how to save the world

my synopsis of the some of the elements that might comprise one’s Ikigai; any misunderstandings about ikigai here are mine

I‘ve written before about the ancient Japanese concept and philosophy of ikigai. Contrary to business consultants’ perverse and simplistic misappropriation of the concept, ikigai has absolutely nothing to do with “the work you’re meant to do”, or “finding your purpose”, or in fact about anything aspirational.

It is, rather, about the lifelong discovery, appreciation and acceptance of who you really are, now, authentically, as gauged by what gives you joy, what you care about, and what is in your true nature.

I listed what I currently consider to be my personal ikigai in my first post on the subject. Who I am, really, is a lost, scared, bewildered, and rather lazy human who has been fortunate enough to be able to engage, more and more, in quiet, creative, playful and hedonistic activities in beautiful, peaceful places, alone or with small groups of intelligent, curious, gentle people.

That might seem rather self-centred, and not of much service to the rest of the world, but my younger-days aspirations to make the world a better place seem to have dissipated. I am content, even driven, these days, to chronicle the accelerating collapse of our civilization and the ruin it is invoking on our planet, and speculate on how and why that has come to be. Perhaps I may yet find some activity that will reengage my energies and reconnect me to the more-than-human world from which I have become untethered. Something worth dying for, even. It’s not unimaginable.

My sense from studying indigenous and non-human cultures is that almost all creatures, including our bonobo cousins and even the first humans, have always intuitively sought to live in balance with the rest of life on earth. That of course makes Darwinian sense, and our disconnection from the more-than-human world might explain why the human species no longer attempts to live in such balance, and has as a result unwittingly precipitated the sixth great extinction of life on our planet.

What, I wondered, might our collective ikigai be, as a species, and as members of tribes, communities and federations?

I concluded that our ikigai wouldn’t include ‘being in love’, nationalism, or acquiring stuff. These are things that wild creatures don’t care about, and that’s not because they’re insensate or less present in the world than we are. Our human preoccupation with ‘personal’ love, with country, and with our possessions is a sign, I think, of our mental illness, our Civilization Disease. These are preoccupations born of disconnection and of fear.

To try to figure out what our collective human ikigai might be if we were somehow freed of Civilization Disease, I have been looking at some studies of non-human societies, and asking myself:

• What is it that wild creatures most love about being alive and about ‘getting up’ each day? What brings them joy, what do they collectively care about?
• When, and where, and doing what, are they happiest? What is their true nature, and what do they pay attention to?
• How do they somehow sense that their lives are part of, and at least partly in service to, some greater whole?

The dogs and cats I have known, and the birds that I’ve studied, seem to spend much of their lives (at least when they’re not under stress) in one of two states: equanimity, and, when there’s something new and interesting in their purview, excitement.

In times of equanimity they sleep, groom themselves and each other, and just hang out together. They seem very happy “doing nothing” except noticing, socializing, and (I would guess) appreciating and accepting just being a part of everything that is. They seem to see the world with a sense of endless wonder.

In moments of excitement they play, they explore, and they tend their young and others in their ‘tribe’. They seem to enjoy doing these things, too, though the tending of their young can clearly be exhausting. Even finding food, except in the rare and stressful times and places of scarcity, seems pleasurable, not ‘work’ as we would describe it.

In short, one might say, the ikigai of a cat is to be a cat, and the collective ikigai of a flock of birds is to do those equanimous and excited (and occasionally stressful) things that flocks of birds do together, like gathering noisily in staging areas every evening and flying together to an overnight roost of thousands of their kind, for no other apparent reason than the sheer social joy of doing it.

My sense is that our modern human ‘civilized’ lives are so filled with stress and unnecessary scarcity that we can hardly relate to such a way of just being. We’ve almost never, at least since infancy or early childhood, had the opportunity to just be, moving between states of observant equanimity and curious excitement.

bonobo photo from wikimedia by Nick Hobgood, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Yet that is, I think, our essential nature. We are not so different from crows. We are not (biologically) meant to live this way, in lives of constant stress and struggle, doing ‘work’ for other people, hoping that tomorrow will be better or at least not worse. We are not meant (biologically) to live surrounded by people we don’t know or trust, crowded together and clueless about how to tend for ourselves, and hence dependent on others far away to provide us with we what we need (if we can even ‘afford’ it). We are not meant (biologically) to struggle to find purpose in, and meaning to, our lives, or to live much of our lives suffering from illnesses caused by chronic stress and poor diets.

And we are not (biologically) meant to wreak such cancer-like havoc on the rest of life on earth, and on our ecosystems. “Survival of the fittest” does not mean survival of the strongest and most ruthless, it means survival of those who best fit within the ecosystems they are a part of and co-evolve with. How and why our species lost the essential connectedness with the rest of life on earth that informs that ‘fit-ness’, is a subject that never ceases to fascinate me. How could such a seemingly intelligent species become such a plague upon the planet? I have blamed the evolution, in humans, of the idea of a separate, vulnerable self for the malaise of Civilization Disease, but I’m not entirely happy with this explanation.

Wolfi Landstreicher, in a quote I have used often on this blog, says that our civilized, self-domesticated way of being is unnatural and abhorrent:

In a very general way, we know what we want. We want to live as wild, free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up with this misery? We want to make this world into a place where our desires can be immediately realized, not just sporadically, but normally. We want to re-eroticize our lives. We want to live not in a dead world of resources, but in a living world of free wild lovers. We need to start exploring the extent to which we are capable of living these dreams in the present without isolating ourselves. This will give us a clearer understanding of the domination of civilization over our lives, an understanding which will allow us to fight domestication more intensely and so expand the extent to which we can live wildly.

I don’t share Wolfi’s optimism that rediscovering our natural way of being is as simple as putting our minds to it, but I think his diagnosis is pretty accurate. He is talking about living the way bonobos and crows and other wild creatures now live and have always lived. Why should this be so impossible for our species?

Part of me wants to accept our fucked-up human situation with its endemic Civilization Disease and disastrous trajectory as the only thing that could have happened with a species as strange and terrible (but also so ordinary) as ours. Its collective ikigai might be something like:

We care, to the point of preoccupation, about our own happiness and ‘fulfillment’, and, to a lesser extent, that of those we love and erroneously think we know. We take pleasure in entertainments that distract us from the reality of our imprisoned, tragic, domesticated, disconnected lives. Our ‘tribe’, the group we feel we belong with, consists of those who give us attention, appreciation and reassurance, and who confirm what we believe, which is what we want to believe whether or not it is true. Our true nature is to be obsessively protective of our selves and those we love, and to be often consumed with anxiety, shame, guilt, jealousy, and other reactive emotions that reflect our regrets about the past, our judgements about the present, and our fears about the future, none of which are actually warranted.

Pretty grim, huh? This is, I think, what Civilization Disease has wrought in us, and how it’s damaged us and made us all mentally ill. Still, I can understand how this has happened and how it’s made us, sadly, who we are. It’s a tragic story, but one that instils in me some compassion. This is a diagnosis of a species dying of a terminal illness, after all. We can at least offer the patient hospice.

But another part of me wants to see through our disease to humankind as it was before we went astray. What might its collective ikigai be? Maybe something like this:

We love to hang out with our tribe-mates, playing, joking, taking in this astonishingly beautiful world with a sense of curiosity and unceasing wonder. We take pleasure in exploring the unfamiliar, in learning and showing new things. We love to create things and appreciate others’ creations. We look after each other, especially the young. We are awed by, and respectful of, everything. We are amazed that everything we need to thrive is right here, in this world of seeming abundance, and somehow we are instinctively able to do just what is needed.

Yes, this could be the ikigai of bonobos, of cats and dogs and crows and most wild creatures.

But it also might be our collective ikigai, just forgotten and muddled with the onset of disease. Perhaps we have just forgotten who we really are. And perhaps, after collapse, those few humans that are left, inspired to start again, will remember.

Despite what you may have been led to believe, turnout in most western nations’ elections hasn’t actually changed significantly over the past fifty years. And while young people are less likely to vote, they say that’s about scheduling conflicts with school and work, not about lack of interest. In fact, older voters are the cohort most likely to say they don’t think it makes a difference who wins their country’s elections. But they vote in larger numbers anyway.

My friend John Whiting recently sent me a note saying:

More and more countries are dispensing with the superfluous Changing of the Governments.

I take that to mean that when political, economic, social and other systems have become so dysfunctional and sclerotic that they’ve ceased doing anything for citizens, and the citizens have “tried” both the government of the day and “the loyal opposition” and found no significant difference between them, they start to find elections, and the entire exercise of ‘democracy’, superfluous.

I’m one of those old geezers who votes steadfastly in every election despite believing that it makes no significant difference which party wins, other than who will be designated ‘enemies of the state’, and which lobbyists and party faithful will be rewarded with kickbacks, subsidies, and plum civil service jobs after the election.

Of course, the rhetoric of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties is different. They blather about their different “values”, and their group Cabinet photos depict different levels of diversity. But their actions are, with the exceptions noted above, substantially indistinguishable. The system is in charge, running on its own momentum and inertia. Which cogs actually operate and oil the machine doesn’t affect what the machine does.

I have lamented the near-impossibility of changing large, complex systems in past. I have also written that the “system” actually doesn’t exist — it’s a mental construct, an invention to “make sense” of what seems to be happening in a particular domain.

What does it mean to say that something that doesn’t actually exist is effectively running our civilization over a cliff?

It means that the combined actions of 7.9B people, each doing their best in the context of the ever-changing circumstances of each moment, and each of whom are entirely biologically and culturally conditioned and not in ‘individual’ control of their decisions and actions at all, determine the state and trajectory of human civilization.

We are predisposed to do everything we do, including whether and how we vote. Again, that’s not to say everything’s predestined, predictable, or preordained — the circumstances of the moment enormously affect what we do, and they are utterly unpredictable and beyond our control.

This isn’t defeatist or nihilistic. It’s actually pretty amazing how our rudderless civilization has evolved and what it’s come up with despite no one being in the driver’s seat.

As it becomes more and more evident that it doesn’t matter whether we vote for the Tweedledum or Tweedledee party, this will not necessarily affect voter turnout, at least in the short run. Most of us, I suspect, are now well conditioned to vote against the party or candidate that we find most repulsive, and turnout seems to reflect the degree of repulsiveness of the most repulsive party or candidate. Though, as we get conditioned to more or less repulsiveness in the candidates, that trend will tend to even out as well.

At some point, what is likely to happen is that the party in power will

1. restrict who you can vote for in the next election,
2. enact laws enabling it to stay in power longer or ‘forever’, and/or
3. restrict what governments can do, and hence ‘privatize’ the real power so it’s not subject to the vagaries of elections.

This is happening, more or less blatantly, everywhere. Examples of (i) are: the Democratic Party’s squelching of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, twice; and the first-past-the-post system, which largely precludes “third” (non-Tweedle) parties from winning elections.

Examples of (ii) are gerrymandering, the ending of term limits, and the usual forms of government-in-power propaganda. Examples of (iii) are everywhere, as governments of the day sell off public properties cheap to their donors and ‘friends’, privatize government services to other ‘friends’, and completely deregulate the private sector.

Eventually, we will be conditioned to shrug off the fact that there are no elections anymore — that, to use John’s words, our countries have decided to “dispense with the superfluous Changing of the Governments”. All it took was a quiet, backroom handshake between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And what difference did it make?

We’ve been conditioned, in most western nations anyway, to believe that elections are essential to democracy and good government. And that the only alternative to the election of ‘representatives’ to make and manage laws, is tyrannical and self-serving oligarchies.

But there are many alternatives to obtain information and consensus of citizens about what laws to pass and how to enforce them. One alternative is Citizens’ Assemblies, where groups of citizens are selected at random to learn about particular issues and recommend the best alternatives to address them, and then, their work done, disband. These have been used in many variations in different societies around the world throughout history. They’re what Extinction Rebellion has concluded is the only way to actually change laws and economies fast enough to at least lessen runaway climate change.

It was a revelation to me to realize that a quick end to our modern industrial economy was not only viable, it was inevitable, and the sooner it happens, the less the global devastation and suffering and the sooner the healing of our planet from its excesses can begin. How had I been so conditioned as to believe our way of life was not only worth “saving”, it was the only way for humans to live?

Perhaps the same is true for that economy’s handmaiden — the idea of ‘representative’ democracy using elections and voting.

Maybe there’s another way, a better way. As unimaginable as it might be for us now, perhaps our future is a world where power (and wealth) are vested in citizens selected at random, and vested only long enough and narrowly enough to address a specific issue. As The Dawn of Everything explains, such means of getting things done for the betterment of all have many historical precedents.

If “the Changing of the Governments” is becoming superfluous, perhaps rather than trying to make such changes meaningful and essential again, we should try doing without “governments”, at least as we know them in their awful, sclerotic, dysfunctional and unrepresentative form, entirely.

That may be unthinkable now (except to those who have studied the history and principles of anarchy), but so, even twenty years ago, was the idea that industrial/financial capitalism is a failed and unsalvageable experiment.

Maybe it’s time to stop trying to save or fix what does not and never did work, and try something that has, and just might.

image of ballot box from Wikimedia, CC0

map from statista, CC BY-ND 3.0

One of the things I often lament about the massive centralized systems modern humans seem predisposed to develop, is that they grow so large, complicated and cumbersome that they become essentially incapable of being changed, even if there is overwhelming agreement on both the need for change and the nature of the change that’s needed.

An obvious example is the utter incapacity of world governments to rid ourselves of the scourge of moving clocks back and forth twice a year. Early this year, the US Senate unanimously (!) agreed to forever cease semi-annual clock changes, starting in November 2023. One would think that this would be enough to make it happen.

But no, the House doesn’t consider it a priority, so it is unlikely to even be put to a vote there, and, yet again, the proposal will die and will go back to the drawing board.

Canada and many other countries already have laws ready that will likewise dispense with clock changes — as soon as the US enacts theirs. (It’s too confusing for international commerce and airlines to have two different systems.)

This is a totally dysfunctional situation — governments and citizens all over the world overwhelmingly want a simple change made in the law to stop forcing them to change their clocks twice a year, but still, it doesn’t happen.

How we measure things seems to be a frequent exemplar of the dysfunction of human systems. Here are some more examples of mis-measurement, and some simple ideas to improve how we measure things:

1. The measurement of years in “BCE” (BC) or “CE” (AD) terms. This is a silly anachronism, especially when there is no year zero in this calendar. It makes computing time spans needlessly complicated, and is completely arbitrary. What would make more sense would be to add a number to all years that would make every year a positive number. If that number were 10,000, for example (the age, some say, of the oldest human civilizations), our current year would be 12022. I’d suggest a symbol be used instead of letters of abbreviation to denote it — maybe the symbol » (to represent ‘the arrow of time’). So in historical documents we’d refer to 300 BC as »9700, and we’d denote last year as »12021. In current documents we might replace the leading 1 with the | symbol so that last year would be the more familiar »|2021. Some scientists who often reference much longer time periods, where the precise year is unimportant, use the abbreviation BP (‘before present’), so that ‘300 million years before now’ is written 300MYBP (or MYA). For this, we could use the complementary ‘less than’ symbol, so it would become 300M«. 
2. Let’s also look at our current conventions for calendar months and weeks, a horrible hodgepodge of historical accidents and misunderstandings. If we really need to keep 7-day weeks, then Hank Green’s idea of having 13 months of 28 days each, with an extra day at year-end (a global holiday of course) makes sense, so that (i) the first of every month falls on the same day of the week and (ii) every month is the same length. (There would be two extra days in leap years). Personally I like the idea of making weeks shorter, such as only 6 days long, keeping the two weekend days of course, so that the four day work week becomes a fait accompli. And I like the idea of 10 months, so that would mean 36 days per month (6 six-day weeks a month, all of them starting on the same day every month), with a five-day carnival at the end of the year (six-days in leap-years). With ten months instead of twelve, we could eliminate the silly Imperial Emperor months of July and August, so that the names for the last four months of the year actually make sense (eg October becomes — ta da! — the 8th month). The only logical way to denote dates without the confusion of whether 9/11 is September 11th or November 9th, is to use the unambiguous and computer-sorting-friendly Y.MM.DD format, so that in Hank’s calendar, today (September 23rd, the 266th day of this non-leap year) would be »|2022.09.14 (the 7th day of the 2nd week of month 9) and in my calendar it would be »|2022.07.14 (the 2nd day of the 3rd week of month 7). In either case you could shorten it by omitting the |2022. — but please, no slashes, hyphens or ambiguous 2-letter months (eg MA which could mean either March or May).
3. Can we please, once and for all, get rid of the ludicrous system that has two ten-o’clocks every day? The 24 hour clock has been around a long time. It’s time to use it everywhere. I’d love to move the whole day to metric, with ten, one-hundred minute hours per day, and each minute lasting 100 seconds. My seconds would click by about 15% faster than the current measure, but we’d make it to the end of the day at the same time, and my h:mm:ss notation would be so much easier to work with than the current base 60. But that’s probably a bit ambitious when we can’t even get rid of clock changes no one wants.
4. And can we please get with the metric system, all of us, at last? If you want to fondly remember furlongs and farthings, fine, but don’t make the rest of the world use your arcane Imperial nonsense, or convert back and forth from/to it.
5. It would be great to have one global ‘basket’ currency, against which all others would be measured and into (and out of) which all others could be converted. Currencies would make so much more sense if their value was based on some objectively-determinable formula (based on the actual production of real goods and services and the quality of life that that production ‘buys’, and not $%#& GDP). So instead of being at the mercy of damned grifters, speculators and hedge funds who play currency exchanges like lotteries, grossly distorting their real relative value, we would have stable currencies, easily converted. When it comes to currency values, ‘the market’ is an ass.
6. And while I’m bashing GDP, how about a replacement for it based on a mix of objectively measured and subjectively-felt well-being? The fact that anyone still considers increases in GDP as in any way representing a healthy economy or a ‘good thing’, is insane. And at the very least, we should be using median per-capita measures, and GINI indices of inequality, not ‘averages’ of billionaires and paupers.
7. Two of the most important measures of economic health we use now are unemployment rate and rate of inflation. Let’s start using the real numbers instead of the trumped-up fake numbers produced by governments ever since Reagan, Thatcher and their lying counterparts in other countries started distorting them in the 1980s.
8. And please can we get rid of pennies, nickels, and other vestiges of ancient times that have no value and which cost a fortune to produce, manage and account for? And while we’re at it, if your currency is regularly used in vending machines, it should be in coins, not bills. That means US $1 and $5 and Canadian $5 and UK £5 and Euro €5 bills should now be coins. And for Pete’s sake, if your bills are still all the same colour in this day and age, give your head a shake. It’s »|2022 after all!

There are, of course, much greater injustices that could be quite simply corrected if lawmakers were to grow spines. For a start, we could reintroduce usury laws that would make it illegal to charge interest at more than 2% above the rate of inflation. The bankster usury that is now permitted on loans, lines of credit and credit cards means that many citizens are paying interest at an annual rate of 30% or more on their debts (the US median rate, for the 99%, is about 16%), which is simply obscene. And we could return to taxing capital gains (unearned income) at rates at least as high as the tax rates on earned income.

Still, fixing how we measure things might be an easy way to start making everyone’s lives easier, and give us a much clearer picture of what is currently going on in our society and economy than the current awkward, outmoded and obfuscating ones.

Thanks to Kelly Gavin for prompting my thoughts on this post. The snarky tone is my own.

A model of Lafarge Lake Skytrain Station and the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam, near where I live, made of 40,000 LEGO blocks.  The model is housed in the building depicted in the centre of the model. It’s a gorgeous model, meticulously created by the Vancouver LEGO club, but it doesn’t need to, or presume to, tell you how the train, the station, or the centre actually work.

The human brain “makes sense” of things by identifying apparent patterns in the signals it perceives, and then by creating elaborate models of how it conceives reality to be, based on those perceptions. These models or representations of reality are then shared with others, and accepted, rejected or amended, to produce our beliefs and worldview. Collectively, these beliefs, and the behaviours that stem from them, constitute our culture.

Part of these models are representations of the ‘space’ and ‘time’ in which the brain’s perceptions and conceptions are assumed to be ‘situated’ — the models just don’t make any sense without such a framework. And then, to make the models ‘useful’, another part of the model is assumed to be situated in the centre of these representations — designated as ‘here’ and ‘now’. We call these essential parts of the model ‘selves’.

The brain doesn’t particularly know or care whether these representations are accurate representations of reality. Its job is just to perceive, conceive, and model — to ‘make sense’, as best it can, of everything it is ‘aware’ of. The most important quality of the model is not its accuracy but its utility. Like a good map, the model doesn’t need to be (and can never be) exact and include everything ‘real’ in it. That would make it impossibly complex, useless and unfathomable. So it simplifies.

That seems to work. The perception of ‘orange’, ‘big’, and ‘fast moving’ leads to the conception of ‘tiger’ and the body quickly responds with a fight, flight or freeze response. The brain adds to the model constantly, so that in the city, ‘orange’, ‘big’, and ‘fast moving’ might be a taxi or a bus. Our instinctive response is modified accordingly, whether we are in the path of the bus, about to step in front of it, or furious that it didn’t stop for us. Pretty good model, no?

No, actually. It’s a really, really simple model. It is ignorant of a million things, from the state of the mind of the bus driver (or tiger) to the state of the bus’ brakes (or the tiger’s eyesight), to the state of mind of the person behind us on their phone who, when we stop quickly, is actually going to bump into us and push us into the bus’ (or tiger’s) path, when, had we kept going instead of stopping, would have resulted, perhaps, in the bus driver, seeing us walking into the road instead of stopping, possibly braking in time. Or in the tiger, not presented with a yelling, flailing body staggering into its path, ignoring our presence completely. Simplified models can be dangerous misrepresentations of reality.

What’s worse, in our brain’s desperate sense for ‘meaningful’ patterns, we can easily come to conceive of patterns that aren’t really there at all, just because we want them to be there — because if they were, it would be interesting, or reassuring, or give us an ‘aha’ moment, or even, if we were the first to articulate it well, our fifteen minutes of fame, or wealth, or power.

And then, having conceived these things, and persuaded others of their veracity, we come to believe them, and make others believe them, and pretty soon you have a whole mass of people believing something that is completely invalid — like our beliefs about immigrants, or gays, or CoVid-19, or trickle-down economics, or strict parenting, or abortion, or the war in Ukraine, or the inevitability of progress, or good and evil, or how to operate education systems, health care systems, or penal systems.

To come to believe these things, we have to develop, or accept, an absurdly simplified model that is nothing more than a conception in someone’s brain — our own or that of someone we trust. And if we want to believe them, we will overlook any evidence or logic that clearly refutes them.

A while ago, I coined what I call Pollard’s Law of Human Beliefs, that goes like this:

We believe what we want to believe, not what is actually true. We want to believe in happy endings, simple answers, the inevitability of progress, self-control, karma, responsibility, destiny, miracles, a proper order of things, the power of love, and infinite human capacity and agency. Most of us want to believe in a higher power that can step in when we falter. We want to believe what those in our circles of trust believe (even if it’s crazy, gaslighting or propaganda). So we tend to seek sources that reinforce those beliefs and ignore those that undermine or unsettle them. Our hopes and expectations are determined by those beliefs. Our worldview is the sum of those beliefs, hopes and expectations, and bears no necessary resemblance to truth or reality. This invented reality is the only way we can  make sense of a world that is vastly too complex to ever make sense of.

Perhaps a corollary of that law is that we will create models, representations of reality and truth that correspond to what we want to believe, for various reasons, and/or what we have been led to believe by others we trust. And we will use these models, and rely on them and defend them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence (which we will ignore or deny) that they are untrue, that they bear no resemblance to the reality they purport to represent.

And by doing so, we will be flirting with incredible danger — of stirring up needless hatred, jealousy, shame, envy, grief, anxiety, or guilt, of starting or prolonging or supporting a fight or even a war, of enabling liars and hate-mongers and sociopaths to acquire power and wealth and oppress others, of traumatizing friends, family, or strangers, of getting people savagely punished, ostracized or killed, of causing injury, loss and destruction, of spreading or perpetuating a disease, or of instigating or enabling any number of beliefs, feelings and actions that cause suffering to ourselves, our loved ones and others.

All because we just wanted to believe, we wanted something to be true, to be “as simple as that”. And we couldn’t help ourselves.

All of the models we employ and deploy so diligently in our work of sustaining and building a society and culture — in business, in child-rearing, in teaching, in politics and law and law enforcement, in economics and finance, in health care, in journalism and book-writing and many other human endeavours — are just rough representations, guesses, opinions, stuff we mostly want to believe is true and simple, when it is often untrue, and when the situation is almost always vastly more complex than we can hope to comprehend.

The simple, beautiful, elegant “untrammelled free market” model, for example, thus produces not efficiency but grotesque, ruinous inequality. The theoretically-sound hierarchical model of business produces not merit-based advancement and effectiveness but vicious competition, chronic dysfunction, sociopathic leaders and disengaged wage slaves.

The idealized model of self-regulating industry produces not social responsibility but climate and ecological collapse. The inspiring model that employs debt, subsidies and marketing to stimulate production produces not prosperity and the promised “perpetual growth” but economic excess, massive waste and ultimately economic collapse.

In short, all of our models are wrong — of necessity they are grossly oversimplified, woefully incomplete, and incapable of effectively determining either the best course of action, or the potentially disastrous impact of their implementation.

But we can’t help ourselves. Our models are the only tools we have. We are trying to do our best.

Even now, we are using absurdly flawed Cold War military models that are blowing up in our faces and risking both economic calamity and nuclear disaster. Even now we are scheming to use geo-engineering to try to stem runaway climate collapse, essentially a Hail Mary shot in the dark, when we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing or what its potential consequences might be. All we have are a few simple models, and a million unknowns.

This is the culture that, with the best of intentions, we have created.

We mistake our models, our guesses, our opinions and our beliefs for real knowledge, and convince ourselves we may, soon enough, know everything. But we know nothing. We’re just fumbling around in the dark, pretending we aren’t clueless, and destroying our planet in the process.

Still, they’re lovely models, aren’t they? Like the LEGO model in the photo, they’re beautiful, they’re fascinating. Even a child can appreciate them. My book, my blog, all the key milestones of my professional career were all about presenting and using new and compelling models. Without our models, we would just be another species of dumb animals, right?

It’s too bad none of our models actually work. But hey, aren’t they great? Look!: intersecting circles, pyramids, cause and effect charts, systems diagrams! It’s all there, everything we need to save the world. Awesome, huh? Now, all we need to do is…