “fighting” the genuine extreme Right, and you’ll get badly hurt. The other is the traditional moderate Right, which in many countries was pronounced dead, but is showing signs of recovery. In France, for example, there’s a clear centre-Right majority in the country and in Parliament, and we are seeing the effects in the appointment of the Barnier government and in the choice of the traditionalist Bruno Retailleau as Interior Minister. The Catholic Church and the part of the Right that identifies with it has picked up support in recent years as well. Partly this was the law on homosexual marriage, which dynamised the Catholic Right in a way that hadn’t been seen in generations, and partly the increasing tolerance of Muslim religious interference in the secular state, which has made some highly-conservative Catholics reflect that two can play at that game.

I have thought for some time now that the genuine Left is standing in front of an open goal. All it has to do is kick the ball in. A Left that showed it was receptive to the concerns of ordinary people would be poised to sweep into power, but this would require a reconsideration of thirty years or more of anticipatory cringes. Parties of the Left were so befuddled by Recentist political ideas that they thought that their occasional victories were because they had adopted these ideas, not that the electorate had rejected the neoliberal policies that resulted from them. The predicament of Starmer in the UK is absolutely emblematic: elected as a result of widespread disgust with the Tories, his own party has no idea what to do other than imitate them while trying to look a little less nasty.

Demonising the concerns of ordinary people as being “extreme Right” cannot work in the longer term, and will simply increase populist feeling to the point where it becomes unmanageable. I have said before, and I repeat, that those who make populism of the Left impossible will make populism of the Right inevitable. I doubt one in a thousand of those currently finding the “extreme Right” under every stone have any idea what that would mean.

Johnstone: Authenticity

To Be An Authentic Person Is To Stare Deeply Into The Face Of Uncomfortable Truths. Caitlin Johnstone. Sep 22, 2024.

To be an authentic person is to stare deeply into the face of uncomfortable truths.

It’s to experience all the footage of shredded bodies in Gaza with a visceral understanding that these are real things happening to real people whose lives mattered just as much as your own.

To come to terms with the reality that the power structure you were raised to trust and the political party you were raised to side with are responsible for some of the worst things that have ever happened in our world, and that their depravity must be fought tooth and claw.

To stare unblinking into the very real possibility that the madness of our rulers could cause total human extinction by nuclear war or environmental destruction within your own lifetime.

To admit that your previous understanding of an issue was a misguided perception caused by propaganda, and to be fully open to the possibility that this is also true of your current understanding of other issues as well.

To deeply recognize the ways your own delusion and dysfunction have played a role in the delusion and dysfunction of humanity as a whole, and to cease viewing yourself as separate or separable from the self-destructive patterning of our species.

To be honest with yourself about the circumstances of your birth and the ways in which you have it better than other people in different circumstances and in other parts of the world — often at the expense of those very populations.

To be honest with yourself about the ways in which your actions harm others, and take any steps necessary to rectify this wherever you can.

To be honest with yourself about the ways in which you have been harmed — your traumas and wounded self-beliefs and your maladaptive coping mechanisms ensuing therefrom — and do the work necessary to heal them.

To be honest with yourself about how little you really know about this boundless mystery called life, and to be humble in your position as a clueless member of a young species in a universe that none of us understand.

To explore with sincere curiosity the possibility that all our assumptions about the reality we are experiencing have been wrong this whole time, right down to our beliefs about things as fundamental as thought, perception, and the existence of a self or a separate outer world.

To be an authentic person is to constantly plunge headlong into the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unknown and the unpredictable, even when doing so feels like a kind of death, for no other reason than because that’s where the truth is.

It’s to always welcome the truth with open arms, even when it is unpleasant, embarrassing, inconvenient or downright terrifying, come what may.

Western "Democracy"

The Bizarre State of Western Democracy. Prabhat Patnaik, People's Democracy. Sept 8, 2024.

DURING the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate. True, it is not that the governments first ascertain popular wishes, and then decide on policy; the conformity between the two is typically ensured under bourgeois rule by the government deciding on policies in accordance with ruling class interests, and then having a propaganda machinery that persuades the people about the wisdom of these policies. The conformity between public opinion and what the ruling class wants is thus achieved in a complex manner whose essence lies in the manipulation of public opinion.

What is currently happening however is altogether different: public opinion, notwithstanding all the propaganda directed at it, wants policies that are altogether different from those being systematically pursued by the ruling class. The policies favoured by the ruling class in other words are being pursued despite public opinion being palpably and systematically opposed to them. This is made possible by having most political parties line up behind these policies; that is, by getting a very large spectrum of political formations or parties backing these policies against the wishes of the majority of the electorate. The current situation is thus characterised by two distinct features: first, a broad unanimity among the bulk of political formations (parties); and second, a total lack of congruence between what these parties agree on and what the people want. Such a situation is quite unprecedented in the history of bourgeois democracy. These policies moreover relate not to minor questions concerning this or that matter, but to fundamental issues of war and peace.

Take the United States. The majority of people in that country according to all available opinion polls are appalled by Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people; they would like the US to bring the war to an end and not keep supplying arms to Israel for prolonging it. But the US government is doing precisely the opposite, even at the risk of escalating the war into one that engulfs the entire middle east. Likewise, public opinion in the US does not want a continuation of the Ukraine war. It favours an end to that conflict through a negotiated peace; but the US government (together with that of the UK) has systematically torpedoed all possibilities of peaceful settlement. Its opposition to the Minsk agreements, an opposition conveyed to Ukraine through British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s trip to Kiev, is what started the war in the first place; and even now when Putin had made certain proposals for establishing peace, it egged Ukraine on to launch its Kursk offensive which ended all hopes of peace.

What is significant is that both the Republicans and the Democrats in the US are agreed on this policy of providing arms to Netanyahu and Zelensky, despite public opinion wanting peace and despite the fact that any adventurism by Ukraine runs the risk of unleashing a nuclear conflagration.

This contrast between what the people want, despite all the propaganda they have been subjected to, and what the pollical establishment ordains, afflicts all metropolitan countries; but nowhere is it as stark as in Germany. The Ukraine war directly impinges on Germany in a manner it does not on any other metropolitan country, since Germany was entirely dependent on Russian gas for its energy needs. The sanctions on Russia have caused a shortage of gas; and the import of more expensive substitutes from the US has pushed up gas prices to levels that strongly impinge on the living standards of German workers. An end to the Ukraine war is urgently demanded by German workers; but neither the ruling coalition consisting of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens, nor the main opposition consisting of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Socialists, is showing any interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict. On the contrary the German political establishment is trying to whip up fears of Russian troops appearing on German borders, even though, ironically, it is German troops that are stationed at present in Lithuania on the borders of Russia!

In their desperation for an end to the Ukraine war the German working people are turning to the neo-fascist AfD which professes to be against the war (though one knows it will inevitably betray this promise once it comes anywhere near power) and the new Left party of Sahra Wagenknecht that broke away from the parent Left Party, Die Linke, on this very issue of war.

Exactly the same is true of German attitudes towards the genocide in Gaza. While the bulk of the German population opposes this genocide, the German government has actually criminalised all opposition to the Israeli genocide on the grounds that it constitutes “anti-semitism”. It even broke up a convention that was being organised to protest against the genocide, to which internationally-known speakers like Yanis Varoufakis had been invited. The use of the “anti-semitism” stick to beat all opposition to Israel’s aggression is pervasive in other metropolitan countries too. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, was hounded out of that party, ostensibly on grounds of his so-called “anti-semitism” but actually because of his support for the Palestinian cause; and US campus authorities have invoked this charge against the widespread campus protests that have rocked that country.

Such riding roughshod over public opinion is typically sought to be achieved by keeping these burning issues of peace and war off political discussion altogether. In the coming US presidential elections, for instance, since both the contenders, Donald Trump and Kamla Harris, are agreed on supplying arms to Israel, this issue itself will not figure in any presidential debate or in the presidential campaign. While other topics where they differ will hold centre-stage, the crucial one that affects people and where they hold a different opinion from the contestants, will not be an issue for debate.

One reason for the support of the political establishment for Israeli actions, which is far from being a negligible one, is the generous funding that such support gets from pro-Israel donors. According to a report published in the Delphi Initiative (August 21), half the cabinet of Keir Starmer, the newly-elected Labour prime minister of Britain, had received money from pro-Israel sources to fight the elections that brought them to power. The same number of the same journal also reports that one-third of the Conservative members of the British parliament had received money from pro-Israel sources for elections. Pro-Israel money in other words is available to both the main parties of Britain; this makes support for Israeli actions a bipartisan affair.

On the other hand what happens to those who stand with Palestine is illustrated by two cases in the US Members of the Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both black progressive representatives, who were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and strong critics of Israeli genocide, were defeated by the intervention of AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which poured millions of dollars into the effort. The Delphi Initiative of August 31 reports that 17 million dollars had been spent for Bowman’s defeat and 9 million dollars for the Ad campaign against Cori Bush. Interestingly, the campaign against Cori Bush did not mention Israel’s aggression against Gaza, as AIPAC knew that on that particular issue the public would have supported Cori Bush rather than her opponent, and hence frustrated its plans for her defeat. What all this means is that a fundamental decision on war and peace that affects everybody is being taken in the metropolitan countries against the wishes of the people by a political establishment that is financed by lobbies with vested interests.

In the metropolis there has thus been a transition from “manipulation of dissent” through propaganda, to the total ignoring of dissent, even dissent by a majority, that has proved to be immune to propaganda. This represents a new stage in the attenuation of democracy, a stage characterised by an unprecedented moral bankruptcy of the political establishment. Such moral bankruptcy of the traditional political establishment also constitutes the context for the growth of fascism; but whether or not fascism actually comes to power, the attenuation of democracy in metropolitan societies has already disempowered people to an extent that is quite unprecedented.

Johnstone on Gaza apathy and what it portends for our collective future: extinction

"Why Should I Care About Gaza?" Caitlin Johnstone. Sept. 8, 2024.

The other day someone on Twitter asked me why he should care about what’s happening in Gaza, saying, “Why should I care about anyone that isn’t in a 20 mile radius of where I live?”

I was a bit taken aback by this. I must confess I live in a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to caring about the world; most people I interact with from day to day either agree with me or disagree with me about the abusive nature of the empire and what our problems are and what should be done about them, but the one thing they all have in common is that they care. Outside my little bubble I suspect this “why should I care?” sentiment is probably pretty common, though.

There’s a 2017 Huffington Post article by Kayla Chadwick titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” which expresses frustration at this type of attitude, because it is very difficult to argue against. If you’re not already the sort of person who would naturally care about the death and suffering in Gaza, it’s going to be hard to get you to see why you should. If you’re missing the part of yourself which hurts when it sees children ripped apart by Israeli bombs, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the value of that part.

But I like a challenge. So I’ve had a bit of a think about it, and I’ve come up with the most honest and complete answer to this question that I am able to produce right now. It might not convince anyone, but it is a well-reasoned answer.

Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.

For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it. We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.

The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.

The ability of plutocrats to exploit cheap labor overseas directly affects how much you and your neighbors can earn to provide for yourselves and your families. If we had true international class solidarity, they wouldn’t be able to get away with that anymore.

The ability of corporations to feed our biosphere into the capitalism machine and offload costs of production onto the ecosystem to maximize profits directly affects the kind of environment we’ll all be living in in the coming years. Corporate suits can only get away with this because the citizenry who vastly outnumber them have been manipulated into accepting their cancerous behavior.

The ability of war profiteers and empire managers to push for more war and militarism around the world directly affects how much of our nation’s wealth and resources are allocated to supporting the needs of ordinary people at home, and threatens us all with the looming possibility of nuclear armageddon. The imperial propaganda machine works so hard to manufacture consent for this madness because otherwise nobody would consent to it.

The oligarchs and government agencies who run the US-centralized empire are able to exploit our tendency to only care about our immediate surroundings to construct global mechanisms which affect everything — including our immediate surroundings. All it takes is a little narrative manipulation coupled with our own nearsightedness to keep us from seeing what they’re doing.

They destabilize entire regions in the global south with war and imperialist extraction, and when people start fleeing those horrible conditions they use propaganda to manipulate those in the global north into hating immigrants instead of focusing on what’s driving the mass exoduses.

They deliberately maintain a level of unemployment to artificially depress wages, and then propagandize the working poor into thinking the unemployed are parasitic welfare moochers.

They create a controlled opposition false dichotomy between two mainstream political factions who both serve the capitalist empire in every meaningful way, and then manipulate both sides into blaming all the problems this causes on the other side instead of on the architects of this whole disaster.

These manipulations would not work if our circles of compassion were sufficiently wide. The same moral myopia which causes us to fail to see a Palestinian child as worthy of our care and attention also causes us to fail to recognize the underlying causes of all the major problems we see all around us.

It’s true that caring about that Palestinian child, in and of itself, will yield you no personal material gain. But being the sort of person who would care about that Palestinian child will help pave the way from hell on earth to paradise. Enough humans having a wide enough circle of compassion to care about the suffering of other humans who they will never meet is all it will take for us to create a healthy world.

Our species can no longer existentially afford small circles of compassion. We can no longer afford ignorance and apathy. We’ve got to start learning about what’s happening in the world, thinking in terms of global community, and caring about our fellow beings on this planet in the way we care for our friends and neighbors.

Sure that’s not our tendency right now, but every species eventually hits a point where it needs to adapt or go the way of the dinosaur. That’s where we’re at right now. The days where “rugged individualism” could be defended as a rational worldview are long over, if it was ever rational to begin with.

This isn’t the twelfth century. We’re not going from birth to death in tiny communities unconnected to the rest of the world. Whatever device you’re reading this on has parts from multiple foreign countries, which passed through countless foreign hands to come into yours. We all touch one another’s lives around the world from distances which used to have no relevance to the human experience of this planet.

We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct.

That’s why you should care about Gaza. Because humanity’s collective failure to care about such things is driving our species further and further into misery and dystopia, and closer and closer to the precipice of eternal oblivion.

Radagast: The Cure for Climate Anguish

The Cure for Climate Anguish. Rintrah, by Radagast. Sept. 7, 2024.

So I’ll try not to waste too many words on this, but the Dutch Extinction Rebellion protesters are blocking the entrance to the state museum in Amsterdam.

Ted Kaczynski famously warned that protesters should not create a rift between themselves and the general public. Rather, they should seek to find adherents, by attacking the excesses of the system they oppose. For his anti-tech revolution, he recommended focusing on genetic manipulation, rather than, let’s say, the electricity grid.

So if you block the entrance to the state museum, preventing people who have very little spare time from going to the museum, you’re inevitably just marginalizing yourself. You’re also marginalizing yourself of course if you start piling other leftists causes on top of your cause, like the Palestinians.

But I don’t think these people are seriously trying to save the world. I think they want to be able to say to themselves that they were “on the right side of history” and “tried everything”. Above all else, they’re trying to treat their own existential anguish.

They kind of ran out of ideas, so now they’re settling on a kind of “fifteen degrees to Hitler” leftist social shaming strategy. The fossil fuel industry is Hitler. ING, the Dutch bank, funds Hitler, so they’re nazi’s. The nazi bank also funds the museum, so the museum are nazi sympathizers.

But this is a bit of a dead-end social strategy. At this point, my honest recommendation is to just accept that the attempt to stop global warming has failed and we’re going to die.

“It was all looking pretty bleak. But then people blocked the entrance to a museum funded by a bank that also funds the fossil fuel industry and things began to get better!”

The Africans are fucked, the elephants are fucked, the orangutans are fucked.

But let’s be honest to ourselves. The African population is projected to swell to 3.5 billion by 2100. Global warming or no global warming, they were fucked to begin with. Their fertile soils are flushing down into the ocean.

Congo had 12 million people in 1950. They had 101 million in 2020. They will have 379 million by 2100. What did you think was going to happen? “Oh no, global warming caused millions of people in Congo to die of starvation in 2050 who would have otherwise died in a Malthusian catastrophe in 2080!”

Most people don’t zoom out, they live in the here and now. If you zoom out you’ll get anxious, because you will see your own ugly old mug and your death on the horizon. But if you’re going to zoom out, it would be better if you would recognize the inevitability of collapse too.

Nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen, but you don’t have to be a genius, to recognize collapse is baked into the system by now. Forget about global warming for a moment. We don’t have the natural resources we need to keep the system going. The aquifers are depleting, our soils are flushing into the ocean, the pollinating insects are dying from our pesticides, our sperm counts are crashing and most of the population is obese.

The Koreans and Japanese are dying out, the Afghans and the Congolese are undergoing a population explosion. Call me racist if you want, but I don’t think the Amish-Afghan-Congolese coalition is going to build the same sort of society as the Japanese and the Koreans did.

If you think the temperatures we’ll get by 2050 are terrifying, wait until you see the resource depletion problem that kicks in much earlier. We don’t have the natural resources we need for the whole sustainable energy transition, there’s very little copper left in the world.

And if you think the resource depletion is scary, wait until you see the real problem, the pandemic problem. Congo has always had monkeypox. But in the old days people lived in isolated villages, so the virus would die out for lack of hosts, before finding its way into the next village.

But now people are living in giant refugee camps, in cities where children with bullet holes in their body lay in the same hospital bed as children with monkeypox. People now live in refugee camps where a hundred people have to share the same toilet. The women are forced to prostitute themselves, to feed their children. Just as nature tries to be merciful to the chickens we put in cages, nature tries to be merciful to the poor people stuck living in these refugee camps.

When you go from 12 million people to 101 million people, you make it much easier for a virus to spread to the next host, before dying out. Add some airplanes and truck drivers to that and a virus can spread to multiple other countries. That’s what happened to monkeypox. I said it before, I’ll say it again: Orthopox viruses killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century, even though smallpox was extinct by 1980. When this goes wrong, it goes very wrong.

“We’re going to save the Africans from global warming!”

Bro, you can’t save the Africans from monkeypox. The vaccines have finally arrived, but they won’t start vaccinating until they’ve trained the personnel, so the first vaccines will be administered in October at earliest. After that it’s a week or two before the vaccine is actually effective.

They will have 380,000 vaccines, on a population of 90 million in Congo alone. The capital city Kinshasa has already had its first 11 detected cases. There are 17 million people living there.

Good luck. This is going to turn into the same thing as SARS2, you’re just going to accelerate its evolution by vaccinating against it.

“I wonder what’s going to happen…”

Well, I have often released animals in Sim Life that showed this growth pattern and ate all the plants before the plants could produce seeds, so allow me to spoil the ending for you: They’re going to die. You can stabilize the ecosystem a bit, by releasing a plague virus before the animal population peaks, but otherwise they will probably just make all your plants extinct too.

But that’s just Congo. Nigeria will have 477 million by 2100, Ethiopia will be at 366 million. The EU will have 420 million by 2100, so yes, Nigeria alone would have more people than the EU. What do you think is going to happen?

By 2100 Nigeria would have the population density of the Netherlands! Forget about improving yields for a moment. In the Netherlands, we’re using 7% of our land, just for housing. Your food production is going to decline, simply because you’ll need to use your most fertile farmland to build houses and roads for your population. After all, your first cities like Lagos emerged in fertile river deltas, not in the middle of the desert up north.

We obviously won’t make it that far, collapse is baked into the system by now. But people don’t want to hear this, they want to think they can still dig their way out of this hole.

The crown of trees looks like this:
(see his post for pic)

This is how they stop pathogens from spreading. For generations, people living in the jungle did the same thing, they were highly xenophobic, they avoided other tribes.

But now countries like Congo are becoming an actual unified whole. And the number of flights worldwide exploded:
(again, see his site for pic)

So take a guess what’s going to happen.

The writing is on the wall by now.

Like the era of antibiotics, the era of controlling viruses through vaccination is of limited duration.

We’re now entering the pandemic era. Global warming will be of secondary concern.

Welsh on Collapse

Types Of Civilization Collapse. Ian Welsh. September 4, 2024.

We’ve had a couple posts recently on collapse. One, by Nate Wilcox, on the possibility of civil war and a another by commenter Grim Jim on just how many people would die in a civilization collapse.

Let’s take a look at the dimensions of collapse.

First is slow vs. fast. John Michael Greer tends to push slow, though his position is more nuanced than that. In the slow collapse things just keep getting shittier, with, perhaps, some break points. (If there’s a civil war, there’s a big jump in crap.) In this model it’s hard to say exactly when the collapse happens. When did the Western Roman Empire fall? There are easily half a dozen possible dates one could argue for, and that’s a collapse complete with a barbarian invasion.

In general expect countries which can feed and fuel themselves to be in the slow collapse bucket, though there’ll be exceptions, especially if they can’t defend themselves. Canada is one of those, if it isn’t invaded by America, which it probably will be. Russia is also in it, if they don’t wind up in a nuclear war.

Remember that modern agriculture will be effected by collapse: heavy use of fertilizer, pesticides and oils makes it vulnerable. So if a country appears to have a massive surplus, well, it may not. When AMOC ends and Europe loses ten degrees celcius overnight, they may as well.

The same here is true of water: when glaciers finish melting and most snow pack is gone, there’s going to be a lot less of it. So look at where the surplus food and water is coming from.

Second is distribution by time and place. Everyone likes to quote Gibson, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Some countries have already collapsed. Sri Lanka, for example. Others are further along the path: in the first world, Britain’s a good example. Within countries some places collapse first: Northern England is notably a hole. Catholic Belfast has never not been poor, and so on.

In the US there are places where we can be sure of regional collapse—as Sean-Paul pointed out to me, the Texas triangle is just going to run out of water in a couple decades. The American Southwest is doomed for pretty much the same reason.

As for that, the homelessness epidemic shows that for many Americans, the collapse is already here.

Internationally Bangladesh will be one of the first high-population countries to collapse. Among major countries, India will be one of the first. The Europeans can go any time when the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) ends: and that’s due sometime in the next 50 years, as a “when not if” proposition. I don’t know Africa well enough, but obviously multiple countries there are already close to collapse and the only thin which could put that off would be concerted efforts by China (financially and developmentally) and Russia (food and resource aid.)

China’s a hard one to predict: they have huge climate change vulnerabilities, especially to flooding in the North, heat in the North and water in general. On the other hand, if they play it smart they have the world’s industrial base and the best chance of adaptation and mitigation, especially due to their alliance with Russia, which will keep them in resources and food longer than otherwise. Since Russia mutually benefits, they’ll keep the Chinese topped up as a priority.

Which leads to the bigger point: when food starts getting scarce countries will stop exporting, and this is when food importing countries will start real collapse (and food riots, and civil war.)

As for water scarcity, that’s when you’ll get water wars.

And both will exacerbate any internal tensions. When there’s not enough to eat or drink, the “other” whoever that is, is likely to get it in the neck. Countries with significant internal rifts, like India between Hindus and Muslims/High and Low-Caste will see incredible violence and mass murder of minorities. Whether that also describes America is a question much debated, but at the least there will be a vast increase in discrimination and at the worst purges or even civil war.

In Europe there will be huge backlashes against visible minorities, especially Muslim ones and perhaps also Jews, as they are tarred with genocide and accusations of controlling governments.

I would suggest to expect a general pattern of slow decline punctuated by cliff-drops. Things will slowly get shittier, then suddenly get a lot shittier. To give a small example, in Ontario where I live, before Covid you could expect to be seen in an emergency department within a couple hours and to get an MRI or CT scan within a couple months, often a few weeks. Now it takes ten to twelve hours to be seen in an emergency (unless you’re obviously bleeding out or can’t breathe) and imaging tests can take six to nine months.

In collapse some foods (starting with imported ones) will go from widely available to just not on the shelf. Medicines which are imported will stop being available, again in slow decline then suddenly, almost impossible to find.

Slow, then precipitous, then slow, then precipitous.

The general prescription here, for small groups and individuals is to make yourself as independent of the grid as possible, to figure out how to grow climate controlled food, and to find a water source. Even in slow collapse models there will be large numbers of brownouts, water will be shitty if available (hello England) and so on. If you can’t handle at least a few hours or days off-grid, life will be miserable.

Collapse isn’t a disaster movie, though there are parts of it that are. (All the people made homeless by wildfires know this, and there will be coastal inundations). Rather it’s a series of long slide, punctuated by catastrophes.

Rees: On Being a Snowflake in an Avalanche

On Being a Snowflake in an Avalanche: The Catastrophe of Overshoot and How to Cope. William E. Rees, Resilience. July 11, 2024.

This article is divided into three parts. Part 1 is the scene-setter, a rundown of humanity’s overshoot predicament and how we got into it. Part 2 chronicles my career-long response to understanding overshoot from an ecological perspective. If you’re still with me for Part 3, I share a few lessons learned and offer some advice for coping with the challenges of both knowing about and experiencing the consequences of overshoot.

Part 1. Some History of Humanity’s Overshoot Predicament 

Over a decade ago, one of the most comprehensive assessments of global climate to date showed that the mean global temperature for the first decade of this century was approaching the highest levels in the past 11,000 years. A more recent article suggests that temperatures in the early 2020s are actually unprecedented in the past 24,000 years, and that the magnitude and rate of heating over the last 150 years far exceeds the magnitude and rates Earth has experienced over the entire 24-millennia period. It is no surprise, then, that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently declared 2023 to be the warmest year in the instrumental record and that Antarctic sea ice coverage had dropped to a record low. 

The beat goes on—the most recent data available show January, February and March 2024 to be the hottest January, February and March on record (just the latest in a series of ten). Looking ahead, our current policy track would result in ~2.7C mean global warming by century’s end, and one credible study argues that, with fast and slow feedbacks, even current atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are sufficient to generate 10C heating. But even 2.7 degrees warming is sufficient to flatten agriculture in many areas and render large areas of Earth uninhabitable. Analysis shows under a range of warming scenarios, that the projected geographical shift in the normal human temperature niche by 2100 would force the unprecedented migration of one to three billion people to thermally safer parts of the planet. Picture the abandonment of major cities and megacities, the invasion of rural areas by desperate millions and an ungovernable world in geopolitical turmoil. 

And that’s just global heating. Alarming as these data are, global heating is only the most palpable symptom of climate change which is, itself, only one co-symptom of a much greater meta-problem, ecological overshoot. Overshoot means that: 

Humans are consuming even self-producing resources (e.g., fish stocks, forests) and replenishable resources (e.g., fresh-water aquifers, arable soils) faster than they can regenerate and producing (often toxic) waste in excess of nature’s assimilation capacity. 

Think about that for a moment. You should soon realize that virtually all so-called “environmental” problems are actually caused by overshoot. Even anthropogenic climate change is an excess waste problem. (Carbon dioxide is the greatest waste product by weight of industrial activity.) The numerous other co-symptoms of overshoot include plunging biodiversity, fisheries collapses, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, groundwater depletion, rising cancer rates, falling sperm counts, contaminated food chains, the pollution of everything, etc., etc., most of which are worsening with each new assessment. 

It should be clear from this dismal accounting that, left unattended, overshoot is a terminal condition. The depletion and pollution of the ecosphere is a genuine existential threat, not only to human “civilization” but also to the existence of thousands of other species with whom we share the planet. It is therefore a supreme irony that everything the world community is doing to address global heating—switching to wind and solar electricity, promoting dubious CO2 extraction technologies, subsidizing electric vehicles, etc.—is not only not fixing the climate but is actually worsening overshoot. Fossil fuel use is still increasing, and carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rise to new records annually. Yet we remain in effective policy paralysis.

How stupid is that?

This is not just a facetious question. Homo sapiens is actually a much duller blade that most people can imagine. The ecological crisis is hardly breaking news; the road to overshoot is potholed with cogent warnings. Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, sometimes credited with catalyzing the environmental movement and an unprecedented raft of environmental legislation, was published in 1962. A decade later (and over half a century ago) the Club of Rome’s (in)famous Limits to Growth (LtG) projected already existing trends to show that pollution and resource scarcity could lead to global economic and population collapse in the mid-21st century. William Catton’s unsurpassed classic, Overshoot, appeared in 1982. The Union of Concerned Scientists published the first of many World Scientists’ Warnings to Humanity in 1992, arguing that humans are so altering the living world that it may soon be unable to sustain life as we know it. 

Significantly, 1992 is also the year in which The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted; it came into effect two years later with 165 signatories and 198 parties. (In addition, corporate interests and environmental organizations participate as advisors and observers.) Nation-states agreed to return their GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Toward this end, the convention’s decision-making body, The Conference of the Parties (COP), has held 28 so-called COP Conferences—the most recent in Dubai, in 2023—on measures to reduce emissions and reverse climate change through decisive action. The first more or less universal “legally binding” global climate agreement was adopted at COP 21 in Paris in 2015, with the parties committing to limit global heating to 2 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels, while striving to keep the increase to 1.5 degrees or less. 

Simultaneously, climate concern, combined with the rising costs of fossil fuels and massive subsidies from governments, catalyzed the emergence of a whole new “clean” energy sector. In recent years, investment in wind turbines, solar panel installations, nuclear plants (clean?), grid improvements, electric vehicles and related infrastructure has been breathtaking, surpassing investment in fossil fuels and reaching $1.7 trillion in 2023. One encouraging seminal review shows that since the mid-2000s, a large and growing number of research groups have concluded that 100% renewable energy “is feasible worldwide at low cost.” The public are enthusiastic supporters, having been convinced by such studies and relentless industry promotion, that a painless and economically attractive transition from fossil fuels to “green renewable energy” is already well underway. 

What’s not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. During this 32-year period of solemn pledges, binding agreement and policy action to reduce GHGs, carbon dioxide emissions actually ballooned from 22.5 billion tonnes (Gt) in 1992 to 37.2 Gt in 2023, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased from 360 to 420 parts per million, i.e., to 50% above pre-industrial levels. In addition, a third of carbon emissions is dissolved in the seas causing ocean acidification. Perhaps most remarkably, in 1992, fossil fuels provided about 81% of the world’s primary energy; 32 years of progress later, fossil fuels still account for 82% of consumption. It may seem beyond belief, but half the fossil fuels ever consumed by humanity have been burned since 1990! Such is the power of exponential growth.

But what about that massive investment in clean electricity? The positive effect on emissions has largely been neutered by increasing global demand for energy. Wind and solar power (W&S), where most investment is going, accounted for only 14.3% of global electricity production in 2023 (compared to ~60% by fossil fuels). In short, despite the promotional hype, billions invested, and rapid capacity growth, W&S electricity contributed only ~2.7% to the world’s final (consumer level) energy consumption last year. The global community would have to install over four times the current multi-decade cumulative global stock of wind and solar infrastructure to fully displace fossil fuels from electricity generation alone—and this assumes no increase in demand. Problem solved? Not quite—we’d still have to address the non-electric and hard-to-electrify uses of energy; as noted, fossil fuels are holding steady at over 80% of the global energy mix. 

These data from the real world suggest that the clean energy transition is actually barely underway. There is no possibility that we will achieve quantitatively equivalent “100% renewable energy” by 2050. (And if we try, note that the mining, transportation, refining, manufacturing, installation, maintenance and replacement associated with W&S is powered mainly by fossil fuels and produces major collateral ecological damage.) This is why the stricter Paris goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is already in the rearview mirror, and Earth will likely experience 2.0C heating by 2050 well on the way to, well, who knows? 

Should we be surprised? Not really—after all, the renewable energy transition is being sold partly on grounds that it involves massive capital investment, promises excellent profit-making opportunities and creates thousands of jobs. The reality is that the much-vaunted green energy revolution is really an attempt to maintain the market-based capitalist status quo—at best it’s “business-as-usual-by-alternative-means”—when the growth-oriented status quo is the structural source of the problem. 

It is no coincidence then, that since the entire mythic “limit global warming” show debuted in 1992, the two signature drivers of overshoot, real gross world product and the human population have increased nearly four-fold and 45% respectively. We can safely conclude that the world community’s singular focus on climate change has served as a major distraction from the real existential threat—the worsening meta-problem of global overshoot. 

To repeat, “How stupid is that?” 

Part 2. My Response over a Career as an Academic Ecologist

I’ve reviewed these data because the half-century in question is the context for my entire academic career. I have spent five decades struggling to understand the human eco-predicament and the enigma of inaction with the “stupid” question never far from mind. In fact, it still lingers in the air like stale smoke. My work and that of thousands of other scientists has had little palpable impact on the state of the world—though I suppose things might have been worse without it—and left me only slightly less befuddled. 

And I am in a better position than most to confront eco-reality. 

It was my good fortune to spend much of my youth playing and working on my grandparent’s farm in southern Ontario. This was invaluable life experience, regrettably not often available to young people today. Even as a ten-year-old, my daily chores on the land and the simple act of eating food we had grown infused me with certain knowledge that humans are of the Earth, made from soil and rain. This juvenile epiphany permanently shaped my educational path, steering me toward becoming a PhD ecologist. 

By the early 1970s I was beginning my academic career, a still wet-behind-the-ears but enthusiastic assistant professor of human ecology. Inspired by the recently published Limits to Growth, I seized an opportunity to give an elaborate seminar to a committee of senior colleagues on the growing relevance of the ecological concept of carrying capacity as applied to humans. 

Big mistake? 

Among the audience was a prominent resource economist who took me aside after my presentation and opined that, while I appeared to be intelligent enough, I was apparently ignorant that economists had thoroughly trashed LtG and essentially abolished the notion of human carrying capacity. Hadn’t I heard of the law of supply and demand? Was I unaware of human ingenuity and technological prowess? Local scarcities? No problem—that’s why we have globalization and international trade in scarce resources. He explicitly warned that should I continue down the obviously sterile path to resource limits and carrying capacity, my academic career at the University of British Columbia would be “nasty, brutish and short.” To help me avoid the inevitable, he kindly provided a list of corrective readings.

These readings served only to prove that economists were utterly ecologically blind. (How stupid is that?) Contrary to received wisdom, technology doesn’t actually increase carrying capacity—it merely accelerates the rate of resource exploitation and drawdown; global trade doesn’t increase domestic carrying capacity—it merely shuffles productivity (biocapacity) around, temporarily relieving local limits while depleting distant surpluses. And how about the absurd assumption underlying economists’ basic models that the economy is essentially separate from, and independent of, “the environment?” 

These trivial—but apparently novel—insights actually reignited my interest in carrying capacity and led me (with my graduate students) to develop ecological footprint analysis (EFA) and accounts. Eco-footprinting uses quantifiable material flows to compare any human population’s demand on productive ecosystems (its eco-footprint) with nature’s supply (biocapacity). EFA confirms unambiguously that many countries are running ecological deficits (consuming more bioresources than domestic ecosystems can supply) and that the total human population even at average material standards, greatly exceeds long-term global carrying capacity—i.e., humanity is well into overshoot. 

Three decades after the first formal publication on EFA, the human eco-footprint (EF) remains one of the world’s best-known (un)sustainability indicators, has generated an industry of EF analysts and has inspired a number of spinoffs (e.g., carbon footprint, water footprint, material footprint). That’s the good news. The bad news is that its success has served also to intensify condemnation of the EF concept and methods as “so misleading as to preclude their use in any serious science or policy context.” Our point-by-point rebuttals of such critiques ricochet harmlessly off the ideological armor of neoliberal economists and techno-optimists. 

The intellectual slagging gets worse. In fact, anyone who attempts to associate the contribution of growing populations to the human eco-predicament (a major strength of EFA), will need to develop a certain intellectual insouciance to direct ad hominem attacks. For frequent repetition of this sin, I have repeatedly been characterized in social media as anti-human, eco-fascist and racist. 

“Neo-Malthusian” is perhaps the mildest of such negative epithets (though one I am happy to accept). In a recent widely read paper, my co-author and I used the context of global overshoot to critique the so-called energy transition and Green New Deal thinking. The reaction from renewable energy proponents was swift and intemperate. The journal’s editor was so cowed that he published an apology for allowing the paper through the peer review process (we were actually well-reviewed). Said editor seemed particularly exercised because we had argued that the world community should consider a controlled downsizing, and we had the temerity to suggest setting “…a limit to the world population so as to avoid overshoot… an unfortunate echo of Malthusianism that is surely not even conceivable today”. 

What I find “not conceivable today” is that any even half-informed person cannot recognize limits, the reality of overshoot and the possible implosion of the ecosphere. It should also be clear that the only effective solutions will entail planned absolute reductions in economic throughput (energy/material consumption and waste production) and smaller populations. In short, overshoot and its various symptoms cannot be resolved without major economic restructuring, significant changes to high-income lifestyles, and global population planning. 

Perhaps, for some, fear of the inevitable is negated by belief that humans are destined to abandon a shriveled Earth and populate the galaxy. Or perhaps we will upload our minds and consciousness to some universal computer, digital immortality forever freeing us from the messiness of corporeal existence. Others take comfort in—or even welcome—the prophesized biblical end times and their ascent into heaven. (Good luck with that.)

On one hand I sympathize; there is good reason to fear. The modern human enterprise is utterly dependent on abundant energy (Fig. 1) and this creates a double-barreled dilemma. Simply “stopping fossil fuel” without an adequate substitute would collapse the economy (i.e., modern civilization). On the other hand, continuing our use of fossil fuels risks the wrath of climate change, worsens overshoot, and will likely collapse both the ecosphere and the economy (i.e., modern civilization). 

click through to Rees' article at resilience+ for:

Figure 1. Chart of energy consumption vs GDP 

Sometimes when contemplating this dilemma, I see the human enterprise as a monster avalanche and each of us little more than incorporated—even willfully participating—snowflakes. We are simply swept along in the furious deluge, our best efforts useless in slowing its gathering momentum. Frankly, it is increasingly evident, to me at least, that we are innately incapable of comprehending the full scope of our predicament let alone controlling how things unravel. 

But should that stop us from developing a well-articulated “Plan B?” And how can ordinary citizens cope while contributing to a softer landing?

Part 3. Lessons Learned and Advice for Carrying On

As someone who’s been contemplating questions like these for more than fifty years, I have a few suggestions. First of all, learn not to take matters personally—neither the human dilemma nor attacks on efforts to awaken the sleepwalkers. Neither you nor the world will benefit from fits of depression or your withdrawal from the fray. Instead, revel in your knowledge and understanding even if it’s partially wrong (which it inevitably will be). There is a certain satisfaction in being able to interpret sensibly what’s going on and sharing your understanding with others. You might even learn something from the debates and likely push-back! Perhaps the most important thing is not to allow events beyond your control to prevent you from celebrating life—grab that bouquet, nettles and all! (For one thing, it’s unlikely that you’ll get a second round!) 

Of course, informed people want to “do something,” and there are dozens of books out there describing the 100 things you can do to save the world. But be cautious—offloading responsibility onto individuals and debasing the common good is part of the neoliberal agenda that has shaped public discourse and elevated corporate values, particularly in North America, since the 1970s. Drastically modifying one’s lifestyle may be a genuine response for some, but is mere virtue signaling for others. In any event, it has no detectable effect on the state of the world. Sorry.

“But wait,” you protest. “If we all just consumed less, it would make an enormous difference.” Agreed, if everyone chose poverty, for example, the environment might catch a break—but not everyone will, so the environment won’t. The simple fact is that humanity’s ecological predicament is a collective problem best addressed through collective solutions. Individuals cannot pass environmental protection legislation, implement ecological tax reform (full social cost pricing), impose resource quotas and rationing, build adequate public transit, implement population planning, replace GDP with a genuine well-being indicator, etc., etc. These are full-on, macro-level “Plan B” activities. The really heavy lifting can be done only by senior governments or other umbrella organizations in the wider public interest. Even the bottom-up activities of individuals and sustainability-oriented community groups (e.g., the degrowth, transition towns, circular economy, and similar eco-advocacy organizations) will be most effective in a supportive top-down policy environment.

But there is a catch. The political process in many countries (particularly the US) has largely been co-opted by powerful elites and the corporate sector. Those who fund politicians’ electoral campaigns expect—and receive—reciprocal favors. An ecological “Plan B” is not among them. Modern so-called democracies are plagued by regulatory capture by the corporate sector or other vested interests, which have succeeded in kneecapping the US Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and reversing many important environmental reforms passed since the 1970s. 

If we are to upend such corrosive activities and reignite democratic fervor, we may have to protest—riot even—by the thousands in the streets. In the meantime, let’s at least recognize that democracies can work only through the involvement of well-informed citizens. Write those letters criticizing government stupidity (such as subsidies to both fossil fuels and electric vehicles) and encouraging constructive policies. Repeat often. Make sure also to attend all-candidates meetings at election time armed with sharply-honed questions about proposed legislation or simply your favorite candidate’s stance on climate or biodiversity loss or gross pollution or population planning, i.e., on overshoot. In short, we have an obligation as citizens to be a public pain in the ass to errant senior politicians and wannabe leaders. 

On a more micro-“Plan B” level, citizen activists should focus attention on the necessity for relocalization in the (increasingly likely) event that “senior management” fails absolutely. Whether nation-states and the global system precipitously collapse or slowly unravel, the future of humanity will be local. As one historian astutely observed, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” 

In this light, should not local environmental and other citizens’ groups be organizing to cope with unfolding eco-political reality (as opposed to lobbying to subsidize larger families, for example). How do we reestablish a sense of mutual dependence and community? And how can committed communities best acquire the basic skills, tools, equipment and land to ensure local food sufficiency and otherwise enhance their economic self-reliance in the event of energy shortages or the breakdown of global or national supply chains? 

Indeed, as matters unfold, those best equipped for an economically smaller future may not be wealthy elites but rather Indigenous peoples and others who have acquired the skills needed to live close to the land. In any event, forward-looking communities should be planning for the downsizing and relocalization of their economies and the reintegration of human activities as much as possible with nearby supportive ecosystems. The survival of “civilization” requires that the human enterprise be reorganized into manageable, human-scale spatial and eco-economic units consistent with the necessity of one-planet living.

Let’s be honest. Preparing the present to thrive in the future sounds like a formidable task. And it is—you will likely spend a lifetime at it. But after the daily fray, go home, open a bottle of wine and enjoy dinner. Remember, we may live in uncertainty, but the bouquet of life is by no means all barbs and nettles.