how to save the world

Small Graces

Posted on February 24, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is #14 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.

I am walking toward the city’s small sports stadium, which, except in those rare times when an event is in progress, is open for use by the public, and is a place for practice.

In the elevator, on the way down from my apartment, I meet a woman accompanied by a small, anxious-looking dog wrapped in a winter coat. When I ask the woman about the dog, she looks rather apologetic and says:

“Oh, it’s not my dog, really. Her owner, my friend and neighbour, is now bedridden and not able to take her for walks. It’s the least I can do. Poor dog is 17 years old, and deaf and blind now, but once she’s navigated out the elevator she’s in her element, and she loves to sniff everything outside. When she dies, I don’t know what my friend is going to do. The two of them are inseparable. She has a little ramp to get up onto the bed, and spends almost all her time curled up with her person, sleeping and getting pets. They have a love that I don’t think many people could ever understand.”

She’s tearing up a bit, and so am I. Just another small grace, these walks, these stories, happening all around us that we never learn about. I wave to the dog-walker and head north.

I think about the famous commencement speech by David Foster-Wallace, about how so much depends on how and what we pay attention to. He said:

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience… [long, funny, grim story about having to do ghastly, infuriating grocery shopping at the end of a mind-numbing day at work].

“The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in his way…

“Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

“Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

I arrive at the little stadium, having made my way past the many numbered sports fields, mostly occupied now by practicing girls’ teams, since it’s not “prime time” for boys’ practices and games. I maneuver onto the eight-lane track through the runners and walkers, and begin my daily half-hour jog. I smile at the metaphor of all these people, going around and around in circles, getting nowhere. When the weather’s bad, I do my run on the gym’s treadmill instead, where it’s the belt that goes in circles.

There’s a slightly-overweight boy walking mid-way between the lanes marked for running and those marked for walking. As he comes up behind a bevy of chattering girls roughly his age jogging slowly on the outermost of the ‘running’ lanes, he slides over into the innermost lane, puffs himself up, and sprints past them. I laugh. I’ve seen him before, and, as I expected, as soon as he’s around the curve from the girls, he swings back into the walking lanes, gasping.

I think about the crow outside my window who regularly drops a pebble in midair and then dives down to grab it in his beak, only to soar up and repeat the exercise over and over. Showing off to potential mates, or just practicing? Or just doing it for the sheer fun of it? Unlike the gasping boy on the track, the crow need not invent a story of what might be possible if he plays his cards right, and says the right words to the right girl at the right moment.

There is an older couple ambling, hand in hand, along the walking lanes of the track. She keeps shooing him on ahead, saying, in some universal language: “Go on now; you don’t have to wait for me. I am only slowing you down.” But he refuses; of course, she is not slowing him down. They are like two cars on the same train, hitched. Without her, he would quickly go ‘off the rails’. At least that is my story. Does she know this, I wonder? And does he know how to tell her?

Unlike Mr Foster-Wallace, I don’t believe we have any control or choice over what or how we think, or what we notice. Our conditioning determines what we think and notice and do, and whether we are or are not self-aware enough and motivated enough to see or think about things differently. We may be conditioned to see others compassionately, believing that we’re all doing our best, and, as the famous quote in the photo above puts it, exercise the kindness that comes from understanding humans’ endless, tragic and ubiquitous struggles.

Or we may be conditioned to become inured to caring about others, because it’s just too much sadness and sorrow to bear, and because trying to care when we can’t, paralyzes us into despair, callousness and indifference.

Both kinds of conditioning are perfectly understandable. No argument, no intervention, can make someone care when they can’t.

After a year of gentle rehab, I have finally recovered the ability to run, for an extended period, without pain or exhaustion. I don’t know why this is such an important capacity to me, such a core part of my self’s identity, but it is. Perhaps I still believe I am no use to the world broken.

As I run, I watch the practice going on in the field in the centre of the track. It’s a girls’ field lacrosse practice, with a sizeable group of young teens for such a male-dominated sport. Unlike the boys’ game, and like ice hockey, women’s lacrosse is non-contact, and as such it’s a joy to watch — faster, more elegant and more strategic than the body-damaging, penalty-ridden, more discontinuous men’s game.

I am astonished by the intensity of the practice, the concentration and obvious care that goes into their repetition and learning of moves. This is serious play, and a commitment to the kind of rigorous, patient practice that makes so much of a difference in so many fields of human endeavour.

Practice, it seems, is a bit out of fashion these days. In the workplace, it’s now become too expensive (ie too profit-suppressing) to provide time and space to let people learn, and make mistakes, on the job, so we expect their schooling to give workers all the practice they need to be competent, or perhaps extraordinary. But they don’t get it in the educational system either.

For most, I fear, developing competence in human endeavours, from gardening to parenting and from coding to business and political governance, is now a matter of fake-it-’til-you-make-it, and if you fail, well, try the same approach in some other field. Perhaps as a result, there is a huge, and unnecessary, amount of failure, that ultimately costs us more than the investment in practice up-front would cost. But we no longer dare think that far ahead. Why practice when the world is fucked?

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that in writing, in music, in diplomacy, in the media, and in business “management” we are now surrounded by hacks, dilettantes and incompetents who believe their diploma or their ‘natural gift’ gives them everything they need to be brilliant, without the need for practice.

Practice is, after all, tedious and exhausting. If it’s done badly, it will merely reinforce errors and bad habits. It can be discouraging. But it is essential. The lack of practice in so many aspects of our society shows up in the mediocrity of our art, music and literature, the utter incompetence of most organizational and political ‘leaders’, and the lack of innovation in technology and the sciences.

I shake my head and extract myself from this rant-inside-my-head, and simply admire the intensity and perseverance of the young lacrosse players. They remind me of the skateboarders that I see every place where there is a ramp or a curb or an unimpeded stretch of concrete. They show us that practice is ultimately its own reward, and that sometimes, despite everything, people will be conditioned to be willing to practice, and practice, and practice — until they can do, easily, what they once thought impossible.

I just hope that these young lacrosse players will be spared from the epidemic of abuse, psychopathy, hazing, debilitating injury, and cheating that has ruined most ‘professional’ and many amateur sports and destroyed so many young bodies and young lives.

Walking home, now, beneath the overhead skytrain tracks, I come upon a guy sitting at a concrete table in the midst of the wide walkway. He has his bicycle upside down on the ground beside him, much of it dismantled, and there are dozens of parts organized neatly on the table where he’s working with a cloth and a small toolkit. He is singing, and smiles at me as I pass. I have no doubt that he will soon have reassembled all these mysterious parts into a precisely engineered whole, and will zip by me before I get home.

I think back to last weekend’s Bowen Island Fix-it Fair, where my friend Paola Qualizza and her husband organized a dozen volunteer repairers of electronics, musical instruments, bicycles, clothing and furniture to spend three hours fixing close to a hundred odd items that the islanders brought in. Many of the fixers took home items they didn’t get around to fixing in the allotted time. Several people came in, toolboxes and sewing machines in hand, just to help the fixers, impromptu. Others came in, empty-handed, just to watch and ask questions and learn how to fix things themselves.

We’ve been doing this, twice a year, for nearly a decade, and it keeps growing. I just sat at the entrance, smiling and greeting people as they came in, and marvelling.

Mid-way through the event, a young man carrying a baby in a soft (“SSC”) carrier took the baby into the men’s washroom, drew down the baby change table, and quickly and skilfully changed the baby, chatting away to it the entire time.

A few minutes later, I saw a teenaged boy, with his apparently-repaired skateboard under his arm, stride out of the school gym where the event was held. His black hoodie, in large letters, read: “Be gentle, man!”

It’s a magical event.

So now I’ve made it home. The Amazon delivery guy is struggling at the front door of the apartment building, dragging a full mega-bag of parcels, each to be delivered to the recipient’s door. I hold the door open for him, since his load is too awkward and heavy to haul to the door before the 5-second opening click ends. I thank him for doing his thankless, ghastly job. As I watch him juggle several devices and plan out his delivery, I realize that he, too, is learning to be really good at what he does, through practice. There was no manual that taught him to be so competent.

Beneath the hardened exteriors of so many of the people we meet, there are endless stories of grief, of shame, of sorrow, of fear and anxiety and helpless rage and hopelessness and struggle. Mostly we dare not tell them, or even hear them. We cannot reveal ourselves to be that vulnerable to the rest of us eight billion mildly deranged monkeys, all of us pacing our cages and wondering what the next uncertain day will bring.

Yet the world is full of small graces, when our absurdly busy lives and relentless conditioning let us take the time to notice them.

Back in my apartment, I make a cup of tea, and look out the window in the falling dark. I nod and quietly thank those whose many small actions of kindness and compassion are never noticed, and those whose unrecognized, practiced competence makes our world a slightly better place, and its monkeys a tiny bit less deranged.

Posted in Creative Works, Month-End Reflections | 2 Comments

The Preteriat

Posted on February 21, 2023 by Dave Pollard

(Another post on political theory)

The late David Graeber talks with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, image from London Real (2015)

The adjective ‘preterite’ (rhymes with the adjective ‘confederate’) is an ancient word referring to ‘that which has been passed over’.

In his recent retrospective review of Thomas Pynchon’s Ulyssean novel Gravity’s Rainbow, writer Aurélien describes how the term is used (extensively) in that book. I’ve been using the term ‘precariat’, referring to people who live their lives in a state of permanent precarity (scarcity, uncertainty, and imminent danger of loss). But Aurélien’s use of the term ‘preterite’, meaning those who have been or are being forgotten, lost, passed over, damned by the gods, seems equally if not more à propos. They (we?) are the losers in an increasingly-desperate rats-in-a-cage game of survival in a time of current or looming collapse and obscene inequality.

Perhaps the precariat is also (to coin a word) the preteriat? Or perhaps the preteriat is a much larger group, encompassing both the precariat and those who don’t yet realize just how vulnerable and helpless they (we?) are as collapse deepens. All those who are being and will be ‘passed over’.

Aurélien describes the preterite as “ordinary people, mostly reasonably good, mostly reasonably honourable, trying to do their best in a world where power lies elsewhere”.

Gravity’s Rainbow uses the term in this sense of “the multitudes who are passed over by God and History”, in apposition to the “elite”, the chosen. Thomas Pynchon also uses the term as a form of wordplay: Gravity’s rainbow of the title, is, after all, a reference to the arc of a missile, an arc that ‘passes over’ those below it.

Regardless of what you make of the novel, the term is an intriguing metaphor and perhaps a useful label for the increasing proportion of the world unlikely to survive our civilization’s collapse. This mass of humanity spans the globe and the political spectrum. It’s a label that many of those who fall under its umbrella would shudder to share with others who fit the definition, for whom they feel no affinity. They (we?) are united only to the extent we are, if we are willing to admit it, the losers in this increasingly cut-throat game of musical chairs. But what better strategy for the elite than to condition the preteriat to loathe each other by focusing on our differences from each other?

It is doubtful that the preteriat could ever unite enough to rally each other and call for an end to our deference and fealty to this small, quiet, disorganized, self-absorbed elite — privileged self-proclaimed ‘leaders’ ultimately preoccupied only with themselves and their self-aggrandizement.

But it’s interesting and amusing to imagine. Picture the rabble of left and right, the woke and the ignorant, the racialized and the racists, the disaffected, idealistic young and the cynical, embittered old, together, shouting, OWS-style…

À bas the elites, the celebrities, the obscenely rich, the do-nothing heirs, the worthless scions, the smug C-suite circle-jerkers, the media barons, the new robber barons, the pompous bone-headed tech billionaires living off corporate and military-industrial welfare, the corrupt psychopaths whizzing through the military/industrial/financial/government suites’ revolving doors extorting taxpayers’ money, paid for through cynical political campaign contributions, and all the rest of the professional-managerial caste (PMC) (and it’s a caste, not a class)! Aux barricades!

On the ramparts of this bizarre coalition of the passed-over, a rebellion would begin — against the babied, coddled, endlessly-subsidized rich whose parents bought and bribed universities to get them prestige university admission, and degrees and jobs they could never have obtained on their own merits, along with the commensurate deferment of military service. Not to mention zero inheritance tax. This is not anti-intellectual rebellion. It is anti-alphas, anti-top-caste fuckery.

You might be a member of the preteriat if:

You have to do work you hate just to survive
You would be in deep shit if you got a sudden unexpected bill for $10,000, or if your net worth, excluding the precarious equity in your home, is less than $100,000, or if a stock market crash would wipe out your pension and force you back to work in a society in which you are now too old and weak to be employable
You are in any of the categories of poor, dumb shits (thanks to our crumbling education systems) that Hillary Clinton would consider “deplorables”
You haven’t eagerly embraced the US/NATO goal of crushing and bringing about regime change in Russia and China so that its wealth can be stolen and hoarded (and not for you)
You work for less than $35/hour, or have to work two jobs, or more than 50 hours/week, just to get by
You have never, and could never, get a job, a promotion, a military deferment, or a special deal on something, simply by pulling strings with your, or your family’s, connections
You could never afford to fly “business” class
You don’t own your own home outright
You have committed the sin of being poor, sick, uneducated, or homeless
You actually pay taxes, since you don’t qualify for the tax credits reserved for the ultra-rich

If you are, perhaps unknowingly, a member of the preteriat, then beware:

When economic and/or ecological crises hit, you’ll be abandoned and left to your own devices. The cupboard will have been pre-emptively emptied.
The PMC/elite are quietly buying up well-secured properties in ‘safe haven’ locations like New Zealand, that you cannot afford and in which you are not welcome except as an obedient labourer.
The US and its vassal states are working fiercely to become the world’s unipolar nuclear power and effective owner of all the world’s natural resource stocks, and controller of all the world’s information media. Consider why they might be doing that. (Oh, wait, that would be a conspiracy theory — never mind.)
There are lots of churches ready to tell you you will be rewarded in the afterlife for your sacrifice and obedience in this one. Good luck with that.

We’re all doing our best. The ill-defined and utterly disorganized PMC/elite are scared and bewildered about what’s happening, just like the rest of us. They’re not evil, or any more insane than the rest of us. If we were in their shoes, we’d probably be doing just what they’re doing.

There isn’t going to be a caste war. That isn’t how nature works, and it isn’t how human societies have ever worked.

Ironically, for all their hoarding, the PMC/elite are no more likely to survive this Long Emergency than the preteriat. In the long run (and this will take decades or more to play out) the survivors will be those with strong communities with collective know-how (practical, agricultural, ecological, social, useful-stuff-making and fixing know-how, not military or managerial), and not those with wealth, resources and power.

So thanks to Aurélien for the new term, describing a huge and growing group that no one wants to be a part of. I think it’s a useful, and needed, addition to the vocabulary of collapse.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Wish List

Posted on February 20, 2023 by Dave Pollard

image from rawpixel, public domain cc0

This blog just turned 20 years old, celebrated its 3,000th post and surpassed the 10,000 cumulative page mark. Looking back at its evolution, I’m astonished how little I’ve perceived myself changing from year to year when it’s clear I am a completely different person from the guy who started this blog as a work pilot project in Feb 2003.

I don’t believe the same things, or perceive the world, or other humans, the same way. The things I used to want, which I mostly never got, just aren’t important any more. I don’t know why they ever were. And I’ve long since given up the belief that what I do in the world makes any direct and enduring difference. I’m fine with realizing that almost no one really cares, or even notices or understands, what anyone else says and does. How could they? Everyone’s caught up in their own self-preoccupied loop of knowing and struggle and dis-ease.

To the extent I’ve made any difference, it will be in ways far too circuitous and complex for me to ever understand.

My new lists of what I want for myself, and what I want to give the world, are much shorter and less ambitious. In part that’s because I am older and have less time left to accomplish things, but mostly it’s because I’ve learned that we really have no choice in what we believe and do, so a shorter list is just less likely to lead to disappointment.

THINGS I USED TO WANT FOR MYSELF:	THINGS I USED TO WANT TO GIVE THE WORLD:
Attention and popularity Appreciation and recognition Reassurance More knowledge Wealth (enough to never worry) Power (enough for leverage) Success (of all types) Freedom (of all types) Peace of mind and “presence” To be perpetually in love To be healthier and fitter* To be less depressed* To be less anxious/fearful* To be less angry* To learn to dance To learn to swim To visit a bucket list of places Better facilitation skills Better management skills To be better-looking (* things actually achieved, though mostly not due to anything I did)	A better understanding of: • how the world really works • business and innovation • the creative/imaginative process • complexity, systems and collapse • information and learning • technology, the sciences • politics and economics • writing, the arts, and stories • human nature and culture Advice (on everything under the sun, including “how to save the world”) New, useful skills Money for worthwhile causes Hope Direction
THINGS I WANT FOR MYSELF NOW:	THINGS I WANT TO GIVE THE WORLD NOW:
A little more self-awareness Equanimity The joy of wonder Better conversational skills Better attention skills Lots of play time To be better-looking (yep, still)	Better attention (mostly to the more-than-human world) Kindness and compassion Different ways of thinking about things Different possibilities to consider A “thousand small sanities” A little more joy/fun

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Why Humans Struggle With Democracy: A Theory of Governance and Power

Posted on February 16, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is a bit of a theoretical exploration. I had to write it out to make sense for myself of the two complex articles it attempts to summarize, so I thought others interested in the theory of politics and power might find it interesting.

This is how it’s supposed to work. From flickr by Occupy Posters (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Over the past few days, Rhyd Wildermuth has been exploring the subject of political collapse and the history of human governance, drawing in particular on a summation of Carl Schmitt’s political theories by the arch-conservative historian NS Lyons.

This article is an attempt to summarize these two extremely long articles, and figure out what they might mean for our current situation. The basic argument is, I think, as follows:

Throughout the history of civilizations, governance has always been about power — who has it, and when and how it should be used. Civilizations in order to function need an acceptance of a hierarchy, and authorization of those in power, to maintain order. Without it, chaos and anarchy would prevail and these civilizations would inevitably politically collapse.

For most of our civilizations’ history, that power was vested in the gods, and in their chosen representatives — the shamans, the clergy, the emperors, and the royalty. These representatives acted on the will of the gods, with whom they were in direct communication, and hence had the “divine right of kings”.

Most of our civilizations’ wars and crusades were thus ideological, internecine battles between different groups who claimed they were the ones that spoke for the god(s) (singular or plural). These were absolutist battles between ‘good’ friends and ‘evil’ enemies.

Attempts to introduce secular and representative governments were a direct confrontation to this arrangement of power, though they existed side-by-side for much of our more recent history. They are, it is argued, inherently weak, since under them power is supposedly granted from below, by people who never really know with any finality what they want, rather than vested from above, by gods who are omniscient.

Carl Schmitt (an advisor and supporter of Hitler) claimed that such secular governments can survive only to the extent they retain the power of exceptionalism — to impose executive orders that suspend democracy, by a kind of resurrected ‘divine’ right, as ‘custodial dictators’ when the circumstances require it (a ‘war on terror’, for example). A tacit pact must always therefore exist between the ruling government which provides security for the masses in any large society or state, in return for obedience to those rulers.

If obedience is not forthcoming, Schmitt argued, anarchy and collapse of the state is threatened, and then the government’s duty is to suppress the disobedience by suspending the laws as needed, decreeing the disobedient to be ‘enemies’ of the state, and destroying them, in the interest of restoring and maintaining order and security. Just as the gods once ‘smote’ enemies directly so that good would triumph over evil.

So, as we have seen in countries where drug lords, criminal gangs, kleptocracies, robber barons, corrupt corpocracies, and religious fanatic groups (Taliban etc) are actually in a better position to provide security to the citizens than the elected government is, the citizens will quickly pay fealty to these unelected powerful groups instead, as long as that makes them feel more secure.

Rhyd argues that what we’re facing now is a situation where governments think they can and must invoke emergency and executive orders to maintain authority and order, while the citizens have come to believe that governments should have no such authority — that all authority must be the will of the people, and that executive orders, like CoVid-19 mandates and undercover wars and decrees on universal ‘rights’, are a violation of that authority.

The problem is that, while many agree with this, they disagree on what exactly constitutes a violation of government authority. Some see CoVid-19 mandates as essential to the health and safety and hence security of the citizens, while others see them as tyranny. Some would see the ‘secret’ CIA bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines as essential for the eradication of enemies of the US and its vassal states and the maintenance of global order and security, while others see it as a blatant and indefensible war crime.

The question, then, is: How, if at all, can secular governments survive in the absence of any consensus on who the ‘good’ (friends) are and who the ‘evil’ (enemies) are? Especially when modern technology enables propaganda, mis- and dis-information, censorship, surveillance and mass oppression by whoever happens to be in power against whoever happens to not be in power.

Complicating all this, Rhyd argues, is the belief by many religious fundamentalists that the collapse of this unstable, corrupted civilization is actually a good thing, since it will usher in a ‘rapture’ of some kind or other, where the gods will save them (in their current or future lives), smite the ‘bad’ guys and disbelievers, and restore the ‘natural order’ of the gods. All of this generally presupposes humans to be inherently evil, flawed sinners incapable of governing ourselves.

This is radically opposed to the more recent but some might say equally religious view of an equally large number that we are inherently good, that the ‘natural order’ of things is an unsteady but inevitable ‘progress’, and that technology is speeding us along that trajectory.

_____

My thoughts on all of this:

There is a tendency here for us to see our current situation as rather unique — an unprecedented struggle everywhere in the world for power over the ‘other’ groups that are seen as threatening to destroy everything we believe in.

But I would instead see this as just a change in the geographic playing field of similar struggles that have been with us since the dawn of human civilizations. Whereas at one time crusading armies conquered the enemy by marching on and occupying their territory, and either killing them or ‘converting’ them, today the opposing forces are right in our midst.

So what is unique, today, I think, is that the planet is now so crowded with humans that instead of homogenous tribes and nations of similar-thinking people warring against each other along their borders, our ‘enemies’ today often live right among us. The ‘winning’ side can no longer just redraw the borders to show how good conquered evil. The red-blue map, for example, is no longer two solid blocks of colour with a Mason-Dixon line between them, with largely-unopposed (at least, unopposed by those enfranchised) governments in power in each area.

In fact, all over the world we have seen such a fracturing of beliefs in every small geographical area that we can no longer Balkanize our way into separating the combatants. Even a ‘civil war’ is impossible, because the opposing sides, while living in their own psychological and religious worlds, walk the same streets and live in the same communities, largely indistinguishable from each other by their dress, language and practices. Segregation, at every level, almost never works.

We saw in Rwanda where this can lead — during the 1994 genocide, Rwandan Hutus slaughtered nearly a million fellow Rwandans, mostly Tutsis and Hutu ’sympathizers’, and mostly with machetes. These two peoples are virtually indistinguishable in appearance, and share the same languages and religions, and live in the same communities. Some Catholic and Protestant church leaders egged on the Hutu murderers, using their pulpits and broadcast media, falsely portraying the Tutsis as un-Christian ‘foreigners’. Many observers trying to keep the peace were severely traumatized by the sheer ferocity of the slaughter, often neighbour-against-neighbour.

Some would say that humans are just inherently xenophobic (and there are some interesting evolutionary arguments as to why we evolved that way), and that the only answer is homogenous tribal communities with clear geographic territorial boundaries between them, and resigning ourselves to constant skirmishes over those boundaries. Others would blame more recent phenomena like the new media, or new technologies, or overpopulation, or new religions, or ‘evil’ leaders and stupid/complacent followers, for the kinds of ideological polarization that seem poised to erupt into violence almost everywhere.

I have no idea myself. Human civilization has evolved the way it has, and I don’t think it has to be logical. Nor does it have to be inevitably leading in any particular direction. Most changes are cyclical, not linear. “History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

The important thing, to me, is that we simply don’t have any time or energy to waste on ideological and philosophical and religious differences and the resulting wars and violence. Our world is on fire, and the industrial economy that spread the conflagration is poised to collapse.

But it seems likely to me that, since our ideological differences are more visceral, more relatable, and more emotional, to most people, than the heady abstract stuff of climate change and economic fragility, we will continue to pursue our wars, our coups, our bombings, our propaganda, our oppression, and our xenophobic hate, even as everything continues to collapse around us.

Is that just the way we are? Can we really not help killing each other, and in so doing accelerating the damage to our planet and its climate, at the very time collaboration on dealing with our shared crises is so desperately needed? Over any period of time longer than a century or two, are we just incapable of governing ourselves in any kind of democratic way?

These are rhetorical questions. But political theorist Rhyd and historian NS, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, put forward a pretty compelling case that the answer to all of them is ‘yes’.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Eight Billion Mildly Deranged Monkeys

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is a work of fiction.

image from Pixabay, CC0

Seville came in from lacrosse practice, dropped her stuff in the closet, and plunked down on the sofa opposite where her father was working.

“OK. This makes absolutely no sense, dad.”

“You’re just figuring that out now? I though you were my smart daughter.”

“I’m your only daughter, dad. No, I mean the Nord Stream pipeline bombing. So, your premise in everything is that everything we do is conditioned behaviour, and that we’re all doing our best, right?”

Darien nodded, slowly, pulling his attention away from reading something on his computer.

“So, Sy Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, who uncovered the My Lai massacre, and did much of the work exposing Watergate and the Abu Ghraib tortures, has published overwhelming evidence that the US Navy and CIA, with the complicity of the government of Norway, and with the advance approval of Biden, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. That’s an act of war against a major nuclear power, and a war crime under any sane definition. Staggeringly risky act. Huge, long-term consequences. So how on earth was it ever approved?”

“My guess is that they thought they would get away with it. They do this kind of thing all the time in dozens of countries. By the time their biggest atrocities are fully revealed, they’re old news and too late to do anything about, so people just shrug and move on. It’s always worked before.”

“So how exactly were they ‘conditioned’ to commit endless numbers of war crimes and atrocities? And by whom?”

“Fear is a great conditioner. People like Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland have oceans of blood on their hands. But they have both been conditioned all their lives by the people around them to absolutely believe they’re doing the right thing. That if they don’t commit ‘good guy’ atrocities, then ‘the terrorists’, who play by their own rules, win.”

“Jeez, you make it sound like Hollywood war, or a sports movie, where the evil guys cheat and almost win but the good guys triumph in the end. Real life’s not like that.”

Darien shrugged.

Seville continued: “They must know they can’t keep these things secret when there are investigative journalists and whistleblowers committed to exposing them?”

“Last I saw, most real investigative journalists and whistleblowers who dared show the US or its allies in a bad light were either shunned by all the major media, or they’re living in exile, or in prison on trumped-up charges. Or dead. Who’d want to risk their life to expose crimes when the citizens have been conditioned to see those crimes as just business-as-usual?”

“So why are the media colluding with all this? Surely some of them have some moral compass ‘beyond the ends justifies the means’.”

“Maybe because powerful people have conditioned them the same way. They’ve come to believe that they have the power to topple governments, as they did with Tricky Dick. They don’t want to topple Biden by telling the truth about what he did, because if that happened, Trump or DeSantis will win, and Putin and Xi will win. So they refused to print Sy’s story, even the journals he used to work for, for the same reason they now refuse to print anything by Noam Chomsky.”

“But someone is eventually going to publish it, surely?”

“Doesn’t matter. If the main arbiters of important public discourse all refuse to give it any attention, it can be dismissed as blog blatherings and conspiracy theories.”

“So the generals and the defence industry, like the US general who just announced his troops are readying for war with China in 2025, what’s their conditioning?”

“I suppose it’s the same as it’s been for 70 years, still fighting the cold war. They believe religiously that the only safe future is one under unipolar US control. That all foreigners are suspect — especially if they look different from us, or espouse socialist ideas, or question the American dream. The crusade of the US/NATO political-military-industrial complex is for a world free of conflict because it’s free of dissent. A world where everyone believes the same thing. Conditioned fear, conditioned faith.”

“Not to mention a world with big profits for defence contractors.”

“Yep. And my sense is the defence contractors genuinely believe they’re doing the best for their shareholders and their families, and also upholding freedom and democracy.”

“Sheesh… OK, so what about the climate crisis? If Biden really believes we have to keep temperature change below 1.5ºC, how can he justify mongering for wars with Russia and China that will enormously worsen global warming?”

Darien smiled: “That’s a really good question. How would you explain it, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he’s trying to do his best?”

“He’s fooling himself, believing that somehow he can put off dealing with climate but not fighting world wars? Or he believes that he can’t do anything with an antagonistic Congress? Or that if he tries to deal with climate change he’ll be out of office and the alternative going forward will be much worse for the planet?”

“OK, those are reasonable guesses. Let’s take them one at a time. Now this guy has the brightest minds on the planet who know the most about climate change at his disposal. What do you think he believes about the possibility of stopping or mitigating climate collapse?”

“Hmmm, well, since the billionaires are all buying bunkered mansions in New Zealand, because they know collapse is coming soon, Biden probably knows it too. So privately he’s acknowledged that that battle is already lost?”

“I think that’s a reasonable assumption. So if climate collapse is coming soon and can’t be stopped, what’s his duty?”

“Well, the alpha rats start hoarding all the food in times of scarcity. So… his duty is to get everything he can for the Americans as soon as possible… and that means that since Russia and the OPEC countries have so much energy, and China owns and processes all the key metals and dominates global manufacturing, they both have to be defeated and their wealth and processing capacity has to be appropriated for American use.”

“Makes sense to me. Sounds like a conspiracy theory though, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a very depressing idea. So fear is the primary conditioner. But there’s something else going on these days, isn’t there? I know a lot of adults who are living in despair about war and the climate and the general failure of your generation to leave anything for my generation. They are experiencing… what? Guilt, grief, helplessness, hopelessness… shame?”

“Yes. Brilliant. Shame is almost as effective at conditioning us as fear. So what do we do when we feel overwhelming shame?”

“Look for someone else to blame everything on. Or deny it’s happening at all.”

“Exactly. I think there’s a growing sense that we have failed dismally to make the world a safe and healthy place for future generations. So who or what do we blame?”

“Um… ‘systems’ that needs to be reformed. Overpopulation. Immigrants. Russia, China, Iran. Communism and socialism. Corrupt, greedy individuals. Failure to take responsible action… But you say no one is to blame!”

“Yes, but most people will never accept that. They’ve been conditioned that someone or something must be to blame, must be responsible. So if people have been conditioned to feel shame and fear, and to have absolute faith in certain unquestionable truths, it doesn’t surprise me to see them scapegoating others. And in the meantime, if they’re feeling hopeless, they may also be inclined to hoard everything they can for themselves, their families, and their confrères. Hoarding is our biological conditioning in times of scarcity and precarity. Blaming is our cultural conditioning in times of catastrophe and shame.”

“You don’t have a very high opinion of our species, do you?”

“I don’t mean it to be critical. It’s just our conditioning. No one is in control. We’re just eight billion mildly deranged monkeys, all trying to do our best and conditioning each other to continue to do what has got us into this mess, with the best of intentions.”

“Apparently.”

“Fuck… That totally sucks… So, if we’re doing our best and our best isn’t good enough, then what?”

“Then we vacate the scene and see if the next group of species, which may or may not include humans, can avoid the mistakes we made when we were, for no apparent reason, put in charge of the lab.”

“If there’s a livable ‘lab’ left.”

“True. But we eight billion at least get to find out how the story ends. The first 100 billion of our species died before they had any idea where we’d be now. That’s something, isn’t it? We all want to know how the story ends, even if it’s not a happy ending.”

“That’s not good enough; we have to do something.”

“Of course we do; that’s our conditioning. That’s all we can do.”

“I hope you’re wrong about us all being conditioned and not having free will.”

“Me too. For your sake. If we’re all just acting out roles in a play, for no reason, for no purpose, with no idea what our next lines are going to be, and all that can be done is to watch, and to wonder, and to give up trying to make sense of it and understand it and just witness the sheer awesomeness of it, that’s fine with me… apparently.”

“If you say ‘apparently’ one more time, I might have to kill you.”

“Oh, but then who would you have to depress you with data and charm you with witty rhetoric and enchant you with impossible, useless ideas about how the world works?”

“I’m sure among those eight billion deranged monkeys there must be a few who could render that invaluable service.”

Posted in Creative Works | 2 Comments

1.5ºC: Will El Niño put us over the top in 2024?

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Pacific Ocean temperature anomaly data from NOAA, based on the INO measurement, one of several used to measure the intensity of El Niño and La Niña cycles; projections are mine, but are consistent with several of the latest climate models

When you live on the west coast of the Americas, you really feel the influence of El Niño (exceptionally warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific) and La Niña (exceptionally cool ocean temperatures in the Pacific). Here in Vancouver, we have just come off three years in a row of (on average) cooler than normal temperatures, as La Niña has held sway. And that’s despite the fact that we’ve broken all time high temperature records in each of the last two summers — at the -1.0º nadir of La Niña. It’s been two years of extremes for the usually-moderate weather of the coast. Last August was the hottest August on record, and last November the coldest November on record.

In our last El Niño cycle, in 2014-16, we broke records here for the hottest one-year moving average temperature. Meteorologists are predicting the next El Niño will start late this year or early next year, and if that’s true, we’ll get our eyes opened about climate collapse pretty quickly. If we hit 43ºC (110ºF) in suburban Vancouver in 2021 when La Niña was at -1.0ºC from normal, what will we be facing when El Niño tops out (as it did in 2015-16) at +2.6ºC from normal?

—— vs: ——

chart from Wikimedia Commons; projections for 2023-24 and Strong-El Niño trendline are my additions

The chart above from Wikimedia shows the inexorable rise of average global surface temperatures to well over 1.0ºC above ‘pre-industrial’ (1850-1900 average) levels. Climate scientists have made it clear that avoidance of climate collapse, and the livability of our planet, depends on keeping these increases to less than 1.5ºC above these levels.

As I’ve been reporting for 20 years now, an increasing number of climate scientists say that keeping increases to that level is practicably impossible. If you draw a trendline through recent El Niño maxima, then if we get another strong El Niño in 2024, as many climate predictors are now forecasting, we could easily shoot past the 1.5ºC ceiling next year. So much for predictions we’d have “until 2030” to achieve this.

Along with other recent revelations about Big Oil suppressing their actual huge emission levels, about alarming rises in methane emissions, about the utter failure of tech solutions like carbon offsets, carbon capture and storage, and transitions to renewables to have any impact whatever on rising emissions, about the staggering ecological cost of endless wars, and of course the failure of doltish, doddering, virtue-signalling politicians everywhere to even begin to act on their absurd promises, climate catastrophe is now inevitable. The only question is how much and what parts of the planet will become unlivable, and how fast.

These data suggest, once again, that this is coming faster than even last year’s gloomiest predictions anticipated.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 7 Comments

Links of the Month: February 2023

Posted on February 9, 2023 by Dave Pollard

cartoon by Michael Leunig

Every once in a while I take a quick peek at the publications that I once lauded for their insight, their investigative reporting, and their courage to speak truth to power. Basically I wanted to read their response to award-winning journalist Sy Hersh’s exposé on the Biden-approved US Navy/CIA bombing of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines.

So I glanced at the headlines in the NYT, the latest New Yorker, the Guardian, and Daily Kos, just to get a sampling. Other than one buried verbatim transcription of the White House’s and CIA’s one-sentence “utterly false” dismissal of the revelations, there was nothing. Complete silence. (Billmon has elaborated on Sy’s article, as have Patrick Lawrence and Craig Murray.)

I suppose, like all the other times they have been embarrassed to have been duped and caught in monstrous US military war-crime lies (My Lai and Vietnam, Abu Ghraib, the Hill & Knowlton PR con about Kuwaiti baby incubators being turned off, the “shock and awe” Iraq Wars, the obscene war in Afghanistan, the photo-op Navy Seals’ murder of Bin Laden in a Pakistani prison, and on and on and on), these complicit news media hope that if they say nothing people will forget about their grievous misreporting and move on. Their mastheads should read: We Never Apologize.

These once-important news and analysis sources are now really nauseating to read. Endless, amateurish, shameless, information-free, anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Iran, war-mongering, fear-mongering screeds, full of hate and fury and misinformation and dutifully transcribed propaganda from the Pentagon and CIA spooks and White House PR offices. Reading even just the staggeringly-biased headlines and the first paragraphs visible above the paywalls now leaves me feeling polluted, disgusted, insulted, and abused.

It’s just scary to think that a lot of people believe these rags are reporting something even vaguely resembling the truth. Having read just a bit of what I’ve been missing since I turned them off, I have to go take a bath and scrub off the dirt.
/rant

COLLAPSE WATCH

you don’t suppose this would have anything to do with Biden’s attempts to foment war with a certain foreign country, do you?

How to give up: Dark Mountain Manifesto co-author Dougald Hine talks about XR’s decision to abandon Direct Action, the inspiration of Oaxaca’s Gustavo Esteva, and what we can do next after we discover we have no choice but to give up and walk away from everything we once believed to be true, including our false sense of control and power and agency and certainty about the future, and words that have lost their meaning. But I’m dismayed he’s looking at the disastrously unsuccessful 12-step ‘surrender to your powerlessness’ program as a model going forward. We’d be better looking to wild creatures for ideas on coping with collapse, rather than new religions. The crows can show us how the light actually gets in.

Bend not break: Nate Hagens has a 5-part series of interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger on adapting to and coping with collapse and the polycrisis; the 3rd (outline and transcript; video) on the psychology of collapse, and the 5th (outline and transcript; video) on strategies for dealing with it, are IMO the most valuable. Thanks to Paul Heft for the links.

Biding time: Lovely essay from Flat Caps on how our perception of time has evolved and now come unraveled, and how that perception determines our worldview on collapse.

Will political collapse accompany economic & ecological collapse?: Two measures of political collapse are corruption and kleptocracy, and they are on the upswing everywhere.

Why a transition to renewable energy is an impossible dream: Albert Bates employs the chart above to explain some of the reasons, and Richard Heinberg elaborates:

This means that, if society’s overall emissions are to stay within the budget permissible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, the rest of society (i.e., sectors other than the energy industry) will have to reduce emissions, perhaps effectively to zero. How this could be accomplished for sectors such as aviation and the steel and cement industries is barely imaginable. Unless we figure out how to reinvent many key industrial processes, they’ll simply have to be significantly downsized.

Hospicing Modernity: Dougald Hine writes about a different way of thinking about our role in times of collapse:

‘In these times, all we can do is be a sign,’ a father tells his daughter in Ben Okri’s novel The Freedom Artist. ‘We have to help to bring about the end of the world.’ We must do this, he goes on, so that a new beginning can come. ‘But first there must be an end.’

First there must be an end – but many kinds of end are possible. My friend Vanessa Machado de Oliveira wrote a book called Hospicing Modernity. The title invites us to a kind of work in which the focus is not on saving modernity, or bringing it down, or rushing to build what comes afterwards, but doing what we can to give it a good ending.

Carbon offsets are a fraud: But then you already knew that. And you already know carbon capture and storage is a fraud too. Thanks to John Whiting for the link, and the one that follows.

Greenland’s already soared past a 1.5ºC rise: Its ice sheet is collapsing at an incredible rate.

LIVING BETTER

cartoon by Will McPhail, from his website

Dying with dignity: This Canadian organization produces courageous, factual, articulate reporting and advocacy for those facing excruciating and humiliating end-of-life agony, who are prohibited from ending their lives peacefully by religious zealots and political opportunists. This is the abortion fight all over again. Gutless waffler Trudeau Jr is, again, fighting on the wrong side of this issue.

Global South shows us how to prepare for pandemics: It’s all about global collaboration, not competition to develop new tech.

Eugene bans natural gas in new homes: A courageous step, especially since they voted for it now, rather than kicking it to a referendum that would end up seeing it defeated by moneyed lobbyists. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

How not to fight poverty: Lyz Lenz outs right wingers’ contemptuous laws trying to gut social assistance to the poor and compel single mothers to get married.

Vancouver adds mental health nurses to emergency response teams: Still far too many mis- and under-skilled cops on the payroll, but these pairings with mental health nurses have been shown to work better.

A real strategy to deal with the housing crisis: The Vancouver Foundation reiterates the need for massive-scale construction of decent, affordable, publicly-financed and operated housing.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

facebook meme; thanks to Michael Dowd for the link

What’s really going on behind the curtain: Daniel Dumbrill and other actual investigative reporters discuss what’s happening in the US/NATO/Russia war, China warmongering, CoVid-19 capitulation and other subjects. Still some flickerings of truth out there.

Bend or break?: Aurélien provides some historical context to explain why the current political system is teetering on collapse.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

Jeremy Corbyn on Julian Assange, multipolarity, and the need for peace in Ukraine
Aurélian explains the absurdity of Europe’s “rearmament” and how most of those opining about the advances and withdrawals in the Ukraine war have no idea how wars are actually conducted
The Chinese weather balloon lunacy and why China didn’t pick up the phone
Bill Gates celebrates China’s rise — didn’t he get the memo?
Chris Hedges on imperialism’s cooption of “woke” culture
Sacrifice workers to fight inflation or no op-eds for you (thanks to Gerry Gras for the link)
Pentagon urges overt military offensive against Russia
Self-proclaimed “untethered” US general calls for war on China by 2025
Pentagon war against Russia, China and Iran has long been in the planning (a warning written back in 2018)
The demise of Finland’s vaunted education system (due to cuts in health and education spending — what a surprise!)
100,000 Israelis march to protest Netanyahu’s corrupt, totalitarian, apartheid regime
Medea Benjamin outlines how peace in Ukraine is possible. So do Lee Camp and David Swanson. A former Israeli PM says the US blocked his attempt to mediate in the war. And finally there are peace marches, Feb 19 in the US and Feb 25 in the UK.

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

The imperialist spinmeisters have launched an all-out disinformation attack on Caitlin Johnstone
Economist JK Galbraith explains why “the debt ceiling” is a myth

CoVid-19 Watch: Short takes:

Biden’s continued CoVid-19 policy of mass infection without mitigation
Zeynep Tüfekçi explains the dangers of the current explosion of H5N1 bird flu
Canada has been lucky so far in 2023 because the bivalent vaccines that most senior Canadians have received seem to work on the XBB.1.5 variant
China reports that 80% of its population has now been infected, in line with the experience of other countries abandoning protections. But because the new variants are so much less lethal (so far), China’s previous, stringent policies have saved millions of lives.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

six word story — from the memebrary

Barnes & Noble turns it around — by refusing promotional money from dealers, charging a fair price, and making the stores interesting. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

A piano lesson: How to play Grieg’s beloved Concerto in A minor like a professional. Fascinating.

Scientists find new way to control quantum computers: Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at her funniest.

Genetic screening is already here: Also from Sabine. How genetic screening is currently used, and how it might be used in the future, for better or worse.

Making eye contact: Liana Finck explains it’s OK if you can’t look the world in the face.

A high-pressure exhibit: Hank Green takes us behind the scenes at the Monterrey Bay aquarium, which shows creatures from the deep sea, kind of in the own environment, a technical tour-de-force.

Is this the future of pop music? In a feat going Milli Vanilli one better, a Korean company has introduced a K-POP group called MAVE: that is made entirely of avatars. No human dancers can match their gymnastic feats, the singers don’t have to be pretty or skinny or coordinated or fit to be part of the group (as long as they can sing). And that way recognition can go to the real stars, the music’s composers and players (not that it will). Look out, David Crosby, they may not be done with you yet! (Oh, and the ‘performers’ even have personal profiles, in case you want to stan them.)

Yuja and Khatia: Yuja Wang and Khatia Buniatishvili are my two current favourite pianists. My sense was always that Yuja was more technically precise and Khatia was more emotional in her playing. But when I listened to them playing the same pieces, I ended up with the opposite impression. And surprisingly (as I’m a romantic) I can’t decide which I like more. Of course, it’s not a duel.

The new rules of etiquette: Some of these rules are very funny and insightful, especially the first two sections on dealing with friends, lovers and strangers. (What is not funny is finding your way around the pay/registration wall to access it.)

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

combination of two memes from the memebrary; here’s a third: Egyptian scholars have found records of late-Egyptian archaeological work dating back to 500 BCE, on early-Egyptian relics from 3,000 years earlier; that one single culture lasted so long that it required the expertise of archaeologists from its final centuries to reconstruct the history of its earliest centuries

From Kim Addonizio, in Tell Me

New Year’s Day

The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow

and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves

being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed

to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia

I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.

Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember

from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads

lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls

are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand

at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one

rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.

They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used

to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives

have carried them
this far without ever once

explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here

with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up

with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care

where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it

they can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

The Next Right Thing

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Many years ago I had the privilege of going hiking in Wales with Dave Snowden, back when we were both more-or-less inventing the discipline now (and unfortunately) called ‘Knowledge Management’.

Other than the fact we share a Welsh heritage, and we’re both political lefties, we could hardly be more different (“to give up hope is a mortal sin”, he says somewhat mockingly of his conversion to Catholicism), which is one of the reasons I continue to enjoy our occasional correspondence and keep up with his new work. Though I should confess he still loves to debate, while I, the conflict-averse Canadian, abhor it, which sometimes challenges our relationship.

He recently did another long talk at The Stoa, in which he delightfully attacks muddle-headed, arrogant, well-intentioned, self-important idealists and ideologies which fail to understand how change (or anything else) actually happens in the real world. He takes shots at the execrable Jordan Peterson, at Ken Wilber and the Spiral Dynamics crew, at Rebel Wisdom, at logical positivists and post-modernists and meta-modernists and neo-platonists and stoics, at self-proclaimed and anointed gurus of all stripes, and many more. He even criticizes the Game B gang that includes Daniel Schmachtenberger and many of the Stoa regulars.

The real value of this talk, however, as with most of Dave’s work, is appreciating his pragmatic, evolving, challenging take on the world and how it works, and how practically we can nudge it in more positive directions.

His talks are dense, opinionated, sometimes rambling, and full of the jargon of complexity which he’s had to master to deal with the largely-academic world he has to navigate, and to introduce new concepts for which there is no useful English term. There is a glossary however, for those willing to learn the shorthand, and I certainly needed it for this talk. Nevertheless, as a caveat, some will find his talk opaque and annoying.

This post is basically to capture what I learned from this particular talk. I may have some of it wrong, and/or oversimplified, but here are my notes:

Focus on understanding the present, rather than inventing an aspirational future: What is the “next right thing” that can be done to move in a positive trajectory? Knowing the current situation is far more useful than picturing an ideal future state, and it keeps you grounded instead of caught up in fanciful ‘design’ activities that may be completely impracticable. We should explore new ways of thinking and being in the world to deal with the realities of the moment, not a new grand narrative for the future of the world that some lotus-eating group of idealists thinks we should all strive for. More present-focused activists, please, and fewer future-focused designers.
Evolution, at every scale, is a punctuated, and synthesizing process, rather than a prescribable linear one: We didn’t ‘advance’ from “hunter-gatherer” to “agricultural” to “industrial” cultures. Every change was a blending of the old and new, with the best of each not necessarily selected for. There has never been any simple set of stages of ‘progress forward’ in any complex situation, and stage theories are hopelessly flawed, simplistic ways of trying to solve problems or assess ‘progress’. Likewise, there are no “higher levels of enlightenment” that people can achieve. Terms like “turquoise” measure nothing more than your level of narcissism. Learning and evolution are, instead, complex processes directed towards “messy coherence”.
The meta-crisis is actually a poly-crisis: Meta actually means ‘between’ not ‘higher’, and the multiple, complex, interrelated crises we face are not part of some one larger crisis, but rather manifold and diverse.
It makes no sense to look at things in isolation from their relationships and their environments: Narrowing your focus and analyzing something as if it were separate and apart from everything else is simply bad science. As Richard Lewontin has explained, for example, the real cause of most of the diseases we face is not bacteria, viruses and cancers, but rather overwork, malnourishment, and dysfunctional, under-regulated industrial systems.
Social atomism is a terrible basis from which to analyze complex problems: Humans evolved to make decisions as collectives, not as individuals. We are defined by our communities and our physical and social environments. We are not isolated individuals whose aggregate choices transform the world; we are part of our collective(s) and our environment. Collectives can do many things that individuals cannot. Our current hyper-individualism does not augur well for our capacity for addressing the poly-crisis.
How to nudge a group forward: Three questions to understanding the situation: (1) Who has a voice or power in this situation (“agency”)?; (2) what opportunities and constraints are available to them to exercise that power (“affordances”)?; and (3) what methods and paths can be employed to act on those opportunities and overcome established impediments and deterrents to change (“assemblages”) ie What are the adjacent possibles that can be identified and enacted right now? [This resonates a bit with Daniel Schmachtenberger’s 35 questions.] Dave’s organization helps groups to (i) map where people are now, (ii) give individuals the epistemic sovereignty to define their own position, and (iii) from that, identify sustainable pathways to a different future, in part through asking the above questions.
When people have to choose between eating food and heating their home, this is not a “crisis of meaning”: People with their heads so far up in the clouds that they mistake real problems for epistemological ones, need to get a life.
Putting people in positions where they have to think differently: There’s a myth that informed dialectics and conversation actually promote change, but it is far more effective to put people in a position where they have no choice but to think differently. Take them to visit a factory farm. Have them accompany a cop and a social worker who’ve been called to deal with a domestic violence incident. Or impose new constraints, such as “you can’t come to the office for the next year because of the pandemic”.
Making it easier: Changing the dispositional state: Lowering the ‘energy’ cost of change, or shortening the time needed to change, makes it easier and more likely that change will happen. [I might add that making it more fun can also improve the dispositional state for change.] If you want people to use LED bulbs instead of incandescents, make them cheaper and more accessible. [If you want people to learn some new skill, make a game of it.]
The next pandemic is likely to be much worse: It’s likely to be an avian virus or bacterial disease with a much higher fatality rate. Recent hyper-individualistic behaviours and distrust of public health authorities suggest we’re really poorly equipped to handle such a crisis.
One unsolvable problem for AI is its incapacity for drawing on historical context and for creating and learning from metaphor: We reason by analogy and communicate and innovate by metaphor, and that capacity draws on a vast, diverse, and culturally-based history of knowledge, ideas and experiences. That is not programmable.
There is no such thing as mastery: Learning is a complex, iterative, continuous, non-linear process. Holding oneself out as a ‘master’ of anything is a conceit.

Lots to think about here.

When/if I next get the chance to sit down with Dave, I’d love to explore with him my sense that humans (or at least human brains) loathe complexity, uncertainty, and not knowing, and what we might be able to do to get people to embrace complexity and revel in uncertainty and not knowing instead. Is the answer making it more fun? Chess players seem to enjoy complexity. Murder mystery fans seem to enjoy uncertainty and not knowing, for a while at least. Perhaps the play’s the thing?

Posted in How the World Really Works | 4 Comments

Better Than Real

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Dave Pollard

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

— TS Eliot, East Coker, the Four Quartets

I‘ve always been a daydreamer, and a bit of a misanthrope. It’s not that I don’t like people. I just find it hard to care about all the things they care about. I look out at the city with astonishment and joy, and I participate in social activities. But I feel like I’m living in a whole-world hospital, full of people with serious physical, emotional and situational illnesses. They’re doing their best, but I’m not inclined to want to spend a lot of time with them, since I can’t do anything for them, and I find their illnesses (as I found my own) exhausting, enervating, and unpleasant.

I imagine, as I look down at the people and cars scurrying around, that we’re eight billion bewildered monkeys, racing around mimicking each other desperately, in the hope that someone knows what they’re doing and how it came to this, and where it’s going. Eight billion monkeys totally conditioned by our biology and culture, doing the only things we can under the circumstances of the moment. All doing our best to cope with the illnesses that afflict and confront us everywhere. We know something is not right, but we’re helpless to understand or address it.

I never quite got with the program. From my earliest school years I just couldn’t relate to what other people said, did, or cared about. It just didn’t make sense. Why were they acting this way? They were like starving rats in a maze, or beaten zoo animals endlessly pacing their cages. They were cruel, angry, anxious, selfish, driven by jealousy, guilt, and shame. They were dreadfully unhealthy, and mostly unhappy.

So I just withdrew into a world of imaginary creatures that acted the way I thought everyone should — creatures that cared about what I cared about. I still interacted with other people, and sometimes really enjoyed those interactions, but they were mostly half-hearted and unpleasurable. I played out my own conditioning and then retreated as soon as possible into my own, very different, invented reality, one that made sense to me.

This looks familiar, vaguely familiar
Almost unreal yet it’s too soon to feel yet
Close to my soul and yet so far away
I’m going to go back there someday.
Sunrises, night falls; sometimes the sky calls
Is that a song there and do I belong there?
I’ve never been there but I know the way
I’m going to go back there someday.

Come and go with me; it’s more fun to share
We’ll both be completely at home in midair —
We’re flying not walking on featherless wings
We can hold on to love like invisible strings.

There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met
Part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?
You can just visit, but I plan to stay —
I’m going to go back there someday.

— Paul Williams (for The Muppet Movie), I’m Going to Go Back There Someday

No surprise that, now, much of my time is spent writing fiction, of one kind or another. I can imagine myself, and imagine others (joyful, curious comrades and playmates) with me, on a beach or in a forest or in a totally different world, as vivid as any ‘real’ thing.

As a child, I created a world of fictional characters, imaginary friends, people who were, to me, far more interesting than the ‘real’ people I had to interact with, since my fictional characters were healthy, wild creatures, not the domesticated, reactive, tense, damaged inmates of this global self-made prison we call civilization.

The list of ‘actual’ people I’d like to meet and invite to my ‘ideal dinner party’ has gradually been whittled down to a handful. I’d much rather have dinner with some of the fictional characters I’ve invented over the years — healthy, joyful, curious creatures that would never want to live in the ‘real’ world we have (in more ways than one) constructed.

I find most writers’ fiction to be hopelessly and depressingly unimaginative, wallowing as it does in the milieus and personas of our global hospital-prison. Why would anyone want to read, or watch, depictions of ghastly human struggle and suffering, with their absurd, impossible Hollywood deus ex machina endings? Perhaps they make others feel better and hopeful about their own situation, but they no longer have any appeal to me.

So if I want to spend time with people and animals and in places and times that I find joyful and interesting, I mostly have to make them up.

And I do. I turn the sound off on the screen and make up my own lines for what the characters are saying, which are generally more interesting and more fun than what the hack screenwriters provided. At tea houses and in restaurants I imagine fascinating stories and conversations for the other patrons. I’m rarely interested in knowing who they ‘really’ are or what they’re ‘really’ talking about.

Although I’ll probably never know for sure, my sense is that the 8 billion mutually-conditioned Homo monkeys on the planet, and the 100 billion others who have lived and died creating and struggling in civilization’s hospital-prison, have inherited the terrifying disease whose principal symptom is the chronic illusion of having a self that is somehow separate from everything else, and which then needs to be constantly protected and defended from everything else.

As I’ve written elsewhere (probably too often), I think this is a uniquely human affliction, the result of evolving a brain sophisticated enough to invent complicated models of what is happening in the ‘real’ world, and then, with encouragement from other afflicted humans, mistaking those models for actual reality.

It’s as if humans, as young children, suddenly went to sleep one day in an astonishing, full, already-complete world, and then woke up the next in an ersatz simulacrum of a world, a fake, incomplete model of the world, where nothing worked and nothing made sense. And then had to spend the rest of their lives trying, hopelessly, to make sense of it, when it isn’t even real.

And through this effort, we have created a dreadful, prosthetic, human world, the one I see outside my window, a mad world that has so utterly destroyed its ecosystems that it’s produced the massive and unstoppable extinction of most life on the planet.

So my invention of these other worlds, these alternative fictions of healthy, joyful, loving creatures living together in peace, is not about hope. I have no illusions that there is a path from today’s beautiful, terrible world to the ones I have invented. I am not expecting anything to ‘get better’, to unfold any way other than the only way it can. I will not be disappointed if the human experiment, as seems increasingly likely, ends badly.

If there is consolation in this, other than the fact that, despite the human carnage, this world is still an astonishing, wondrous place, it is that if our selves and the atomized world of their invention are truly just illusions, then it doesn’t matter what we do, or don’t do. It doesn’t matter whether we choose to live in endless struggle in the composite human fiction of the ‘real’ world, or in an alternative fiction that is far more pleasant.

Jeremy Bentham was an early exponent of the idea that we should in all things seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the greatest number (and as he was an animal rights advocate, that ‘number’ was not limited to just humans). My observation has been that this is far more than just a moral code — it essentially describes what evolutionarily underlies the conditioning of all life on the planet. It is Gaia’s modus operandi.

But seen through the veil of the dis-ease of the illusion of self and separation, the calculation of optimal pleasure and minimal pain has changed, for humans, from a holistic assessment (“what is healthiest for the organism that is ‘all-life-on-Earth'”), to one of the adding-up of individuals’ levels of pleasure (“what is optimal for the greatest number of individuals, weighted somehow by their relative importance”). That is an insane calculus.

My conditioning precludes me from being a NTHE‘er, at least not to the point of trying to crash civilization faster than it’s already doing itself.

Instead, my conditioning seems to be leading me to withdraw from the cacophony of that collapse, and instead sustain myself in the alternate fiction of a world that is so well attuned to the rhythms of all life on earth that it need not collapse, one that already maximizes the pleasure and minimizes the pain of all-life-on-Earth.

So I’m checking out of the hospital and the prison, where I was not equipped to be of much service anyway. I’m going back to that undivided, uncivilized, pleasure-filled, vaguely familiar place, with echoes of my earliest childhood where there was nothing that had to be done.

I’ve never been there, but I know the way.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 2 Comments

Exemplifying and Modelling ‘Teal’

Posted on February 3, 2023 by Dave Pollard

image CC0 from pexels.com

I‘m a member of a discussion group around the book Reinventing Organizations and the concept of Teal. The book, and practice, advocates creating organizations that are self-organized, self-managed, self-correcting, transparent and minimally hierarchical. I’ve written about it before.

The upcoming session of our group challenges us to take Teal personally. How can we exemplify and model the practices and principles of Teal organizations in our everyday lives — in whatever activities (even just conversation) we undertake with family, friends, collaborators, and other ‘community’ members — and not just in the “work world”?

Here are some of my thoughts on the subject — none of them novel, but pulled together in one place:

Start by knowing ourselves better — As I described in my collapse readiness reminders poster, this entails knowing what we’re good it, and lousy at, what our blind spots and biases and triggers and tacit assumptions are, and being aware of why we’re reacting, in the moment, the way we are.
Growing our capacity to engage others — The art of inviting others to a group or a conversation or an exploration begins with genuine curiosity about what others care about, and entails learning how to ‘craft’ an engaging invitation.
Sustaining an atmosphere of trust — The very best theatre ensembles trust each other deeply, and they ‘rehearse’ together to get better, as equals, authentically, transparently, with utter honesty and a focus on each other’s and their ‘customers’ extraordinary experience. Just don’t ask me how they do it!
Learning by asking great questions — Asking questions to understand why things are the way they are and how they might be different. Daniel Schmachtenberger’s brilliant list of questions to ‘understand the problem-space’ is great for starters, including challenging our own tacit assumptions.
Appreciating what we have in common — Understanding and building on our shared values and beliefs, what we all care about, enjoy doing, and are really good at, and how we uniquely do things and express ourselves. Our whole way of being in the world that we share in common. This is the bedrock of community. Without it, everything is a negotiation.
Learning to understand and appreciate opposing perspectives — Kind of the antithesis of #5. This entails deeply exploring and appreciating why people believe things so different from our beliefs. And then trying to synthesize some sensible understanding and viable approaches that are compatible with and encompass both sets of beliefs. Devilishly difficult, but powerful when it works.
Staying aware of where we’re going — Because too often we go off on tangents in meetings and conversations, because we forget what our common purpose or objective is. This ‘purpose’ may be a best possible outcome. Or, if things are in flux and we don’t know yet, it might just be the first next step, some tactics aimed along the trajectory we think might be the best one.
Learning to recognize and call out power dynamics — Most of us kinda wish we had more power, so we’re quick to use it when we have it. But exploiting power differences almost never produces optimal results, and can lead to resentment, disengagement, learned helplessness, and abuse. Sometimes power abuse is unintentional, or passive-aggressive, or even non-verbal. It takes constant diligence to keep challenging the use of power, and shifting power to those with less, to restore healthy group dynamics and optimal behaviours.
Being willing to delegate to the most competent — That means acknowledging that the person with the matching title or job description or CV isn’t necessarily that person. It means letting go of control. And, always, it means matching authority to responsibility. Too many lousy ‘leaders’ delegate the latter but hold on to the former.
Being willing to take courageous, calculated risks — Most of us become more risk-averse as we age and gain authority. That’s partly why real innovation is everywhere in precipitous decline, and why so many corporate oligopolies are dangerously sclerotic. Life is too short to always play it safe. We learn much more from our mistakes than from our successes. And there are ways to make it safer to fail.
Learning and practicing collective accountability — This is not the same as ‘responsibility’, which refers to being the one on the hook to take action (and/or flak for failure). It means assessing together the measure of what has happened, and collectively deciding what should be done about it. It removes the ‘blame game’ and the individual burden, especially since in most cases no one person or group of people ’caused’ the outcome anyway.
Learning and practicing the Art of Dialogue — This is more, and less, than conversation. It entails a lot of listening and paying attention without analyzing or even really thinking. It requires suspending judgement and postponing questions and objections. Its author David Bohm said true Dialogue requires and enables us to set aside our conditioned thoughts and beliefs and open ourselves to appreciating those of others, and hence developing a collective understanding.
Learning how to self-correct (adapt to change) — This is about honing our capacity to continually sense what is happening and respond effectively, much as a living organism does when it detects something wrong. It requires a commitment to accept and exercise collective accountability (see #11 above). It requires a knowledge of what a “healthy state” looks like for the group in question (family, community, organization, or even for an individual) at a time of upset, struggle or turmoil. And it requires awareness of what pathways might be available to shift toward that healthy state.
Learning and practicing facilitation, consensus and conflict resolution skills — We can practice these skills in many contexts: eg at the family dinner table, during a political debate, or when someone needs guidance (not advice) to sort out their own thoughts and priorities. Facilitation is a servant/steward role; consensus is not the same as agreement; and conflict resolution is about fairly discharging emotional distress. You don’t learn these essential skills in MBA school.

These are worthwhile objectives, I think, but the real question is: How do we actually get better at these things? What practices can we put into place now to test and track our improvement? How can this list be made useful instead of just interesting?

What is needed are practical methods to obtain and hone these skills. My guess is that one reason so many organizations that try to “get to Teal” fail is because their people just don’t have these skills, and there isn’t an opportunity to develop and practice them.

My sense is that we need a kind of “Teal curriculum” to learn the fundamentals of these important capacities, and to practice them until we’re really good at them. Like an anti-MBA program. Maybe even offer it in high schools.

Fun to think about, anyway.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Working Smarter | 5 Comments

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