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Here is a barely (but increasingly) coherent draft diatribe about sustainability that seeks to slip
below the surface platitudes and status quo propaganda. To get a better look at what a first
iteration toward sustainability would entail requires an unflinching answer to the question,
“What would a true “green economy” require?” If and how a person addresses the real issues
tells us a lot, and there is less and less time for equivocation. Most are trapped in the paradigm
they claim to try to seek to transcend, supporting “greenwash” enterprises with nothing
sustainable but surface that will accomplish little worthwhile but conventional profit (still their
principal focus).
Here’s a slogan-revealing, cant-smashing, fluff-exposing look into the hard physical and social
science of sustainability. When a person or institution talks about the “green economy,” one can
either expose their shallowness or confirm their probity. The superficial and the phonies can’t
even enter this conversation, because most have neither the physical nor moral courage to
confront the myths and illusions of our time. We as Americans are disadvantaged for entering
this conversation because political realism (realpolitic in the rest of the world) is almost
unknown in our society since we are genetically biased against it and it’s not taught anywhere.
This diverse material may appear disjointed (it’s not; it’s iterative) and extreme; however,
given all that we know about human nature — the history and science of our species, culture,
and civilization — this synthesis is the best-fit hypothesis to explain the facts in evidence.
Economic growth has relied on population growth. That cannot continue. This is the most
evident (and most disregarded) truth of all: there is not one single social, political, economic, or
environmental “problem” that is not exacerbated by more people and alleviated (but not solved)
by fewer. When all the problems are regarded together in a system of multiple parallel-and-
converging threads, this truth becomes even more obvious. That population pressures are not a
major focus for the few sane humans still involved tells us that ideology and denial have totally
corrupted political discourse. More on this below...
Ever since the dawn of time, what we now call economic growth has relied on increasing energy
use (from eating meat, from wood, from domesticated animals, from coal, from oil…). With Peak
Oil, that cannot continue (unless all that space-alien technology escapes from Area 51). Per
capita energy use has been declining since 1979.
Growth has implied improving quality-of-life. That has not been happening for 50 years, not even
for the elites.
“Peak Oil” is a lot easier to understand, and much more marketable, than the Tragedy of the
Commons. Easiest of all, however, is “global warming.” If the IPCC had said, “Cut economic
activity by 90%,” instead of “Cut Carbon Dioxide by 90%,” then at least the peak-oilers (if not
the ruling Oligarchs) might have gotten a useful message. But what else could anyone expect in a
world where politicians and academic economists would rather die than tell the truth? And
that’s only partly because they would be assassinated if they did. It is totally contrary to
established patterns of ruthlessness, short-sightedness, and self-serving for the established
powers to ever pass laws to limit economic activity, thus there is no hope the ruling Oligarchs
can save themselves or anyone else.
Assume that two fundamental "genetic sets" (strains of people) exist in a Pleistocene tribe. For
starters, each group is represented by ten mating pairs, for a total of 40 people in the tribe.
Further assume that each tribe loses 30% of its population every twenty years due to war,
disease, and famine.
Members of Gene Set 1 are intelligent, honest, and forward-looking. The mating pairs in this set
only have two children each and limit personal consumption because they know the tribe is over
carrying-capacity (many die of starvation). After 20 years, this set has 20 original adults + 20
children = 40 members.
Members of Gene Set 2 are stupid, corrupt, chronic liars, and only care about the present. The
mating pairs in this set consume ten times as many resources as the first group and have an
average of ten children before the females die of overwork. After 20 years, this set has 10
original adults (the males) + 100 children = 110 members.
A famine kills 30% of the tribe. We assume it affects both Sets equally. Now, Set 1 has only 28
members, while Set 2 has 77 members. The tribe has grown: it now has a total of 105 members.
The fraction of Gene Set 1 will continue to shrink through time until it dies out. What kind of
people will be selected during this population growth? Obviously, it’s people who are stupid,
corrupt, chronic liars, and only care about the present. The ancestors of everyone alive today
were selected by a process something like this one (despite all the epi-genetic and environ-
mental variations introduced into the system), with Alpha-clan dominance and resource-
sequestration only exacerbating the trend.
Here’s some more math, of an engineering nature: it would take approximately 50% of the entire
industrial capacity of our country exclusively focused for 20 years to build the wind-power
infrastructure to replace the amount of energy we are deriving now from our principal high-
density energy source — petroleum. Similar investments would be required for tapping solar,
tide, and other ambient energy flows. What would become of the “growth” conversation under
such a regime?
That means that it cannot maintain the extreme resource-use inefficiency of “the
market”
A “market” may be efficient at the price mechanism (i.e., efficient in using money, of which,
ironically, there is no shortage except in our conditioned habits of thought) were we ever in a
market not distorted or manipulated by concentration of power in command-and-control
Oligarchs; however, there are no Adam-Smith-type “free” markets anymore, given corporate
consolidation and corporate-government convergence and engagement (also known as
“fascism”). So “price efficiency” is a meaningless virtue. Thinking mankind will run out of
“money” is like thinking we will run out of inches or feet.
Existing markets are 50% to 90% inefficient in resource use. Financially, this “overhead” is the
enormous edifice of banks, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and all other institutions
associated with money, economic competition, and distribution of resources in terms of money.
The most debilitating aspect of this is that the ‘financial sector” actively subtracts significant
actual value from the general economy while diluting monetized value through terminal
inflation. Physically, included in the overhead is all the “competitive” manufacturing duplication
and decentralization of facilities for development and design and manufacture, the absurd losses
A green economy must abandon the conventional “market ideology,” and since that is simply
politics by another name (and how Our Lords and Masters manipulate us), to accomplish a “green
economy” we must fundamentally change the operating basis of our polity, and evolve the
cultural values driving it.
Given the unsettled science and the clear energy-budgets, all the frenzy about reducing
greenhouse-gas emissions is incremental window-dressing to advance one element in a strange
pervasive emotional climate of fear-shock and denial-numbness, and to advance yet another
layer of taxation (the “carbon tax,” for wealth re-allocation), manipulation (a marketing fad for
more profits and maintenance of monopolies), and political control (from aligning hysteria), in
addition to all the other successful such gambits. It is not substantive; it is pocket-media and
customized hype.
That means that it cannot continue to hide its inefficiencies and distortions by
shifting costs to unmonetarized “externalities” and concealing them outside the
artificially closed financial system
A green economy must internalize all closed-system costs and benefits, and expand the
boundaries of that system to include the entire planet. “Natural capital” must become as
important (or more) than Capital.
It must also stop monetarizing social, personal, and spiritual values, and must give equal (or
greater) priority to non-monetarizable human and ecological values. Not everything can be
valued in currency, and currency-value cannot adequately reflect human priorities.
The cost of energy must be measured in terms of energy (ERoEI — “energy returned on energy
invested”) instead of “money,” and applied in a steady-state “economy” in a new form of
cooperative “systems” government — explicit political decisions not based on concentrating
wealth, but actually dedicated to the common good (a good made more attainable through
reducing population as one of many parallel threads).
Some of the ideas of the Imperial Chinese system look attractive (although not totally
attractive) to advance the common good. Late Imperial Chinese government maintained a viable
self-myth as a “meritocracy” and it was known as “examination hell.” Morals (Confucian, et al.)
were taught to everyone — especially the political leadership, in a classic example of Alpha
socialization-indoctrination. Principle-based leadership is a long-term survival strategy to
stabilize an ecosystem of fractious factions of the Oligarchy. This is not understood by the
Proles, who don’t think dynastically, and whose minds are consumed with visions of their next
wife or speedboat.
The global so-called “fiat” currency system is inherently unsustainable and unstable, requiring
pyramid and Ponzi manipulation, endless dilution with “new” money levered off existing debt,
and periodic re-initializing by the feudal elites (the “economic cycle”). It totally distorts all
relationships between wealth, power, and value, concealing facts of political governance behind
the religiosity of economic “science.” This debt system requires “growth” in the Dollar-value of
assets to absorb the increase in the number of monetary units and conceal the structural
inflation (which the government must under-report) that is necessary for the system to work for
its owners, our neo-feudal Lords and Masters.
Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.
We need to dispel the notion that somehow Government is in control of money making. The
banks create money for the benefit of their owners, the already-rich Lords and Masters. They are
not acting as a shill for Government; governments have completely ceded this power to them.
We also need to dispel is the myth that there is any significant difference between major private
banks and government doing the printing. The upshot is the same, very few people controlling
the system, making new money from nothing, and not distributing it evenly (seigniorage,
dilution, and “riding down the multiplier”). Money is “created” when a bank makes a loan; in
other words, our “money” is backed by debt — mortgage debt, consumer debt, “national” debt,
corporate debt, currency debt, debt on debt, debt on debt on debt. There is no “money,” there
is only debt.
If the American People ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by
inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them
will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent
their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the bankers and
restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking
institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing
armies.
Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States (1743-1826)
(Letter to James Monroe, January 1, 1815)
Debt is “discharged” by rolling over into new debt (which defines “new” “money” as the interest
accumulates), not paid with representative value (labor-productivity, precious metals,
commodities, etc.).
Economics is a “social construction.” Humans did not co-evolve with money or markets. There
were no economists in the Pleistocene, nor “money.” There were “politics,” defined as “getting
people to do things.” Since humans did not evolve with a “medium of exchange” (except,
perhaps, meat for sex), no a priori reason exists for us to have a monetary system and all that it
entails.
Economics was invented by rich and powerful Oligarchs to serve their own interests. Just look to
see what institutions hire economists to see the truth of this. Economics professors and
economists are professional dis-information agents who claim that “money” is just a “medium of
exchange.” In a society where the formal political system floats on a sea of money, this lie can’t
even pass the “straight face” test.
If economics, money, and the monetary system were invented by our rich and powerful Lords
and Masters, why did they do it? Obviously, for political purposes — to make the rest of the
world do their bidding without the uncertainties of more literal forms of force. It also makes it
easier for the competitive factions of the Oligarchy to cooperate when advantageous (i.e., when
extracting wealth from the productivity of the rest of us).
Thus, economics, the financial system, and money became a “hidden political system” that
pretends to be something else. It’s the perfect political system for the Oligarchs, who make
political decisions that effect us all, are not held responsible for those decisions, and get others
to pay for them with their earnings and their lives. Obviously, the Oligarchs do not want a one-
person, one-vote political system (a “republic” or “democracy”) when they can have a one-
dollar, one-vote political system (an “economy”).
It is natural that the country whose theories of government are the most unrealistic in the
world should develop the greatest and most powerful sub rosa political machinery.
Thurman W. Arnold
Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944) thought the “key step” was to overturn the
belief that social life should be subordinated to the market mechanism. Once free of this
“obsolete market mentality,” the path would be open to subordinate both national economies
and the global economy to democratic politics based on “human values.”
Whole dimensions of what it means to be a human being and be treated as one are not
incorporated into the economic calculus of capitalism.
Originally, corporate charters were not “to make a profit at any lawful purpose;” they were to
accomplish some semi-governmental task (with political overtones for the ruling elite) like
“pacify” colonial subjects, build public works that would require much capital and promised to
generate revenues, and do things that could be “plausibly deniable.” General share ownership
among the elites distributed and diluted (if not outright concealed) responsibility and
“Economic change” is actually “regime change” with all its attendant violence and blood
(however artfully obscured). And then when there is “green power,” there will be a “green
economy.”
Because the order of nature is providential, the free market that reflects natural order also
reflects the workings of providence. In this way the spheres of morality, theology,
jurisprudence, and economics become hostages to nature, so to speak.
Like all gods, this economic god is an abstraction; it doesn’t actually exist. Nevertheless, we
evolved to fight and die for this economic god just like a suicide bomber fights and dies for his
God. In essence, Western elites are missionaries with the biggest and best weapons.
Even though scientists and philosophers have been pointing out inherent flaws in our economic
god for over a hundred years, we have been — and will remain — stuck in a tight loop that goes
something like this:
First, Western elites demand a world organized around the god of self-regulating markets:
All over the globe, we have recently witnessed a return to religious fundamentalism. In my
view, the return to the equilibrium price-auction model in economics represents a parallel
development — a desire for psychological certainty in a world that is, in the last instance,
uncertain.
Dangerous Currents, Lester Thurow, page xix
Then, when the failures of self-regulation of these markets become intolerable problems, elites
blame outside “interference:”
Our Lords and Masters then demand that governments and central banks mitigate these
intolerable problems by cutting interest rates, providing bailouts, regulating every aspect of
Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, wars are raised to carry on taxes.
Thomas Paine
With State-against-State wars now superceded by culture and economic wars (because the States
themselves are chattel to the Oligarchy, with a few notable regional and cultural exceptions),
the Wars on Carbon Dioxide (Global Warming), Poverty, Drugs, Cancer, Terror, ..., and ... are all
systematically designed to perpetuate its “enemy,” and perpetuate the livelihood of the
warriors engaged in an enforced stable equilibrium with the enemy, while providing grist for
media manipulation as “public policy” is defined and re-defined to generate huge profits for the
owners and controllers of the corporations involved.
After any one (or set of) these intolerable problems have been mitigated or equilibrated, we all
go back to the first step and initiate a new subject-matter loop, whose subject is some
enterprise the Oligarchs wish to strengthen their hold over — a new “War on Whatever.” One
man’s conspiracy is another man’s business plan.
That’s a very long way from “Give me liberty or give me death,” one of the mythological slogans
of rebellious “democracy.” The “culture of life” as the theocons call it does not, alas, mean a
deep respect for human life, from cradle to grave, with prudence as the guide to the grayest
areas at the very beginning and very end of life. It has come to mean an absolutism with respect
to maintaining life and survival — even to the point of absurdity, as in the Terri Schiavo case or
opposition to RU486. And to the other wing of today’s conservatism — the authoritarian wing — it
means sacrificing basic liberties (such as habeas corpus) and basic moral principles (such as the
prohibition on torture). But it remains a staggering sign of how so-called conservatism has
abandoned what were once its core principles, and shamelessly manipulates fear of terrorism
and adherence to religious fundamentalism.
If the right to be kept alive by the government is the single most important civil liberty, then
there are no other civil liberties. If the government’s primary job is keeping people alive, then
anything which can be potentially perceived as dangerous to life can be prohibited and “warred-
on:” “dangerous” speech, “dangerous” press coverage, the habeas corpus rights of “dangerous
prisoners” held without trial, “dangerous” property rights like the right to buy or sell
“dangerous” products (i.e., guns, drugs, cigarettes, McDonald’s, etc.). And this says nothing of
the socialist implications of such an ethos, since the “right to be kept alive” by the government
necessarily implies that the government must provide its chattels free proprietary healthcare,
free proprietary education, free food, free water, and free anything that would tend to
“improve” and preserve an individual’s life. Anything short of death, then, becomes a small
price to pay to be maintained, in effect, as the property of the State. This harks back to royal
Human rights are more important than national security. After all, what is national security for,
if not to secure human rights? The Constitution of the united States of America lists the rights
that the nation was intended to preserve — against, incidentally, an assault from the same sort
of government that would have us abandon human rights for “national security,” while in fact its
main interest is in preserving the power and increasing the wealth of its owners. So it contrives a
campaign of hype and fear, and shocks and indoctrinates its people to obey its dictates for the
chimerical promise of security. Sadly, it believes its own lies, and implodes into manic self-
delusion (except, perhaps, for a few ruthless architects at the helm) in direct proportion to its
religiosity. One should never underestimate the power of a genetically mediated tribal
algorithm, both at the Alpha top and the servile bottom.
[Statist, Islamist, Christianist, Marketist... are all a metaphor for each other, and all identities
and beliefs are manipulated by ruthless factions whose sole motivation is power at any cost.
Human values are more important than market values. “Economics” is the religion of the modern
corporate State, and the new opiate of the masses — even for those already narcotized by other
fundamentalisms. Statist Oligarchs rely on religiosity (the pretense of objectified external
absolute authority — the automaton behind the curtain of Oz) whatever its form or content, and
are not shy to layer it on. Ironically, religion originated out of authoritarian tribal power
dynamics, so marketism and traditional religion are natural feudal bedfellows, especially in their
Statist denominations. This is ironic because of the legitimate pretensions and aspirations of
political philosophy and of spirituality. Add corporatist prelates of the marketist religion owning
the government (“just another corporation”) and its chattel “citizens” (or, now, “consumers”),
and one has a neo-feudal fascism committed to concentrating wealth and power in as few hands
as possible, as ruthlessly as Alphas have ever propagated their own agenda in history, and with
more serfs than ever convinced they are “free.”
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies.
They feed them on falsehoods ‘till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
Some Oligarchs so fully filled their most wildly imagined coffers that they become conflicted and
inclined to disengage the fray (if not outright inbred and decadent), making them even easier
prey for the next, hungrier band of ever-more-ruthless brigands.
The same thing is happening now in the oil-rich Middle East, as one dynastic clan or multi-clan
Oligarchic faction exploits a credulous “nation” of ignorant and naive people blocked
emotionally and neurologically near a mean developmental age of two.
Diluting the Dollar to death is just setting up for the next regional “fiat” currency, the “Amero,”
owned by the next ascendant faction of Oligarchs, positioning its own currency so they will have
complete mastery of the polity. Not only have they evolved to define State policy and sequester
State resources for their own purposes, but to negotiate a relatively bloodless transition from
one top-Clan to another in decline.
Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and
commerce ... and when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way
or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of
inflation and depression originate.
Chinese Imperial policy docked noble families one level of rank per generation unless they
maintained or advanced their rank by playing by the Emperor’s rules. This is the original
meaning, the etymology, of the word “disparaged.” The first thing a faction or Clan does when it
comes to power is block the pathway or loophole which they exploited to gain their power (so
no-one else can come up their base, given that all the prior Clans had each blocked their
approaches). The last thing they do is loot the kingdom on the way out (unless they’ve been
finessed or blocked). Gradually, every aspect the entire polity becomes locked down under
control of one faction or another.
And this one goes way back to primate bands in the forest and savanna: in their natural settings,
silverback gorillas and hoary chimpanzees have been seen running the same basic scam — hyping
up as fearful a bordering band of “others,” and then defusing actual conflict through “safe”
Alpha-culture conventions while appearing to their band to be “defeating” that “other” band
(exchanging genes, actually, through slavery, which also was the principal vector for cultural and
technological diffusion). Competing Clans (“factions” of the Oligarchy) conspire together
(“coopetition”) to maintain in “the people” the illusion of external “warfare” to maintain their
primary position through fear and covert internal “class warfare” against everyone else (and
each other when expedient). This is a significant evolutionary behavioral and cultural advance
over the silverbacks who had to run solo with their flock of females and offspring.
The collective mind of the serf class with its politically correct belief-structures has imploded
itself with the self-delusion that they are “surrendering” of their own free will to be “kept
alive” by the State, and so it’s not a loss of integrity or sovereignty and degrees of freedom. The
cognitive mind cannot experience the difference between “submit” and “surrender,” although it
can certainly spin symbological froth and frenzy ad infinitum.
The purpose behind any action is to feel something or to avoid feeling something. When a
being is motivated by avoidance to feeling something, he acts out of fear. Fear will
eventually move one into this intellectual level, where symbols have been substituted for
feelings. Feelings are no longer safe. People who have the purpose to create feel; people
who have the purpose to avoid feeling think.
The most creative people not only feel, but they can translate feelings into symbols that will
arouse feelings in another. In answer, the one who is avoiding feeling often imagines the
creative person is enforcing feeling on him, and he usually counters with some act of
resistance. This causes suffering.
What is the meaning of life? Life is. Life doesn’t come with a meaning. You can study the
symbols or you can go out and feel alive.
So “Iran delenda est” is nothing new on the face of the Earth, nothing new at all. In fact, this
entire story is thousands of years in developing. Its contemporary players are simply the most
adept and the most obscure.
J.P. Morgan]
The Alphas are becoming increasingly masterful at their covert rule, as they define the listening
as well as the speaking; the myth-making as well as the myth fulfillment. Yes, the 20th Century
was the century of technology, but far beyond the physical technologies like electronics,
petroleum, and metallurgy, it was the century of the technologies of propaganda, socialization,
education, and psychological and social conditioning. Combined, all these have given the Alpha
elites mastery of communications and weaponry, and of the very thoughts and drives of their
chattel serfs. They know what to say and how to be heard with no un-orchestrated noise, since
no-one else is allowed to speak in the “main-stream media.” Our Lords and Masters offer the
seductions of bounty and the illusion of power for the paper-tiger “loyal opposition,” and
assassination if that doesn’t work. Pop Quiz: What two things do U.S. Presidents Lincoln,
Garfield, and Kennedy all have in common?
The only sustainability the dynastic Oligarchs are committed to is to sustain their power, even if
it kills them. That it might kill anyone else, or even everyone else, appears unimportant (“We’ve
bred our children to know what to do...” and “We have secrets you’ll never find out...”).
In other words, elected officials ask the factory owner what government can do to increase his
profit so he will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make
themselves better off. Keep giving the rich a greater fraction of the economic pie and they will
keep increasing the size of the pie. This is the fundamental assumption of so-called “supply-
side” economics (now thoroughly discredited through bitter experience).
That’s how our Founders designed it, and that’s how “public” policy is made today:
The policy formation process begins in corporate boardrooms... where problems are
identified as issues to be solved by new policies. It ends in government, where policies are
enacted and implemented.
William Domhoff
Our Founders saw the “common good” as the sum of “individual goods” which could be measured
by spending — the more, the better. Today, spending is measured by Gross Domestic Product
(GDP). It’s literally a measure of money (not materiel, not value) changing hands. Our
“Standard of Living” is simply a measure of how much money one spends. Obviously, now that
we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity (in the physical
sense — not currency-denominated GDP), most of our Founders’ core assumptions have been
shown to be incorrect.
Biophysical Laws
Thermodynamic laws, evolution theory, and modern genetic sciences were unknown by our
Founders. Today, these laws and sciences signal the end of our form of government. The first
law of thermodynamics (conservation law) states that there can be no creation of matter and
energy. This means that the economy is totally dependent upon natural resources for everything:
it is a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of nature. The German physicist Helmholtz and the British
physicist Lord Kelvin had explained this principle by the middle of the 19th century.
The second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) tells us that energy is wasted in all economic
activity. In 1824, the French physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law’s concepts while
working on “heat engines.” The English Lord Kelvin and the German physicist Clausius eventually
formalized Carnot’s concepts as the second law of thermodynamics.
Our government was designed to require more-and-more energy (endless economic growth) to
solve social problems, but the thermodynamic laws described above limit the available energy.
Energy “resources” must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called
“sinks” (this is known as the “net energy” principle). In other words, if it costs more-than-one-
Biologists have found that our genes strongly predispose us to act in certain ways in certain
circumstances. This explains why history repeats itself and why humans have engaged in war
after war throughout history: from time-to-time an environment emerges when “inclusive
fitness” is served by attacking your neighbor and stealing his resources. This social aggression is
further rewarded by the same dopamine pathway in the brain activated by sex, food,
psychoactive drugs, and intense exercise.
Since our government was designed to require ever-growing energy resources, but energy
resources are strictly limited by thermodynamic laws and a finite planet, sooner-or-later our
civilization will collapse into another spasm of world wars. It’s just a matter of time.
A “genetic” algorithmic process called “reciprocal altruism” guarantees that elected officials
and their cronies will nearly always come around to agree with the “suggestions” of lobbyists
and each other. It’s a natural, automatic, and subconscious process. Only a sociopath is immune.
Unfortunately, no lobbyists represent the common interest: they are high-ranking subjects of the
feudal Oligarchs. Our Founders assumed that the common interest was the sum of individual
interests. Our Founders based our system on the ideas of the French Physiocrats, which were
formulated before the laws of thermodynamics were understood, and before the technologies of
the corporation for concentrating wealth and power through social control were developed.
Local government policy begins in corporate boardrooms too, but additional structural aspects of
our political system guarantee that local communities are powerless to stop the Oligarchs and
the merely “rich” from converting local neighborhoods into cash.
Our present system of government is designed so elected and appointed officials serve as both
public advocate and judge, a situation that makes it structurally impossible to advance the
common good. On the one hand, we are expected to evaluate the impacts of complex economic
proposals; on the other hand, we are supposed to be non-professionals — just plain folks.
The result is that, say, county commissioners can’t personally evaluate the proposals in front of
them, nor do they get objective opinions or studies from a public advocate (the government’s
professional planners are known to not represent the public interest, even though elected
commissioners are supposed to act as a watchdog on government).
Yes, commissioners do hear from a few citizens of unknown motivation and expertise who are
able to take a day off work to testify. But since these individuals rarely bring “studies” (with
explicitly-stated assumptions, etc.), it’s always unclear how much weight to give to their
testimony. Moreover, commissioners are acutely aware of their impossible double role of judge
and advocate, bend over backwards to give the appearance of objectivity, and thereby nearly-
always give the benefit of the doubt to a “developer” or an advocate for the interests of the
established powers. Some “reasonableness” can always be found to justify anything (such as
“national security”).
No one would argue that a defendant could ever get a fair trial with a legal system like this.
Our Founders assumed that since economic growth was always the best way to solve social
problems, the public didn’t need a professional advocate to ever question special interests.
The point here is that since our government was specifically designed to rely on perpetual
economic growth to solve social problems and maintain public order, the political system is self-
reinforcing and literally out of human control. When economic growth becomes impossible — as
thermodynamics tells us it must — then our present form of government becomes impossible too.
Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use
whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most
plausible arguments they are able to devise.
Reinhold Neibuhr
Those after-the-fact arguments support primary behaviors that are complex automatic
algorithms derived from genetic imperatives.
When most people look around the world today they see a lot of problems. If they are clever,
they see sets of interacting problems. They see energy and technology problems; they see
ecological and environmental problems; and they see economic problems. If they are somewhat
deeper thinkers, they may see population problems. The simple truth is that they are all
suffering from vision problems.
What most people see as technological or social problems are more correctly seen as a set of
symptoms of a systematic underlying problem, symptoms that are manifesting themselves in the
social and technological arena. In the same sense, what people are interpreting as “ecological
problems” are the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world’s ecology. And what people
are interpreting as “economic problems” are merely the set of symptoms that are manifesting in
the world’s economy.
The underlying problem is the same in all three cases. It is not merely that there are so many of
us, it is that Homo sapiens is a hyper-aggressive species with no effective predators, the ability
to manipulate its environment on a planetary scale, and the ideological perception that it is
apart from, and superior to, that environment (a projection native to feudal Alpha identity). In
all of nature, this instability leads to expansion-and-collapse cycles — Gaian precursors of the
“economic cycle.”
The spreading perception that the core environmental problem is human population growth is
useful, but woefully inadequate. Population growth is just another symptom of the problem
stated above. One can demonstrate this with a simple thought experiment: imagine that we
stabilized our population tomorrow, at our current 7+ billion people. Would that fix the
problems of resource depletion, ecological devastation and the economic instability caused by
That entirely typical evolution happened because, as with every other species, those restraints
were readily available within the environment — mainly resource scarcity, predation, disease,
and, later, war. Because those external restraints were available, selection didn't endow us with
internal restraints because they weren't needed. In fact, during our early time as a species, an
internal self-restraint mechanism acting in addition to the external restraints would have been
counter-productive, and would have been actively selected out of our makeup.
However, as we developed the physical, mental, and cultural abilities to circumvent those
external restraints — through extinguishing all large predators, and developing agriculture,
mining, medicine, and “social science” — we outfoxed ourselves, because in the absence of
either internal or external restraints we are left with no effective way to reign in our genetic
urge for unlimited expansion and the automatic algorithmic behaviors it generates. All that
remains is our intellectual capacity to foresee outcomes and to regulate our behavior through
“reason,” which is not strong enough to counterbalance our innate behavioral imperatives.
Alpha conditioning is very strong, as the selection pressures have been more concentrated and
stringent than for the Proles. Since the intensity of the conditioning and genetic-behavior
enforcement are stronger in the Alphas, their algorithmic behaviors have become narrower,
more specialized, more rigid, more unstable, and less adaptive. Hence the continuous turnover
as Alpha clans become “decadent” and cycle through factions, and the habit of Alphas to see the
problems as being other Alphas rather than the system itself. And hence the obsessive
expression of simplistic market values over more subtle and demanding human values, and of
“inevitable” apocalyptic end-games over adult relationship with our selves and each other.
There may be no hope whatever that our tinkering will solve the real dilemma of humanity. We
are behaving exactly as our evolution has defined us, and it’s unlikely that we will stop. Our
challenge is to figure out ways in which our feeble minds can create the conditions for the
continued survival of our species and perhaps some of our civilization, despite both our
unconstrained, innate urge to grow and our glorious but tragic ability to “reason” after the fact.
Collectively, we are barely able even to distinguish these countervailing aspects of our
fundamental nature, much less change them. They are at the root of all our troubles, and we
will need to be enormously cunning to outmaneuver them.
This gives new meaning to the notion “think outside the box,” and requires an integration of
thinking and feeling that has not yet happened in our culture.
Resources
http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild291207.htm
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/hubecon.htm
http://www.warsocialism.com/
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0208/S00055.htm
http://www.solari.com/learn/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/24/eco-junk/
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1834
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness