Signs of Collapse: Activism Degenerates Into Reactivism

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Dave Pollard

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the fourth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.


image by Midjourney AI; my own prompt

When you are incapacitated, or merely incapable of acting, all that’s left is reacting.

When you can no longer think coherently and knowledgeably, because you’ve forgotten how to think, or never learned, or not practiced it in a long time, and because you have no access to reliable knowledge, because it’s censored, or obscured by propaganda, or simply unavailable in the bubble of identically-conditioned people in which you live, all that’s left is reaction — helpless outrage, righteous indignation, mindless fury, and undirected lashing out.

When everything around you is increasingly disordered, dysfunctional, chaotic, impossible to navigate or fix, the only thing you can do is scream, or cry. When no action is possible or useful, all that is left is reaction.

The word reactivism is a neologism, a made-up word, not yet in dictionaries. But it describes a phenomenon that, I think, reflects our civilization’s accelerating collapse: A state where the predominant behaviour of people is chaotic, incoherent, purely emotional, impulsive, and unconsidered.

One of the problems with reactivism is that it is almost always ineffective, and in many cases actually worsens the situation. People believe what they want to believe, and the last thing most people want to believe is that things are awful and hopeless, and they will often instinctively resent and oppose anyone who makes the awfulness and hopelessness of the situation crystal clear. So the result of many if not most protest movements, for example, has been the demonization of the protesters.

This is not to blame people for being chronically reactive. Our behaviour is conditioned, and any creature, wild or domesticated, put in a situation where it is trapped, helpless, threatened and miserable, where there is no clear way out of that situation, is almost inevitably going to react in an incoherent and ineffective way. In many ways, the upsurge of reactivism in our societies around the globe is completely understandable.

We see evidence of it in street protests from across the political spectrum, and in the endless blather on social media, where the objective is often to generate the largest number of “reactions to this post” — as if the volume and intensity of reactions represent something somehow positive or meaningful. We see evidence of it in increasingly vituperative editorials, devoid of factual content and laced with propaganda and other misinformation.

And of course we see it in the surge of wars, genocides, and acts of “terrorism” (whose primary or sole purpose is to incite fear, rage, and other primal emotional reactions), often now enabled by new and even more terrifying state-sanctioned technology.

As collapse worsens, more and more of us are becoming more and more fearful, angry, grief-filled, chronically anxious, hate-filled, and hopeless, and this is inevitably being expressed in more and more reactive behaviours. And that reactivity, by inciting more of the same, feeds on itself. It’s a form of mental illness, of what I have called “civilization disease”.

What’s worse, there is evidence that governments, corporate oligopolies, and others in positions of wealth and power recognize this growing reactivity, and the dangers it presents to “law and order”, and their reactivism is driving them to surveil, threaten, and clamp down on citizens and customers, and ramp up the propaganda, to either suppress the growing disorder, or to exploit it.

This doesn’t bode well for our capacity to ‘manage’ the accelerating collapse of all the systems of our teetering civilization. And there is nothing we can do about it, since it’s just the collective result of all of our conditioning.

Increasing social chaos, unfortunately, seems to be one of the historic hallmarks of civilizational collapse — just when we most need level heads to prevail to deal with never-ending crises, that’s when our species seems most inclined to lose its cool. One need look no further for evidence of this than the growing, relentless, reactive political, economic and military provocations, from all sides, being acted out all over the world, which seem inevitably to be leading us to the ultimate and most deranged form of reactivism: nuclear and global war.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | Leave a comment

The Correct Amount

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Dave Pollard


A recent post by Cory Doctorow describes the quandary of the “consumer” when we are incrementally coerced into accepting more and more restrictions, impositions, invasions of privacy, junk fees, and obstacles in access to and use of what we buy, even while the staggeringly wealthy oligopolies that provide these “services” are exploiting an ever-growing lack of regulation and control over their often abusive and anti-consumer practices.

He uses as an example DRM (the scourge of “Digital Rights Management”), which urges you you to “own” something “today“, but endlessly reminds you that you don’t really own it, because all the benefits of ownership (like being able to share it with someone) remain with the “digital rights holder”, while you receive only the liabilities of ownership (risk of loss, destruction, corruption etc). And of course, the thing you “own” only works on some proprietary platform that you don’t and can’t own, and which the owner can make you pay for over and over again (“upgrades”) at their leisure, and at whatever price they choose to charge you.

He lampoons the absurdity of this by comparing it with a dangerous but popular old quack cure — radium suppositories! — and with the inevitable conclusion that was finally, reluctantly realized: The correct amount of radium to shove up your ass is zero.

Analogously, he says:

  • The correct amount of DRM to allow in consumer products is zero.
  • The correct amount of collusion between realtors representing sellers and realtors representing buyers is zero.
  • The correct degree to which government officials should cycle back into working at the industries they oversaw and then come back to work in government again is zero.
  • The correct amount of surveillance data that can be collected and sold to others, and the correct amount of warrantless surveillance that should be allowed against citizens is zero.
  • The correct amount of monopoly, oligopoly, price-fixing and collusion of corporations that should be tolerated is zero.

Making such claims, Cory says, is now characterized as “unreasonable”, which is as absurd as saying it is “unreasonable” to assert that the correct amount of radium that you should insert in your bodily orifices is zero. Surely, their advocates argue, some amount of these things is acceptable and perhaps even inevitable and possibly beneficial?

It’s an insane argument, and we should not put up with it.

Cory was on a roll with this, but he has a lot of other corporate and political malfeasance to write about, so he concluded there. I’m under no such restriction, so here are my proposed additions to the list:

  • The correct amount of genocide, apartheid, and high-tech terrorism that a country should be permitted in order to exercise its right to self-defence is zero.
  • The correct amount of acceptable old-growth cutting and other unsustainable forestry practices is zero.
  • The correct amount of acceptable fracking and other new hydrocarbon exploration and development is zero.
  • The correct amount of tolerable additional increases in global average land and ocean temperature is zero.
  • The correct number of wars, sieges and coups that your country should be starting, arming, provoking and otherwise enabling in the interests of “national security” is zero.
  • The correct amount of lies, propaganda, censorship, and mis- and disinformation that politicians, governments, and media should be enabled to propagate is zero.
  • The correct number of people who should be left without free or readily-affordable health care and education is zero.
  • The correct amount of unhealthy food that Big Ag should be allowed to sell into the marketplace without unmissable warning signs on it is zero.
  • The correct amount that Big Pharma should charge governments for essential medicines, beyond the identifiable direct costs of developing those medicines, is zero. And the price that governments should charge to their citizens for those medicines is zero.
  • The correct amount of lobbying, bribes, kickbacks, campaign financing and other coercive activity that corporations and political pressure groups should be allowed to engage in, and the amount of government subsidies they should receive, is zero.
  • The correct amount of pollution of our air, water, soils and land, and the amount of waste that industry should be allowed to produce, is zero.
  • The correct amount of acceptable coercion of employees, through abusive labour practices, threats and intimidation, non-compete ‘agreements’ and non-disclosure ‘agreements’ and other mechanisms, is zero.
  • The correct number of employees that can be laid off when executives have recently been or will soon be paid bonuses, or when stock buybacks have recently occurred or are planned, is zero.
  • The correct amount of acceptable confinement, torture and other abuse of humans, and of all living creatures, is zero.
  • The correct amount of inequality — of wealth, physical and mental health, and opportunity — between any country’s or region’s most well-off and most struggling and suffering citizens, is zero.

Whether we can actually achieve these objectives or not is not the point. The point is that we should strive, as a matter of principle and basic human dignity, to achieve them, and that arguments that dismiss even our attempts to achieve them as being “unreasonable”, and that assert that we should tolerate any of the above injustices, abuses, and atrocities, to even a limited degree, are dangerous and corrosive, and should be loudly called out and denounced.

When we allow “reasonable” amounts of injustice, abuse and atrocities, we open the door to much more, we become tolerant of situations and behaviours that are, by all human standards, intolerable, and we invite the kind of decay of our institutions, our principles, our practices, and our thinking that we see now, rampantly, everywhere around us.

So when we hear arguments from people that it’s “unreasonable” to refuse to accept the inevitability and appropriateness of a certain amount of injustices, abuses and atrocities, in every area of human endeavour, perhaps our best response might be to suggest to them where they might place their radium suppositories.

Posted in How the World Really Works | Leave a comment

This, Alone: What We Pay Attention To

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Dave Pollard

This is #34 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community. 


our neighbourhood café after dark; my own photo, photoshopped

So this body is walking around the neighbourhood, apparently, taking advantage of the fact that its long bout with plantar fasciitis seems to have mostly ended. This self remains a hostage to this body, which does what it does irrespective of what this self reasons to be the most appropriate course of action, leaving this self with nothing to do but rationalize what was done. And this self remains also a perpetual hostage of its feeble and hopelessly flawed internal model of ‘reality’, the prosthetic veil through which it unhappily views and judges everything. With such a handicap, it is amazing that the human species has endured as long as it has without killing itself off. At least, that is what this self tells itself, now.

Two teens cuddle on the sofa in the café, half-draped across each other. Their eyes dart back and forth between their screens and each other’s eyes. Their faces are animated, passionate. They hold onto each other almost desperately, at least one hand constantly in touch with each other’s body. They speak, but the words they say are incoherent. They don’t have to make sense. The tone, the touch, the expression is all that matters.

Of course, nothing about this is conscious. The chemicals in their bodies are compelling this conditioned behaviour exactly as they drive the mating behaviours of wild creatures. Exactly as they condition and drive all our behaviours.

The objective of this particular evolved conditioning, it would seem, is to make the couple oblivious to everything except the task at hand — the business of procreation. And then, if that task succeeds, the chemical mix will shift to compel parenting behaviours. They could not choose to do otherwise, any more than they could choose not to breathe. They think they ‘know’ each other, and are ‘known’ by each other in that unprecedented way conveyed by our most anthemic love songs. But there is no ‘knowing’ another person. They are each, as we all are, always, utterly alone, and utterly unknown.

Three guys half-hidden in the bushes, on the windowless, doorless side of the supermarket, the part where stuff is stored before shelving, are shooting up, or ingesting, street drugs. They are looking out for each other, kind of, casting furtive glances out toward the street before returning to the task at hand. One of them is crouched over, gently rocking. One of the others is fiddling with what looks like a kind of torch. The third guy looks over toward me; when I keep walking he turns away, sits down under one of the bushes.

The people walking by, giving them a wide berth, are, just like me, going around the corner to the supermarket entrance, driven by the same chemical conditioning to harvest what is needed to survive and feel good as the men in the bushes. It seems the only differences between us are the circumstances that have led up to our respective conditioned behaviours. We judge; we ‘make sense’. We think we know what is going on, and why it is going on, and that we have some control over what is going on. But we know and control nothing. Each body is just acting out its conditioning. Each brain is furiously rationalizing that conditioning as ‘its’ decision, when it is not. Apparently, that’s all our big, much-vaunted human brains can do.

As I look out the window of the café, a couple pushing a baby carriage stops to chat with someone sitting at an outside table. Coming up the side street, a woman pushing another baby carriage stops as she gets near the intersection to do something on her cell phone. For a long moment, the two carriages sit, almost face to face, their tiny passengers staring at each other with astonished looks. Their attention is riveted on each other.

There is some evidence that babies, like wild creatures, have no sense of themselves as separate beings, and no sense of anything else as being a separate ‘thing’ either. That doesn’t mean that babies and non-human animals can’t learn conditioned behaviours that enable them to respond very effectively and instinctively to their situations and environments. They have no need for ‘selves’, and no need to ‘make sense’ of things. The babies look at each other as they might look at wild creatures, and as young wild creatures might look at them and at each other — with conditioned curiosity, an evolutionarily advantageous learning tool. “What is that thing? Let me feel, touch, sniff, explore it. Bring it closer.”

There is a young man sitting in the corner of the café. He has headphones on, and nods occasionally, most likely participating in a webinar. His hands are positioned so they can’t be seen on the screen’s camera, and he’s folding paper into different shapes. First, he produces a paper boat. Then, taking longer, he carefully constructs a paper airplane, taking pains to make the folds crisp and precise. A few minutes later, the webinar apparently over, he puts his two constructions on the windowsill beside him, packs up, and leaves the café.

A few moments after that, a woman with a young boy in tow comes into the café. They sit at the table next to where the paper-constructor was sitting. The woman goes to the counter to place her order. The boy looks around, spots the paper constructions on the windowsill, and stares around the room. He then races over to the windowsill and picks up the paper airplane. He looks at it for a moment, and then, choosing his destination, an unoccupied table four tables away across the room, carefully launches it. It glides perfectly, and several people turn as they see it whizzing past them, landing faultlessly on the unoccupied table. The boy, seeing it land, quickly sits and puts his head on the table, hiding his face. And then suddenly there is a little round of applause from some of the café customers. The boy glances up in surprise, and sees several people looking at him. He jumps up, bows, and sits down again. His mother, her back turned to the action, returns to the table looking at him with a frown on her face and says “What was that about?” The boy shrugs. A moment later, a departing customer picks up the airplane and, with a wink, quietly hands it back to the boy.

Outside, a small dog is taking its people for a walk. The dog is paying attention to everything, sniffing, staring, darting sideways at the slightest noise or disturbance. Its people, like most of the people walking along the street, are not paying much attention to anything. Some of the people on the street are talking on phones or looking at tiny screens, or chatting with each other, not watching what is coming toward them, largely oblivious to upcoming curbs and other obstacles. Other people on the street are walking more quickly, looking straight ahead, with that “I know where I’m going” expression. It’s as if they’re willing themselves to not be there at all, to jump forward to their destination and skip the annoyance and exposure of the journey.

Two 20- or 30-something guys wearing dark sunglasses amble along the street together, walking deliberately slowly, taking up much of the sidewalk. They have that practiced “I’m somebody” strut. They are paying attention, but only to being-paid-attention-to. Unlike the fast walkers, they want to be noticed, but they also want to not appear to want to be noticed. It’s all street theatre, especially when they are nearly run over by a woman staring at her cell phone, disrupting all their performances.

Three young teenage women walk by them all. They are toting shopping bags, and one of them, wearing a very short, loose skirt, has her hand firmly smoothing and holding the hem of the skirt down as they walk. Perhaps like all of us, it seems she’s not sure what she wants, and whether and by whom she wants to be noticed. One of the guys in sunglasses, still recovering from the collision with the distracted woman, pivots involuntarily when he catches sight of the teenager in the short skirt, nearly causing another collision. He looks annoyed; his cover is totally blown.

John Green (drawing on Amy Rosenthal’s work) wrote that so much of our worldview, and the course of our lives, is determined by what we pay attention to. He said ‘by what we choose to pay attention to’, but of course we have no choice. Even if we unsubscribe, or turn off the screen, that is as much conditioned behaviour as moaning at our personalized doom scroll. Everything we do and believe is conditioned by others’ behaviour, so in that sense John is exactly right: the ‘others’ that we are exposed to, face to face or in our viewing and reading and listening, condition us and hence determine what we subsequently think and believe and do.

In a world of social bubbles, few of us are exposed to, or ever pay attention to, people who live or think much differently from how we have been conditioned to live and think. Even worse, we are entrained to dismiss those ‘others’ who say or do anything (or are even alleged to have done something) that we disagree with or don’t understand. Even when we are exposed to them, we don’t pay attention to them. They must be wrong, misled, stupid, evil, or insane. Scroll past, change the channel, walk away.

The little dog knows better — it knows everything is wondrous, interesting, worth paying attention to. For most of its life, it’s not clamouring for attention from ‘others’. Unlike we humans with our cell phones and sunglasses and carefully chosen clothing, it is not the centre of its own universe.

Two kids, probably on their way home from high school judging from their outfits, stop into the café for iced lattes. The boy reaches into his backpack and draws out a small stuffie (plush toy) which he presents, a bit awkwardly, to the girl. Her reaction is nothing short of a swoon. She covers her mouth in delight. She laughs and smiles and hugs him. When he goes to place their order, she pins it to her pack and takes dozens of selfies of herself with her new gift and the pack. She looks so happy!

My new adopted community is very multicultural, but there are a few things that many of these cultures seem to have in common that aren’t part of what might be called established ‘Canadian’ culture. One is an almost exaggerated, but absolutely genuine, politeness to strangers. (I would now never think of not acknowledging my co-passengers in our apartment building’s elevator, and wishing them a good day as each arrives at their floor.)

But a second is the important ritual of bringing gifts to almost any occasion, no matter how informal. The gifts are mostly simple and often handmade, and elegantly but not ostentatiously wrapped. There are entire, separate rituals that govern how these gifts are presented and how they are accepted (partial hint: give and receive gifts with both hands). Gift-giving is an absolutely lovely custom, and I’m hoping it rubs off on the rest of us. Such a simple way to say what we can never hear too often: I see you; I appreciate you. This is for you.

I walk towards the lake, and in the park I just stop, and sit, and look around. It’s so easy not to notice; to turn one’s attention inward instead, and live inside one’s head. Too often, it feels safer, too, and more reassuring. No one gives us their complete attention the way we give it to ourselves.

As I watch the people and the more-than-human creatures — in the café, on the streets, in the park — I am struck by how humans, thanks to our meddling ‘selves’, process our ‘aloneness’ differently from how other animals seem to. Only for us, I think, is there ever a sense of being lonely. Other creatures are social, of course, and are conditioned to enjoy (and may depend heavily on) the company of their ‘tribe’. They may even justifiably fear being isolated from their tribe. But I think they are connected to all life on the planet, and are integrally a part of their home ecosystems, in a way that humans have forgotten. You can’t be lonely when you’re always connected to, and part of, everything else.

We humans can only console our fragile, disconnected, befuddled selves with the knowledge that these selves actually have it all wrong: In truth, there is no ‘one’ to be alone. If we could only see past the false, separating veil of the self, and pay attention to what is ‘outside’, I suppose that would be obvious.

Posted in Creative Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Month-End Reflections | 4 Comments

The Lesser of Two Evils

Posted on September 19, 2024 by Dave Pollard

A quick note to email subscribers: A couple of readers reported that my September 15th Links of the Month post was sent to their spam folders, apparently because of the large number of links in the post. If that was you, and you’d like to read that post, it’s here. No other articles seem to be affected. Thanks — Dave


“The Aftermath” by Midjourney AI; my own prompt

Several people recently have chastised me for discouraging Americans from voting, or, alternatively, encouraging them to vote for Jill Stein. I am sure that as the Canadian provincial and federal elections gets closer, I will get the same response when I tell people I’m voting Green in the provincial election and NDP in the federal election (neither candidate has a chance of winning), instead of voting for Trudeau’s (misnamed) Liberal party’s candidates to keep out the foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic Conservative party. As in the US, both ‘leading’ parties avidly support the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, and the beating of the drums for America’s planned wars against China and Iran.

I’ve voted ‘strategically’ before, choosing the ‘lesser of two evils’ rather than a candidate I don’t actually despise. Finally, I grew tired of the pressure to do so, and I quit. It was like getting off a bad drug.

Here’s what I now say to my (many) detractors on this issue, on both sides of the border:

The issue, as I have tried to assert elsewhere, is not simply the ‘lesser of two evils’ — it is the degree of difference between the two ‘evils’. The fact is that Trump had four years in office, and, for all his extreme and inconsistent rhetoric, did not behave significantly differently from Obama or Biden during this time. But now we’re being pressured to believe that “this time it will be different”, and that all the checks and balances in place in the US political system will magically disappear and allow him to declare himself dictator for life, torture and kill all his opponents, and introduce martial law and deer-antlered vigilante militias that Americans will then be saddled with forever. We’re also expected to believe that he will be able to overcome the staggering inertia in the US political system that is so deadening that, even with unanimous cross-party support, the country has been unable to pass, in forty years of trying, a simple piece of legislation to end the absurdity of daylight saving time.

The ‘two evils’ we’re being told are our ‘only’ choices (by the moneyed interests that control the media, the debate organizers, and social media, despite the fact there are other candidates on the ballot) are essentially indistinguishable on the issues of the genocide in Palestine and the desirability of continuing and escalating war with Russia and inciting war with China. How anyone could argue that either of them is significantly ‘less’ evil than the other is beyond me. The fact that it might (and I say might — for all their rhetoric about women’s rights, neither Obama nor Biden did anything to entrench them) be slightly easier for a woman to get an abortion in some states if Harris wins, isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference in the midst of an endless wave of absurdly-expensive and morally-corrupting global wars that shift ecological collapse and economic collapse into overdrive (and will, unless we put the brakes on, eventually and inevitably lead to the reinstatement of compulsory military service in the west as well).

Advocates of holding your nose and voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’ (because anything else is just ‘wasting your vote’) rail against voting with your heart rather than your head, which is an insult to intelligent voters who realize how corrosive it is when humans are forced, against all common sense and moral sense, to pull a lever to support one extremist war-monger over another. We become less than human when we are forced, like prisoners compelled to punish each other in order to be fed, to participate in and to support utterly inhuman and inhumane actions because it is the ‘lesser of two evils’.

Voting with our heads is what got us into this mess. Only by voting (and acting politically in more effective ways) with our hearts, and refusing to continue to go along with the dictates of an abusive, utterly broken political and economic system, can we even start to free ourselves to make the changes that both common sense and moral sense tell us are the imperatives of our time. Our instincts have evolved over a million years to guide us to do what is best for ourselves, our tribe, and our world, and we should trust them — how we feel — over the cold ‘rational’ calculus of a voting ‘choice’.

If something just feels wrong, it probably is.

So when I talk to American voters this fall, and when I vote in the coming Canadian provincial and federal elections, I recognize that my vote will count for nothing, as will the votes of those who vote for ‘third parties’ and independents in the US elections.

But I will proudly ‘waste’ my vote, because voting for someone who has pledged to end our countries’ participation in wars, coups and genocides, and to redirect our tax dollars and our energies to address the collapse of our domestic economies, the corruption and perversion of our political systems, and the absolute certainty of near-term climate and ecological collapse, just feels right to me.

And I say that with the full knowledge that the struggle to address the polycrisis — the collapse of all the interrelated systems that underlie our civilization — is most likely a hopeless struggle, probably doomed to failure, no matter who is in office.

But never, ever again will I be goaded, against everything my instincts and my heart tell me that I should do and that I should stand for, to vote for the ‘lesser of two evils’.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 14 Comments

you don’t want to know

Posted on September 17, 2024 by Dave Pollard

this is a work of fiction

Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, via Against Silence

 

it’s been going on for years,
the quiet disappearances, the coups,
the money passed behind backs,
the smearing of reputations:
“having that person in power is not acceptable”

it’s been going on for years,
the stroking of her hair, her arm
making her want to scream,
making her wish she were dead:
“don’t tell your mother”

it’s been going on for years,
the torture and terror of animals,
the kicks to the head when no one is looking,
their death by suffocation in trucks with tiny vents:
“we call them ‘downers’ if they’re crippled or die en route”

it’s been going on for years,
the little digs, the belittling, the sneers, the threats
on the school grounds, by the storefront, in the alley, on the job site,
the endless dread of what happens if you tell, or if you don’t:
“i could crush you in a second; hand it over; do what you’re told”

it’s been going on for years,
the lies, the promises, the torture prisons, the ’shock and awe’,
the reneging, the devastating sanctions, the threats of escalation,
the calls in the night, before the bombs fall again:
“you have 58 seconds: run”

it’s been going on for years,
for centuries, millennia:

this is who we are now,
this is who we always have been.

Posted in Creative Works | Leave a comment

Links of the Month: September 2024

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Dave Pollard


the explosion of “vaccine hesitancy” since the start of the pandemic, per poll tabulations by YLE

I’ve added a fifth ‘regular’ section to the “Politics & Economics As Usual” category of my monthly links. I’ve called it “Industrial Disease and Malnutrition”, kind of as a sly reference to the Dire Straits song. It’s for news about how our modern food, drug and ‘health’ systems are making us progressively sicker. It’s the Fifth Horseman, I suppose, the successor to pestilence. As the politicians, the scientists, the corporations, and the economists all try to tell us ‘their’ truth, the horsemen are starting to trip over each other.

As the endless, useless wars and genocides continue to expand, and the collapse of our broken economic, political and ecological systems accelerates, it’s not looking good out there, folks.

COLLAPSE WATCH


“Over the past twenty years, reported average annual GDP ‘growth’ of 3.5% has been made possible by borrowing at an annual average growth rate of 10.6%. Adding “real” GDP of $92tn came at a cost of $280tn in net new debt.”

Phantom “growth”: Economists continue to insist the economy is “growing” while the majority of citizens insist they are dealing with more financial and economic hardship than at any time in their lives. The citizens are right. Tim Morgan explains the smoke-and-mirrors arguments, and what they bode for our future.

Betting it all on sci-fi solutions: Three climate scientists admit that 1.5ºC — which we’ve already at least temporarily overshot — was a hopeless goal, and describe the massive and rapid changes that would be needed to avert much greater global warming. The biggest problem, they say, is that leaders are going all in on discovery of magical new, unproven and unlikely future technologies to do essentially all of the work to reduce emissions.

When the reservoirs and dams dry up: Sustained droughts have meant that across Canada, dams are unable to produce the hydro energy that energy companies banked on, and instead are substituting and importing more and more fossil fuel energy. The same is happening in other freshwater-rich countries in Scandinavia, central Europe, NZ, China and South America.

Three new kinds of refugees: Traditionally, refugee numbers have consisted mostly of people fleeing direct persecution by their country’s authorities. But now, the vast majority of refugees are of three new types: economic refugees fleeing crippling IMF austerity programs pushing them to the edge of starvation, “regime-change” refugees fleeing brutal dictatorships, often brought about by coups enabled by the CIA and corrupt large “we’ll coup who we want” corporations, and climate refugees fleeing the horrific effects of climate collapse.

“The world is coming apart, isn’t it, dad”: In an editorial by an award-winning cartoonist that the NYT surprising published, the author confesses that his son’s, and his wife’s (she grew up in Eastern Europe) profoundly pessimistic views about the inevitability of collapse, are well-founded, and his own, based on reading the mainstream western media, are not.

Blue states turn against the homeless and refugees: New York joins California in introducing draconian new laws to penalize, criminalize, evict and expel the homeless and those living in migrant shelters.

LIVING BETTER


greeting card in their “on second thought” series, from someecards

Wait, really?: Rebecca Watson laments the loss of critical thinking skills, especially among young people passively accepting conspiracy theories and hate- and war-mongering rhetoric.

Québec moves ahead with implementing MAID as Trudeau waffles and Poilievre vows to cancel it: The province has told enforcement agencies to accept advance directives and not to interfere with doctors carrying out legal wishes for dignified death. Trudeau has postponed and postponed implementing this element of MAID, to placate the right wing and religious groups in his own party. Meanwhile, in Ontario, Dying With Dignity is suing Trudeau’s government for excluding excruciating mental illness from eligibility for MAID even after the courts ruled that exclusion was unconstitutional.

Approval voting is best: Veritasium consults with mathematicians to understand why various proportional representation systems can be almost as undemocratic as first-past-the-post, and concludes that only one voting system is actually consistent with the idea of truly democratic representation: Approval voting.

Wingnuttery, deconstructed: Lyz Lenz explains why JD Vance hates single women.

How Community Bonds and Community Land Trusts enable non-profits to provide affordable housing: Community Bonds are doing what the banks should be doing, but aren’t. Community Land Trusts can also be an important part of the solution. Watch the video on Peace Village in Oregon to see what CLT-based housing can look like. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the video link.

Why “codifying Roe” is the wrong way to establish women’s reproductive rights: Restrictions and interference with abortion rights were already rife when Roe was law; much stronger legislation is needed.

We’re not crazy: Hear Jill Stein talk about the real issues facing the US and the west, as she responds to the sham ‘presidential’ debate between the two Tweedles. Thanks to Gerry Gras for the link.

What it’s really like to live in China: A long-time businessman and former westerner gives viewers a balanced view of the pros (safety, cleanliness) and cons (lack of privacy) of living in China. And a Scandinavian traveler weighs in with his experiences in Xinjiang (the comments to this video are even more interesting than the video itself).

Small acts of sedition: Committing small acts of ‘sedition’ can help you keep your sanity, and reduce your sense of powerlessness. Caitlin Johnstone explains what these are. “Giving a receptive listener some information about what’s going on in the world. Creating dissident media online. Graffiti with a powerful message. Amplifying an inconvenient voice. Sharing a disruptive idea. Supporting an unauthorized cause. Organizing toward forbidden ends. Distributing literature. Creating literature. Having authentic conversations about real things with anyone who can hear you.” And do something every day to help de-normalize the abuses of the Empire. “Denormalize poverty. Denormalize injustice and inequality. Denormalize the ruined buildings and ruined bodies in Gaza. Denormalize the nuclear brinkmanship with Russia. Denormalize the destruction of our biosphere in the ravages of ecocidal capitalism. Denormalize the surging authoritarianism we’re experiencing as the empire works frantically to stomp out dissent. Denormalize the war machinery rolling out around the world, and the increasingly militarized police forces in our streets. Denormalize the psychopathy of the politicians and government officials who cheerfully serve the empire in facilitation of these horrors. Denormalize the way media and government institutions controlled by the powerful work to manipulate the way we think and perceive every day of our fucking lives for the benefit of the powerful.”

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


“I’m speaking”, a painting by Caitlin Johnstone

Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

Corpocracy & Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:

Administrative Mismanagement & Incompetence: Short takes:

Industrial Disease & Malnutrition: Short takes:

FUN AND INSPIRATION


cartoon by Instachazz (Chaz Hutton)

How “sound illusions” work: Fun facts about how our brain processes sound. Worthy of a Pullet Surprise.

Digging towards hell: Indi relates the ‘industry’ of mining to our rapacious relationship with the earth as a whole. Sheer poetry.

“I think like you do, and it’s nice to know that I’m not alone”: Robert Jensen writes about what it’s like to always be outside the Overton window. Thanks to Gerry Gras for the link.

What would Marshall say?: A student of Marshall McLuhan speculates on how he might have responded to AI and other current technologies.

Live Nature Cams: Set 1 and Set 2

How Subarus became seen as cars for lesbians: It was all planned, kind of. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


cartoon by John Atkinson

From Shuly Xóchitl Cawood – in Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough

The Laws of Less and More

I’m still thinking about what my tio said when I was twelve:
that I was chubby and needed to watch my weight.

Until then, my body had been meant
for only me.

Even decades later I am thinking of this seed he planted,
the soil I gave it, the sun of my belief.

I am thinking of what I did not eat for so long:
milk, cheese, peanut butter, bread, mayonnaise.

I did not eat a sandwich for so many years. I only yearned for
parts of me to disappear, for other parts

to show, be admired, render me beautiful. I believed
a body could do so much more if I gave it less.

Recently when I, in middle age, told my doctor I was giving
weight despite no change in diet or exercise, she said, you need to eat

less. And now I think of all the lessons I learned when I was twelve
that I practiced for years—all the times I told myself you should not have,

you will not have, you should never, ever have. Restriction as devotion
became what others saw as disciplined, the only part of me I allowed to grow
wild.

From Lena Khalaf Tuffaha in Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017). Please read these words from her, written in January of this year, entitled Against Silence. The poem that follows may make more sense with that context. 

Running Orders

They call us now,
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza?
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war-time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

 

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

How We’re Supposed to Live Now

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Dave Pollard


what Jim Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency” — a gradual multi-stage collapse over an extended period

Nate Bear writes:

I live in a dry, water-stressed patch of the planet. Not far from us villages have been under water rationing measures this summer, although so far we’ve been spared.

A friend messaged me the other day asking about my predictions for water availability in the future. I suggested it would eventually run out but with ‘false’ years where things look normal and everyone forgets it’s a problem and then next year it’s worse than ever, then it gets better again for a bit and so on. Authorities will react minimally, afraid to take on big agriculture that drains so much water, and will apply temporary fixes.

I said we’d have enough notice to plan, or not plan, or react, or not react. Irrigated fruit tree agriculture will end. Eventually most agriculture will end. But we’d know months in advance that a bad water crisis moment was approaching. I said that what we should be really worried about, the thing we’d have only days to plan for, is a catastrophic heat burst that took temperatures close to 50C for weeks on end, buckle the infrastructure, stop the AC, dry the land, spur mega fires, cause many thousands to drop dead within hours, cooked from the inside out, our bodies unable to shed heat in overheated homes. I said this would happen in the nearer term than the water crisis, but that both would happen in our lifetime and then I went back to watching US Open tennis highlights on youtube.

And it got me thinking about how we’re supposed to live now. About the facade of normality that envelops us in every moment despite the planet collapsing conditions we live within.

It’s an interesting question, How we’re supposed to live now. For much of the world, I doubt that there is much of a façade of normality. For most in the Global South, and most of the world’s poor, I think, there’s just the daily ordeal of scraping by, of making do, of dealing with endless anxiety and precarity. Even in the affluent west, every few decades a war or an economic depression comes along that re-teaches everyone that ‘normality’ is fleeting.

My sense is that what Nate calls “the ‘false’ years where things look normal” will slowly become rarer, and it will begin to dawn on us that the ‘false’ years are not years of recovery to the old ‘normal’, but a plateau at a new ‘false-normal’ level, a hiatus before the next stage of collapse weighs in. That seems to be how collapse works.

And I think Nate is correct in predicting that we’ll “have enough notice to plan, or not plan, or react, or not react”. It’s become a cliché that change happens gradually, and then all-at-once. The problem is, we’re not very good planners, and we’re notorious over-reactors. Our behaviours and our beliefs change slowly, reluctantly, and we live in an age of enormous imaginative poverty, because technology has deprived most of us of the exercise needed to imagine other possibilities, other ways of living and being, for ourselves. And thanks to our collapsing educational systems, few of us learn about such ‘other possibilities’ from a serious study of history.

There is of course no one way we’re “supposed” to live. We used to be a very adaptable species, before most of us moved to the prosthetic environment of cities, where we’re utterly dependent on other people knowing how to do things for us, and on their being able to do them. So, pre-civilization, when crises occurred, we tended to the needs of the moment, as we and all species have always done, and we had the competencies to change, self-adapt, and endure.

Now, incompetent as babies, we can only cry and wail that we can no longer get what we want, and Why doesn’t someone stop the evil or insane person we are told is to blame, so we can get back to our normal state of comfort?

But the important lesson, of history, and of the fragility of civilizations, and of Nate’s lament, I think, is that When we have to learn new ways of living and being, most of us will do so. My (urban) grandparents’ stories of how utterly their lives changed during the Great Depression, and how much they learned, quickly and of necessity, as a result, have always stuck with me. So have their stories about the propensity of communities of strangers to suddenly come together and help each other out in difficult times.

I think it’s not only unnecessary, but quite possibly premature, for us to try to guess what new and old competencies will be need in our post-normal, collapsing world, and to strive to acquire those skills and competencies now. We cannot know how, and where, and when the multiple phases of collapse will uniquely unfold in each place. We cannot even know whether we will ourselves be among the two billion climate refugees that scientists now think collapse is likely to produce. Even if I were to acquire the agricultural skills needed to survive where I live now, with the resources available for agriculture now, they will do me no good if collapse forces me to migrate to, say, an area we now call ‘tundra’, where I’d likely have to learn a very different hunter-gatherer way of living or perish.

There is a lot of wringing of hands about how many billions will starve to death as collapse deepens. That is certainly a possibility: Read up about the horrors of the Irish potato famine to see how easily and quickly that can happen. But if you look at how wild creatures respond to situations where the population is much greater than what the land can sustain, you might conclude that a much more gradual and less gruesome resolution is more likely. Stories of lemmings and locusts notwithstanding, most animals, it seems, voluntarily and instinctively reduce their populations to bring them back into balance with the local ecosystem’s carrying capacity. And as Nate says, we’ll have enough notice to do the same. Once it’s clear that the best alternative to condemning your future children to a life of starvation is not to have any children, my guess is that much of our overpopulation problem will (though too slowly) diminish.

There’s also some evidence from history that, if and when the situation gets bad enough that starvation is unavoidable, a certain proportion of the population will voluntarily and instinctively self-select to die so that others may live. Those who are old and infirm, and those who just cannot psychologically bear the thought of living out the rest of their lives in desperation and deprivation, may well just choose to end their own lives more peacefully.

As for me, my ‘preparation’ for collapse, rather than entailing the learning of new skills and competencies, is about psychological preparedness — imagining, based on studies of past collapses, and on mostly fictional, non-dystopian writing about post-collapse earth, what it might be like to live in such a world, and imagining myself and those I know in such a world. Essentially, to imagine if, and how, we could cope.

My sense is that our rediscovery of the power, value, and importance of community will be at first bewildering and frustrating, but then become our most important, and astonishing, re-learning. We will ask ourselves: How did we ever forget that we are entirely and only a part of something larger, not individuals but members of a community of humans that is part of a larger community of all life?

And at the same time we will learn how a healthy community adapts to its environment, rather than trying for force the environment to change to meet its needs. And, just as my reading leads me to believe we will re-learn how to be a part of a community that is part of a greater community, it also leads me to believe that we will learn, as collapse deepens, to evolve a society and a local economy based on the resources at hand, as all post-collapse and frontier communities have done.

From reading books like The Mushroom at the End of the World, The Logic of Sufficiency, and A Scientific Romance, I imagine that that post-collapse economy will be a salvage and scavenger economy, perhaps like the one that today’s largely-urbanized crows have evolved. Rather than a life of struggle, scarcity and disease, such an economy could easily be one of considerable comfort and leisure, if we are smart about it. The crows and bonobos, amongst others, might show us the way. There is enormous logic in a life of sufficiency, rather than the life of efficiency so many of us have come to worship. But we will see whether our species, with its huge but oft-befuddled brain, will one day figure that out.

I don’t know how we’re “supposed” to live now, but for me, that’s the only way to make sense of things, to give myself some perspective about it, and to become a little more equanimous about what we will soon face, and what we cannot hope to change. To me, it’s exhilarating to imagine what might emerge once our well-intentioned but broken, crumbling, numbing, ubiquitous civilization has at last vanished from the face of the earth.

As Ronald Wright put it in A Scientific Romance, “if a dinosaur can become a hummingbird, all things are possible”.

Posted in Collapse Watch, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Witnessing

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Dave Pollard


photo from Jonathan Cook’s latest article on the genocide in Palestine, source uncited

As long as I’ve been chronicling the collapse of our global industrial civilization and its systems, I’ve described myself not as an activist — someone determined to “do something about” collapse — but as a witness to this accelerating and uneven disaster.

The word witness comes from an ancient root word that synonymizes three meanings: to see, to say (what is seen), and to understand (what is seen). Hence we also have view, vision, wise, wisdom, idea, story, history, provide, advise, wit and a host of other essential words, all deriving from the same root.

Of course, the three meanings aren’t all inherent in all the words that have sprung from this proto-idea. We can ‘see’ things, both in the sensory and metaphorical sense of the word, without necessarily saying anything, and without necessarily understanding what we’ve seen. Two people can ‘witness’ the same apparent happening, and yet derive completely different views and ideas of what was seen.

This concatenation of meaning has even given rise to two distinct negatives — unwitting (meaning they didn’t understand what it ‘meant’), and witless (meaning they couldn’t understand what it meant, due to cognitive impairment).

I have long argued that we believe what we want to believe — what fits with our existing, conditioned worldview — not necessarily what aligns in any way with the facts or evidence, ie with what we ‘see’. That doesn’t mean that we’re all witless. There are sound evolutionary reasons why human brains are conditioned to find patterns and to disregard what doesn’t fit with those patterns — to dismiss things and not ‘see’ them at all if we can’t ‘make sense’ of them.

Devoutly religious people will see one or more gods’ hands at work in many things that happen, for example, and their belief systems will be untouched by any facts that contradict those interpretations. What we want to believe will affect what we actually believe and hence what we ‘see’ as having actually happened. People with strongly-held beliefs (dogmas and rigid ideologies) will be quick to assert (in testimony, in conversations, in op-eds etc) their own belief about what happened (and why it happened), and will be utterly intolerant of (and deaf to) any other possible interpretation of what was witnessed, and of anyone who says or understands differently.

So the facts about how the US (through “fuck the EU” Victoria Nuland’s 2014 coup, the subsequent CIA-supported civil war etc), with its compliant military sidekick NATO, deliberately and systematically provoked the Russian invasion of the Donbas regions of Ukraine to justify its attempts to destabilize and bring down the Russian government, don’t really matter to most people. And the facts about the ongoing and relentless US-powered genocide in Palestine by Israel really don’t matter to most people. Those facts don’t ‘fit’ with what they believe, so they can’t be right.

Of course, if those currently supporting the Ukraine proxy war and the Palestinian genocide were to witness first-hand what had happened and is happening in either of those countries, then what they saw, what they said, and what they understood, would most likely be very different from what they would be asserting today.

So this raises the question: What exactly does it mean to ‘witness’ something? How can I presume to call myself a witness to the collapse of our entire civilization, when I have not (and probably no one can) ‘witness’ that collapse in its entirety first-hand?

I would argue that it’s because over the past fifty years I have seen mountains of evidence, in the context of the history of past civilizations, that ours is collapsing at an accelerating rate, and that no one and no ‘group’ of people, no matter how large and smart and rich and well-organized, can prevent or even mitigate that collapse. My conditioning (as a nature-lover, and as a student of history and culture and human nature) is such that I must do my best to ‘witness’ this collapse: to see it happening, say what I think is happening, and try to understand why it is happening.

I do not presume to be a ‘witness’ to the ghastly events unfolding in Ukraine or Palestine. But in my writing about these events, I rely substantially on the first-hand accounts of those who have been and continue to witness these events. And their accounts tell a very, very different story from the fourth-hand press releases, propagandized ‘intelligence’ reports, and hate- and war-mongering op-eds in the media.

And perhaps more importantly, my writing attempts to discern not only what is ‘seen’ by others, first-hand, to be happening in those countries, but why it might be happening — not because people are simply ‘evil’ or ‘insane’, but rather as the combatants’ automatic, entrained responses to a lifetime of cultural and biological conditioning, under the ever-worsening circumstances of our pressure-cooker, overcrowded, falling-apart civilization. My job, and our job, I believe, is not to condone or condemn, but simply to understand. (Of course, as someone who has been conditioned to believe we have no free will over what we do and what we believe, I would say that.)

That does not imply that I cannot be outraged, and am not outraged, by what is apparently happening — that’s part of my conditioning too. But while I completely understand the expressions of outrage from those personally affected by these ghastly events, I have absolutely no time for those not personally affected who vent their outrage and righteous indignation, to assuage their own neuroses and uselessly rile up others. Inflicting your hate- and fear-driven mental illness on others is an act of cruelty, and it has no value other than to dangerously and destructively self-perpetuate.

Yet, even when it comes to these hordes of ignorant opinionated spewers of hate and fear, I believe my job is to witness (and understand) their dysfunctional behaviour, too. So-called “social media” seem to have evolved specifically to attract and inflame these sad people, in order to sell them crap they don’t need, and thus they encourage behaviours that will probably make their psychological illnesses even worse. I have met a number of these people, whose uninformed and misinformed, second-hand opinions, “likes”, piling-on, trolling, and emotional outbursts bear all the signs of deep trauma, childhood neglect, social isolation and abuse. It says a great deal about our crumbling civilization that the “social media” cesspool has become, by default, the primary means by which so many people meet their needs for attention, appreciation, and reassurance, needs they can’t fulfil through genuine, coherent, practiced communication with other human beings face-to-face.

This is what happens, I guess, as a civilization enters its final stages of decline. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. Our means of coping with the increasingly unbearable reality of chaotic collapse seems to entail us, somehow, becoming less human, less capable of authentic human appreciation, empathy, and understanding. Like rats in an overcrowded laboratory cage, fighting over the dregs, increasingly, we can no longer tolerate, no longer witness, and no longer care.

.  .  .  .  .

’Cúagilákv Jess Housty, a citizen of the Haíłzaqv First Nation, recently wrote her own essay on witnessing, based on her years of living alongside the whales of the Pacific coast.

“I’ve learned the greatest threat to life is disconnection”, she writes. The culture of her people is all about relationship, about caring, and about the interconnectedness of all life on earth. She speaks of bearing witness as an act of humility, a precondition to conscious living and acting with humanity:

Like many others, I watched with an ache in my heart in 2018 when Tahlequah, an orca in the Southern Resident J pod, nudged her dead calf to the ocean’s surface for 17 days in what appeared to be a ritual of mourning…

Grief is ceremony. It can have elements that are both private and public, but when it is enacted in a public way as Tahlequah’s was, we can’t be simple spectators. We need to be witnesses.

In Haíłzaqv culture, to be a witness is a deep responsibility. It obligates you to be an archive embodied, ready to recall the events and the ceremonies you have witnessed and the business that has been conducted before you when the record of your testimony is required… In the context of Tahlequah’s mourning, bearing witness is how we must reciprocate the ocean’s generosity, the feasts it has provided us, the gifts it has given us.

I don’t know why Tahlequah’s calf died. I can recite the pressures that bear down on the ocean, on orcas in general, on Tahlequah’s pod in particular. I carry that anxiety in my bones like ocean salt etching into my marrow. Dwindling food sources. Chemical and noise pollution. The lingering intergenerational impacts of all the live captures in decades past. The hazards of shipping oil. The low howl of climate change.

My empathy overwhelms me at times because what I see in our ocean relatives so closely parallels what I see in my own community; we’ve also felt starvation and contamination. We’ve also heard our languages drowned out by white noise and felt the intergenerational trauma of fractured families. We’ve also calculated what we stand to lose to an oil spill and stared down the uncertain future of a wildly shifting climate…

I cannot imagine the deep grief of losing your offspring. If that mourning was an ocean, I’m not sure I could even imagine standing at its shore. But when I watched the footage of her nosing her dead calf to the ocean’s surface, I felt her pain — in my head, my heart, and my womb. And when I watched her pod take turns lifting that calf up so she could rest as she completed her sacred work, Tahlequah reminded me that we do not move through grief and uncertainty alone. We do it with our community, bearing witness. And thus, our community endures.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 3 Comments

Thank You, John Whiting (1931-2024)

Posted on September 10, 2024 by Dave Pollard


John’s study, in London

John Whiting’s wife, Mary, let me know today that John, who was 93 and not in the best of health, recently passed away.

Many of you will recognize the name from my many, many “Thanks to John Whiting for the link” references in my monthly Links of the Month blog posts. He and I exchanged over 500 emails over the years, and through that exchange I got to know John quite well. Our earliest communications were about a summary I had posted twenty years ago of Ronald Wright’s book A Short History of Progress, a book that John said transformed his worldview.

John was the exemplary “Joyful Pessimist”, always ready to respond to anything I said with a witty, informed, and entertaining anecdote, often about some famous person he’d rubbed shoulders with in his many pursuits in academia, the media, the culinary arts, writing, and the “music biz”. But he was a voracious reader, and over time his perspective on the future of our current civilization, fed by the assessments of how previous civilizations collapsed, and by the endless scroll of bad news in the media, grew steadily darker.

John’s humble reflections about having had a privileged and bountiful life, and, in that context, his equanimity about facing the end of that life, and the precarious and difficult future that the younger generations will face, have served as a model for me in my later years, as we pass the torch, unsteadily, to those who will likely live lives both more awful and more awesome than the stable, comfortable ones that were afforded us.

One of John’s ‘signature’ expressions was ’Thank You, One and All’. So this is a reply ‘thank you’ for John, and Mary, and those he leaves behind, richer for having known him. For all you did, and all you told us about, and laughed with us about, and warned us about, John — thank you.

Posted in Collapse Watch | Leave a comment

The Marshmallow Myth

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Dave Pollard


photo by Alex SooJung-Kim Pang on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Cory Doctorow recently wrote an article debunking the myth surrounding the so-called “marshmallow test”. In the test, young children are told that they can either eat a marshmallow placed in front of them, or, if they wait for a prescribed amount of time, they will instead be given two marshmallows. The tester then leaves the room and records the results.

The research findings allegedly showed that, even years later, the children who forewent the immediate gratification to get the second marshmallow proved to be more ‘successful’ in their lives. These ‘findings’ have been used by conservatives, moralists, and longtermism/effective altruism crackpots to make a borderline-eugenics argument that your success depends on your innate “character” — and that those who have succeeded therefore fully ‘deserve’ the fruits of their success.

As Cory explains, however, subsequent research has indicated that the immediate-gratification kids actually came from significantly poorer and more stressful backgrounds than the ‘two-marshmallow’ kids. They took the first marshmallow because their learning from a lifetime of precarity was not to trust people who make promises, and to take what you can get when you can get it. Their lack of subsequent ‘success’, therefore, was due not to their short-termist ‘character’, but due to the fact that their circumstances were inevitably more difficult, their opportunities and resources inevitably more limited, and their challenges inevitably greater. Cory summarizes:

Once you understand this, the lesson of the Marshmallow Experiment is inverted. The reason two-marshmallow kids thrived is that they came from privileged backgrounds: their high grades were down to private tutors, not the choice to study rather than partying. Their plum jobs and high salaries came from university and family connections, not merit. Their brain differences were the result of a life free from the chronic, extreme stress that comes with poverty.

He goes on to point out that conservatives are completely hypocritical when it comes to patience and long-term thinking. If they really wanted to think long-term, he says, they would have rolled up their sleeves to confront issues like climate collapse and wealth inequality full-on, rather than self-interestedly denying the former and shrugging off the latter by marshmallow victim-blaming. He concludes:

Koch and his fellow oligarchs are, first and foremost, supporters of oligarchy, an intrinsically destabilizing political arrangement that actually threatens their fortunes. Policies that favor the wealthy are always seeking an equilibrium between instability and inequality: a rich person can either submit to having their money taxed away to build hospitals, roads and schools, or they can invest in building high walls and paying guards to keep the rest of us from building guillotines on their lawns. Rich people gobble that marshmallow like there’s no tomorrow (literally). They always overestimate how much bang they’ll get for their guard-labor buck, and underestimate how determined the poor will get after watching their children die of starvation and preventable diseases.

In The Triple Helix, biologist Richard Lewontin argues that it is important to winnow out the seemingly simple, “obvious” causes of our civilization’s problems, and those that conveniently align with our particular political and social ideologies, to reveal what really underlies them. He provides two important examples. He asserts that the commonly-accepted explanations (better hygiene and sanitation, antibiotics and other medicines) for the dramatic drop in deaths from infectious diseases in “industrialized” nations, represent a complete misunderstanding of historical events and the impact of technologies. Instead, he argues,

Infectious diseases were not the causes of death, but only the agencies. The causes of death in Europe in earlier times were what they still are in the Third World [and among the poor the world over]: overwork and undernourishment.

And he goes on to argue that our modern western chronic diseases, and the ecological devastation of our planet, are the agencies, not the causes, of the horrific and grossly unequally-distributed crises and suffering humans and the more-than-human world are contending with in this century.

The cause is the narrow rationality of an anarchic scheme of production that was developed by industrial capitalism and adopted by industrial socialism. In this, as in all else, the confusion between agencies and causes prevents a realistic confrontation with the conditions of human life.

If we look at the marshmallow test through a no-free-will lens, we can see Cory’s point that poverty or trauma might well have conditioned the one-marshmallow kids to behave ‘impatiently’ as they did.

But did conditioning equally determine the fact that Koch, other privileged conservatives, and the two-marshmallow kids have arrogated behaviours and self-important beliefs that have disproportionately contributed to the destruction of our planet and the immiseration of most of its inhabitants? Or, to ask the question from a Richard Lewontin perspective, to what extent did the conditioning of all of us, rich and poor, weak and powerful, contribute to the creation of the massively dysfunctional systems we are struggling with today, systems that have produced a world of chronic stress, poverty, scarcity, precarity, malnourishment, disease and overwork, and consequently horrific violence, trauma, inequality and ecological degradation?

I ask it this way because, tempted as I am, as a lifelong socialist and environmentalist, to blame execrable billionaires like Koch, Musk, and their ilk, for wilfully producing the polycrisis and the staggering global suffering and destruction it is wreaking, as a non-believer in free will, I just can’t accept that it’s that simple.

The cycle of causality would seem to be something like this:

Richard would seem to be saying “it’s the system, stupid”. But no one is in control of the “system” (the upper gold box in this chart). It’s the collective product of eight billion humans’ uncoordinated behaviour, each doing our part, and each doing what we’ve been conditioned to believe to be our best. Of course the rich and powerful have a greater impact on these systems (and their dysfunctionality). But they don’t control them, or even have much impact on them. And their behaviour, like all of ours, is just conditioned anyway — they have no more control over what they do each moment, than they have over the systems we have all created.

In a nutshell: We, all of us, are continuously co-creating the staggeringly complex, dysfunctional systems that have produced the current civilization-shattering polycrisis, with all its horrific consequences and the commensurate stress-driven feelings that have led in turn to all the violence and misbehaviours and trauma we are currently suffering from. And all of those consequences, in turn, feed back to determine our (next) behaviours. Classic ‘vicious cycle’. The endgame, inevitably, is collapse.

That’s not to exonerate the Kochs and Musks and other reprobates who are oblivious to or in denial of the horrific damage they are disproportionally enabling, and the horrific suffering that damage entails. It’s just to say they have no choice in any of it. Like the bad guys in the black hats in a poorly-written Hollywood action flick, they’re just acting their part and reading their lines. Given their conditioning and the (ever-worsening) circumstances of the moment, that’s the only thing they could possibly do. Just like us.

So where does that leave us with the marshmallows? Those ‘choices’, too, are entirely conditioned. They are not choices at all, right down to the wavering until the poor kid gives in and grabs the marshmallow at the eight minute mark, unable to wait for the possibly larger ‘delayed’ award.

We are all those poor kids in the laboratory. Whether it’s marshmallows or ballots or weapons of mass destruction, acts of gratitude or revenge, a thousand small sanities or a thousand acts of cruelty, or lying under oath or whistle-blowing to end a long and brutal outrage, what we’re going to do next, and next week, and next year, is all determined. Not predictable, mind you — no one knows the circumstances that will be in place in each future moment when we do the only thing we could possibly have done.

If you’re like me, you’ll keep stressing about all the stuff in the boxes in the chart above, wondering what might be done to make things better, or prevent them getting worse. Some of you might even write annoying articles like this about them. You have no choice about doing that, either.

I think it’s a wonderful irony that the inventors of the test chose marshmallows as the irresistible temptation for their subjects: There’s not a single healthy or nutritious ingredient in them, and if they knew what was used to hold them together in that scary shape, even the hungriest child might refuse the ‘treat’!

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments