A Scientific Explanation of Nothing (Appearing As Everything)

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Midjourney AI’s take on scientists debating the existence of time and free will. Apparently Midjourney is of the impression that all scientists are male. I wonder where it got that idea? ChatGPT did no better with its all-male list of “prominent figures” on these topics. Not so intelligent. 

Over the last month or two I’ve made my way through four provocative books about the nature of reality:

  1. theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland
  2. quantum physicist Julian Barbour’s The End of Time
  3. theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics
  4. neuroscientist Anil Seth’s Being You

The authors of these books know, refer to, support, and sometimes criticize each other’s work. But to some extent they all represent a growing but still unorthodox school of scientists who believe, on the balance of probabilities:

  • time does not exist
  • the ‘self’ does not exist
  • free will does not exist

They use words like illusion, misconstrual, and even hallucination to describe what time, self and free will really are, and why they seem to exist, and how their actual non-existence does not in any way affect how the world works, or how we function in it. Unlike some more conservative, orthodox thinkers in their fields (some of whom say that widespread acceptance of our lack of free will would somehow, preposterously, inexorably lead to global chaos and anarchy), they describe how the human brain might have evolved the faulty belief in the reality of these things (we are incorrigible pattern-seekers, sense-makers, and meaning-makers, after all), and how our belief in them has not affected, and need not affect, our beliefs and behaviours — any more than our mistaken belief that the sun revolved around the earth affected them.

Three of the books tackle the issue of free will, and explain why we are not ‘responsible’ for our actions, and describe the moral dilemma that this realization presents for our systems of laws, enforcement, and incarceration. The horrific lifelong trauma, both psychological and physical, suffered by most of those who then became serious criminals is supported by mountains of data. That doesn’t ‘justify’ their behaviour, but it does explain it.

Just as journalist Michael Pollan and biologist-neuroscientist Robert Sapolski explained in their books, the argument outlined in these books isn’t that we should take no action against those convicted of crimes, but that (i) instead of using the threat of punishment and incarceration as an attempt to deter criminal behaviour and reduce recidivism, we should use counselling and other methods to treat those convicted, the same as we should for anyone else suffering from serious mental illness, and (ii) we should only incarcerate those who we perceive to pose a significant risk to others, and only until treatment of their mental illness reduces that risk.

As scientists, all four writers are most interested in how abandoning our belief in the ‘reality’ of time, self and free will, affects our overall understanding of the nature of the universe and our place in it. In that respect, accepting that time is just a mental construct is relatively easy — our new models of the universe and its workings are mostly independent of the concept of time and work just fine without it.

Likewise, setting aside the confusing plethora of words like ‘determinist’, ‘physicalist’, ‘materialist’, and ‘compatibilist’, these writers seem to accept that, regardless of its lack of intuitiveness, and the ethical dilemmas it poses, the evidence for our behaviour being completely biologically and culturally conditioned, rather than subject to free will, is increasingly compelling, and that all attempts to locate, identify, or rationalize the existence or even the need for a ‘self’, have failed.

We simply don’t need the concepts of a self, or of free will, to comprehensively explain human behaviour. In fact, our behaviour makes more sense if we acknowledge that they don’t exist. And it’s not terribly difficult to explain why our species evolved the ubiquitous misunderstanding that we have selves and free will, and the false belief that time really exists.

In short, our understanding is wrong, but it is perfectly understandable. This is how the human brain apparently makes sense of things, by creating flawed, best-that-it-can-manage models, and then adopting them as accurate representations of reality until/unless a better model can be found. This is why it is so easy for humans to get caught up in a movie, which is just pixels on a screen, and feel that its characters are real and that the events it depicts are really happening.

So why do we care? If our misunderstanding of time, self and free will doesn’t affect our behaviour, what does it matter?

It matters for the same reason that our search to understand quantum effects, and why they just don’t fit (to put it mildly) with any of our existing models of how the world works, matters to us — We want to know ‘the truth’. We endlessly seek better models that more accurately represent reality.

Some scientists are now going further. Sean Carroll, another theoretical physicist (referred to in two of these books), says that when we dispense with the concept of time, we need to also reconsider our understanding of the rest of what seems to be real. While he is holding on to a belief in the many-worlds theory, he’s also admitted that the true nature of reality can most likely never be known or understood, and that the only thing we might be able to say with any assurance about the universe is that it is “an infinite field of possibilities”.

This is not so far from the message of radical non-duality that “nothing is either real or unreal”, that everything is just “nothing appearing as everything”. If there are only appearances, then anything is possible, ie the universe is an infinite field of possibilities. (Two of the books go into why, if anything is in fact possible, most ‘improbable’ things never seem to happen, drawing largely on entropy theory. They also suggest that our categorization of the ‘arrow’ of time might be our flawed model of the apparent tendency of things towards greater entropy.)

Even if we might be persuaded that everything is just an appearance, and that nothing (including time, space, separate things, and selves with free will) is real, what does it mean when radical non-dualists say nothing is ‘unreal’ either?

By ‘unreal’ we generally mean imagined or imaginary, like a hallucination or a story. The message of radical non-duality is that time, the self, free will, and other constructions of the (apparent) brain are ‘purely’ unreal — they are just things the self conjures up and imagines to be true, because it lacks any better explanation for what seems to be happening. But “nothing appearing as everything” (all the ‘stuff’ that isn’t merely conjured up in our brain) is neither real nor unreal. In other words, it isn’t real, because nothing is separate and because there is no time for anything to ‘really’ exist in or be happening in. And it isn’t unreal, because we aren’t just imagining it. “Nothing appearing as everything” is, therefore, just an appearance. We can’t conceive of anything being neither real nor unreal (though if there’s been a ‘glimpse’ it is immediately understood), but we can kind of get the concept.

So what about ‘consciousness’?

In terms of understanding the nature of reality and the message of radical non-duality, the whole concept of consciousness, as important as it is to many scientists, theologians, philosophers, spiritualists, and psychologists, is essentially irrelevant. The term has no strict definition and is often used to mean very different things. It is, merely, another mental construct, a concept, a model, with no actual basis in reality. The entire family of similar terms — awareness, presence, self-awareness, sentience, and even knowledge — are the arrogation of qualities of the self, arrogated strictly to the self. They are scaffolding placed atop the concept of the self, and, like the self, they are just models, theories, ideas, sense-making, devices used by the illusory self to position itself (at the centre) in the model of reality that it has constructed. There is no need for something called ‘consciousness’ to ‘really’ exist, any more than there is a need for the self to ‘really’ exist. It is like the rationalization of a hallucinator for how their hallucinations are actually real.

One of the fundamental principles of science is that, in seeking to understand how something is, or works, one should look for the simplest possible explanation. We could all make up stories about fairy dust or holograms or 13-dimensional strings to try to explain how the universe unfolded or how everything fits. The problem is, every time we find an explanation that seems sensible, it turns out to be either disproven by a subsequent discovery, or crazily convoluted (like the theologians’ complicated models developed to try to refute Copernicus and Galileo) and untestable or unfalsifiable.

The message of radical non-duality, which resonates with a lot of new discoveries in both physics and neuroscience, is, arguably, the simplest possible explanation for the nature of reality. It is falsifiable — there could one day be verifiable evidence that time or the self or free will actually exists. The message is internally consistent and quite elegant in its simplicity:

  • The self and all its constructs are psychosomatic misunderstandings, illusions concocted by the (apparent) brain and body to try to make sense of the signals they are receiving.
  • Everything ‘else’ is only nothing appearing as everything, for no reason or purpose. Nothing that appears is real or unreal. And nothing matters.

There are obvious reasons why such a message produces rejection, outrage, dismissal and disbelief when it is heard by most people (including most scientists). Even if it is correct, it is useless. There is nothing you can do with this understanding of the nature of reality and humans’ place in it. It is immensely humbling, and thinking about it puts humans (especially scientists) on the defensive. Not only is there nothing you can do with this understanding, there is no ‘you’, no self, no thing separate that can do anything, or that ever has done anything. There is only what is apparently happening, for no reason or purpose. Everything that ‘we’ think we have done, or learned, is just a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation in the desperate attempt to make sense and make meaning of (and try to control) everything that is apparently happening, when there is no rationale or meaning for, or control over, anything.

It’s enough to make you howl in anger, indignation, and incredulousness. No, that can’t be.

Perhaps the same reaction that those who first read Copernicus’ and Galileo’s books had.

(Oh, and if you only have time to read one of the books above, I’d recommend Sabine’s, especially the excellent chapter on free will.)

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 8 Comments

Links of the Month: August 2023

Posted on August 11, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney AI’s take on “pointing the finger of blame”

You are not responsible. Not for your actions, or your inaction, or anything that has happened or will happen or failed to happen. Not for the world’s fuckedupedness.

I’m not saying that to make you feel better. You had no free will or choice in, or control over, what you did or did not do. Everything you have done or will do is the result of your conditioning. Individual action isn’t how social or other change comes about anyway. Human behaviour is an emergent phenomenon, highly dependent on the immediate and ever-changing local situation and the needs of the moment. No one is to blame for what does or does not happen. No one is responsible for the mess. What has happened is the only thing that could have happened. The deus ex machina only occurs in simplistic revisionist history, fairy tales, and Hollywood movies.

This is how the world works. Not predictably, not according to grand design or predestination or consensual collective intention or mass uprising. Often not prettily. (But pretty wondrously nevertheless.) This is what collapse, which is always inevitable, looks like.

The last words and epitaph of our civilization will be: If everyone had only…

COLLAPSE WATCH


famous line from The Princess Bride, which perhaps also applies to the word ‘collapse’

Science ‘journalists’ clueless on collapse: Most of the mainstream media misreported a journal article predicting the 50% chance of the AMOC North Atlantic circulatory system changing course between 2025-2095 as “collapse of the Gulf Stream as soon as 2025“. And we wonder why the general public is clueless! Meanwhile, seawater temperatures off Florida’s coast hit a world record (38ºC, 101ºF), the standard hot tub temperature, resulting in a health warning to residents. In our preoccupation with ‘average’ global temperatures, we’re missing the fact that ocean, arctic and antarctic temperature changes have already soared far past the point of no return.

Badmouthing climate realists: Meanwhile the magical thinking humanist salvationists like Rebecca Solnit are dissing scientists and citizens who say it’s time to get real and who want us to shift to preparing for inevitable collapse, as if those who care about the issue weren’t already divided and discouraged enough. Fortunately there are saner voices like Umair Haque to call them on it.

We’re already geoengineering: Hank Green explores whether instead of throwing more waste products, metals and artificial crap into the air to see if anything helps, we might see if putting perfectly natural stuff up there (like water vapour) might help at least a little. I’m not sure about this, but he makes a coherent argument.

Democracy is a great idea that doesn’t work in practice: Indrajit Samarajiva goes a step further than those who say capitalism is hopelessly flawed idealism, and asserts that the same is true of our naïve idealism about democracy. And that naïveté is preventing us from getting real about the impossibility of making real changes to our political and economic systems, and hence about the inevitability of collapse.

LIVING BETTER


from the memebrary

The fracturing of the petit bourgeoisie: Rhyd Wildermuth reviews Dan Evans’ book A Nation of Shopkeepers, arguing that economic events have caused the (increasingly struggling) western middle class to split into two factions, only one of which relates to the “social justice identitarianism politics” now espoused by the western Tweedledee parties like Democrats, Liberals, Labour and Greens. Thus enabling a shift towards the reactionary populist Tweedledum parties (Republicans, Conservatives), the only other game in town. Worth thinking about.

The appeal of cult thinking: Richard Heinberg strays from his usual collapsnik essays to describe his brush with cults, their allure, and the dangers they pose to all of us. Thanks to Bart Anderson for the link.

Why soy milk is better for you than both dairy and other ‘alt milks’: Michael Gregor looks at the nutrition data. Includes a transcript for those allergic to videos.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


record high temperature in Death Valley — photo op!

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (the first two articles in particular are essential reading; thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

CoVid-19 Refuses to be Cancelled: Short takes:

FUN AND INSPIRATION


from the memebrary — photoshopped panel from an old Calvin and Hobbes strip; if you don’t get the reference, ask a Canadian

Ólafur Arnalds from Iceland’s volcanic wilderness: A recording of an outdoor concert in one of the most desolate and breathtaking places on the planet. Includes some of his finest compositions, and a travelogue of Iceland seen from the air.

Great contemporary women artists: A profile of 17 outstanding  modern women artists with examples of their work and links to more.

What is money?: A great Economics 101 primer on money, banking and the modern economy with no-bullshit economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The nonsense of Meyers-Briggs: The great physicist Sabine Hossenfelder continues to wander far outside her areas of expertise, but this time credibly deconstructs our obsession with meaningless ‘personality tests’. And in another article, she describes what’s wrong with modern-day theoretical physics, where she’s on solid ground. (Hint: It’s about money.)

South Africans fight Alberta forest fires: And they greet their hosts with heart-warming rousing music, to the astonishment of onlookers. Thanks to Peter Webb for the link.

The state of the media: If you want to see how low the mainstream media will sink to get readers, take a look (carefully: multiple trigger warnings, even just the headline) at this nauseating piece of ‘reporting’ by the Toronto Sun, owned by PostMedia, Canada’s largest newspaper publisher. Even the News of the World and the National Inquirer were better than this.

“Wichita Lineman” deconstructed: Composer Jimmy Webb and Rick Beato talk about how the song evolved, break it down compositionally, and credit its influences. A wonderful interview with a brilliant writer of words and music.

More pop music mashups: DJ Earworm has been cleverly mixing audio and video from each year’s US top 25 pop hits for more than a decade, and the resulting ‘mashups’ are usually better than any of their components. Some of the best are his mashups from 2022, 2021, and 2016.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


New Yorker cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz

From Julian Assange, on the function of Wikileaks, in 2010 (thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for the link, and the one that follows):

We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it’s all bankrupt. And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don’t even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction.

From Noam Chomsky, on the limits of acceptable opinion:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

From Indrajit Samarajiva, on Biden’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine:

Cluster bombs are the spray-and-pray of artillery, and prayer is not a winning military strategy… Cluster bombs salt the earth with high explosives, which make them a crazy thing for Ukraine on soil it claims to care about. They fail at a much higher rate than 1%, 14% according to the NYTimes. I’m citing from imperial propaganda rags because even they can’t hide the depravity. These are widely illegal weapons for a reason. They are also not nearly as effective as A) just having a steady supply of regular shells and B) more accurate guided and drone munitions. It’s really a unique combination of evil and incompetent. Forget wunderwaffen like F16s and HIMARS, how do you win an artillery war with no bullets?… The great White Empire is running out of bullets. They’re becoming the butt of a joke. And the punchline is the severed legs of children.

From Indi again, citing municipal engineer Charles Marohn, on the unsustainability of urban development:

Every road is actually a long-term liability, and cities don’t raise nearly enough money from taxes to pay for them. Instead they take money from new projects to pay for maintenance on the old, just kicking the can down the literal road. And we’re rapidly nearing the end of the road. If you thought the housing collapse was fun, wait for the roads collapse. In this case actual tunnels and bridges will fall down.

[Charles writes:] “We began to collect hard numbers from actual projects and compare those costs to the revenue generated by the underlying development pattern. This work continues, but in every instance we have studied so far, there is a tremendous gap in the long-term finances once the full life-cycle cost of the public obligations are factored in. Without a dramatic shift of household and business resources from things like food, energy, transportation, health care, education, etc… and into infrastructure maintenance, we do not have even a fraction of the money necessary to maintain our basic infrastructure systems.”

The very reasons [he cites] for the car-city’s collapse (“it’s too expensive!”) are the reasons the car-city can never change (“it’s too expensive!”) It’s the sunk-cost fallacy writ large. Americans have simply invested too much publicly in roads and too much privately in cars to ever turn around. The system will just keep going until the bridges fall down and the oil runs out. Chuck puts the problem simply when he says:

“The great American experiment in suburban development entices communities to take on long-term liabilities in exchange for near-term cash advantages. But as those liabilities cost the community more than the development creates in overall wealth, the approach ultimately results in insolvency. To forestall the day of reckoning, more growth is induced, setting up a Ponzi scheme scenario where revenue from new development is used to pay liabilities associated with old development  This is unsustainable, but that has not kept us from trying desperately to keep it all going.”

What I think he misses is what Aboriginal thinker Tyson Yunkaporta observes when he says, “it really is not possible to maintain massive nations and cities in any sustainable form.”

From Carl Jung, on “the task of social adaptation” (thanks to Paul Heft and The Negative Psychologist Nick Williams for the link):

This task [social adaptation] is so exacting, and its fulfilment so advantageous, that one forgets oneself in the process, losing sight of one’s instinctual nature and putting one’s own conception of oneself in place of one’s real being.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Moving Beyond Ideologies

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Dave Pollard


My essay last week attempted to draw together three sets of ideas (those of Aurélien, John Michael Greer and Tyson Yunkaporta) about how and why political collapse is now unfolding. The gist of these ideas is that politics has become rooted in simplistic ideologies (notably what might be called ‘conservative’ nostalgic reactionary traditionalism, versus ‘liberal’ eternal-progress-seeking humanism). But the suggestion here is that all ideologies, political theories, and —isms are doomed to fail in real, complex, large-scale societies, because human nature just doesn’t work that way. Our belief systems, behaviours, and ways of thinking and seeing the world, don’t fit into neat, simple ideological boxes.

To make matters worse, failures of education, lack of practical experience, poor critical thinking skills, ignorance of history, and lack of imagination, have resulted in the administrations charged with implementing these ideologies becoming increasingly incompetent. (Victoria Nuland probably qualifies as the poster child for ideology-obsessed incompetence, and Biden just gave her a big promotion.) From the top down, our political governance and administration is more and more infantile, amateurish, and incapable of doing the job, Aurélien argues, and he spent most of his life in the system. And they are more and more credulous. Every newscast contains new evidence to support this observation.

We are now coping with the consequence of imposed ideologies managed by incompetent people — namely utterly dysfunctional, horrifically mismanaged, dangerously-broken systems. Most of us sense that something is terribly wrong with our political systems, but the only options we’ve ever been presented with are all based on impracticable ideologies. We can hardly even imagine a political system that isn’t ideology-based. Even if the ideology is as intellectually and morally bankrupt as “Hope” or “MAGA”.

Those who’ve become disillusioned with all the —isms have of late started casting around for a new ideology, a new theory or model or new ‘story’. And each group of salvationists has a different ideology: social justice theory, longtermism, neosurvivalism, posthumanism etc. As the song goes, “Everybody wants to change the world.” And “if everyone would just…” the world would surely be saved.

Their intentions are good, of course, but’s it’s exactly these sorts of ideologies that got us into this mess. Instead of dreaming up and designing new ideologies and models to impose on the population, we are going to have to ‘grow up’ and realize that we will only manage our way through deepening civilizational collapse (economic, political, ecological and social collapse) if we abandon ideologies entirely and instead support and promote acceptance, adaptation, competence, experience, pragmatism, and collaboration, focused on matters over which we have enough substantiated knowledge not to be dangerous, and on matters which directly affect us and which our actions can meaningfully affect.

That is only likely to happen sporadically, among those who appreciate the failings of ideology (political, economic, social, religious, scientific and philosophical) to serve us well. It is also likely to happen only in small groups and at the local level. And it will never come about as a result of some large-scale concerted effort. That’s just magical thinking.

So it’s a hard sell. We’re mostly sold on the ideologies and —isms we’ve been conditioned all our lives to believe are fair, moral, and/or the best way to live. We don’t want to give them up, and are easily suckered by political opportunists who will reduce everything to a dichotomy — “us” versus “them”. But it’s getting harder and harder to stomach the endless attempts to sell us warmed-over, failed ideologies. The very thought of voting for a Biden, or a Trudeau, or a Starmer, even at the risk of the latest reactionary sociopath squeaking by them into power, is enough to make anyone who ever called themselves a progressive, absolutely gag.

But here we are. I have often trotted out my Being Adaptable reminder list for coping with collapse (reproduced above), which I think is quite ideologically neutral, unless you believe collapse is a conspiracy theory, in which case I really can’t offer you anything. But beyond that I have been at a loss to suggest what could or should be ‘done’ to deal with any aspect of the collapse ‘polycrisis’, and the same applies to political collapse.

Fortunately, Aurélien has been asking the same questions, and today he asked So Where Do We Go From Here? The article starts off rather slowly, at least if you’re a regular reader of his blog or this one, reiterating the complexity and interrelatedness of the polycrisis. But then he gets to the heart of the matter.

I won’t try to summarize the whole, long article, but here are what I thought were the highlights and major insights from his thinking [my blather in square brackets, and emphasis mine]:

Action to contain, let alone resolve, even one of the [polycrisis] problems, would require high-level national and international coordination, massive technical and managerial expertise, and the allocation of immense financial and human resources over years or decades, according to a robust long-term plan. Yes, that was my reaction too: there’s no point wishing for things you can’t have. [Even, or especially, if some political group promises them.] If you actually want to see how the collective West handled a really grave crisis it’s enough to look at the Covid shambles…

Western states today are not only incapable of preventing [major natural or human-caused] disasters in the first place, they are incapable of dealing with the symptoms and the consequences. Theoretically, even now, the worst effects of climate change could be avoided with massive coordinated action, the energy crisis could be managed with careful rationing, changes in patterns of life and massive investment in alternative technologies … which everyone knows is not going to happen. That’s not pessimism, any more than it’s pessimism to say that an old tractor can no longer pull a heavy load up a hill, and there are no spare parts…

[So] the problems are of an unprecedented gravity, the individuals who have to deal with them probably represent the weakest political class in modern history, and the surrounding circumstances greatly limit their ability to act, even if they knew what to do. So the interaction of the situation and the response to it is unlikely to produce much that is positive.

So far, so grim. But if we are to think our way through the problems of the future (and yes, I am getting to that) then we have to have a clear idea of what they are, and of what can effectively be done to confront them. To begin with, it is wise to assume that the solutions cannot come from enfeebled governments and adolescent political classes. This is not to write off all possibility of governments doing necessary and useful things, but it is a question of scale and capability: things have effectively gone too far already. Nor can we have any confidence that the private sector will step in: in many cases they will simply make things worse.

The corollary of governments no longer being able to deal with these problems, therefore, is that it is pointless to stage performative acts to demonstrate (or demand) that something is, or should be, “done.” The Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP) will probably continue, since these things acquire an inertia of their own, but ultimately, the Conference brings together actors who, with the best will in the world, no longer have the political or technical capability to influence the progress of climate change very much. And by extension, gimmicks aimed at “raising consciousness” or “putting pressure on governments” are equally pointless and counter-productive. There is no point in wasting time and energy lobbying governments to do things that they cannot do, or to engage with problems they cannot solve…

The final point I want to make about the future context, is how the inevitable decline will come. Here, the problem is that “decline” is not one thing but a whole series of things, going at different rates. As a general rule, elements of our society will disappear like Hemingway’s character who went bankrupt — gradually and then suddenly. Which is to say that the capabilities that support our society will not necessarily decline gradually and in a civilised fashion. The de-industrialist dream, I think, is of slow and steady decline: each year a little less energy, a progressive adaptation to climate changes, and so forth. But we know quite a lot about the decay of complex systems, and it resembles what happens when a bridge finally buckles and falls under gradually increasing stress. And there never has been a society remotely as formally and technically complex as ours, so we have very little idea where the inflexion point comes, and the system suddenly can no longer support itself…

So rather than gentle managed decline, what we can expect is a series of sudden, unpredictable lurches downwards, to a new temporary equilibrium, but without any consistent logic. Likewise, the terrifying diseases of my childhood, like Smallpox, have been banished by immunisation. But if we can’t get the vaccines for some reason, and the percentage of the vaccinated starts to fall much below 90-95%, we would be in trouble very quickly.

How are we going to deal with all that? The first thing to say is that, if we are facing a series of unprecedented changes and crises at a time when capability to deal with them has never been lower, then much will depend upon individuals and groups who can actually do something. Crises tend to have a Darwinian effect on groups and structures: those best fitted to handle the crisis find themselves thrust into in positions of responsibility. This happens with armies and governments at the start of wars, for example, when competences required in peacetime are no longer relevant.

It’s perhaps hard to realise just how far government has become performative and virtual in recent decades. It’s not simply that governments have lost capability, it’s also that they don’t care. For modern political parties, the imperative is that of the Party in 1984: to be in power. Actually doing things is dangerous: you might fail, and even if you succeed you could annoy potentially powerful groups. Talking about doing things, on the other hand, is fine. Blaming others (especially outside forces), condemning your opponent’s or your rival’s plans on ideological or financial grounds, successfully burying a problem or even denying that it exists, are the standard tools of government today…

So I think we are at a point where action and influence (if not necessarily formal power) will increasingly devolve upon those who can Do Things, as it always does in difficult times, especially at a local level. Otherwise, we will perish…

It seems clear that if we abandon performative gestures and impossible demands, if we recognise that our enfeebled states are likely to be overwhelmed by the challenges of the near future, then we are of necessity thrown back on the collective resources of ordinary people. In times of stress, these have often turned out to be considerable, and our energies might be better devoted to doing things ourselves and with others, than striking poses to demand action from institutions that increasingly lack the capability to act. You can certainly demand your “rights” but, as Spinoza was probably not the first to notice, rights do not enforce themselves in the absence of power…

Perhaps it would be useful if we were to consider how we spend our lives, and try to do what we are doing to the best of our ability… Perhaps we will be called on to make a personal contribution when the time comes, or perhaps we just cultivate our personal gardens as best we can, which is not a small thing in itself. But given the series of crises that are drumming their fingers in anticipation of an interesting future, we will not be helped by performative actions or performative words, but only real actions, no matter how humble, of ordinary people.

Yeah. What he said.

Thanks to Paul Heft, Cara MariAnna, and Ivor Tymchak for helping me think through the ideas in this post.

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

Just Beautiful

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Dave Pollard


screen cap from Ryan Woodward’s award-winning short animation Thought of You

About 20 years ago, when I was speaking at an event in the UK, I was asked to pick three adjectives to uniquely* describe myself. After thinking about it, one of the words I chose was hedonistic. It’s been part of my bio ever since.

Everything I’ve learned seems to confirm that all animals are driven by the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. When I attempted to identify my Ikigai last year (the things that get me up in the morning and give direction to my life), I realized that almost all of them were hedonistic. And a lot of them were about the enjoyment of beauty in all its facets — in music, creative works and the arts, beautiful places, wild creatures and people, beautiful ideas and discoveries, beautiful games and puzzles and designs and models.

When I started playing with the Midjourney AI image creator, I wondered: What is the most popular subject, and the most popular adjective, in users’ image prompts? It took very little time to discover that the most popular subjects were fantasy and women, but one adjective appeared in twice as many prompts as either: the word beautiful.

I wrote about the subject many years ago, but in some recent email exchanges about why people want to see images of beautiful things, I was asked: What is it that makes something beautiful? 

I thought about that, and then of course I asked ChatGPT. Its answer was quite good (I’ve shortened and paraphrased it a bit):

  1. Symmetry, harmony and proportion
  2. Complexity, mystery, variety, and intricacy
  3. Resonance with the natural world, both its familiarity and sense of belonging, and its strangeness and diversity, the sense of wonder it arouses in us
  4. Elegance and simplicity
  5. Emotional impact, a capacity to touch or move both the heart and the mind
  6. Cultural familiarity and synergy (our aesthetic preferences are culturally conditioned)
  7. Associations and memory (we find ‘reminders’ of things we love or loved, to be beautiful)
  8. Uniqueness, novelty, and the element of surprise and unexpectedness
  9. Skilfulness, craftsmanship and perfection (we find beauty in excellence of process or product)

I remember when I was studying art and composition many years ago (a course I audited), being told that there are two types of beauty: natural beauty and artistic beauty. The former, I was told, can be and is appreciated by all creatures, and is a biological, inherited appreciation, while the latter, apparently, is only appreciated by humans, and it is a culturally learned appreciation.

There is a reasonable argument to be made that our love of natural beauty is co-evolutionary: that the environment to which we were best suited co-evolved with us and other creatures, and hence our attraction to its beauty is both a cause and a result of our living in places we consider beautiful. There is a similar argument that our artistic tastes are conditioned by what we are exposed to throughout our lives, how our patterning, judging, sense-making brain evolves, since different cultures have remarkably different senses of what is beautiful.

TS Eliot made the argument that great poetry must appeal to us (ie give us pleasure) both intellectually (through offering a new idea or way of thinking or seeing) and emotionally (“moving” us in some way, through imagery, pathos etc). Perhaps that’s true of all great art. Creating a beautiful work of art then becomes a bit of a balancing act — it has to be culturally accessible to us but not to the point of being clichéd; it has to challenge us a bit intellectually and emotionally.

Many of the studies of what people find beautiful are based on being shown human faces and gauging our reactions, perceptions and judgements about them. We’re told that we find symmetrical, harmonious, well-proportioned faces beautiful (criterion #1 on the list above), but also appreciate a degree of complexity, mystery, or uniqueness in facial features (criteria #2 and #8 above). And that as we get older, cultural familiarity and memory association (criteria #6 and #7) weigh in more strongly.

The face pictured above, Midjourney’s depiction of a “very beautiful Black man” is certainly symmetrical, and perfectly proportioned according to the supposed ideal/average facial proportions that aestheticians attempt to recreate.

I was going to post my favourite painting to conclude this article, but I’m not sure which it would be. Pam O’Connell’s In Deep Conversation would be in the running. So would Sławek Gruca’s Family Portrait. For drawings it would probably be any of Rebecca Clark’s Diptychs. For mixed media it might be Ron Woodall’s Snug Cove Dogs. In sculptures, Marisol Escobar’s series of Magritte carvings would be up there. Perhaps favourite photo would be Maren Yumi Motomura’s Brazilian Buddhist retreat photo I call Mindful Wandering.

They all hit different ‘buttons’ from the above list of nine criteria for beauty.

If you had to choose only one painting or other work of art to have in your home, what would you choose? (You don’t have to limit your choices to works you could afford.) And if you can narrow it down, what is the ‘main’ reason you find that piece so exceptional?

* This was a fascinating exercise, and one that taught me something about myself. The exact challenge was: Pick three adjectives that you think uniquely describe you, words that you doubt many people would ever use to describe themselves. 

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 8 Comments

“What is the Matter With Young People These Days?”

Posted on August 5, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Pew Research surveys of other countries’ view of China, over time; if you ever doubted the power of propaganda, this should set you straight; thanks to Indi for the link

Over the past five decades I have watched the political views of my ‘boomer’ generation shift further and further right. In the process I’ve found myself more and more in agreement with “the younger generations” and less and less with my own. In every survey that includes a demographic breakdown, my views have aligned most closely with those of women in the youngest age bracket.

At least, that was the case until about five years ago. Gradually, the sociopolitical views of GenX have moved right to the point those views are indistinguishable from those of Boomers. But more surprisingly, the views of Millennials and GenZ (aka “Plurals”) on military and political interventions in other countries, generations that have been historically opposed to such interventions, have recently swung hard right.

The massive, IMO horrific, propaganda-driven shift in western attitudes toward China from mostly positive to overwhelmingly negative (see charts above) have cut across all generations and western nations. Statements by Biden and the Pentagon/CIA that China (the US’s largest trade partner) “threatens” the west’s political and economic dominance and hence must be opposed by every possible means, struck me, when I first heard them, as the senile, paranoid blatherings of people who just didn’t understand how the world really works. After all, the offshoring of manufacturing to China, instituted starting with Nixon and expanded by every government since, is the only thing that has kept the essential goods of western society affordable to all but the ultra-rich, and hence prevented the collapse of most of the western financialized do-nothing economies.

Now, suddenly, westerners of every generation are banging the drums for war with China, (and with Russia and other countries), and it’s young westerners who are banging the drums the loudest!

Citing a very recent Newsweek poll, Billmon at Moon of Alabama reports:

In the poll, those identified as “Millennial,” between 27 and 42 years old, were most likely to “strongly support” committing U.S. troops to Ukraine. However, more respondents aged between 18-26 (Gen Z) said they would support the measure overall, 47 percent saying they supported or strongly supported sending U.S. troops.
Nearly a third of respondents aged over 59 said they opposed pledging U.S. troops to Ukraine, with a further 25 percent “strongly” opposing the suggestion.

WTF? While Billmon rather belligerently suggests sending the younger generations to boot camp in Europe to change their minds, my reaction was more: What the hell has happened here? 

I am flummoxed, to use an old word that generations since the boomers would probably have to look up. One third of Americans think the US should send troops to Ukraine (tantamount to a declaration of war and massively increasing the risk of world war III and nuclear Armageddon ), one third are opposed, and one third are on the fence. And the younger generations (and Democrats) are much more in favour of direct military intervention. What are these (young, theoretically more ‘progressive’) people smoking?

That’s all I’ve got. I have no explanation, not even a theory. What am I missing here?

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 13 Comments

Is This How Political Collapse Will Unfold?

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Dave Pollard


photo by Noah Berger for AP (federal troops called in to ‘restore order’ in Portland during the BLM protests)

As ecological and economic collapse accelerate, the follow-on impacts on the other systems of our civilization (political, educational, health care, transportation, communication, social etc) are now starting to be felt. Political system collapse includes the systems of law and order (including the judicial system, enforcement and equality under the law), public institutions and regulators and their infrastructure, and ultimately governments themselves.

I’ve written before about how political collapse is now occurring in various ways around the globe, and suggested that some of the signs of collapse include increasing mis- and disinformation, propaganda and censorship, scapegoating, disenfranchisement, suppression of dissent, widespread surveillance, overt and large-scale corruption, the emergence and use of paramilitaries, widespread arrests, incarcerations and ‘disappearances’, election interference and fraud, and finally election cancellations and the dismantling of democratic institutions. Over the past decade, most of these have been employed in many countries, and their use is becoming widely normalized in much of the world.

Although political situations vary from country to country, a similar dichotomy of behaviours has emerged in recent years in most western nations, often labeled as ‘polarization’. Most of the population has been conditioned and propagandized to support either the Tweedledums (mischaracterized as ‘right-wing conservatives’) or the Tweedledees (mischaracterized as ‘left-wing liberals’) in their nation, and to loathe the other. Both sides have been infected with a belief that the ‘other’ represents an existential threat to everything they believe in.

But in fact, both the Tweedles represent entrenched, privileged caste interests that are reacting to the increasing evidence that our entire civilization is in an advanced, and uncontrollable, state of collapse, and worrying about who will control the lifeboats as it sinks. Both believe that their caste holds the moral high ground and that what they are doing is for the benefit of all, and that the ‘other’ side fails to appreciate that. Both adhere to fiercely-held ideologies that have been reinforced throughout their lives, but which have never actually been shown to work, anywhere. And both believe that the ‘other’, whether that be the “woke shitlibs” or the “deplorables”, are too stupid, too ignorant, and/or too disconnected from the citizenry and reality, to realize that their position is untenable.

And both have been conditioned, from within and from without, to be absolutely terrified of what extended control of the machinery of state by the ‘other’ would mean for everything they hold dear, and, to some extent, for our collective capacity to deal with accelerating collapse.

The following is a bit of an overstatement of these two castes’ positions, but I don’t think by much:

The Tweedledums: This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for authority, order, hierarchy, individual initiative, and ‘traditional’ ways of doing things, governed by a strict, lean, paternalistic elite that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by established ‘family values’ and by their interpretation of the will of their god.

The Tweedledees: This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by mutual care, affluence and relative equality for all, governed by a kind, thoughtful, educated, informed and representative elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of humanism and ‘fairness’.

In an age where everything appears out of control, both are trying to entrench and hold on to what control they (think they) have.

And in the US and its many vassal states, when you layer on both groups’ fervent belief in US exceptionalism (“we’re categorically smarter than the rest of the world, and hence exempt from the rules we arbitrarily force on everyone else”), and the American Dream (“you can be/do anything you want to be/do, if you work and fight hard enough”), you have a recipe for disaster.

Most readers of this blog would likely identify more with the Tweedledees than the Tweedledums. We tend to be well-educated, and believe that education is important. We tend to be well-read, and believe we are more well-informed, more ‘reasonable’, and (let’s face it) smarter than the Tweedledums. We tend to think our successes are personally deserved and our failures are systemic failures. We tend to be humanists, rather than believers in some higher power.

So, if you’re still with me, I’d like you to stop reading this now and read this new essay by Aurélien, Reality Would Like a Word, in its entirety. You may not like it — he’s skewering the Tweedledees, and not being gentle about it. It’s a bitter pill. But he’s not doing it as a Tweedledum, since he has even less use for their ideology and idiocy.

His basic message is: The Tweedledees have had power for most of the last seven decades, and have royally fucked up everything we’ve done, and then shrugged it off as if it wasn’t our doing, or wasn’t a big deal. And we’re still doing so. He says we need, as I said in my less gracious and less articulate recent rant, to get over ourselves, and to grow up. We’re flying full speed into the hurricanes of polycrisis and collapse, and our preoccupation with one-upping the Tweedledums, and with ‘social justice’ platitudes, incrementalism, technotopian thinking, niceties of speech, and mistaking virtue signalling, policy platforms, and wishful out-loud thinking for actual progress toward real goals, constitute a grossly negligent and staggeringly ignorant response to the existential crises of the day.

The Tweedledees’ mashup of social liberalism and neoliberalism, “one-world” strategies, public-private partnerships, outsourcing, privatization, centralization of services, underfunding to balance budgets, kowtowing to the military-industrial complex, over-reliance on consultants and idealized theories, abandoning the homeless and mentally ill and other underserved and disenfranchised groups to “allow them to sort things out for themselves”, endless compromise on core issues, both-sides-ing, support for misguided and mischaracterized wars, inattention to bureaucratic bloat — these idealistic and well-intentioned but practically unsupportable strategies have produced heavily-encumbered, stagnant, dysfunctional political systems that are incapable of change, and neither efficient nor effective, and ultimately unsupportable except by the most idealistic wearers of rose-coloured glasses.

And as this becomes increasingly clear — as the disaster in Ukraine makes it nine war disasters in a row while the drum beats for a tenth with China to try to break the losing streak (“we’re the good guys, and we’re exceptional, so we have to win in the end”), as ecological collapse worsens and the “we still have time if we only all…” rhetoric rings more and more hollow, as economic collapse rumbles in and then settles in indefinitely under the weight of our global crushing debt load to the earth and to future generations, as more and more countries reject the US-controlled IMF/World Bank/CIA/NATO systems of bullying, subjugation, resource theft, vassalage and penury, and turn against the west, as more and more countries collapse politically and economically and become failed states like Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, as… well I could go on, but you get the idea. As all this becomes clear, the Tweedledees will cease to be credible or electable, and with no alternative but the Tweedledums, the stage is set for decades of authoritarian, oppressive, dysfunctional rule, until the economic and ecological realities topple all the fragile and now impoverished domino governments, and we’re left with utter chaos.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m not going to proffer any solutions to this. Collapse is going to be hard, but it might be a little less awful if those of us who pride ourselves on our reason, our intelligence, our open-mindedness, our capacity to cooperate and explore new ways of being and doing things, wake up and smell the rotting corpse of our misplaced and failed idealism. There is nothing wrong with admitting failure — we did our best, and the result was… well, not so good. And largely on our watch. Admitting to our best-efforts failure, and admitting that there’s no inevitable Hollywood happy ending ahead (“if we only all just…”) would at least be a start to coming to grips with the unfolding disaster.

If we can do that, then it just might mean that rather than trying to replicate this failure as collapse brings down everything we tried to hold on to, we might instead follow Tyson Yunkaporta’s counsel to just pay attention to what is happening, accept it, adapt to it, foster the conditions for what seems to be needed to emerge, and let it emerge. And not try to impose any models or ideologies as we learn how to live, and to be, in collapsing and post-collapse societies. We’ve tried models and ideologies and “-isms”. Time to admit they were seemingly good ideas, but accept that they didn’t actually work in practice. And that, as a grim consequence, we have created a vacuum that will enable the equally ideological Tweedledums to wreak havoc, on top of all our other polycrisis challenges, for at least the next few decades.

If you haven’t yet, please read Aurélien’s post at the link above. It’s an eye-opener, at a time we really need our eyes opened.

And if you have read it, then you might be ready for John Michael Greer’s newest article, which reiterates the same unhappy truths, from an American rather than a European perspective.

Voices of sober sanity, at last.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 12 Comments

Scenes from a Café

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is #20 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. 


Midjourney AI’s take on an unpretentious, small local café, in impasto painting style. My own prompt.

I have been spending a lot of time this month in our local café, which has of late become very popular. What might be called “café* culture” seems to attract a certain demographic that’s really hard to pin down. It’s not specific to gender, age, or ethnicity, so what is it that determines who is inclined to hang out in cafés? Since retiring, it’s seemingly become part of my culture.

But why? I have no idea. Wherever I live, wherever I go, I seem to seek out cozy, relaxing cafés, and I often invite others to meet with me there. So I spend a part of most days just being part of that culture, and observing and being observed by others who are likewise part of that culture. Perhaps I am a bit of a voyeur, or rather, just an amateur cultural anthropologist. Perhaps it’s just about finding places to belong, in our anonymous, atomized modern world.

•     •     •     •

The anthropologists’ consensus is that we humans split from our closest cousins, the bonobos and chimps, about 6 million years ago, and that much of our separate evolution from them since that time was the result of a combination of drastic climate change (forcing us into very different ecological niches) and the radically different diets that those moves required.

Two of our evolutionary adaptations were art, which evolved about 100,000 years ago, and abstract language, which may have evolved as recently as 7,000 years ago. So for 99.9% of our species’ time on earth, we lived without the need for spoken language beyond the most immediate and obvious vocalizations. We have expressed ourselves through art ten times longer than we have done so through language.

What would it be like to live without the use of, or need for, language? How much have our other means of communicating with fellow humans become stunted from lack of attention and practice, as we have spent all our time trying to make our vocal cords do almost all the work of making our feelings, ideas and preferences known, despite the horrible imprecision of language?

In some of my recent explorations of the community in which I live, I have been trying to focus my attention on what I am seeing and hearing, rather than trying to ‘make sense’ of it, react to it, or make meaning from it. So in this month’s meanderings, I’ve been doing just that — listening not to the words said (which because of the multiplicity of languages spoken here I often do not understand anyway), but rather the way in which things are said, and the face, hand and body ‘language’ that accompanies the words.

And I’ve been trying to do that without judgement or interpretation — just listening and paying attention, without trying to ‘sleuth’ meaning or cause. Trying to see the world through an artist’s eye, or a child’s eye. Leaving the question “What was that all about?” unanswered, and instead chronicling just what was seen and heard.

This is immensely difficult for me, as someone who has made my living, and pursued many hobbies, based on knowing or figuring out all the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys and hows. Answering all the questions. So I’m trying my best to just relate what was seen and leave it to others to puzzle out the answers, interpretations, and what it all means for the nature of our species and the future of our world, if they’re inclined to do so.

So here are some of my observations, my amateur cultural ethnography if you will, over the course of the last week, uninterpreted, to the best of my ability, along with the unanswered questions they bring to mind:

•     •     •     •

1: Beautiful People: As I look around at the people seated at the tables in our local café, I am suddenly aware of how unusually physically beautiful these people are. Not only that, they are exceptionally well-dressed, down to the smallest details of hair, nails, colour coordination, and especially shoes. I then realize that, over the past few days, I have unconsciously been dressing myself more carefully, and given more attention to my own appearance, than I would ‘normally’ do, before I walk over to the café. What does all this say about our culture, and why would we be doing this?

2: Screen Protector: Consistently, about half the people I see in cafés are sitting alone, and disproportionately they are looking at laptop screens or phone screens. Often I’m the outlier, the only one there by myself without a screen. Does that make me suspicious, reflecting our societies’ nervousness about ‘loiterers’ (=etym. ‘doing little’)? Does the very word ‘screen’ offer a clue?

What’s interesting is that, unlike people on public transport, screen-users in the café seem completely comfortable with their solitude, and oblivious to others. One woman has her phone on a stand, sideways, and is utterly absorbed watching what appears to be a Korean bake-off cooking contest show. Another young woman, cross-legged on a café bench seat, is clearly texting back and forth with someone. She’s obviously not Zooming, because she is not speaking, but her rapid, expressive hand movements and facial expressions are telling a remarkable story about what the text thread is about — she is puzzled, annoyed, incredulous, exasperated. The recipient of her texts is missing the critical emotional content that is being broadcast to anyone in the café looking her way. What does this tell us about the limitations of text messages, and about the ways we instinctively (animalistically?) communicate with more than words? And why have platforms like Zoom not been able to capitalize on what would seem to be their obvious advantage in bridging this communication gap?

3. Cafe as Performance Space: At a table nearby, a young, impeccably- and strikingly-dressed young Japanese woman is having an animated discussion with another woman, in Japanese. The woman is smiling, and she is moving her hands in a perfectly symmetrical fashion. She’s very expressive with her hands, punctuating her vocalizations, but always symmetrically, and her blouse has wide, embroidered sleeves that come together almost in a heart-shape each time she ends a statement, bringing her hands together. It’s almost as if her hands are dancing, putting on a show. The woman she’s talking with is also speaking animatedly and moving her hands, but in a completely uncoordinated way. I have to stifle a laugh when, at one point, this second woman swipes her hand across the table and accidentally knocks her drink over, rather disastrously.

At the next table over, a woman is looking at her screen and moving her lips and hands, but not making a sound. She does this for several minutes, even when a man comes and sits beside her and opens his laptop. Her facial features are theatrical, and what she is doing, which the guy beside her watches carefully and wordlessly, is a mystery. A rehearsal? And do public places like cafés offer a safe environment to practice performing? And why do we love to perform in public anyway? Self-expression? Recognition? Escapism? To “move” our audience in some unique way we can control?

4: Confessions: The next day, I am listening to a man with a British accent talking quite loudly with another guy about his ‘new’ job — as a “day-trader”. Like most “day-traders”, he confesses, he started doing it because he was laid off from his job. He uses several quasi-legal techniques, he says, to get 10:1 leverage, the ability to ‘invest’ up to ten times the actual capital he owns. Day-trading, he admits, is really not much different from gambling at a casino or race-track, and except during an extended bull market, it’s a zero-sum game or worse. And he also admits that the collapse of crypto has been ‘devastating’. The guy he’s talking with nods but says almost nothing as this guy’s tale of fear and woe comes pouring out.

I, unlike this guy, realize I’m listening to a confession, and that the guy is not giving the confessor what he’s looking for. But what is that? Empathy? Reassurance? An argument? The day after that I hear a woman confessing to her friend that she thinks she’s been a terrible mother. The friend doesn’t say much, either, but she holds her friend’s hand, and looks at her friend with a very sympathetic expression. Still, that didn’t seem to be enough. Or maybe it was. Who am I to say? What makes people want to confess in public places? And what do we owe our friends when they confess to us? Or when they, like stoics, hold it all in? Do we owe them the truths they don’t want to hear? Or the comfort of our uncomfortable lies?

5: Book Signals: Have you ever seen someone reading a book you really like, and found it almost impossible to resist signalling that fact in some way to the reader? I understand that you can buy fake book covers that make it look like you’re reading something profound or interesting, when you’re reading crap, or, vice versa, that get a rise out of strangers by putting a lurid title and cover on an innocuous read. Most people who read books in cafés seem to be coy, keeping the book mostly flat so others can’t see the title. But if they hold it up so it’s clearly visible, it seems almost like wearing a tee shirt with a message. A provocation to respond, to acknowledge, to nod in agreement?

Yesterday in the café, a young man was reading Gabor Maté’s When the Body Says No, about how our body does and does not handle stress and trauma. He was underlining passages, holding it up, nodding, shaking his head, talking to it. His body was clearly saying yes! And it’s a really good book by the way. And no, I didn’t go up and talk with him about it, or even point at it and give him the ‘thumbs up’. But I was really tempted.

6: The Thing About Girls on Scooters: When I sit by the window of the café, I get to see what’s happening on the street outside. And it’s an interesting street. Coquitlam has recently started a pilot program offering e-scooters and e-bikes for hourly rental. It’s had great take-up. And there are, from what I have observed, two types of e-scooter users: (1) teenaged girls, and (2) everyone else. What’s noticeable is that the teenaged girls drive faster and more skilfully than everyone else, and that they are obviously having enormous fun riding them. It’s unusual to see teenaged girls smiling in public, but when they are on these e-scooters they are positively beaming. What’s that about? Is it like the 1890s, when the arrival of commercially available ‘safety’ (ie non-penny-farthing) bicycles suddenly liberated a whole generation of young women to go places without parental supervision? Or is it a Cyndi Lauper thing? It’s a joy to watch, anyway.

7: Every Artist is a Magician: Last week there was a guy sitting in the far corner of the café with a large spiral-bound notebook on a clipboard. He would write something for a minute or so, and then he would unclip the notebook, turn the page, and start writing something else. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, so I went to “get some extra sugar” for my latte and peeked over. He was sketching the room, for one minute per page. They were lovely sketches, from what I could see, with bold spare lines and images, more like ‘impressions’, of people, just a few essential swirls for each, and then the minute was up and he’d turn the page and start over, turning his gaze to something else. It was mesmerizing, but he was being totally discreet about it. Just as well, or everyone in the room would be looking over his shoulder. What was this all about? Is this like the parable of the potters who won the contest not by painstakingly making a few carefully-constructed pots but by making hundreds and learning quickly from their mistakes? Or is it like the street portrait painter, churning out quick caricatures of strangers while others look on breathlessly? No wonder art has been around ten times longer than language! It is magic, after all.

8: Café Rituals: Every space, public or private, has its rituals, from the mundane to the spectacular. Most rituals are learned and practiced (like latte art), but the ones I admire are the ones that are spontaneous and often cross-cultural. And cafés have some of these. The one I’ve seen most requires that the establishment have those large (usually white) 20oz round-belly cappuccino/latte mugs. They’re too big to lift comfortably with the handle, and so it’s instinctive to cradle them in both hands and lift them to your lips. You’re almost compelled to make a ritual of this two-handed gesture, especially on a cold day when the mug warms your hands and your tummy at the same time. I’ve seen it done by all ages, genders and ethnicities, and almost always with a smile. Something ancient coming out in us?

9: Multitasking Messages: Yesterday there was a threesome in the café, two young women and a young man, all fetchingly dressed and extremely attractive, who were talking tech (something about e-wallet security) like business colleagues. But something else was going on. The two women were both leaning in towards the guy, and it was not noisy, so it wasn’t to hear better. There was a lot of brushing back of hair, crossing and uncrossing of legs, and stroking their coffee/tea mugs that bordered on fondling. If you’ve ever studied body language the messages were clear. But the guy either wasn’t getting them, or didn’t want to ‘hear’ them: He was biting his lip, blinking a lot, and his whole body was squirming a bit. This communication was going on entirely independently of the oral conversation, and it was absolutely hilarious. I was really trying just to observe, and not make meaning of what I was seeing, but sometimes that’s just impossible.

10: Things Are Never As They Seem: This happened Thursday on the way back to my favourite café from a trip to the city, on the SkyTrain. I boarded at the second station of the line, when the train was mostly empty, and a significant number of people boarded at the same time I did. Generally speaking I expect people in that situation to scatter roughly evenly into the empty seats in the train car, kinda like the human equivalent of the Ideal Gas Law we learned in high school. But on this occasion, eight of us entered and all went to the foremost eight seats of the car. That just didn’t feel right. A random group of people all unnecessarily clumped up together like that? I almost bailed to a more isolated seat, but at the next station a bunch more people came in and soon it was pretty crowded everywhere.

I looked at the seven people around me, trying to make sense of this strange behaviour: Two rather elderly Japanese women. A middle-aged blonde woman muttering to herself in what sounded like Italian. Two of the most astonishingly beautiful children I’ve ever set eyes on — flawless, golden-brown complexions and large almond eyes with almost other-worldly long eyelashes. And a harried-looking middle-aged couple wearing oversized sunglasses talking quietly to each other. Surely these people had nothing in common. And then the blonde woman said something in her ersatz Italian accent — and the other six all burst out laughing! I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. And then the whole group of seven started chatting to each other, but the language(s) they were speaking didn’t sound like any language I’d ever heard. Finally my curiosity got the better of me and I asked one of the Japanese women if she could tell me what language they were speaking. (Have you guessed?) “Oh”, she told me, “it’s Portuguese. We’re visiting from Rio de Janeiro”.

They were a family. Of course I welcomed them, and we chatted about local events and attractions, and the Women’s World Cup. I listened enough to discern how Brasilian Portuguese sounds with a slight Japanese accent. And appreciated the remarkable mix of genes and cultures that had produced these startling-beautiful girls. And learned how to say boa viagem. I’ll be damned. I’d never have guessed.

•     •     •     •

Asking questions in a blog article is often a provocation to entice the reader to supply answers to them; often the questions are disingenuous, and the writer is actually manipulating the reader into answering the way the writer wants them to.

I don’t think I’m doing that, at least not in this post. As I posed the questions above, I realized these are the questions that I would normally try to answer for myself after making these observations — that’s my predilection for trying to make sense of, and meaning from, everything. And I realized as well that these questions don’t need answers (and any answers would just be opinions and theories anyway).

Sometimes, it’s enough just to observe, and to pay attention. Just doing that brings its own joys and delights. And it might teach us to hold the world more tentatively, more lightly, and more equanimously. Less opinion, less judgement, less certainty, less reactivity, less expectation, less ‘making sense’ of what often makes no sense. Which might serve us well in the decades ahead.

* I define a café as a place that serves mainly coffees and teas, at a relaxed pace, along with pastries and sandwiches — enough perhaps for lunch but not for dinner. With comfy chairs such that it can serve as a ‘third place‘. Starbucks and similar in-and-out fast-food beverage establishments frequented mostly by teenagers and commuters are not, IMO, cafés, and they have entirely different (and to me unfathomable) cultures.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Month-End Reflections | 6 Comments

Not Meant to Live This Way

Posted on July 26, 2023 by Dave Pollard


bonobo mother and child; from wikimedia by Nick Hobgood, CC-BY-SA 3.0

The more I learn about how wild creatures live (in the absence of severe encroachment by human populations), the more convinced I become that our species was never meant to live the way almost all of us do now.

In the natural world, populations evolve to fit comfortably into the ecological niches they emerged in, to accept and adapt to changes in their environment, and to self-regulate their numbers or migrate elsewhere when life becomes the slightest bit difficult. That just makes sense — why would any creature deliberately choose to live in, and raise offspring in, a situation of chronic precarity, stress, and scarcity, when the option of ceasing to procreate, and of moving to a less inhospitable environment, is always available?

Natural evolution has succeeded for 4+ billion years because it works brilliantly — both for the creatures that live in each niche, and for the ecosystems, land, water and air, of which they are a part. Nature is co-evolutionary. (Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish, and short”, often misrepresented as referring to the lives of wild creatures, actually referred to human lives in the absence of strong central governments.)

So what went wrong with our species?

In his book Rogue Primate, naturalist John Livingston argued that we ‘civilized’ humans have, with the best of intentions, domesticated ourselves. Domesticated creatures, he said, are by definition totally dependent on a prosthetic, disconnected, surrogate mode of approaching and apprehending the world, to stand in the place of natural, biological, inherent ways of being. Such creatures see the world through this artificial prosthesis, instead of how it really is, and this self-domestication is what we call civilization.

The very word ‘domesticated’ means ‘made property of the house’, and comes from the same root as ‘dominated’.

Why would we have ‘voluntarily’ subjected ourselves to the miseries of domestication, rather than continuing to live wild and free in the forests that were our home for our first million years on earth? Do we believe the only way we can keep all 8B of us under control is through domination, by being ‘made property’ (ie made ‘proper’)?

The only explanation that makes any sense to me, especially after reading The Dawn of Everything, is that we had no choice. There is some compelling evidence that our exodus from living in the trees of the African tropical rainforest, about six million years ago, may have coincided with a massive climate catastrophe in that part of the world, most likely as the result of immense cosmic radiation storms that may have lasted a million years or more, and which burned most of our home habitat to the ground.

But whatever the explanation, it seems entirely plausible to me that we adopted a civilization culture not because it was better suited to us than the wild, free, leisurely way we were already living (or because we “ate from the tree of knowledge”), but because the environments we had to flee to were so strange and harsh that we had to band together in unnaturally large, hierarchical groups to survive there at all. And now, having forgotten the natural ways of being in the world, we have conditioned each other to believe that ‘civilized’ is the only way that humans can now live.


Midjourney’s take on a bonobo evolved to be a factory worker; my own prompt

The question is whether this conditioned belief actually stands up to scrutiny. Much of The Dawn of Everything suggests it does not. Human societies, even in the last ten thousand years, exhibit a remarkable variety of social and political structures and belief systems, many of them not meeting the definition of ‘civilized’ or ‘domesticated’.

I have often argued that the possibilities for the evolution of our species have been constrained by an unfortunate combination of imaginative poverty (stemming from our lack of practice, in our work, play and reflective lives, at imagining things other than the way we’re now so thoroughly conditioned to see them), and an endemic mental illness that I’ve called Civilization Disease. This ‘Disease’ stems, I believe, from the enormous chronic stress and precarity in our unnatural modern lives that has made us unnaturally (and maladaptively) angry, destructive, hateful, fearful, anxious, distrustful, overwhelmed, and grief-stricken, and in the process has disconnected us from seeing our place as an integral and harmonious part of the local ecologies in which we live.

So, sick and bewildered and unable to fathom any other way to live and to be, we behave like rats constantly being shocked in a Pavlovian test — we are incapacitated, terrified, and anxious about when and where the next shock will come. Living in the future, or in the past. We, and our civilized culture, have rendered ourselves completely dysfunctional, and the result is that we have precipitated the accelerating extinction of most (or perhaps all) life on the planet. Not deliberately, but like conditioned rats, through behaviours that cause us to be endlessly and fiercely reactive, or paralyzed into inaction, or both.

So I was quite fascinated to hear some of the thinking of Australian indigenous professor Tyson Yunkaporta, who in this discussion says:

The most important thing we have to do as humans is to reclaim our adaptive capacity as a species. Acceptance and adaptation are central to our human knowledge systems. In any knowledge system that is human, and not ‘domesticated’, acceptance is a part of it…

All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence and allow it to emerge and just behave with integrity, and, you know, maybe others will do the same. But the minute you have an idea and you think this is an important idea, everybody should know about this, everybody should be doing this — as soon as you do that you’ve made an ideology and you’re stuffed [that’s a Britishism for ‘fucked’].

What would it mean for us to abandon ideology, stop trying to impose ‘designed’ solutions to the insoluble predicament of collapse, refuse our self-imposed ‘domestication’, and instead embrace reconnection, acceptance and adaptation as the hallmarks of our action and interaction with the world, and foster the conditions for the (re-)emergence of a viable, joyful, peaceful, and non-destructive way of being in the world?

What would it take for us to accept that the current collapse will likely continue for centuries and even millennia, and to see our role humbly as adapting (and helping other species adapt) to each new situation, and acknowledging that it could well be a hundred generations or more, if our species survives at all, before we can take our place once more as essential and beneficial members of the local ecosystems to which we belong?

Since we have no choice in our behaviours — what we think, believe and do is, IMO, entirely the result of our biological and cultural conditioning given the immediate (and unpredictable) circumstances of each moment — these questions are not asking what should we do. Rather, by asking ‘what would it take’ or ‘what would it mean’, I’m asking what would be the indicators that we were evolving (or not) into a species that ‘fits’ (in the Darwinian sense) where it lives and hence contributes positively to the co-evolution of all life on earth.

This is the perspective of a chronicler of collapse and re-emergence, not that of a reformer or ‘world-saver’ (‘saving the world’ being neither possible nor necessary). Not what should we do, but what would it look like if we were, once again, on the right track?

Here are what I think some possible indicators of ‘being on the right track’ might be, over the coming decades and centuries:

1. The gradual abandonment of centralized systems that don’t work, rather than continuing to exhaust the earth trying to keep them going.

Our current human systems have become dysfunctional and rendered our cities and other human arrangements unliveable, giant Ponzi schemes that require more and more energy to prop them up, while the infrastructure underlying them is crumbling despite the endless investment in ‘growth’. Collapse is forcing us, in more and more places, to abandon our failed ‘developments’ and, excruciatingly slowly (we don’t much like change, we humans), to try out other ways of acting and being in the world.

That means acknowledging that cities, suburbs, industrial agriculture, ‘private’ transportation, centralized governments, the extractive economy, and endless wars simply do not serve us, and, reluctantly and with great difficulty, giving up on them. It will likely take centuries of collapse for us to really get this. But slowly but surely there will be growing indications that none of these well-intentioned but ruinous human inventions work, and they will be abandoned. Collapse will make their dysfunction more obvious, and their abandonment unavoidable. (This is, I think, what Daniel Quinn means when he talks in his books about ‘walking away’ from civilization.)

2. The relearning of the skills and the necessity of sharing and scavenging.

As The Dawn of Everything illustrates, our basic nature is to share and give to each other and to the world. The most respected and listened-to people in most pre-industrial societies were not the richest and most powerful, but those who gave the most to others (experience and learned wisdom as well as material gifts). That cannot be measured in currencies, but I think we’re going to see it more and more as collapse deepens, as an indicator we’re back on the right track.

And we are, in our DNA, a scavenging species, not an apex predator. (We don’t have the speed, fangs or claws needed to be apex predators, and our compensating prosthetics are running out of fuel.) What we are instead is a creature with a big enough brain to figure out how to make the most of what’s readily available. With collapse, much of what we humans now need to survive in any numbers are no longer economically viable to produce, so we’re going to have to scavenge, reuse, and repair or ‘regenerate’ just about everything (including our soils and our water). All at a tiny local scale (large-scale initiatives will soon be seen as obvious non-starters; the cupboard to fund them is bare).

The book The Mushroom at the End of the World is a deep dive into how the sharing/scavenging economy is already starting to emerge in “the capitalist ruins”. We’re going to see more and more signs of it as things continue to fall apart. That economy is emergent, not something that can be designed. And there’s nothing shameful about a scavenging way of living and being — the crows and ravens have shown us that, brilliantly.

3. A closer paying-attention to how we can best ‘fit’ into the world, and ‘belong’ to it, including a rediscovery of what the ‘natural’ world offers us and what we owe to it.

Instead of trying to remould and exploit the planet to meet our desires, we are going to have to ‘re-member’ how to be an integral part of it, how we all ‘fit’ ‘together’. This will mean less time in our heads dreaming up ideas and ideologies to change the world, and more just ‘being a part’ of it. That means, for example, relearning about our local ecologies, and how all of the elements of them work together.

Perhaps the best indicators of when this might start to happen will be the subjects and objects of our labour, our studies, and our conversations. If you look at what most of us are spending most of our time talking about, learning about, and working at today, it would be easy to be discouraged. But as collapse, of necessity, removes these subjects from our attention and this work from our economy, our attention, our interests, and our labours are all likely to shift to areas that help us fit better into the real world, rather than the collapsing prosthetic one we have constructed. And relearning to pay attention to the natural world is the first step to reconnecting with it.

•     •     •     •     •

So, my sense is that, over the coming decades, centuries and perhaps millennia (not long in the planet’s scheme of things), we will have no choice but to abandon our prostheses and illusions of control, relearn to live in and pay attention in the world, accept, adapt, share and scavenge furiously, and rediscover how we belong. It won’t be easy. There will, mostly by slow attrition rather than ghastly death, inevitably be a lot fewer humans in the post-collapse world than are living in our artificial, unsustainable world today. And quite possibly there will be no humans at all — we cannot know.

Relearning to adapt, to accept, to behave with integrity (in both senses of the word), to foster the conditions for the emergence of what is later found to have been inevitable, and to reconnect with and be a part of and belong to the rest of life on earth  — these are no new things. They’ve been our history, and our destiny, for millions of years.

It’s how we’re meant to live.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 8 Comments

A Rooftop Rhapsody

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Dave Pollard


My own photo, taken from the rooftop of our building, with a little photoshopping; not AI, but, rather, DIY

“Just look” said the voice,
though it was not really a voice.
It wasn’t actually saying words,
more like making a suggestion,
as when you see someone’s eyes darting
or their hands moving, and your eyes follow them;
or like a comma, saying you might wish to pause.

More like swallows’ chirps than language,
gentle supplication — evening plainsong,
hints at what to notice, melancholy exhortation —
“See, there. Listen. This is what you’ve missed,
distracted by the fearful noises in your head. Just this.”

I was not listening.

I was walking on the roof.
It’s flat, with chairs, a table, an umbrella, left unopened.
I had a mug of tea at hand. The wind had calmed,
I’d lit a candle, left it on a dish nearby.
The sun had set and now the city lay
spread out below,
ten thousand glowing lights,
a murmuring of refuge offered
in the falling dark — the street-lamps dimly waking,
hopeful, slowly getting bolder.
Now-parched temperate evergreens,
and soaring peaks beyond, a backdrop.
Everywhere the here and now, unseen.

“Just look”, said the voice again.

“At what?” I replied.

“No, don’t look at anything. Just look.
See if you can see. Not things. Not what is happening.
That is all just make-believe,
some stories you’ve invented or been told.
Just look until you really see.
Don’t think, react, identify. And don’t ‘make sense’.
Look close, between all that.
Observe the lines and light and shapes and shadows.
Notice without naming, with an artist’s eye.”

“Too hard”, I said.

“Then look at forms and shapes that can’t be taken in.
Look at the tiny crack in the mug,
the blobs of colour at its edge.
Look at the candle flickering in the evening breeze.
Look at the lights
that stretch out half way to the hills
before they’re lost in forests’ darkening shrouds.
And notice the reflection of the light
on the gleaming edge of the metal railing.

See the spaces in between
the real and unreal things you title, tag, and label,
tearing them apart, when they are one.

These songs and shards of light that strike your eyes,
an invitation to this body you call yours;
they’re calling out, and speaking — not to you,
of course, because there is no you.
They speak as all wild creatures speak,
they tell you ‘this is here; this is amazing;
it is everything and it is nothing;
it is raucous, silent, still and ever-changing;
it’s oblivious to ‘you’, oh sad believer in your self.
It is unknowable
to those who think they have to know.
It can be seen, but not by any one.

That baby who you met this afternoon, in the café — yes
there it could at once be seen,
because there’s no one there that’s in the way of seeing.
Even if you looked for hours into that baby’s eyes
you’d still not see the wonder there, reflected. Ah,
poor homo sapiens, all you’d see
is ‘baby’ there, and ‘eyes’! And so
you’d miss it all. It’s so astounding
no mere words could capture it — there is no space
to squeeze between
the meaning and the making sense, and thus convey
what really is, that ‘you’ can’t see.”

“I know”, I say.

“It’s not your fault. For
trying makes it all the more impossible.
And knowing you can’t see
just makes it even more annoying. As
you know a sightless person can’t be made to see
by telling them to concentrate,
to focus, and try harder.
Of course the sightless one knows that.
For you it’s many times more frustrating,
since, somewhere there, it’s known
the only thing preventing all of this from being seen
is that illusive you that’s in the way.”

I nodded, sighed.
The voice said nothing further.

I stared out, then,
my elbows perched atop the rooftop handrail;
tried to hear the message of the lights.
I listened to them shout, cry, moan, whine, murmur,
whisper, howl, and peep; and
resonated with their pure, deep, single,
gentle steady notes.
I heard the candle’s trill and warble,
wrought mad by the wind.

In my room the light is warm and soft,
and here proclaims its cream-toned truth,
a steady hum at 516.*
The candle, moved indoors, has settled now;
it’s quieter and less aflame,
much of its 210 song too low to hear.
While in the parking lot, way down
below my window,
howl the sentinels of halogen,
their lonely muffled
grim-blue synaesthetic wails an endless 613.

“All beautiful”, I said then, to no one.
“Wondrous, perfect, lovely.”

That was just a guess, of course,
just something gathered, sensed
but not by ‘me’.

I was mistaken, it would seem —
there was no voice: but just
a whisper in the wind,
a flash of light from ancient stars,
now gleaming in a cougar’s wary, watchful eye,
its ears pricked up, and hearing things
no human ear could apprehend, and seeing
what no human eye could glean.

And able, like a baby, to “just look”.

* The frequencies of light in terahertz (THz). The visible spectrum is ~400 (red) to ~800 (violet) THz, with 200 THz being infrared and 1000 THz being ultraviolet. Isaac Newton, perhaps sensing the resonance between light and sound waves, equated the spectrum to the musical scale: D (red), E (orange), F (yellow), G (green), A (blue), B (indigo), C (violet).

Posted in Creative Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 2 Comments

Why We Cannot Prevent Collapse

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Dave Pollard


my own graphic; right click on image to open in a new tab and enlarge or download

Yes, I know — every box in the ‘vicious cycle’ graphic above is hugely debatable. But you know, I’m just tired of debating it. I think it describes what’s going on in the world both at an individual and at a collective level, for just about all 8 billion of us mildly deranged apes, reflected in our public behaviours, our public discourse, and in the heads of people I’ve met of every political persuasion and position of authority.

Derrick Jensen famously said that if we pay attention to the natural world and ‘listen to the land’ we will know just what to do. That’s the ‘know’ in quotation marks in this chart, which attempts to explain why, for very human reasons, although we ‘know’, we don’t, with few exceptions, and can’t collectively at any scale, do anything about it.

I’ve used “mass coherent collective action” (aka “the Great Turning”) as the example of salvationist thinking in the chart; it’s the “humanist” style of salvation myth of most people I know. I could have easily used any of the other classical or current salvation myths — the rapture, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, geoengineering, “great transition”, neosurvivalism, posthumanism etc — they all serve the same useless (in practical terms) comforting function. Nothing wrong with them as long as they’re seen for what they are, and are not.

Thanks for the inspiration to a number of collapsnik writers who have been musing helpfully on this subject, particularly about personal and collective human agency, about our human propensity to obfuscate and put out of mind truths we don’t want to deal with, and about our inclination for disingenuous wishful thinking — including Erik Michaels, Indrajit Samarajiva, and Tim Morgan.

It’s great to be reading the work of others who appreciate that there are no answers to such predicaments, nothing to feel ashamed about, and no one to blame, and that it’s enough to just try to understand and explain what is happening. I think we owe that much to ourselves, all of us doing our weary best, and I think we owe it, too, to the future inhabitants of this planet, human and/or more-than-human, that will live with the mostly unintended consequences of our efforts and our presence here.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments