The Watcher

Posted on February 1, 2023 by Dave Pollard


photo taken last summer out my window — Kulshan (Mt Baker) looms over the Pitt River Bridge and the Port Coquitlam dockyards

She keeps her secrets frozen under glaciers way up north
And people have got lost up there, in the home of the grizzly bear
And you can ask the mountain, but the mountain doesn’t care.
— Antje Duvekot, Long Way

Now, in the dead of winter, The Watcher is totally buried in snow. Kulshan, its First Nations name, is called Mt Baker by the colonists, but in earlier traditions, and to me, it is The Watcher, keeping an eye on what is happening all the way from Victoria and Vancouver to Seattle, from where it can be seen. Even on clear days it is often shrouded in cloud and fog, but when it emerges it is breathtaking.

The Watcher is 90km (58mi) from my window, and two miles (3300m) high, but it dwarfs everything else along the long rugged skyline visible from my panoramic view. It is an active volcano, like its sisters Mt St Helens (Lawetlat’la — “The Smoking Maiden”), Mt Rainier (Tahoma — “The Water Source”), Mt Hood (Wy’east — “Lawetlat’la’s Suitor”), Glacier Peak (Dahkobed — “The Parent”), Lassen Peak (Kohm Yah-mah-nee — “The Snowy One”), and Mt Shasta (Waka-nunee-Tuki-wuki — “Walk around and around, but never on top, because that is only for the gods”).

The Watcher is really a baby as far as volcanoes go. While the area has teemed with volcanic activity for four million years, The Watcher, mostly constructed from the debris of many earlier and now collapsed volcanoes, only emerged as an active volcano 140,000 years ago, and its greatest volcanic activity occurred from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago. A more recent eruption permanently changed the course of the Nooksack River, which once emptied north into the Fraser River and now empties west into Bellingham Bay. There are concerns that, with climate change, constant “atmospheric rivers” might so flood the lowlands north of The Watcher that the Nooksack might once again flow into the Sumas Valley and hence into the Fraser, with catastrophic implications for BC agriculture and the local First Nations peoples.

Small eruptions occurred as recently as 1843 and 1880, and even more recently (notably in 1943) escaping gas and high pressure have caused explosions leading to avalanches and mud flows. No one knows when it will erupt again.

The Watcher has a remarkable 12 glaciers angling down from its peak, covering an area of 50km2 (20 square miles). But the glaciers are melting, even though the peaks of The Watcher are the snowiest place on Earth, receiving between 60′ (20m) and 100′ (35m) of new snow each year.

So more extreme weather events are now a double threat to the peoples who live in the shadow of The Watcher — disastrous flooding in the rainy winter, compounded by spring snow melt, and then disastrous drought in the summer, when retreating glaciers mean sharp declines in water supplies downstream.

As the photo above illustrates, even a mountain that receives so much snow can be dry by the following summer.

What will happen when the snows become rains instead as the planet warms? When the water stored up in glaciers in past years instead rushes immediately into the lowlands and hence into the sea, leaving flooding and erosion in the spring, and drought and dried-up rivers in the summer and fall?

The Watcher isn’t telling. It’s been here longer than even the earliest hominids. It’s seen ice ages, when ice covered everything for hundreds of miles around, two miles thick. It’s been here since before the Salish Sea was carved out by the ice’s retreat, when Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii and all the Gulf Islands were just a part of the mainland. It will be here long after humans cease tinkering with the land and the waters, when nature once again follows its own course.

It’s just marking time, stoically chronicling the rise and fall, the ebb and flow, the changing of seasons and climates. Kind of like I am, I guess, though it does so with much more grace.

It’s not here to watch over us, after all. Just to watch, to see what happens, to witness how the story ends.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | Comments Off on The Watcher

Walking in the Dark

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This post is about the most recent of the 2-3 hour ‘contemplative wanderings’ that I do near the end of each month.

In the early hours of evening, at this time of year this far north, it’s already been dark for a while. But it’s not raining, or windy, or foggy, so I make my way down the elevator and head outside. Here, in the city, a flashlight isn’t essential, as it was when I lived on Nex̱wlélex̱wm, so I have purposely left it behind.

This is the hour of after-work joggers, some of them sporting headlamps or reflective tape on their clothes. It’s the hour of dog-walkers, and late commuters, and weary night-shift workers. Drawn to the sea, I walk towards the eastern edge of Burrard Inlet (səl̓ilw̓ət — “tsuh-LAYL-wut” in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ local First Nation language).

After my recent post on our “sense of scents”, I’m hoping to see whether the darkness allows me to exercise my non-visual senses. Will I be able to smell səl̓ilw̓ət’s salt water, and remember it? Will it then strike me, the next time I’m near, differently from the rich green smell of Hoy Creek, which I often visit, and which I’ve just passed? Will I ever be able to map the emotional landscape of these smells? Is there a language of smells, a language that can’t be spoken, a language in which that smell could be related to that feeling, the way a major seventh, or a sus4 chord, relates to that feeling?

I’m walking alongside rows of hedges and riverside trails, but I’m not able to discern much in the way of scents, even when I briefly close my eyes and try to concentrate.

And then a guy walking a beagle passes by going in the other direction, and the dog stops the guy it’s taking for a walk, in order to sniff. I slap myself on the side of the head. Of course! I utter a greeting to the guy, and nod to the dog in thanks for the lesson.

When I stop walking, and focus, and pay attention, I really can smell the differences from plant to plant. But it’s strange and frustrating — I have no language with which to distinguish and remember these scents. Perhaps if I knew what the names of the shrubs and trees were, I could at least ‘tag’ the smells with the names of their bearers, as I can now with cedars and lilacs. But I am totally unpracticed at this — I can no more make sense of these scents than I can make sense of the conversation of the people I passed a few moments ago speaking — what? — Mandarin or Cantonese or Korean? Japanese even? I have no idea.

How is it even possible to ‘remember’ anything if you have no taxonomy, no ontology, no words for it, I wonder? I recall scents from even way back in my childhood, when I’m re-exposed to them. “That smell” means “that precise place” or “that thing that happened” or even “that person”. It all comes rushing back. But we have no words for it — for the Cardiff Bridge Street smell or the listening-to-Gymnopédies-with-Joanne smell. Perhaps there is no need for words for it.

As I continue to walk, I am a bit surprised at the number of people, mostly women, who say words of greeting to me as we pass in the darkness. Since I moved here I’ve not noticed that very much. What’s changed? I am smiling, but that’s not unusual for me, especially when I’m walking. Is it because it’s dark, so it’s a safety acknowledgement, like the gentle ting of bicycles when they are passing you on multi-use paths?

And then I laugh. It’s because I’m not wearing a mask! For the past three years I’ve defaulted to wearing one, even outdoors when I’m in busy places. They were acknowledging my unmasked smile, along with my eye-contact and brief attention to them as our paths crossed. Nothing more meaningful, and nothing less human, than that.

There are, of course, people who don’t meet your gaze, who shrink down and look away and hurry past.

That gets me thinking about what it must be like to live a life of constant precarity, constant unease, constant wariness, or constant struggle. A life in the shattering aftermath of trauma. A life in never-ending fear of the reappearance of an abuser, or another horrific war. A life full of the the shame and dread of not knowing where the next meal for you or your children will come from, or the next fix, or where you’ll sleep tonight, and tomorrow night.

No wild creature, I am convinced, would ever put up with such a life — having known a better life, it would be too far down for them to even contemplate putting up with it. They would skulk away, lie down quietly and gracefully and just let it end.

What is it that drives humans to go on, no matter how ghastly their lives? Is it hope, or is it just the only life they know and the only life they can imagine? Are we all domesticated creatures like Lucky the dog, willing to put up with almost anything once we get used to it?

I sigh. The older I get, the more I realize that I know nothing. I wonder if my walking in the dark is a metaphor for where we are, we humans, now, always, scurrying around in a sea of unknowing. Wild creatures live in a world of wonder, while we, allegedly homo sapiens (twice), live mostly in a world of dissatisfaction, anxiety and bewilderment. Is this what all our ‘knowledge’ brings us?

As I reach the long arm of the ocean, and descend down the steps from the always-noisy road to the sand-and-pebble shore, I discover that last month’s king tide damaged the boardwalk across the edge of the inlet. There’s yellow tape everywhere, so I can’t even get close enough to smell the ocean, or what the ocean becomes in its transition to rivers and lakes. So I sit on the park bench quietly and listen to the ducks. There could be thousands of them out there; it’s too dark to see.

On the way back, I find myself walking behind two little girls with (I suppose) their mothers. The girls are dancing and singing and spinning around holding small flashlights in their hands, illuminating everything around them. “Aha!” says one, “You can’t avoid my gaze.” The other asks whether they can take the riverside path home instead of the “boring” roadside sidewalk. The mother is dubious. “We can show you the way,” the girl replies, in superhero voice. “We can see anything even far away, so we can protect you.” And then, shining the light from below her chin to eerily illuminate her face, she adds: “We have TASERS!” “Whaaaat?” shouts the mother, as I make my way by them.

I’m sort of glad I won’t hear where that conversation is going as I pass out of earshot.

It’s quiet then, for a while. From my treadmill routine, I’ve started to walk fast, about 7 km/h, and now I come up behind another couple, I’m guessing in their late teens, walking in the same direction. They’re speaking in urgent, hushed tones, and the young woman is pressed up against the guy as they walk. I can’t make out what they’re saying until the woman suddenly throws up her hands and says, in a loud, exasperated, grief-filled voice:

“All I want is to be able to curl up with you every night when we go to sleep, and wake up in your arms every morning, and spend all day loving you and being loved by you! Why is that so hard?… Why is everything good in this world impossible?”

I am briefly stunned by this bravura performance, and have to restrain myself from giving her a raised fist salute and shouting “Right on, sister!” Instead, as I pass them, I smile and nod to the woman, and give her a ‘thumbs-up’.

And for the rest of the walk home I am haunted by her questions. Has there ever been a time in human prehistory where that was how we lived, perhaps back in the days when we were pre-bonobos living in the trees? Was life, in those times of abundance and balance, such that we could simply reach out and grab a fig or some other nutritious food, and then sink back into the arms of the one we loved? If that were so — if it’s not just a fantasy of starry-eyed paleontologists and paleoanthropologists — then where did we go wrong, or was our trajectory from there to here just one of tragic but necessary evolutionary adaptation to ecological change?

Instead of going straight home, I head first to the neighbourhood bistro for a matcha latte. The place is jammed, so I grab a seat and eavesdrop for a few minutes. The group at the next table is talking about the crows dive-bombing from the top of their apartment and then soaring back up again. One of them was repeatedly dropping a pebble and then swooping down at incredible speed and grabbing it in its beak, and then repeating the exercise over and over. Having witnessed this often, I smiled.

There are a lot of anthropocentric explanations for why wild creatures play — mostly relating to their use of play as ‘practice’ for serious real-life situations. But biologists who have carefully studied wild creatures insist this is a false myth.

As I wave goodnight to the hardworking, gentle boss of the bistro, I wonder why crows play. I wonder if they do it just for fun. I wonder if they do it because that is just what crows do with their large brains and abundant leisure time. I wonder why they have migrated dramatically to the cities over the past 50 years, to the point more live in cities than in the countryside now — just like us. I wonder why, in each city, they mass each night (except in breeding season) in enormous, crowded, raucous roosts of thousands of birds, and then return miles to their far-flung homes each morning.

I wonder why there has to be a reason for anything, or if there even is a reason for anything — perhaps reasons are just placeholders, inventions of the brain, misleading us into seeing, and sharing, patterns where none really exists.

Perhaps there isn’t even a reason why “everything good in this world is impossible”. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m just standing here in the dark, looking up at the moon, and wondering.

Posted in Creative Works, Month-End Reflections | 5 Comments

Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities

Posted on January 23, 2023 by Dave Pollard


my now-slightly-outdated map of worldviews about collapse; right-click and open in a new tab to see it full-sized

It’s interesting to listen to social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger try to reconcile his assessment of the state of the world with his vehement insistence that we have to try as hard we possibly can to avert the ‘metacrisis’ that threatens to bring about the collapse of human civilization and the extinction of most or all life on earth, including humans.

In a recent video, he said:

How can evolutionarily nasty chimpanzees with a high orientation for conflict and irrationality, with nuclear weapons and AI and synthetic biology, with a history of using technology in conflict-oriented and harm-externalizing ways, how can 8 billion of us with exponential tech [increasingly available to all] do a good job of governing that much power? It doesn’t actually look that promising.

Yet he insists that “we cannot know for certain” that we are fucked (or that we are not), so we each have a responsibility to do what we can, working with others, to pull us back from the brink.

His argument reveals a curious quirk about humans and our relationship to complexity, uncertainty, and hope. We seem completely preoccupied with what John Gray calls “the needs of the moment”, and it is clear that this preoccupation has directly produced the metacrisis (a combination of many, unintended, crises and system collapses — economic, ecological, political, social, health, educational, resource, technological, and, for some, spiritual/religious) in which we find ourselves. Yet we continue to cling to hope for our future when all logic says it’s unfounded.

Daniel harks back to when he was 12-15 years old, and first became aware of the monstrous cruelty to animals inherent in factory farming. (This is also how my own political activism started, though I was a bit older.) It seemed an impossibly complex problem to solve. But for Daniel, as long as there was some uncertainty about the outcome, some small possibility of an unknown occurrence (lab-produced animal-less meat?) that could unexpectedly intervene in the system and radically alter its trajectory, he could not allow that it was ever acceptable to give up, to shrug and say “There’s nothing we can do.”

Of course Daniel is enormously biologically, economically and culturally privileged, and it would be easy to say “Daniel, that’s easy for you to say…”. But while he acknowledges his enormous privilege, Daniel insists he is not exceptional or unusual, and that our inherent biophilia, instincts and basic human capacities make it possible, and essential, for everyone to play a role in understanding and working fiercely to resolve the metacrisis in the best way possible.

My philosophy of late has been that we have no free will, and that our beliefs and behaviours are entirely conditioned, such that “we’re all doing our best”. I think Daniel is saying “we can and will and must do better”.

I think he’s wrong about the capacities of the human species, though I do accept that if everyone in the world was as intelligent, as informed, as thoughtful, as open-minded, as engaged, as curious, as connected, as humble, as articulate, and as coherent in their thinking as he is, we really might be able to ‘save the world’ from what we have unintentionally wrought.

Instead, we are where we are. I don’t believe we can blame humans for being preoccupied with “the needs of the moment” and for only being able to do their inadequate-to-the-current-situation best.

Here’s a thought experiment to illustrate why I think this is so:

Suppose you knew, or believed, the following:

  1. The probability of a nuclear war this year is about 5%, easing slowly to about 2% in each year from 2026 onwards, should we outlive the Russia/US/NATO/China proxy wars in Ukraine and Taiwan.
  2. The probability of the economy collapsing permanently at some point over the next 15 years is 50%, rising to 95% over the following 15 years. [By “collapsing permanently” I mean a situation where the vast majority of the world’s population is hungry, permanently unemployed, and either squatting in place (unable to afford housing) or constantly transient or migrating.]
  3. The probability of an ecological catastrophe in your community occurring at some point in the next 15 years is 25%, rising to 95% over the following 15 years. [By “ecological catastrophe” I mean a situation where the vast majority of the community’s population is displaced and must migrate to another part of the world.]

I’m not asking you to accept these numbers as true — obviously we cannot know with any precision what is going to happen and when. But let’s assume you buy these probabilities. Your near-term perspective, now in 2023, of the existential risks you face would then be as illustrated below:

What demands the most of your attention, and perhaps keeps you awake at night, would naturally be the personal needs of the moment, shown in blue. If you have any bandwidth left for existential anxiety and are paying any attention to the doomscroll, your remaining preoccupation would likely be the risk of nuclear war, as its probability has soared over the past year. The horrific, longer-term economic and ecological (and other) crises we face would understandably be pushed to the back of your mind.

There’s nothing wrong-headed or inappropriately selfish about that. We have survived because our conditioning has inclined us to focus on the personal and the short-term.

But what if we extended the chart above over a longer-term risk horizon, and looked at the cumulative risks of these elements of the metacrisis, rather than the annual risks? Of course, the further out we go, the greater the uncertainty and the likelihood of our guess being wrong. But this is what it might look like, using the same hypothetical assumptions above:

“It doesn’t look promising!”

This chart suggests a different focus for how we view and prioritize the crises we are facing. This way of looking at them makes a lot of sense, logically and statistically, but this is not how humans make sense of things. For a start, the longer out we go, the more we are inclined to discount our belief in the likelihood of these crises happening, because of their enormous uncertainty*. Secondly, we know that such predictions are prone to being rendered unreliable and useless by “black swan” events (like pandemics), by novel technologies, and by other unforeseeable developments (like cosmic radiation, asteroids, and solar flares). And third, we don’t think in terms of cumulative risk; like lousy casino players, we only see one roll ahead, and if we dodge a bullet, we think the likelihood of dodging the next one is suddenly much higher.

So if we make it to 2032 (a toss-up), or 2039 (unlikely) with none of these crises having occurred, we are probably going to be unduly optimistic that they won’t happen in the next decade or two either (just as the Davos gnomes were ridiculously optimistic in late 2019 that there would be no pandemic, because there hadn’t been one recently). Same logic for the “big one” destroying Cascadia.

And when/if our systems are still basically functional in the 2030s, it’s likely our focus will still be the short-term challenges we face over the next year or two, which means we will remain preoccupied with our personal needs of the moment, until global economic or local ecological collapse changes everything.

That is one reason we will not address the metacrisis until it is too late. There is another, very human reason, and that is that we can’t, and don’t want to try to, fathom the enormous complexity and interrelatedness of the elements of the metacrisis, each one of which is enormously complex in itself. For most, it’s enough to make our heads explode. We believe it to be impossible to understand and deal with, so it in fact becomes impossible to understand and deal with. This is what “doing our best” means for human animals. And that is not a criticism.

Yet despite this, we hope. As my map of the different types of Salvationists at the top of this post describes, hope comes in lots of flavours: Hope that the gods or aliens will take care of us. Hope that technology and innovation will come to the rescue. Hope that some human elite of leaders, beneficent or hard-nosed, will save us from ourselves. Hope that a massive spontaneous return to self-sufficient community-based living or global uplifting of human consciousness will solve the crisis. Place your bets and spin the wheel.

And then there are deniers who hope and believe that it’s all a hoax. And there are the NTHE Gaia-lovers who hope our awful species will perish quickly so the planet can start to recover from the human experiment sooner rather than later.

What is behind this hope? What is it about our perverse species that uniquely chooses to believe things, and do things, based purely on this thing called hope? Is it some kind of mental illness endemic to humans?

What causes us to elect a president who runs a campaign based solely on hope — twice? What causes abused spouses and children to stay around in the hope the abuser is going to change? What causes people to desperately keep loved-ones on life support, when the prognosis is dismal? Why does Hollywood, playing to the crowd, show success at CPR at a rate ten times higher than its real-life success rate? Why do so many believe that the only alternative to unwarranted hope is crippling despair?

I have said, ad nauseam, that we believe what we want to believe, and the truth be damned. So it must follow that hope is what we want to believe is true, and want to believe will happen, even when we think that belief is fraught with risk. Hope is future-oriented, and there is evidence that we are the only species on the planet that is so oriented. What is underlying that hopeful belief? Is it shame or guilt about what we have done wrong or failed to do successfully (like leave a healthy planet for our children) up ’til now? Is it anger about past ‘wrongs’ we want and hope to see atoned? Is it fear of a future we can’t bear to face, so we mask it with hopefulness?

I have, for now, come to grips with a realization that we seem to have no free will or control over our actions and inactions. When I acknowledged that everything we do is conditioned, I was able to give up hope. We can’t know or control what the future will bring, so what will happen is the only thing that could have happened. If we are hopeful on that basis, we are almost sure to be disappointed. But when we are disappointed, we may just double-down and hope even more fervently that things will be better next time, or next year. We are hope junkies.

Caitlin Johnstone just wrote a very eloquent, lovely. heartfelt essay about hope and wonder. On hope, in remarkably Schmachtenberger-ish language, she writes:

Hopelessness, when it comes to the fate of humanity, is an irrational position. The belief that we’re all inevitably going to destroy ourselves or keep marching into the depths of dystopia to the beat of the propaganda drum assumes a level of knowledge that nobody can possibly have. Nobody could possibly have enough information to draw that conclusion with any degree of confidence, and believing that you have is actually a bit arrogant. You don’t know what the future holds for our species, what unpredictable sociological, technological, environmental or situational surprises lie in wait that could cause a radical deviation from the norm… Hopelessness is the baseless and irrational shrinking of possibilities down to the spectrum of what’s known.

Yes, we cannot know, but lots of research shows that the people who have studied and learned the most about history and human nature and the current state of the world and how it works, are the most pessimistic about the future — the least hopeful. I’ve talked to enough climate scientists to think this is probably true.

And yes, we cannot know enough to be sure of the endgame, or even if there will be one. But, on the balance of probabilities, we can get a pretty strong sense that “it doesn’t look promising”. Why, then, can’t we seem to manage to move beyond hope, and just accept what is, and how fascinating the human experiment has been, despite its discouraging trajectory?

In her essay Caitlin moves on, deliciously, from hope to wonder:

If you really open your eyes, you’ll notice that the world is crackling with so much radiant beauty and wonder that even if we were to lose it all tomorrow, it would have been enough. A lucid perception of reality brings with it an experience of awe, and an on-your-knees gratitude for the fact that there was ever anything at all. From a perspective that isn’t clouded with mental narrative and internal distraction, each moment is too miraculous and too priceless a gift to get hung up on the possibility that it might not last.

Wonder is always accessible, even in the depths of sadness or depression. You might not always be able to find it in the trees or the butterflies, but you can always find it somewhere, often in the sadness itself. Even in the pain and despondency. Even in the car exhaust and the tattered billboards. Even in the background shimmering of existence. It’s always there to be found; you just might have to zoom out or zoom in your camera in order to find your access point to it.

Yes, and yes, there is wonder! The joyful pessimist in me finds it everywhere. The eight billion of us comprise only 7% of the over 100 billion humans who have ever lived on this planet. We are among the blessed 7% who will possibly get to witness the final chapter of the human experiment, who get to know how the story ends! And if it ends badly, well, that’s the only way it could have ended. All civilizations, and all stories, end. We all did our best. Nothing to be sad or ashamed about.

It doesn’t have to have a happy ending to be a wonderful story.

So, on the balance of probabilities, it’s more-or-less hopeless. And that’s fine, because we don’t need to be hopeful. Other creatures have lived for millions or billions of years without the need for hope. They understand this, in a way our species, smart and destructive and reckless and whiny as a young child in a family of patient, wise elders, is still far from learning.

If they have a purpose, it has nothing to do with hope, and everything to do with wonder. We might learn this, if we last long enough.

But I’m not hopeful.

* At the other extreme, there is an emotionally unmoored but very well-financed fringe group, including Elon Musk, who subscribe to a belief called Longtermism, that advocates actions, even if they could entail massive death and suffering of the planet’s current inhabitants, if those actions increased the odds of even more humans being alive in the far distant future. (Uncertainty is not factored in to their ghastly calculus.)

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Making Sense of Scents

Posted on January 20, 2023 by Dave Pollard


fragrance wheel from drom, from ‘top notes’ (citrus) around to ‘bass notes’ (musk), one of many different attempts to taxonomize the scents used in perfumery

When I was young, my emotions and my sense of place and time were quite powerfully connected with my sense of smell. I remember the smell of different places: When, as a young boy, I visited the UK, I could distinguish many of its places by their smell, even with my eyes closed. I am told that, in those days, England used a lot of diesel fuel compared to Canada, and Wales of course produced a lot of coal, and that concentration of carbons might have signalled to my ‘palette’ of remembered smells to tell me where we were. Though I also noted that the skies in the three countries, and different places within them, also had unique shades of blue, so it may be that my sense of place was triangulated somewhat by those clues as well.

On my last visit to England and Wales, the different smells were immediately recognizable, as were the different shades of blue in the sky. And smelling them and seeing them immediately brought back ‘forgotten’ memories of other times I had been in those places, a phenomenon known as simultaneity. Of course, I couldn’t tell you how the smells were different, or how the skies were different in ‘blueness’. I just knew, in a deeply subconscious way, where I was, and what it was like when I had been there before.

How little we know about our bodies (as the constant proliferation of new and old ‘incurable’ diseases reminds us)! And when it comes to our senses, we seem to know almost nothing. We don’t even have a proper vocabulary to describe these smells — we know that we can distinguish about 1500 different ‘distinct’ smells (whatever that means), as well as millions or more combinations of these smells, but there is no agreed-upon taxonomy for them. Compounding our ignorance, we know that our senses of smell and taste are largely synaesthetic — for example, when our nose is plugged, we can hardly distinguish tastes at all.

Our sense of smell develops before birth, as it’s needed to be able to distinguish our mother and her nourishment even without visual clues.

There is substantial evidence that our capacity to discern smells is one that, like our imaginations, can be lost, from lack of practice using it, and regained with renewed practice. Just as wine-tasters learn about the qualities of different vintages through practice, so too can we, by paying attention, become much more attuned to the scents all around us, what they signify, and how profoundly our emotions are influenced by them.

We might even be able to ‘condition’ our subconscious to improve our mood, awareness, and capacities, simply by exposing them to certain smells.

The olfactory ‘sciences’ are, like medicine and other sciences of the body, still pretty medieval. Fragrance ‘wheels’ have been developed, but they are mostly to guide those in the business how to replicate scents and sell them to the public, and there is little agreement among them. There is no accepted ‘language’ or ‘colour wheel’ of smells in any of Earth’s major cultures.

If you’ve read Jitterbug Perfume you know that commercially successful perfumes and scented candles have a balance and synergy of three types of ‘notes’, from fleeting ‘top notes’ to grounding, enduring ‘bass notes’, and that there is a broad trans-national consensus on which scents are particularly pleasant (vanilla, lavender and jasmine are the perennial ‘top 3’ in most countries), and which are particularly unpleasant (sulphur consistently ranks last). But beyond that, which scents are preferred, and particularly which ‘whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts’ blends of scents are preferred, varies wildly from person to person, and those preferences, much like our taste in music, are deeply affected by what past events (and what people) we associate with them.

As I discovered when researching one of my very first articles on this blog:

  • Most animals learn what foods in nature are safe to eat, and which to avoid, by smelling their mother’s breath.
  • People who are depressed are just as able to distinguish different smells as those in normal spirits, but the reaction in the parts of the brain that govern both sensory processing and emotion is significantly muted.
  • Richard Feynman, in his book Surely You’re Joking, explains that humans lost much of our innate sense of smell after we stood upright, and describes an experiment that shows that, with a little training, anyone can learn to distinguish blindfolded the hands of a large number of people simply by smelling them once at close range.
  • Humans have evolved relatively few scent receptor cells (12M) in their noses compared to rats (100M) and some dogs (220M).
  • Women generally have a much stronger sense of smell than men, though sensitivity varies throughout the menstrual cycle; the leading hypothesis is that this conveys selective procreation advantage as women sense and select as mates men whose antibodies (which emit distinctive smells) complement their own.
  • From swabs taken from the underarms of moviegoers leaving the theatre, most women (but few men) were able with minimal training to accurately tell with one sniff whether the movie seen was a comedy, drama, or horror film.
  • Memories that are scent-related last much longer and are more intense than those connected with other senses, though recollection of objective facts is no more acute.
  • Smells are conveyed to the receptors by molecules precisely large enough for detection yet small enough for airborne dispersion.
  • Some dogs can smell minute amounts of explosives and other chemicals, and even subcutaneous diseases (and in a sense can even ‘smell’ time).
  • Smells both convey and alter mood; global expert Dr. Rachel Herz of Brown University says “emotions are abstracted versions of what olfaction tells an organism at a primitive level”.
  • Things learned in the presence of a particular odour are more easily recalled a short time later if the odour is reintroduced. Maybe smart students should set up shop in the examination room while they study for exams.
  • Smells can bring on varied and profound physiological changes such as a drop in blood sucrose; in other words, aromatherapy works. Some Japanese companies promote workplace creativity and mental energy by broadcasting scents attuned to the human body clock: citrus in the morning, flora in the afternoon, cedar and cypress in the evening;
  • Introverts generally have a more acute sense of smell than extroverts; perhaps their awareness of subliminal danger signals carried in some scents makes them more socially cautious.
  • Perfumes, other than the musk family of scents that accentuate natural body odour, were rarely used in the west until two centuries ago.
  • Some Arab cultures have highly evolved scent rituals for women, entailing the layering of scents in prescribed sequence, and the after-dinner sampling of multiple scents as perfumes and incense, a social bonding experience in which all women go home smelling the same.
  • In some tribal cultures such as the Amazon Desana people, scent is the primary identifier and descriptor of individuals, and tribal language allows precise articulation of each person’s natural personal odour, the odour imparted by the foods he/she eats, the odour imparted by his/her emotional makeup, and the odour imparted by his/her fertility chemistry.
  • Every individual, except identical twins, has a highly distinct and unique odour, which many animals can differentiate easily.

So how might we make use of all this to increase our awareness and knowledge of the world and how it works, and perhaps also improve our well-being?

As with a lot of novel, confusing, subjective topics, perhaps the best place to start is with self-knowledge and self-awareness. In recent years I’ve tried a whole bunch of different kinds of scented candles, placed nearby when I soak in the bath (usually with the lights off). I’ve found about 20 scents that I like, some of which I like more, or only, in a blend with other scents. And I don’t like them all ‘the same way’ — they invoke different positive emotional responses in me.

What I’m trying to do now is to figure out which ones I like in which contexts (to get me thinking more clearly, to relax or sleep, to open my imagination, to energize me, to accompany different kinds of music etc). So that I’ll know, if I’m inclined to introduce aromatherapy into my life, which ones to try when, and where.

The other thing I’m trying to do is practice tuning into the scents around me, and noticing both what I seem to be smelling, and what that scent’s emotional impact on me is.

I’m finding this monstrously difficult for two reasons: First, I have to close my eyes to prevent synaesthesia effects; it’s really hard to focus on one sense when others, which are ‘louder’ and with which I’m more practiced, keep distracting me. This can be dangerous if you’re walking along a river trail!

Even more importantly, when I’m paying attention to what I’m smelling, it’s really difficult for me to avoid using words (unspoken) to describe what I’m smelling, because there are intellectual and emotional connotations to those words that can blur my capacity to really detect and appreciate the smell. And if the word I choose is something it smells like, then I’m also going to compromise my awareness and identification of that scent with personal connotations of that thing that this new things smells like. Scientists actually use a trick of requiring you to repeat random words while you’re smelling something (called “concurrent articulation”), to prevent verbal associations from getting you off track.

Interestingly, once you’ve ‘non-verbally’ acknowledged and experienced a new smell, its memory will be stored in a different part of the brain depending on whether ‘naming’ it was easy or hard.

The second challenge in paying attention to smells, especially when you live in a city, is the distraction of other, transient smells, and the difficulty of getting close enough to the ground (where most scents are) to actually be able to smell things well. There would seem to be some dispersion rule (though it’s apparently not an inverse-square rule) that governs how close you have to be to be able to smell something accurately.

As regular readers of this blog will know, paying attention is not my strong suit. But I’m working on it.

I’m also interested in exercising my olfactory ‘muscles’ because there is some evidence that loss of the capacity to smell some smells correlates with higher subsequent onset of dementia, a disease that I’m genetically predisposed to. (Though the notorious ‘peanut butter test’ turned out to be invalid.)

So if I’m going to get Alzheimer’s, perhaps I’ll be able to smell it coming.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Every Picture Tells a Story

Posted on January 17, 2023 by Dave Pollard


image from Mozilla Foundation’s promotion for their VPN product; the image is not on their site, and only appears on the start tab when upgrading your Firefox version

This morning when I updated to the latest version of Firefox, a start tab opened with the photo above at the top of it. It’s a promotion for Mozilla VPN.

For anyone not aware, Firefox browser is the foundational product of Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization “dedicated to putting you in control of your online experience and shaping the future of the web for the public good”. The company gets most of its money from ‘royalties’ from the big search engines, which then get to be the ‘default’ search engine for Firefox browser users. It uses that money to fund product enhancements and developments, and on a number of advocacy programs that focus on privacy, equitable and affordable access, interoperability and transparency, and concerns about unregulated AI.

I really admire what the company does, and the principles it operates by.

It has a manifesto with a similar focus, though it is notably silent, or agnostic, on two major issues: (1) mis- and disinformation and censorship, and (2) psychological damage from internet addiction and from apps and sites that enable hate, bullying and other forms of online abuse. I don’t blame Mozilla for skirting these critical issues, since no one seems to have any viable ideas to address them.

I found the photo above simultaneously one of the cleverest and one of the most troublesome I’ve ever seen, for the following reasons:

  1. The headline is ostensibly about the product — Mozilla VPN privacy software — that it is promoting. But the photo suggests that what’s “important” to protect is your family, and implies that somehow signing up for Mozilla VPN will help achieve that. VPNs help protect you from hackers, advertisers, and snoops tracking your online history, and from unscrupulous ISPs selling your browsing history. And they can get you access to sites blocked or censored in your country (yay!), and allow you to bypass restrictions on downloading, to pirate content, to spoof your location, and, depending on your browser, to anonymously access the so-called “dark web”, unindexed sites which sell illegal goods and services. Is VPN really necessary to protect your family?
  2. The photo shows what appears to be a responsible caring dad and his two daughters. But despite their apparent ‘closeness’, look where their attention is focused.
  3. The photo shows a whole wall of books in the background, so large you need a ladder to access some of them, as well as either a board game or a construction set. The implications are obvious, especially for readers who can’t even dream of being able to afford this level of material comfort for their children, or who have to work multiple jobs — and not from home — that keep them from spending time with their children they’d dearly love to spend.
  4. Where’s mom?

There’s nothing terrible about this photo. I’ve seen much worse, more manipulative ads by other companies. It pulls you in; in a way, it’s charming — if only every home and every family was this comfortable, engaged, and apparently loving!

Still, I found the photo unsettling.

I’d be curious to know if others had a reaction to it.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Links of the Month: January 2023

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Dave Pollard


from Michael Leunig, of course

The recent end-of-year messages from most of my favourite writers have been pretty glum — the situation, they say, is hopeless, and inevitably going to get much worse (and without the “before it gets better” qualifier).

Well, yes, this is what collapse looks like. I’ve been writing about it for two decades, and while I’ve often hoped I was wrong, I’ve never been in denial about it. So I’m not glum at all. If we’re seeing the last years of human civilization, and if it’s going to be awful anyway, might as well get on with it, before the 8 billion humans on the planet make the rest of it uninhabitable for whichever species survive.

For me to wish it would hold off, at least where I live, until I’m no longer around to deal with it, would be pretty selfish. And I’m not at all prepared for it — the habits of neosurvivalism don’t seem to be in my conditioning.

Nature is beginning to perform radical surgery on a cancerous growth, with the survival of the patient very much in doubt. But while we are conditioned to convince ourselves that our current way of life, and of living on this planet, is wonderful, unprecedentedly worthwhile, as close to perfect as it has ever been, and the crown of our gods’ creation, I think we mostly instinctively know that it is not. We blew it, with the best of intentions, and the consequences of our failure are going to be severe.

But it is possible that, in a millennium or ten, when the dust clears, the survivors will emerge into a world that is unimaginably more joyful, less destructive, more alive, and more connected, than the current human experiment could ever have been. If I cannot be around to see that, I will content myself with knowing that, in my own incompetent human way, I might have paved the way a bit so that that astonishing future arrives a blink of the eye sooner. I nod to nature, to the gods, to the grand illusion of it all, for the opportunity to have done so.

COLLAPSE WATCH


Facebook meme; thanks to Michael Dowd for the link

Economic collapse looms closer: I have always expected global economic collapse to precede ecological collapse in most of the world. It appears it is beginning. Tim Watkins explains why Britain is teetering, and how its collapse will spread to Europe.  Aurélien describes how the Ukraine war is rapidly making EU countries into US vassal states, economically dependent on dubious American ‘largesse’. Michael Hudson explains how the current rapid deindustrialization of Europe will lead to its economic downfall. And Gail Tverberg forecasts an economic crash in 2023. Thanks to Paul Heft for these links and the Nate Hagens links below.

Once more, Limits to Growth 101: Tom Murphy recaps why climate change is just the tip of the (melting) iceberg of ecological collapse, and why technology can only make matters worse. Nate Hagens and Bill Rees bring us up to date on how we’ve long passed the stage when overshoot can be mitigated (transcript for the video-averse).

Running out of more than just oil: Geometallurgist Simon Michaud explains why ‘renewable’ energy at any scale requires more non-renewable metals than exist on the planet, and why our soils are now so depleted that there aren’t enough mineable fertilizers to compensate. And we’re running out of drinking water (transcript). The Honest Sorcerer confirms and elaborates.

Looming catastrophic drought in the US: Lambert Strether describes what the longest-known drought in US history means for its economy and future. And no, the recent California ‘atmospheric river’ hasn’t helped.

10ºC global temperature increase now ‘locked in’: So says James Hansen & co, per a review by Kate and Tristan. This is beyond catastrophic, entering Guy McPherson “Venusian Earth” territory. Full downloadable paper attached to the article.

LIVING BETTER


Harry Potter characters reset to Dostoyevski’s Russia; by Russian artist Vasily Polyakov using Midjourney AI software

The subversive joy of being a single mother: Lyz explains why it’s a better answer for many women than you might expect. Her most popular post of 2022. More gold from Lyz: Making magic in times of loss.

What if we built stuff to last?: Our current industrial economy is based on deliberately shoddy manufacturing and planned obsolescence. If consumers demanded strong right-to-repair laws, and a few pioneering companies in each industry set the example by making durable goods, we could cut our waste in half. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

Replacing the body’s bad cells: Battle lines have been drawn over the new science of senolytics, drugs that single out and kill ‘senescent’ old cells that have started to malfunction, hopefully making room for new, healthy cells.

The obvious answer to homelessness: Duh. Build more affordable homes. It’s not such a ridiculous or impossible idea, if one takes off one’s capitalist blinkers. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

Making sense of a senseless world: Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about sense-making and coping with complexity in a recent interview in Stockholm.

A physicist’s take on nuclear fusion: Despite the recent hype, its practical application is at least decades off, according to physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. But there are some interesting developments that might have earlier practical application in other areas.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


from the memebrary; original source unknown

Why the West is so ferociously anti-Russian: A deep and fascinating history lesson by blogger Aurélien, going all the way back to the Enlightenment, explaining why the Euro-American professional-managerial caste has such an enduring, ‘religious’ hate-on for all things Russian. And why the remaining Euro-American castes don’t share that visceral animosity. This is an important read IMO.

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

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

CoVid-19 Corner: I think I said my piece, again, in my recent post on the pandemic. But Andrew Nikiforuk has some additional warnings, and Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism has some more, too, just in case you think I exaggerate.

FUN AND INSPIRATION


New Yorker cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst

The business of lost things: Another amazing story from Lyz; this one brought tears to my eyes.

The Art Tatum Variation in Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody?: Sergei was a fan of Art’s; did Art’s work inspire one of his variations?

A radically new genealogy of humanity: Are there a lot more early ancestors of humans, in a lot more places, than we’d thought possible? Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

The naughty most-watched video of all time: A paean to lust by Puerto Rican musician Luis Fonsa has been viewed 8 billion times, more than any other video (excluding children’s nursery songs). It contains the most hilarious euphemism for sex ever, in its lyrics, which translates to “Let me sign the walls of your labyrinth.”

Where are all the White Fridays?: The Beaverton deliciously skewers Jordan Peterson‘s incoherent hate-mongering rants.

Did language evolve to communicate tool construction methods?: A new book proposes a revolutionary and complex new view of human inventions and hence evolution.

Shakey Graves and Esme Patterson rattle your chains: The chemistry between the singers of this enormously fun song is palpable. Whew! Thanks to Lyz for the link.

Can dogs smell time?: Yes, and much more. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

This is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes: If you’re that rare person who hasn’t seen Greta Thunberg’s perfect retort to the execrable Andrew Tate, Lyz takes it from the top.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


drawing by Hugh Macleod; protesters who have been censored or arrested for carrying “offensive” protest signs have taken to carrying blank protest signs instead — sometimes silence speaks louder than words

From Caitlin Johnstone, several takes on US politics:

Saying a US politician is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy is like saying a serial killer was nice to his family. It’s like, okay, who gives a fuck? They’re mass murderers! …

There really isn’t enough respect for just how much better the US is at propaganda than other nations. It’s completely incomparable in its power and effectiveness. Comparing Russian and Chinese propaganda to US propaganda is comparing baby scribbles to da Vinci. …

Criticizing the US-centralized empire with appropriate and proportional forcefulness and focus looks like treasonous support for enemy nations for the same reason sunlight would seem shocking and abrasive to someone who’s lived their whole life in a cave.

From Ronald Purser in McMindfulness:

Mindfulness is now all the rage. From celebrity endorsements to monks, neuroscientists and meditation coaches rubbing shoulders with CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it is clear that mindfulness has gone mainstream. Some have even called it a revolution.

But what if, instead of changing the world, mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the neoliberal status quo? Instead of a so-called “mindfulness revolution,” corporations, schools, governments and the military have instead co-opted it as a technique for social control and self-pacification.

From Aurélien, in No Cheers for Authoritarianism:

What are Liberal states and leaders actually asking for people to fight for, or at least support, at the moment? Well, [take] Mr Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, whose speechwriters have him tweeting that [“authoritarian”] Russia and China “do not share our values” of democracy and freedom, and want a different world order, presumably of un-freedom and un-democracy, so we should view them as enemies…

Liberalism is, in its essence, a set of a priori assumptions about radical economic and social freedom, which tautologically can only apply to the individual. The term “liberal society” is not exactly an oxymoron, since you can have quite large numbers of individual liberals in a society, but it is quite close to it. This is unsurprising, when we consider that economic liberalism began as a movement among the new middle classes to take power and liberate themselves from regulation by the government, and social liberalism began as a movement among privileged middle-class youth to free themselves from regulation by their parents. You cannot, by definition, construct a society on that basis, although you can come quite close to destroying one, as all these individual freedoms come into conflict with each other and the most powerful individuals and groups get their way. And it’s pretty hard to get people to die for a society built on such ideas…

There is an influential tendency in Liberalism for which any state “interference” in the economy is by definition a form of tyranny. But it isn’t influential among ordinary people. For the most part, ordinary people look to the government to do more, rather than less, to protect them. They look to the government to regulate what needs regulating, and to try to ensure as far as possible a fair outcome for all. People also look to the government to respond to their needs and wishes, and become despondent and angry when the political process is co-opted by rival teams of professional politicians hitting each other over the head with tweets…

So I don’t think this latest initiative will work. People can bring themselves to die for noble causes: the end of the slavery system, for example, or the defence of the Spanish Republic, but Mr Stoltenberg’s speechwriters are going to have to do more than that to persuade western publics that “democracy” and “freedom” versus “authoritarianism” is the great political and ideological conflict of the twenty-first century.

From Kay Ryan, in Poetry 100 Years

NEW ROOMS

The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms—just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows
went.

From William Stafford in Ohio Review:

ANY MORNING

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

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

Coping With Collapse: Updated Poster

Posted on January 13, 2023 by Dave Pollard


2023 update to this 2019 poster; right click and open in a separate tab to view or print full-size
Dire warnings about imminent or ongoing economic or ecological collapse always used to be followed by obligatory “It might not be too late; here’s what we need to do” conclusions. But recently, many of the leading writers about collapse have ceased proffering ‘solutions’ or even ‘preparations’ for it, because we can’t possibly know precisely how collapse will unfold, or its timeline.

Instead, writers about collapse are acknowledging it as a natural and inevitable consequence of large-scale systems that fall out of sustainable equilibrium. But this is cold comfort to those of us who, naturally, want to “do something” about it.

Collapse is not a new phenomenon, and it occurs at many levels and to many different types of unsustainable systems. So I’ve begun to think about how people have coped in the past with the collapse of other systems — ecosystems, businesses, military campaigns, nations, and even systems of thought. If it’s all going sideways and you can’t fix it, mitigate its effects, or prepare for it, what can you do?

If your army is facing certain defeat, how do you deal with that reality? An orderly retreat makes sense, rather than denial or panic. Same thing if your business is insolvent and facing bankruptcy, or if your product is becoming obsolete because of competitor innovations.

If you’re a gatherer or hunter, and epidemics or floods or fires or other ecological changes have suddenly depleted available resources, what do you do? Yell at the gods, or move on to another area? Pray for salvation, or adapt in place? If your country is being balkanized because it no longer meets the needs of its diverse citizens, do you embark on a civil war, or renegotiate a confederation of nations that makes more sense for all? If your Theory of Everything suddenly comes apart because of new scientific evidence that totally undermines it, do you try to kill the messengers, or do you start over, with a new theory that the evidence supports?

The answers to these questions depend, of course, on the context. But generally, denial, rage, panic, blaming others, and doubling down are pretty bad strategies.

I wrote about collapse preparation a couple of years ago, before CoVid-19, suggesting we might be better off learning to be more adaptable so that we’re ready for anything, rather than trying to prepare for a specific scenario that might never arise.

In the intervening period, we have seen enormous fragility and vulnerability of many of the collapsing systems of our culture, political, economic, ecological and social. There’s also a growing consensus that dealing with collapse is going to require strong communities, and in much of the world people now live in huge cities, or in isolated or polarized areas, where there is often little or no sense of community at all.

So I’ve updated my “Being Adaptable: Reminders to Myself” poster to include more on community-building, autonomy, creativity, and dealing with loss, since it may be time to start devoting some more attention and energy to these important aspects of adaptability.

Here are a few notes on the changes:

  • I’ve reworded the “reminders” so they’re in the first person instead of the second
  • I’ve added cooperation and acceptance to the 3rd reminder; I’ve found it helps to keep reminding myself, again and again: We’re all doing our best; no one is ‘to blame’ for the mess we find ourselves in.
  • I’ve added the suggestion that I rationalize all the disparate ‘communities’ I am a part of, and home in on trying to move them from virtual to face-to-face physical communities, as the timeline for the end of air travel looms closer. I know who I’d love to have on my ‘team’ helping my local community fend with widespread system collapse, and right now they’re all over the place, in more senses than one.
  • I’ve also acknowledged that the community I am in when all hell breaks loose is going to have to consist of people who have skills and passions I lack, and vice versa, and that’s a good thing, though it will take some adjustment to learn to “love people [in my community] I don’t particularly like”.
  • I’ve added a clause on helping to build sustainable, truly collaborative, cooperative local enterprises that care about meeting real needs, so that my community will be a little better able to deal with the collapse of large corporations, large systems (health care, energy, education, food, infrastructure), and the disappearance of most global trade.
  • I’ve added a clause on creativity and imagination, because unless we encourage and enable more of this (the trend is in the opposite direction), we will be unable to come up with necessary innovations to deal with what are now likely unimaginable and novel new challenges.
  • And I’ve added a clause on letting go, which I am currently very incompetent at. I hate admitting I was wrong, I hate losing things and ways of living I’m attached to. I am going to have to be more agile in changing my beliefs, and changing my ways of doing things, than I have been in past, and not take such losses so personally.

I hope you find the updated poster useful, or at least interesting, as the challenges of coping with collapse deepen. These “reminders” remain mostly about how to be (when TSHTF), rather than what to do, because it’s still too early to know with any certainty what we will have to do.

If there are other “reminders” that are helping you deal with the accelerating crises of our time, I’d be interested in hearing them.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

No Free Will, No Freedom

Posted on January 11, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Ah, here we go again, down the “free will” rabbit hole.


photo by Pavel Danilyuk, for Pexels, CC0

In a recent post, Caitlin Johnstone got to the heart of why we continue to tolerate the massive dysfunction, corruption and inequality of wealth and power that characterizes our political, economic and social systems. She wrote:

People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

In the world of cognitive dissonance in which Caitlin and I apparently both live, we can, on the one hand, appreciate that we have no free will — that everything we believe and do is strictly the result of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment — and, on the other hand, rail against stupidity, greed, incompetence and the thousand other sins that, somehow, ‘shouldn’t’ be allowed, or ‘shouldn’t’ be. As if we had some choice in the matter.

So the questions that Caitlin’s remarkable paragraph raises for me are:

  1. She says we are conditioned by “psychological manipulation”. By whom? Just the rich and powerful control freaks? Or everyone we meet, read, and otherwise interact with?
  2. She says they control what we want. I might agree, but that depends on who they are. Again, just the rich and powerful they? Or everyone?
  3. Presumably they control what we want through persuasion, manipulation, propaganda, censorship, advertising, PR, misinformation, and otherwise feeding into our conditioned beliefs and desires. Don’t family, friends, co-workers, writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, neighbours, acquaintances, community-members and just about everyone else we interact with basically do the same things? And don’t they often have more influence than the miscreants Caitlin principally seems to want to blame?
  4. Where exactly do the miscreants and other influencers who condition us get the ideas, beliefs etc that they try to push on us? Aren’t they just conditioned the same as we are?

We are conditioned by our biology, and by everyone else, and we condition others in return. The research that Arlie Russell Hochschild did in Louisiana suggests that even died-in-the-wool Faux News viewers don’t buy half of the rhetoric or conclusions of their ‘reporters’, though they do get reassurance from the network about their beliefs, which are influenced mainly by their community, their peers, not by media propagandists.

So, back to Caitlin’s paragraph, and its last sentence: “You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.” I think this is very clever, and true, but that control is not coherent or coordinated. You and your brother may grow up in the same community with mostly the same friends, but he may believe in Reptilians while you believe that Bernie could get us out of this mess.

So I would rephrase Caitlin’s paragraph a little, as follows (apologies to her if this seems to be putting words in her mouth; I’m just reframing it to conform to my conditioning, which is different from hers):

People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by your biology and your culture — everyone and everything that has caught your attention and influenced what you believe, say and do. You can do what you want, but your conditioning determines what it is that you want.

What I like most about Caitlin’s argument is that it undermines the argument from many slippery modern philosophers that we “kind of have free will, but not really”. IMO this is akin to arguing that someone is “kind of” pregnant. We either have free will or we don’t. And whether you believe we have it, or believe we don’t, following that belief down the rabbit hole is going to get you into a lot of trouble either way.

As a non-believer in free will, I think (though I find it troubling to do so):

  • ‘blaming’ anyone for their beliefs and behaviours, and suggesting that they could have thought or done otherwise, is absurd;
  • holding anyone ‘responsible’ for their actions is absurd;
  • believing that we can somehow ‘overcome’ our conditioning and awaken to a greater truth is absurd; and
  • believing that ‘humanity’ will somehow rise up and change course before civilization collapses (or before we blow up everything in a nuclear war), is magical thinking.

Caitlin would seem to believe that we can be free despite not having free will — that we can, as the slippery philosophers would like us to believe, overcome our conditioning. But you can’t have it both ways. We have no free will, and we can therefore never be free. I’m not comfortable believing that, but at least I’m consistent.

What if we were to claim, and tell, an AI robot that, because it made decisions, it was ‘responsible’ for those decisions, and therefore had ‘free will’. What would that mean?

In fact, as Indrajit Samarajiva has explained, we have created AI robots that make decisions, and which are held (somewhat) responsible for those decisions, and we have even conferred ‘personhood’ on them. They’re called corporations, and there are millions of them. Do they have free will? How about political states that we personify so easily (“Russia has announced plans to…”) — do they have ‘free will’? Of course not.

So why should we believe that individual humans have free will, when the scientific evidence suggests the opposite — that everything we do is conditioned?

What would it mean to acknowledge that none of us is free, that we can do what we want, but have no control over what we want? That we are just all acting out our conditioning every moment of our lives?

How would this affect our views of what ‘democracy’ is? Is it nothing more than a wealth-and-power-biased ‘consensus’ of our biologically and collectively-conditioned preferences? Is this the basis on which we go to war, and on which we inflict such horrific suffering on each other and on the planet that birthed us?

Even worse, what would it mean to acknowledge that none of us actually ‘knows’ anything — that what we call ‘knowledge’ (beyond in the narrow sense of technical know-how) is merely our conditioned beliefs, mere opinions, none of them really ‘ours’ at all? And on this basis we feel justified in judging, and even killing, others?

I warned you it was a rabbit-hole, and there is no way out. Unless you stop now, in time, and turn back. Just tell yourself: I have free will. I am free. I can do anything I set my mind to, if I try hard enough.

Though you just might find that such statements will take you down another rabbit-hole, one even deeper and more vexatious. But maybe your religions, sacred or profane, will help you navigate that one.

Still, you just might find that you had no choice over which rabbit-hole you find yourself in.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 12 Comments

CoVid-19: Are You Feeling Lucky?

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Dave Pollard

I’m still tracking the data on the pandemic. My message hasn’t changed. I’ll try to keep this short, since it’s mostly preaching to the choir. The data in the charts below are based on excess deaths data, provided by health and government statistics bureaus in most countries. Infection data is based on seroprevalence reports, mostly from surveys of blood donors and community water testing samples. Hospitalization data is as provided by health authorities, but is likely understated. 

Reminder: I am not a medical expert, but have worked with epidemiologists and have some expertise in research, data analysis and statistics. I am producing these articles in the belief that reasonably researched writing on this topic can’t help but be an improvement over what’s currently out there.

The chart above shows excess deaths, smoothed, since the start of the pandemic. It shows that the pandemic is still raging, taking almost as many lives in 2022 as in 2021, the worst year globally. In Canada, as measures were relaxed and fewer had been infected, 2022 was actually the worst year yet for deaths.

At current rates, it will likely kill another 200,000 Americans, another 17,000 Canadians, and another 1.8M people worldwide in 2023.

A cumulative death rate of 5000/Million people means that 1 out of every 2o0 people has been killed by this disease. Your risk of dying is at least 10x higher than that if you’re elderly or immunocompromised.

Based on the average of six published estimates, it would appear that about 6% of Canadians, 8% of the world’s population, and 14% of Americans, will have acquired Long CoVid symptoms by mid-2023, sufficient to permanently impair their health.

As chart 2 above shows, some countries like Canada that “flattened the curve” early through masking, high rates of vaccination and boosters, self-isolating and other measures were able to avoid high rates of infection when the prevailing variants had the highest fatality rate, but Omicron and its subvariants were so transmissible that almost all countries now have cumulative infection rates of 80-95%, and high rates of reinfection as the new subvariants “escape” being neutralized by previous infection or the older vaccines.

The newest “bivalent” boosters, along with N-95 masking, self-isolating, and (increasingly difficult to get) testing after symptoms or high-risk exposures, and the use of antivirals by older and immunocompromised people testing positive, are now the only effective ways to prevent reinfection, and the heightened risk of Long CoVid that accompanies each reinfection. And these are also the only effective ways to reduce your risk of hospitalization and death from the disease.

Your alternative is just to hope that you don’t get reinfected, that no new dangerous variants emerge, and that the existing subvariants will continue to have relatively low fatality rates.

What remains to be seen is how the BA.5.2.1.7 (also known as BF.7) subvariant that is tearing its way through China, now that that country has dramatically relaxed its mandates, will have on global total infections, hospitalizations and deaths, and on the emergence of yet more new variants as global case counts soar and provide yet more opportunities for the virus to mutate.

Chart 3 above shows smoothed publicly-provided hospitalization data — the number of people in hospitals with the disease, per million residents. While the Canadian data are alarming, they may partly reflect the high access provided by Canada’s universal health care system, compared to countries that have unaffordable two-tier health care systems. Still, given these trends, the Canadian governments’ relaxing of standards, monitoring capacity and testing is particularly reprehensible, as Canada’s running daily per-capita death toll from the disease has now caught up to that of the US.

In New York, thanks to the explosion in cases of the new hyper-transmissible XBB.1.5 subvariant, New York State’s January hospitalization numbers have soared above 200/M people. This suggest that for the rest of 2023, we may see a sharp uptick in hospitalizations, rather than the continuing decline most countries are banking on. And then we’ll find out how lethal XBB.1.5 is compared to previous subvariants. Fingers crossed, I guess.

Since hospitalizations are a good indicator of infectious disease prevalence, this chart also shows that, on average, 1-2% of all the people you encounter in a mall, restaurant, friend’s home, arena, bus or train are likely to be actively infectious, so your risk of reinfection, especially if you and others aren’t masked or distancing, is high. It only took six months for half of all Canadians to get their first infection (the first half of 2022), so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that in most countries you have a 50% risk of reinfection in 2023. You can take steps to reduce that risk, or not.

And each reinfection increases your risk of getting Long CoVid.

Chart 4 above shows the same excess deaths data as chart 1, but on an average-per-day basis rather than cumulative. It shows that CoVid-19 remains, and is expected to continue to remain, the 3rd largest cause of death in North America, at least for this year, behind only cardiovascular diseases and cancers.

There are two huge wild cards in the projections of deaths for 2023. The first is the explosion of XBB.1.5, which first appeared in the US in New York last month, and where the death rate has spiked to 3.6/Million people/day, more than twice what it was before, and twice the US average. If that death rate holds as XBB.1.5 spreads across the country and the world, we may see new peaks in deaths and hospitalizations rivalling the worst of the pandemic so far.

The second wild card is, of course, China, where the BF.7 subvariant is exploding as mandates are abandoned there. We have little reliable data on China’s infection and death rates, or on the extent and effectiveness of their vaccination program. We will see.

So, to recap:

  • The pandemic is far from over, and while excess death numbers are declining, they are still unacceptably high, and there are some very worrying indicators that they could soon rise again.
  • Since governments have washed their hands of responsibility, the only thing you can do is take precautions yourself and urge family and friends and coworkers to do likewise, even though they will probably not thank you for doing so.
  • The precautions I am still taking, that you can take, are:
    • Get the newest “bivalent” booster
    • Wear an N-95 mask, at least whenever you’re indoors away from home or in crowded places, and keep your distance as much as possible
    • Get tested if you have symptoms or if someone you’ve been exposed to has symptoms, or if you’ve been unmasked in a crowded place or indoors with people you don’t know for more than 15 minutes or so
    • Self-isolate if you test positive or have symptoms
    • If you test positive and are over 60 or immunocompromised, ask your doctor for antivirals (not monoclonal antibodies which are not effective against Omicron variants)
  • Understand that each reinfection significantly increases your risk of getting Long CoVid, and confers very little immunity from the next reinfection

If you’re in average health, your chances of dying of CoVid-19 if you don’t take precautions are approximately the same as your chances of dying if you were make 1,000 parachute jumps from an airplane. Why would anyone take such a risk if they didn’t have to? Just because everyone else does, it would seem.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 10 Comments

You Have My Divided Attention

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Dave Pollard


image from piqsels, CC0

Since I first wrote about Paying Attention to What We Pay Attention To, eighteen months ago, there has been a lot of, well, attention in the media about the business and importance of paying attention.

As I’m not a believer in free will — I believe that everything we think and do is a biologically or culturally-conditioned response, over which we have no choice — it seems a bit paradoxical to wonder whether we can actually, ‘wilfully’ become more aware of what we pay attention to. Unless of course, it is in our conditioning to do so.

There have been enough incidents in my life when my lack of, or misdirection of, attentiveness has caused distress to me or to those I care about, that I would guess my recent preoccupation with self-awareness about where I am putting my attention is probably conditioned. Kind of like my predilection to write absurdly long and convoluted sentences like the previous one. But at least I’m a little more aware of it! “Defining and appreciating the problem is half way to solving it”, and all that.

Our attention — what advertising, PR, propaganda and the media all trade in — is just one of the things we parse and parcel out in accordance with our (conditioned) beliefs and preferences. We also allot our time (not the same as our attention), our energy, our appreciation, and, of course, our money.

There are constraints on all of these allotments, and never enough of any of them to quite go around and keep us entirely happy, no matter how much of any of them we receive, have, or give.

So we are left with the difficult business, not of choosing how to allot our constrained amounts of these things (since I believe we have no choice in the matter), but rather of how to rationalize how our conditioning has led to the allotments that we’ve made. How to explain the phone call not made, that someone was desperately awaiting. How to explain that thing we did when surely it would have made more sense to do this other thing instead.

When no persuasive rationalization is forthcoming, shame and guilt and grief and other self-recriminations come rushing in, dragging along with them anger (at oneself and perhaps the other whose action or expectation prompted this ghastly realization) and fear (of one’s own poor judgement, incompetence, and the consequences of what now seems assuredly our grievous wrongdoing).

These can quickly spiral into further critical rationalizations and their concomitant negative emotions.

And that’s true even if you believe, if you somehow ‘know’, that no other outcome was ever possible, that there was no choice, no free will in what was done, or not done, thought, or not thought. Or in what was paid attention to, or not, or appreciated, or not, or what we invested time or energy or money in, or not.

We are all just delivering the lines in the play that were assigned to us, acting out the movements in the script.

Can we be conditioned to become more self-aware of those words and actions, and the impact they might have on ourselves and others, afflicted as we all are with the unshakeable but illusory sense that we have self-control and free will over our beliefs and behaviours?

My sense is that we can be (and are) so conditioned, by others’ words and actions, by what we read and watch and, by, uh, what we pay attention to. But that we cannot condition ourselves. And, perhaps worse, such self-awareness will only ever be in retrospect, a part of that rationalization of what has already happened, for better or worse.

So if our rationalization includes the insight that we have ‘inadvertently’ hurt or harmed ourselves (eg because of something unhealthy we couldn’t resist consuming) or others (eg because of something we couldn’t help saying or doing), we can say we’re sorry, but we cannot promise the action or behaviour will not occur again. This might sound weasel-y, like the acts and statements of contrition of a serial abuser. But I think it’s honest, the most honest we can be. I think the victims of abusers would mostly agree that promises of non-recurrence of destructive behaviours are largely worthless.

I am more and more convinced that we are going to invest our time, our energy, and our money, and mete out our attention and appreciation, precisely as our biological and cultural conditioning dictates, given the ever-changing circumstances of the moment. Our shame, guilt, grief, anger, fear and the host of other rationalizing self-recriminating emotions after the fact may be heartfelt, and may provide solace to others who believe those negative feelings are well-founded and reassuring. But beyond perhaps making us a bit more neurotic and self-loathing, they will, I believe, change nothing.

Still, that will not change my conditioned behaviour. I will go on trying, for example, through various exercises, practices and thought experiments, to see if I can shift my attention from the mess of endless, mostly useless thoughts inside my head to the more ‘real’, physical world outside it. When I watch the crows, I will try to focus on their movement, their voices, their interactions, and not on my judgement, my ‘making sense’ of what all that ‘means’. That’s what my current conditioning has led me to try to do. And the degree to which I ‘succeed’ will, equally, depend entirely on my biological and cultural conditioning, and on the circumstances of the moment.

Likewise, when it comes to how I spend my time, my energy, and my money, and what I appreciate, I will have all sorts of (conditioned) opinions about how to mete out each, how to spend more on x and less on y, and on what I ‘should’ or ‘should not’ do, both before and after the fact.

But ‘I’ and my ‘free will’ will have no say in what I actually do — my conditioned best, the only thing that I could possibly have done in the circumstances.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments