Automating Away Customer Service

Posted on July 24, 2022 by Dave Pollard


cartoon by the late New Yorker cartoonist Robert Weber, one of the few cartoonists who worked mostly with charcoal

There is a double interface between the producers and customers of the things we buy and sell: sales and marketing, and what can now only ironically be called ‘customer service’.

Sales and marketing is the stuff that producers push at us, to try to get us to buy what they’re offering. Customer service is what we the customers expect in return — facilitating our acquisition, use and disposition of the ‘product’.

One of the sad features of our modern global economy is that it requires producers to generate double-digit increases in revenues and profits every year just to stay afloat: Fail to produce those huge annual profit increases, and your job is history, and do so for too long and your company is history, too. The ‘value’ of stocks, real estate and pensions depends on such continuous growth. If profits merely stay in the same place year after year, then the value of the stock goes down, since there’s an opportunity cost, the risk-adjusted cost of borrowing, to just sitting on investments that aren’t ‘growing’.

The enormous pressure to endlessly increase profits requires corporate executives to play a number of games:

  1. They can use their cash to buy back their shares, so that while profits may be flat, profits per share rise. This unproductive investment is how much of the ‘growth’ in share values on exchanges has been achieved in recent years.
  2. They can buy up competitors and use oligopoly power to raise prices for the same goods. Tight, global oligopolies have been achieved in almost all major industries over the past four decades.
  3. They can lower the quality (eg use cheaper components) of what they sell, or lower the quantity (eg deceptive packaging) of what they sell, while keeping prices unchanged. They are doing this in spades.
  4. And then, they can cut ‘overheads’, through outsourcing and offshoring, or through reducing the interface with customers, ie sales and marketing efforts, or customer service.

Since cutting sales and marketing is risky when competitors are keeping theirs up, it’s more compelling to cut customer service.

The thing about customer service is that it comes after the sale, so if all producers in an industry tacitly (or explicitly) agree to cut customer service in lockstep, then there is really SFA you as a customer can do about it. If you think customer service now mostly sucks, you’re absolutely correct. It’s not that producers want it to suck; it’s the only way left to keep profits growing so the company can stay afloat another year.

The largest recent ‘trend’ in lowering the quality and extent of customer service is euphemistically dubbed “self-care”, as if this were a good thing. It means that the company no longer cares about you. It means you have to do your own research, your own shopping, your own checkout, and your own ‘after-sales’ service. The only help they will give you is pages of FAQs and manuals you can download — many of them actually run by other customers for free, in the desire to help fellow customers left in the lurch .

The company doesn’t want to talk with you — that’s too expensive for them. You can’t find a direct line phone number for any major company with a real person to answer. You can’t find an email address. They want you to do your own ‘care’, and if that’s not enough, they want you to just go away. They have plenty of lawyers to sic on you if you become too adamant about getting real customer service.

So you now have retail stores and ‘help desks’ that are capable of doing nothing except selling you more products. They offer no service at all. The clerks and help desk personnel have no more access, or power to do anything to resolve your problem or annoyance, than you do. The computer systems that management has put in place for them to use will not allow them to adjust the price, or give you a refund, or give you anything at all. Even if you only bought the item a day earlier, if it’s not in the original packaging and if you want more than a simple exchange for an identical item, you’re screwed — you have to mail it to the manufacturer at your cost. The retailer cannot help you.

You want something repaired or replaced on warranty, they’ll just throw what you give them out and give you a new one. The warranty ‘price’ is essentially an insurance policy to cover the cost of repairs, which are usually far more than the cost of replacing most of today’s shoddy products.

Imagine you’re in a ‘service’ function — working in retail. You’re now just there until they figure out how, in lockstep with their ‘competitors’, to automate the remnants of your job. I’m sure you’ve witnessed this yourself:

  1. “No we can’t special order that for you here, but you may be able to do so on the website. It’s the same one our clerks use for ordering.”
  2. “No we can’t do that bank transfer for you over the phone, even though we know you. We’re constrained by our regulations to get a hard-copy signature from you in person. Our hands are tied.”
  3. “No we can’t reverse that charge. It’s an automatic charge from the vendor, and they specify their right to charge it in their sales agreement.”
  4. “No we don’t sell parts for the products we sell. If you’re in the business you might be able to get them from a wholesaler.”
  5. “No there’s no volume discount if you buy a case. The scan code is per item.”
  6. “No we can’t service it. Since your warranty expired after 30 days, you’ll have to go to a third party repair service, who might be able to fix it for you. Or we could just sell you a new unit.”
  7. “No the system won’t allow me to give you that offer, which is only for new customers.”

And so it goes. Customer service has become, in most industries and retail sectors, an unaffordable luxury. Most of the people in banks, in retail stores, in warehouses — in all of what David Graeber described as Bullshit Jobs — will disappear from sight as soon as their employers figure out how to completely automate, and eliminate, their jobs. Those workers — the unnecessariat — will slide further down the economic ladder into jobs that haven’t quite been automated yet — couriers, fast food service, cleaners, ‘security’ work.

This is entirely the result of the desperate, endless, capitalist drive to keep increasing profits, because if public businesses don’t keep increasing profits, they’re dead. It’s the reason more and more of the GDP is being generated by fewer and fewer ultra-rich customers — the only ones who can still afford to pay for high-quality products and good service. For the rest, it’s a pointless race to the bottom.

It’s the system — an economic system that works by inflexible rules that have made everything we make and do ineffective, sloppy and dysfunctional.

And it’s taken me 50 years to learn that large-scale broken systems cannot be fixed. You have to wait for them to collapse, and try to build something better next time around.

I no longer grumble about lousy customer service, which is the only kind non-millionaires can get. It’s not fair to complain to the bedraggled front-line workers, who are victims, not perpetrators, of this system. Give them a smile, a nod, a thanks when they try their best, which is all any of us can do.

Instead, I do what those caught up in dysfunctional systems have always done — I work around them. If you want to get a sense of what a whole world of people working around collapsing and dysfunctional systems looks like, read Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World, on the emerging ‘scavenger’ economy. Watch the dumpster-divers. Pay attention to the independent one-person repair outfits, and how powerfully they’re networked with each other to do things the big public companies can no longer do. Study the crafters and the pop-up street-vendors and the people who can show you how to make and fix things yourself, and how gift economies function. They, not our dysfunctional capitalist industrial-financial growth economy, will teach you what we’re all going to have to learn to live in the world we are now entering — a world where sufficiency and consistency, not efficiency and excess, are the guideposts for living well.

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

Not Meant to Govern Each Other

Posted on July 18, 2022 by Dave Pollard


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

The gradually accelerating collapse of our economic and financial systems, political systems, health and education systems, essential infrastructure, civil discourse, and of course our climate and ecological systems, and our utter incapacity to make them more than marginally and temporarily functional, has me thinking about governance.

Here’s how governance is defined:

Governance encompasses the system by which an organisation or society is controlled and operates, and the mechanisms by which it, and its people, are held to account. Ethics, risk management, compliance and administration are all elements of governance.

From reading the two Davids’ extraordinary book on past human cultures, The Dawn of Everything, it would seem that scale isn’t necessarily an impediment to functional governance. But likewise:

  • Large human settlements (cities and nations) have historically more often been networks of collaboration and exchange than complex, hierarchical structures, and certainly don’t have to be organized top-down; they are often confederacies of highly-autonomous small groups (what indigenous cultures call “Nations”).
  • Part of the global acrimony we are dealing with today arises from the feeling we’re ‘stuck’ with existing political structures, and that there are no longer any alternatives to them, which stems from a failure to understand history and its alternative structures, and a failure of imagination.
  • War isn’t necessarily a part of civilizations, and has often been absent for centuries, even since the invention of agriculture. But it’s possible that when war arose, the learnings about dominance of war opponents, and dominance behaviours, were then brought back and applied domestically in peace-time, and that is how slavery, oppression, incarceration and other (arguably unnecessary and dysfunctional) aspects of hierarchical cultures came to be acceptable within one’s own ‘tribe’ or ‘nation’. And in some cases (like ours) they then became considered inevitable and essential to the functioning of the tribe or nation. In short, war, and a culture of sustained aggression, sustained violence and ruthless competitiveness, are unnatural and have really fucked us up.

But that’s where we are. What interests me is whether we are are now essentially ungovernable, and why, and is governance even a natural aspect of human societies?

Most indigenous cultures that we know about are not governed, according to the above definition. There are respected members of the community, often elders, who are listened to more attentively than others, but everyone has a voice, and ultimately the decision on what to do is left up to each adult individual’s discretion, and is respected even when considered unwise.

If we didn’t live in a culture that encourages and rewards (with the best of intentions) argument, competitiveness, coercion, dishonesty, and propaganda, it is, I think, unlikely that the debacle of CoVid-19 would ever have happened. It is unlikely that we would have destroyed the natural environment to the point of ushering in the sixth great extinction of life on the planet. It is unlikely that massive inequality would be producing horrific suffering among the poor, and leading to economic and resource collapse even when there is arguably sufficient for everyone.

If we lived in a healthy culture, one without these attributes, then, if the Davids are correct, we would be thriving today.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t share the Davids’ optimism that we can still choose to change, abandon, or reinvent our culture to make it healthy. I think that was a possible trajectory at one point (long ago) but it is now far too late. We are locked in, and while we may be able to conduct some healthy experiments in how to live together functionally in community, this civilization is destined for a hard fall. I believed that, based on my study of complex systems, even before I abandoned my belief that we have free will.

I don’t believe we are meant to govern each other. I think the Davids’ work suggests that collaborative governance is possible, and that temporary roles that have hierarchical aspects, where the person most trusted to make decisions rotates or that role is eventually eliminated as no longer necessary, can assist in creating a functional society. These are all examples of short-term bottom-up granting of power. Top-down power and governance, based on wealth or heredity, is, I think, inherently dysfunctional and inevitably leads to intolerable inequality, supremacism, and oppression.

But that’s what we’re stuck with, and history suggests we’re not capable of the massive and rapid cultural changes that would be necessary to rediscover how to create and sustain functional communities and societies, mostly self-governed.

This is our conditioned behaviour, and that conditioning is now being effectively passed down to, and entrenched in, each new generation.

It would be nice to believe the Davids’ optimistic view of our potential for rapid cultural transformation, but I see no evidence for it. I don’t think you can get there from here.

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

Half Time Score: Coronavirus 10, Humanity 0

Posted on July 16, 2022 by Dave Pollard

Hard to believe I’m still writing about this subject. But here we are.

Just about 2 1/2 years after its first appearance on the planet, and despite all human efforts, the latest estimates are that:

  • 2/3 of the earth’s population has been infected at least once by CoVid-19, and an additional 10M infections are occurring daily
  • the death toll, seasonally adjusted, remains about 15,000 more deaths per day, or about 5.5M more people per year
  • while the IFR is dropping, the rates of infection and re-infection are soaring as vaccines wear off, new variants are less effectively blocked by vaccines, people refuse vaccines and boosters, vaccines and boosters are in short supply in many places, people refuse to wear masks, and we’re in the third “summer lull” in deaths; so the annual death toll shows no signs of declining in the foreseeable future
  • the cumulative global death toll is now about 17M people

There is essentially no plan for dealing with this. The Go For Zero strategy was only seriously applied in a handful of countries, those where there was a high level of respect for public health guidance, and that strategy is the only one that would have addressed this catastrophe. Rich countries are now mostly ignoring the pandemic and hoping it will magically go away on its own, with the richest praying that the anti-viral Paxlovid will at least keep most of its sufferers from dying.

And when it comes to dealing with Long CoVid, we’re strictly in Hail Mary territory.

Fifteen years ago, when I worked in epidemiology planning for pandemics and other disasters for the government, the most experienced and wisest were saying that, culturally, we were simply not going to able to respond to a serious highly transmissible pandemic. I thought they were pessimistic. They were not.

We’ve basically given up. We’re no longer tracking new cases, and in many cases we’re using surrogate measures for hospitalizations and deaths that downplay the continuing toll. We have no plan to deal with the next winter, which will almost inevitably bring another surge. We have no plan to deal with new variants, and the approved vaccines we have been using are increasingly impotent to deal with them, and vaccines specifically for new variants are so far behind the course of the virus they will likely be obsolete before they’re produced. And if a new variant emerges that is more virulent, we’re totally screwed.

How and why has this all gone so badly? Partly it’s the sheer increased complexity of human society, that has squeezed more people into smaller areas and allowed them to travel way farther and faster, taking viruses with them, than was the case with previous pandemics. Partly it’s the distrust of authority that has caused a large part of the population to shun sensible health precautions. Partly it’s the cynicism of governments that prompt them to lie to their citizens and suppress or contradict sensible health advisories that citizens don’t want to hear.

Canada is an interesting case study. Like most of the countries in yellow in the chart above, Canada’s actual death toll per capita from the pandemic has been a fraction of the toll of the US and other countries in orange and red.

This is because for the first year or so, the Canadian public generally trusted and heeded public health advisories. Masking and social distancing and isolating rates were much higher than in most other countries, and vaccines were welcomed and taken overwhelmingly and promptly. It was that first 1-2 years when the IFR, the infection fatality rate, was high, relative to that of the newer variants.

But look at this chart to see what has happened in 2022:

This chart, produced by Canada’s CoVid-19 Immunity Task Force has not received much press, I suspect most likely because the media don’t know what to make of it. Here’s what it says:

  • Seroprevalence is the presence in a tested blood sample of significant CoVid-19 antibodies; the antibodies produced by an infected body are slightly different and distinguishable from the antibodies produced by a vaccine
  • Widespread preventative measures (masks, distancing, shut-downs) were very effective at limiting infection of Canadians to less than 5% of the population (blue line) until the vaccines were produced
  • By the first half of 2021, over 80% of Canadians had significant CoVid-19 antibodies as a result of high vaccine take-up (red line)
  • By the end of 2021, that percentage with vaccine antibodies was up to 90%, and still only 7% of Canadians had been infected with CoVid-19; Canada was close to theoretical “herd immunity”, and was starting to bank on that
  • The Omicron variant was a complete game-changer, totally upsetting the CoVid-19 management strategy of Canada (and many of the other countries shown in yellow in the top chart); in just the first five months of 2022, the percentage of Canadians with infection-related antibodies (ie people who had caught Covid-19) soared from 7% to 47% (it is now over 60%)
  • Because Canada basically stopped testing in 2022, it had no way of knowing that infections had soared until hospitalization numbers started to jump and they had to ‘guess’ why
  • This was further obfuscated by changes in the ways Canada actually computed “CoVid-19” hospitalizations and deaths
  • Only the above chart tells the tale — Canadians now rely as much on getting sick with CoVid-19, as a way of getting limited immunity, as they do on the antibody resistance from their vaccines
  • Infections are soaring nearly as much among the vaccinated as among the unvaccinated (however it should be noted vaccines and boosters remain the most powerful protection against serious cases of the disease causing hospitalization or death)
  • People are getting reinfected with the BA.4-5 variants in as short a time as 2-3 weeks after initial infection, showing that, not only are vaccinations losing their power, infection is almost useless as a means of protecting yourself against future infection

Canada has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and its new daily per capita death and hospitalization rates are now comparable to those of the US.

A lot of mistakes were made by a lot of people, just as in the ‘orange’ and ‘red’ countries, and it would not be fair to blame this entirely on political meddling and incompetence. It’s likely this trajectory was ultimately inevitable.

We’re still learning. Unfortunately, the virus is learning much more quickly.

So stick to the precautions — vaccines and boosters, masks, social distancing and isolation. That’s all we have against a very superior opponent. And it’s only half time.

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

Links of the Month: July 2022

Posted on July 13, 2022 by Dave Pollard


cartoon by Michael Leunig from his fans’ FB page

No further comment. This is where we are, now. Turn it off, if you can, and go outside and play.

COLLAPSE WATCH


New Yorker cartoon by Lars Kenseth

Sri Lanka: This is what collapse looks like: Economic collapse has quickly led to political collapse in the until-recently-stable nation of Sri Lanka. This is likely a foretaste of what we’re all going to face in the coming years and decades. Indrajit Samarajiva, in the process of trying to evacuate himself and his family, tells the terrifying story from the streets of Colombo, day by day (you may have to register for full access or to get daily emails, but you do not need a paid membership to read these articles):

How Charles Koch purchased the Supreme Court EPA decision: The disastrous stripping of power from the EPA, the most important US organization in the fight against global climate collapse, was a long, deliberate strategy of Big Oil.

LIVING BETTER


Cartoon by Dave Coverly

The mirror in the abyss: Rhyd Wildermuth relates his personal story of self-sabotage and how our politics can become our coping mechanism, and explores more about ressentiment, “trying to compensate or cope for a feeling of injustice by convincing ourselves that suffering is sacred and morally good”.

The US west coast commitment to reproductive freedom: The three governors vow to resist and provide refuge for women victimized by the recent fascist Supreme Court ruling. Thanks to PS Pirro for the link.

A culture of caring: Indrajit Samarajiva suggests that we should build our societies on the basis that all babies and children deserve a life free from trauma, scarcity, illness and indifference. What a difference that could make. Indi also expounds on how a society that supports children naturally becomes one that supports community.

Russia shows the way to food self-sufficiency: As a matter of necessity, Russia’s family food gardens now produce the majority of its agricultural production, and are the largest ‘industry’ in the country. In the west, we have lawns instead. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


What kind of country allows this? graphic by UNICEF; thanks to John Whiting for the link

How our economic system really works: A candid and refreshing interview with Michael Hudson summarizing how our current economic system has evolved and what it would take to rectify its dysfunction. The way our western economies have been converted from industrial producer economies (that produce at least some things of value) to financial rentier economies (that merely collect rents on assets owned by the 1%, and produce nothing of value) is essential to understanding why we are on the verge of global economic collapse. It’s long, and well worth reading. In a separate interview, he explains how the US Fed is trying to slash working class wages to fend off inflation caused by military blunders and billionaires’ excesses.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes:

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

CoVid-19 Becomes the Pandemic (mostly, but becoming less so) of the Unvaccinated: Short takes:

  • Nothing has changed. Deaths and hospitalizations are continuing at the same pace as the previous two summers, and wave 7 has begun. This fall and winter could be as bad, in death toll, as the previous two horrific winters (waves 3 and 5), when US deaths were running at over 3,000/day and global deaths over 15,000/day. Most of the hospitalized and dying continue to be older and immune-compromised people, though there’s now a huge spike in reinfections, sometimes mere weeks apart, as the effect of vaccines continues to diminish as variants get ‘smarter’. So the advice is the same: mask indoors and in crowded places, get all the shots you can, and test, trace and isolate when you or loved ones get symptoms. Andrew Nikoforuk is getting flak for his thoroughly researched recommendations and concerns, as he has since the pandemic began, and so far he’s been right every time.
  • Is BA.5 the “reinfection wave”? Ed Yong says it shows every sign of causing more reinfections than any previous variant. Thanks to Tom Atlee for the link.
  • A negative antigen test is an unreliable indicator of not being infected with Omicron, new research says, and 5 days’ isolation after infection is simply not long enough. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

Peace for Ukraine: Short takes:

Prisons full of trauma: Diplomat and journalist Craig Murray describes his stay in a Scottish prison, and the realization that virtually all the inmates there had suffered unimaginable childhood trauma. A chilling read.

Helping the homeless: Melissa Lewis describes the hopeless situation of many of the US homeless, caught between neighbours and police determined to move them out, well-meaning progressives who want them just left alone, and other progressives who recognize they need care, assistance and counselling to deal with the problems that underlie their homelessness. And they don’t know what they want either. This situation, unresolved, can only get worse.

Murder is the leading cause of death of US pregnant women: And the leading cause of death of women postpartum. Now, with forced-birth laws in many US states, far more women will face this horrific additional hazard.

The place you loved is gone (or never really was): Chad Mulligan laments the loss of culture, decency and soul in an America he no longer recognizes. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

FUN AND INSPIRATION


cartoon by John Atkinson via FB

Not Immune: John Green describes our strange social relationship with disease, and wonders why authors of fiction write about it so little. A brilliant comment below the video says it all: “How much better would our lives, our health and well-being be, worldwide, if we stopped attributing illness to morality? It’s stunning.”

From The Beaverton (fake headlines; The Onion for Canadians):

  • “Putin determines cyber attack against Canada not necessary since Rogers is far more effective” (ask a Canadian to explain)
  • “Trudeau promises to continue timing Canadian laws with American tragedies”
  • “Boris Johnson leaves yet another party disheveled and without a clue what’s going on”
  • “Republicans relieved no fetuses killed in Texas school shooting”
  • “Experts confirm that global supply chain is now just one dude named Greg doing his best”

Pop Pop: If you’re a student of musical composition, take a look at this selection of some of the best ‘K-POP’ music of the last three years. Some mind-blowing, sophisticated stuff going on here, rhythmically, harmonically, melodically, drawing on musical styles from across the globe.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


graphic from the Economist; thanks to Indrajit Samarajiva for the link

From Indrajit Samarajiva, on The Hero’s Journey:

While the content of a [Hollywood] film may look like it’s about rebellion, just look at where the hero ends up. They start in an ordinary world and always return there. Almost every film from James Bond to the Avengers is about the violent preservation of order. The people trying to change society are always the bad guys, and we cheer along as they’re beaten and murdered. It’s really quite effective propaganda because it amputates the imagination. That leads us to today, when many within White Empire can’t even imagine systemic change, only individual choices.

From Rhyd Wildermuth, on Seeking Solace (from his upcoming book):

The Woke are no less religious than the faithful. Unfortunately, their supplications are not uttered before trees and shrines but at machines they hold in their hands. They chant litanies about oppression and injustice, but are really crying out “hear my sorrow, heal my pain, right this wrong.” Yet unlike those who light candles to the virgin at the tree or leave offerings to a saint on a lightning-strewn high place, their prayers can only ever be echoed back by others digitally seeking the same solace.

From Marge Piercy: Right to Life:

A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to
butcher for chops. You slice the mountain
in two for a road and gouge the high plains
for coal and the waters run muddy for
miles and years. Fish die but you do not
call them yours unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
orphanages are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.
At this moment at nine o’clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can’t get
Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes
of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold shares
in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.

 

 

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Sclerotic Systems, Sclerotic States

Posted on July 10, 2022 by Dave Pollard


poll by CBS of US voters in May 2022

The other day someone asked me how I can reconcile my views that we have no free will with my argument that the US is sliding, not-so-slowly, into being a fascist state.

My tentative answer is that the way the political systems in the US were established, and the way those with political power have subsequently evolved their economic systems, made an eventual slide into fascism inevitable, even though it will not be supported by anywhere near a majority of Americans.

The US political system is not democratic. It allows and encourages gerrymandering of House district boundaries that enables the party in power to remain in power even when the vast majority of voters don’t want it to do so. It has a two-senators per state system that guarantees rural voters in largely-rural states a majority in the Senate, even with a small fraction of the total votes. Its electoral ‘college’ system has repeatedly produced presidents who didn’t even get close to having the largest number of votes of the candidates. The Supreme Court is packed with nominees-for-life selected by those very presidents who did not get the largest number of votes. It’s a system designed for failure.

In short, the system is sclerotic — it resists even the most wildly popular changes to laws and civil rights and freedoms, and enables new laws, rights and freedoms to be easily clawed back. And because the system is so poorly designed, it is impossible to reform and reverse the sclerosis.

An alien looking at the system would have to think they were watching some kind of corrupt satire — a country with no choice, no capacity for even the most desperately-needed changes, no resilience to external changes, and a choice of doddering Tweedledum or Tweedledee buffoons who blather on incoherently about plans they cannot enact and lies told to them by the advisors who try, mostly incompetently, to pull their strings.

This is a country that is one of only three countries in the world not using the metric system, unable to move forward from the old system its British imperial masters imposed on them.

Into this ludicrous system waltz the corporations, the moneyed interests that shift back and forth over time between the industrial producer class and the financial rentier class. They exploit the political system with one end — to disempower and weaken it so that they are free to do what they please, which mostly entails gobbling up all the resources, land, assets and wealth they can get their hands on, to the impoverishment of everyone else, and the environment. This is child’s-play in a sclerotic system.

So we end up with both a political and an economic/financial system that is dysfunctional, and as incapable of being fixed as a centenarian’s arthritic fist is of opening a jam jar. It doesn’t matter who you elect. It doesn’t matter what most people want. The system cannot change. It is utterly constrained by its hopelessly faulty design, its evolved and entrenched dysfunction, and its unmanageable and entropic scale.

If you want to see this on a smaller, more imaginable scale, look at the public education system, or the health care system (and not just in the US). These systems are full of people doing their best, and ‘users’ who really want them to succeed, yet they, too, are utterly sclerotic and dysfunctional in the vast majority of countries of the world.

When everyone is doing their best and the failures just get more and more ghastly, you know the system is un-reformable and headed for near-term collapse. Earlier this year the US Senate unanimously agreed to move the entire country to year-round Daylight Saving Time in 2023. Yet odds-makers are saying it’s quite possible it will never happen. There are a few opponents determined to scuttle the agreement, as they did in 1973. They are already mobilizing. The system simply cannot change.

The slide into fascism is not what the majority want. What the majority want does not matter. Those determined to turn the clock back to the days when only what rich white males say matters, are finding it dead easy to do so, on many fronts. As hard as changes are to bring about in sclerotic systems, previous changes are easy to undo. You just reverse, cancel, or nullify laws, rights and regulations, or simply order that they not be upheld or enforced.

The Christian-White-patriarchal-fascist minority theocracy that is emerging in the US is not coming about because more and more people want it. It is emerging because weaknesses in the sclerotic political system are easy to exploit by this minority, who have used weaknesses in the equally sclerotic economic and financial system to lock up most of the country’s wealth, which they then used to spread their fear-baiting, anti-government, anti-regulation ‘gospel’ to a populace utterly frustrated by the sclerotic systems that simply don’t serve them, and seem out of control.

The paradox we’re witnessing, however, is not a pro- “law and order” shift. It is a pro- “the old laws and old order” (a nostalgia by conservatives for a time that never was) and an equally fierce anti- “the new laws and new order” ressentiment. It’s another sign of systems in the burgeoning stages of collapse.

When the fascist minority takes power in the US, probably in 2024, it will be hugely unpopular, and will have to use the militarized police and intelligence services to control the population, as it did during the Trump abomination and the previous trial runs under Nixon and Cheney-Bush. And because of the sclerosis of the systems that will have allowed the minority to take power, and the vulnerability of the population to propaganda from the tightly-controlled media, they will be extremely difficult to dislodge. It’s hard to see this not leading to one (or more) of three outcomes: (1) civil war, (2) breakup of the country, or (3) political collapse brought on by global economic collapse.

Large-scale ecological collapse will follow in short order.

No one is to blame for this. We are all doing our best, even the bewildered, fearful fascists who have already taken power in many of the red states. We have no choice or free will in any of this. The systems that have engendered this cannot be fixed, reformed or replaced; they are irreparably broken. The best we can hope for is collapse before the violence breaks out in full force. At least then we’ll be too preoccupied with surviving and making do for ourselves and those we care about, to care about ideological politics, old or new.

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

Unbearable Witnessing

Posted on July 6, 2022 by Dave Pollard


Cartoon by Michael Leunig

So maybe you’re a journalist, on the front lines reporting endless atrocities, lies and trauma. Maybe you’re a health care worker, forced to compromise on the best care you can give because of your employer’s rules about cost management and minimizing insurance or legal risk. Maybe you’re a parent, sending your kids off to a horrifically underfunded school that is dangerous, incompetently run, bans the books you recommend to your children, and fails to provide even the basic essentials of education.

Or maybe you’re just a citizen, cringing a little before each day’s glance at the doom scroll of atrocities, propaganda, disinformation, stupidity, and violence.

You’re feeling a bunch of emotions. Among them are probably: anger, rage, sadness, grief, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, helplessness, and hopelessness.

If you felt empowered to do something about the situations that gave rise to these emotions — in other words, if you did not feel hopeless — the emotions you feel would be the emotions that correspond to the fight or flight instinct of all animals in times of acute stress — the emotions of rage and fear, mostly.

But when you feel unempowered, you feel emotions that correspond to the freeze instinct — such as the emotions of helplessness and hopelessness. Those can in turn provoke other emotions, like shame (“I should be able to do something about this”), grief , guilt (“I should have seen this coming and done something differently”, anxiety, betrayal, and sadness. These are “drawing-into-oneself” emotions, immobilizing ones, rather than “exploding-out” emotions, compelling you to action.

Chronic feelings of rage and fear can give rise to debilitations like PTSD and other forms of trauma.

Chronic feelings of helplessness and hopelessness instead give rise to a debilitation called moral injury. While this term has a lot of definitions, and has been appropriated and distorted by some psychologists, the wikipedia definition stresses that it arises when one knows (or thinks one knows) the right thing that should be done, but constraints make it impossible to do it.

This can be piled on top of feelings of burnout (exhaustion, defeat), and compassion fatigue (where you just can’t, or don’t dare, care any more, because it’s just too damn hard.

I think a lot of us are now in this situation, and it’s getting worse, and more common. In our roles as community leaders, activists, archivists and chroniclers, reporters, healers, workers, parents, teachers, facilitators, mentors, supporters, and more, we play roles where we are expected, and expect ourselves, to be making things better, when in many cases, due to systemic problems, we cannot even come close to living up to those expectations. And neither can we lower those expectations.

It’s a toxic combination, and a large part, I think, of the reason we are all getting less healthy at the very time we are realizing that the systems we have, with the best of intentions, built to make the world a better place, are actually making it worse. This constellation of debilities surrounding moral injury is sapping our energy and reducing our resilience exactly when we need those qualities most.

A term that I’ve come to use to describe this ghastly, seemingly impotent situation is unbearable witnessing. We want to know the truth, and we seek it out, but we can’t face it. One piece of bad news is manageable, if we have time to absorb it, even if there’s nothing we can do about it. An incessant firehose of chronic bad news is exhausting, draining, paralyzing . The collapse of our entire civilization, the only way we know how to live, is unbearable to imagine, and even more unbearable to witness.

One of my favourite questions these days is: If there’s no one to blame, and nothing we can do, then what? It’s a serious question, not a nihilistic or cynical one. We don’t like this question because we know there are no good (or easy) answers to it. But it’s an important one, and becoming more so.

We each have to deal with this in our own way, but what has helped me is:

  • To keep reminding myself we’re all doing our best, and we’re all doing what we’ve been conditioned to do. There are some who think acknowledging our lack of free will is depressing, or a cop out, but to me it can liberate us from the kinds of judgements that poison us to each other, and it allows me to move into a space that is less hostile and more accepting.
  • To become more self-aware — of my reactions, my judgements, my expectations, and how none of these help, and how they only make me feel worse. I still have reactions, judgements and expectations, but when I am able to catch myself having them, it seems to mitigate the malaise that they would otherwise unleash.
  • To give up the search, and hope, for magical solutions. As Derek Jensen has so eloquently said: “Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth… Hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line… A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place.” 

We cannot save the world, but in some small ways at least we can self-manage how we react to what is happening, and instead of being immobilized, we can be sanguine about it. We can be functional. The world needs us to be functional now, more than ever. We are of no use to the world broken. And no use to ourselves. Maybe that means we become a bit Stoic, maybe in means we become a bit courageous, though the courageous people I’ve known have all told me it’s not courage when you have no other choice.

We have no other choice.

This is what collapse looks like.

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

Characteristics of an Unhealthy Culture

Posted on July 2, 2022 by Dave Pollard


Photo credits, clockwise from upper left:  1. China pollution — Damir Sagoli for Reuters; 2. Trump stormtroopers in Portland — Noah Berger for AP: 3. Garbage-pickers in Lagos — Samantha Appleton, in The New Yorker;  4. Refugees in Greece — Daniel Etter/New York Times/Redux /eyevine:  5. Child labourers in Pennsylvania — Lewis Hine in the National Archives

A while back, Tema Okun published (and continues to curate) a fascinating list of the qualities of a White Supremacist Culture. When I read it, I realized that she was at the same time identifying the characteristics of an unhealthy culture.

If you study past collapsed cultures, they had many of these attributes. Drawing on Tema’s list, here’s my list of the qualities of an unhealthy culture headed for inevitable collapse:

  1. chronic and pervasive physical and emotional stress and anxiety
  2. widespread malnutrition (notably in ‘affluent’ nations), chronic and pervasive physical and emotional illness, and lack of resilience and fitness
  3. prevalence of casteism — control and hoarding of wealth and power by a patriarchy, hierarchy, oligarchy or other unrepresentative, privileged, ‘qualified’, ‘exclusive’ group disconnected from and not responsive or responsible to the rest
  4. widespread use of fear to oppress and suppress people and ideas
  5. prevalence of exceptionalism, arrogance, and failure to appreciate the lessons of history
  6. large-scale infighting and divisiveness among and between groups
  7. extreme disconnection from the land and the more-than-human world
  8. rabid individualism — belief that our success or failure is up to us, not dependent on others, and that the individual, not the community, bears ultimate responsibility
  9. a mentality of scarcity, and creating scarcity artificially through inequality to enforce obedience
  10. prevalence of simplistic, absolutist, binary, “one-right-way” thinking
  11. high level of change resistance, and nostalgia for what never was
  12. belief that more is always better, and growth is always good, regardless of cost
  13. intolerance for conflicting or uncomfortable ideas and beliefs
  14. perfectionism — criticizing rather than learning from mistakes, averseness to risk-taking, experimentation and innovation in favour of conservatism and incrementalism
  15. predominant short-termism, prioritizing the urgent, and never allowing time for reflection, listening and true dialogue before decision-making
  16. defensiveness and/or denial of the truth in the face of a compelling preponderance of evidence
  17. a competitive, adversarial zero-sum game mentality rather than one of collaboration and sharing
  18. lack of coherent values — a preoccupation with what is easily measurable over what is actually important
  19. lack of a cohesive, articulate and inclusive story of the culture, employing instead an ideology, a false myth, or an antagonism (what the culture is against rather than what it is for)
  20. rampant and unrealistic future-oriented idealism (eg about space travel, perpetual life, techno-utopias, ‘perfect’ markets, or infinite growth)
  21. endless civil, cultural, genocidal, resource- and land-driven wars
  22. reliance on propaganda, censorship, and disinformation to suppress civil disobedience

Looking at our current civilization culture, the diagnosis would appear to be grim.

How did we get to this stage? My sense is that our collective conditioning over the past few millennia has inevitably led to this, the result of billions of people doing their best to make things better for themselves and those they love. We can rant and rave all we want about all of these emergent, unhealthy qualities of our civilization, but it’s sheer hubris to think we can ‘reform’ it.

This hasn’t happened because we were stupid, or evil, or allowed evil people to come into power. The human experiment on this planet has been a fascinating one, but we didn’t do anything wrong. The way it, and we, have evolved couldn’t have taken any other course. All systems, and all civilizations, do and must eventually crash, despite what those espousing the myth of progress would like us to believe.

This — the way we live now — isn’t how humans, or any creatures, are meant to live. When I say ‘meant’ I’m referring to how we are biologically made up. Like our cousins the bonobos, we emerged as a species suited to a slow, peaceful, low-stress, uncrowded existence. For whatever reason, probably involuntarily, we migrated to very different, hostile environments, and used our large mental capacity to try to control and manage in these new environments. But the systems we created to do this controlling and managing were maladaptive and unnatural, and they have been continually and inevitably coming apart since we created them. And now, as David Ehrenfeld predicted, they are collapsing on a massive scale.

These systems, and this civilization culture, no longer serve us. We are right to be fearful of the struggle and hardship that collapse is already starting to impose on many of us, but we should not mourn this culture’s collapse.

We cannot know whether there will be any human survivors as this collapse accelerates through the rest of the century. But just as our species’ emergence came about as an accident — the aftermath of the fifth great extinction 65 million years ago — we cannot even guess what will emerge from the current sixth great extinction, the one our species, in its ‘wisdom’, unleashed a mere blink in time ago. All we can know is that, if future cultures have many of the characteristics of the list above, nature will not allow them to continue for long.

Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for pointing me to Tema’s site.

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

Recognizing and Honing Your ‘Information Behaviours’

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Dave Pollard


image referring to the practice of treasuring each unrepeatable moment, from the Next Phase blog

Nick Kemp at ikigai tribe just did an extraordinary interview with Yazdan Mansourian, Iranian-Australian lecturer and researcher on information science and information behaviour, who recently published a paper on ‘serious leisure’.

The podcast, with Nick’s notes, is here, and the transcript is here. I listened to the podcast first, and then used the transcript to make my own notes on the highlights and insights the interview provided.

This engaging and well-paced one-hour interview introduces and describes the concept of ‘information behaviours’, and explains how we learn, communicate, process and share information effectively (or not so effectively). Some of this information is new (even to me, and I was immersed in ‘knowledge management’ for a decade during my career), while others, some of them captured in Japanese words and phrases, are ancient, but probably unfamiliar to westerners.

Rather than trying to summarize the essence of this wonderfully-conducted, information-packed and articulate interview by sharing my notes, I thought it might be more useful to list the important questions that listening to it brought up for me. If any of these are questions you’re struggling with, you’ll find the interview worthwhile:

1. Assessing your information behaviours ie how you interact with information, which includes how you identify your information needs, how and when you seek information, what your passive information-receiving activities are (eg watching TV, reading, classroom listening), how and when you share information, and how and when you avoid information. These behaviours have both emotional and cognitive aspects; they’re not always ‘rational’.

    • Thinking about your own information behaviours, which would you say are optimal, which could use rethinking or revision, and which are actually unhealthy?

2. Spending your leisure time wisely: The main types of leisure are observing (eg birdwatching), collecting (eg coins or stamps), producing (crafts etc), creating (music, poetry etc), and performing (eg dance) activities.

    • Do your current leisure activities match (in type and nature) how you’d ideally like to be spending your leisure time? Has any of what started as ‘leisure’ activities turned into work that you no longer enjoy?

3. Finding your ‘serious leisure’ which includes hobbies, amateurism, and volunteering activities that meet six criteria: (i) entail perseverance and commitment, (ii) have the potential to evolve into a career, (iii) involve significant personal effort, (iv) provide enduring personal and social benefits, (v) reflect a unique ethos within a social world, and (vi) form part of your personal and social identity.

    • Which of your leisure activities meet the ‘serious leisure’ criteria? Are these activities all enjoyable, meaningful, and things you’re passionate about? If not, why are you doing them? Are any of your more casual or occasional leisure activities things that you’d like to pursue more seriously? Have any of your ‘serious leisure’ activities become obsessive or addictive?

4. Appreciating imperfection: Many activities (not just ‘serious leisure’ ones) entail both what the Japanese call kodawari (the striving for continuous improvement, appreciating that perfection is unattainable), and wabi-sabi (appreciating the beauty of imperfection and ephemerality). And in any endeavour, to be able to enjoy and be effective in doing it, there’s a need to accept things as they are, including our own and others’ feelings, without judgement or expectation of oneself or others. In Japanese this is called arugamama.

    • Are you excited to strive for continuous improvement while still appreciating imperfection, or does a lack of sustained passion and commitment, or an obsession with perfection, interfere with your enjoyment of ‘serious leisure’ and other activities? 
    • Have you learned (or can you learn) to accept things as they are, in all your activities, or do you find yourself constantly fighting, criticizing, and being frustrated at not being able to change things to how you think they should be?

5. Allowing time for learning and mastery: In the west there’s a tendency to oversimplify, over-rely on ‘book learning’, and settle for a rudimentary or superficial understanding of subjects, including leisure activities.

    • Is your skill or enjoyment of activities held back by not allowing enough time to learn (especially through collaboration and conversation with others with greater skill) and enough time to master the skills needed to do the activity well? Are there clubs or communities of interest/practice you could join to ‘up your game’?

6. Finding your place: Another important Japanese concept is ibasho, “the place where one feels a sense of belonging and purpose, and is accepted as oneself”. When a group of people find this place, information-sharing and learning flow naturally, and roles in the group evolve naturally.

    • In what activities and spaces in your life do you feel this genuine sense of place, of belonging and purpose and being accepted? In what activities and spaces is this missing?

7. Information sharing as coping mechanism for people struggling in their lives: Learning new things can help us feel more in control, more resilient, and less helpless in times of crisis, and information-sharing happens naturally and easily in communities where people love what they do, so that there is a caring space, and a useful role, for everyone. This shared passion and joy then is reinforced by what the Japanese call tanoshimi, the anticipatory joy of the community’s next event, meeting, or connection.

    • How and how well do you participate in groups that use information-sharing as a tool for mutual support? Do you feel ‘anticipatory joy’ about the next event of the groups you’re involved with?

8. Information and information skills as a source of ‘joyful emancipation’: Acquiring critical thinking skills, creative and collaborative problem-solving skills, and researching skills, can liberate us from dependence on passive consumption of unfiltered information, propaganda, incompetent ‘teachers’, groupthink, and social and workplace oppression.

    • To what degree are you ’emancipated’ in your information behaviours and information skills — autonomous, independent, competent, unconstrained, and empowered by what you know and what you know how to find out?

9. Treasuring the moment: Another useful Japanese term is ichi-go ichi-e, referring to treasuring the unrepeatable nature of each moment.

    • Have you learned, or can you learn, to treasure each moment for what it is, and let that appreciation permeate everything you do?

10. Learning by rereading: Every time you read something (or use a different medium such as audio or video to ‘re-consume’ it, you will inevitably learn something new, because you are not the same person as when you first read it.

    • What should you be re-reading now?

Hope you find this podcast as delightful as I did. Thanks to Nick and Yazdan for creating it.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Working Smarter | 3 Comments

The Way It Is

Posted on June 27, 2022 by Dave Pollard

view out my window on Friday

I‘m walking along the river path near my home and when I look up, there’s a black bear walking toward me. Not a big deal, I know, but a new experience for me. And the path is not that wide and it’s surrounded by trees. So when it’s about 8 metres away I turn around and, watching over my shoulder, walk the other way. Two other guys who were behind me on the trail see what’s happening and likewise stop and turn around.

It’s a cliché, but I’m moving faster than the two guys, and feel enormous relief when I pass them — you know, “you only have to outrun the slowest guy”. We come to a fork and the three of us all take the lower path. The bear suddenly speeds up, takes the upper path, and then circles around through the trees to the lower path and stops right in front of us. We of course groan and turn around again. The bear gives us what can only be described as a look of pained annoyance, and then bounds off the path to the stream below.

As I make my way back, I wonder what it must be like to have everyone you encounter so frightened of you that they turn and walk the other way. I wonder what it must be like to have to deal with hordes of an insanely overly-populous, destructive, invasive species every time you just want to go for a drink.

And, most of all, I wonder what it must be like to just accept everything, the way it is, without judgement or expectation.

Last week I had been equally surprised to discover three fully-grown deer in the middle of a small city park, a park surrounded on all sides by busy four- and six-lane roads. They looked very stressed and skittish. No way out. I remember that feeling. To some extent we are perhaps all like them, today, trapped in a culture that no longer serves us, if it ever did, but unable to find our way to another culture that does.

In the light of the accelerating slide of much of the US into belligerent fascism, there has been a growing call by some progressives for stoicism. I think about that as I meander along the river path back towards home.

I mean, it’s not as if we have any choice. We can only feel what we feel, fear what we fear, believe what we believe. Stoicism is not, as some think, a “stiff upper lip” suppression of one’s feelings — that can only end badly. True Stoics (capital “S”) believe in striving to live a natural life based on the virtues of wisdom, fairness, courage and moderation, and eschewing “negative emotions”, which they assert are inevitably the result of poor judgement. It’s the judgements they try to suppress, not the emotions that those judgements can engender.

I think about my recent argument that, while some emotions (fear, rage/anger, sorrow, equanimity, and joy/enthusiasm) are instinctive and probably felt by all creatures, others (anxiety, hatred, envy, jealousy, shame, guilt, longing, loneliness, despair, and even love) require the making of, and a belief in, an unprovable assessment, deep inside your head, of what has happened, is happening, or will happen, and are therefore (probably) uniquely human.

So the Stoics, I think, believe that through an attitude and practice of wisdom, fairness, courage and moderation, the judgements and expectations we make can be minimized, and hence the “negative emotions” that stem from them can likewise be minimized. And, if that were to happen, the Stoic may then be able to live in the same state of mostly-equanimity-and-enthusiasm that wild creatures spend their lives in, except in fleeting moments of fight/flight/freeze stress. (Of course, for some wild creatures, like my neighbourhood bears and deer, who are now constantly afflicted by our destructive and oppressive presence, those moments of stress are chronic, not fleeting.)

It’s perfectly understandable that many progressives and ‘moderates’, who have sat passively by for four decades as the decline into fascism has taken hold, and just hoped that it was a passing phase, are feeling some self-doubt, shame, guilt and despair for their quiet complicity in the demise of democracy and of tolerance for diversity which seems rampant everywhere these days. But my sense is that they are small “s” stoics, rather than capital “S” Stoics. The small “s” stoics, I suspect, will keep voting for the doddering war-mongering xenophobe Biden and his Wall-Street-beholden party, as it loses to the ends-justify-the-means fascists driven by generations of fear, hatred and resentment.

The capital “S” Stoics will instead withhold their votes and patiently await the slow collapse of the US Democratic party, and their fake-liberal counterparts in other nations, paving the way for the eventual birth of radical green/socialist parties when citizens turn away, finally, from the reigning fascists in disgust. It’s likely to be bloody, and take a long time, but that, the Stoic will tell you, is the nature of humans and how social change happens. Economic and then ecological collapse will weigh heavily on the trajectory and the outcome of this political disintegration and re-emergence. By then politics may have become a much more local matter.

As I feel neither responsible for, nor patient with, this likely-brutal process, I qualify as neither stoic nor Stoic. But I have no choice in this, either. I can only attempt to divert my attention to matters less trying, and less ugly. In part, that is what these walks are about — more perceiving and less conceiving, more noticing and less thinking.

The Skytrain in our area is elevated, with lovely, changing lights at night on its support beams, and in many areas a broad pedestrian/bikeway beneath the tracks. These long islands of concrete have stone and steel benches along them, though I rarely see anyone using them. As I walk along one of them now, a car drives alongside blasting a song I recognize.

An aside here: I was first drawn to listen to K-Pop music just a few days ago by an article in the New Yorker, and thence to an extensive overview in NPR. As a lover of complex, layered, harmony-rich music, I was immediately entranced: K-Pop has come a long way in the last decade from its institutionalized, sexualized, exploitative, repetitive roots to embrace a ton of international musical influences, and now produces a dazzling array of some of the most polished, intricate and diverse dance music ever produced. I found the music of the more-popular boy bands too simple for my tastes (BTS sounds too much like a clone of Bruno Mars to me — check out the #s of views for these songs, though!). The girl bands, having to be twice as good to attract the same audience, have done exactly that. Richer harmonies, more sophisticated rhythms and melodies, and full of infectious joy. Yeah, I know they’re still exploited. That’s what happens when money enters the picture.

So the song I hear from the car alongside me is Rain on Me, by the K-Pop girl group MAJORS (you can hear it, if you’re interested, as the 5th cut in my K-Pop favourites playlist). I figure it’s probably a carful of young women blasting it and singing along, but I’m caught up in the music and I just spontaneously start to dance on this concrete island that’s as big as a dance floor. I’m a terrible dancer, but I’m just having fun and laughing as I look over into the car and it’s two guys blasting the music, which surprises me. They zoom off, and, when I get home I research the gender mix of K-Pop fans, and to my astonishment I learn that the fans of all the girl groups on my K-Pop playlist are overwhelmingly male, while most of the other girl groups I’ve listened to since I became infatuated with K-Pop music have overwhelmingly female fans. What’s the difference? Not the degree of eye-candy (all K-Pop music, by both genders, is eye-candy). I think it’s the intensity, the relentless beat, and the strong, layered harmonies. Maybe Korean men actually like powerful, confident, fierce women? Or maybe I’m just a stan.

So now I can’t get the song out of my head and, the bear forgotten, I’m dancing all the way home. There’s a sudden storm in the mountains above me, but it’s still mostly sunny here. I am filled with a sense of elation. This world is fucking amazing, and we’re all so wrapped up in the crises of the moment, our personal traumas, and the endless doom-scroll, that we’re missing it all. It’s right here.

I grab a soy matcha from the local café and take the elevator up, still glowing. And when I walk through the door to the apartment, what I see out the window is the image at the top of this post.

We’re totally fucked. It’s going to get awful. But I’m just standing here staring out the window at this incredible scene, smiling, singing, laughing, dancing.

Nothing else to be done.

Posted in Collapse Watch, Creative Works, Month-End Reflections, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Manifestly, an Imagined Conversation

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Dave Pollard

More radical non-duality nonsense. Skip it if this isn’t to your taste. The conversation included in this post is a work of fiction.


Carlo Rovelli (photo from wikipedia); Tim Cliss (photo from his web site)

I have been reading theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, a summary of the latest thinking in quantum science, which also ponders the nature of reality and, through a side trip into neuroscience, the nature of the self.

Since I’m now somewhat obsessed with the message of radical non-duality, I’ve been reading Carlo’s book through that particular lens. It’s fascinating to see the growing overlap between radical non-duality’s simple message and some of the new, astonishing discoveries of science.

But the message of radical non-duality and the latest scientific theories about the nature of reality are not congruent, and it’s likely they never will be.

Acceptance of radical non-duality would amount to scientists throwing up their hands and admitting that the nature of reality cannot be known, and it’s hard to conceive of any scientist being prepared to make such a career-limiting move.

And since radical non-duality is not a theory or philosophy, but just a statement of what is seen as obvious without the veil of the illusory self, its message cannot embrace science, since science is seen as just another story, an inevitably doomed attempt to enable everything to make sense to a separate self that does not exist.

Still, there’s a tantalizing temptation to try to reconcile the two. I’m doubting that anyone could arrange a conversation between Carlo and one of the messengers of radical non-duality. There was a meeting between Jim Newman and neuroscientist-philosopher Sam Harris recently, and it was an absolute debacle, with Sam wasting everyone’s time trying in vain to fit Jim’s message into his determinist/compatibilist spectrum and finally giving up. (When Sam asked Jim whether he believed in free will, and Jim replied that there is no one to have or not have free will, it was basically game over.)

So, rather than risk a similar disaster, I thought I would instead use my literary licence to imagine a conversation between two fictional characters: Carlo Rovelli’s granddaughter, who I’ve named Carla, and Tim Cliss’ granddaughter, who I’ve named Thea. In the story, both characters have followed the work of their grandfathers, and they find themselves working together on a communal farm in post-civ-collapse northern Sweden. After introductions, this is, I imagine, their conversation:


Photo “Under Cover” by MTSOFan on flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Thea: I’ve read your grandfather’s book Helgoland, and I was struck by how much it did, and yet did not, resonate with my grandfather’s book This Deafening Silence. It would have been fascinating, had they met, to have heard them talk together.

Carla: Yes, I’m familiar with the radical non-duality message, though I admit I don’t really ‘get’ it.

Thea: I don’t think it’s possible to ‘get’ it, at least, as long as the self is around, interpreting everything through its personal lens. I don’t presume to ‘get’ it. I think your grandfather’s theories come as close as any separate self’s arguments can come to articulating it in scientific terms. “Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which . . . there is nothing.” Your grandfather, the most respected theoretical physicist of his time, wrote that! I can almost picture the eyes of his colleagues rolling back in their heads!

Carla: Yes, my grandfather was quite taken with the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna.

Thea: Of course, there are lots of different interpretations of Nāgārjuna’s work, lost in the translation of his mostly-poetic writing style. Your grandfather seemed to believe his core argument was, like your grandfather’s, that everything exists only in relationship to other things. That’s presumably based on Nāgārjuna’s “dependent arising” (pratitya-samutpada) idea. Yet Nāgārjuna and his contemporaries also speak about the emptiness — śūnyatā — of everything, which seems closer to what my grandfather was describing in relating the radical non-duality message, which asserts there are no relationships, only appearances without causality, purpose or meaning.

Carla: I was struck by that as well. My grandfather seemed more than willing to accept that time was just a mental construct, that it didn’t really exist — he wrote a whole book about that. It is hard to understand how anything can have relationship to anything else — indeed, that anything can really exist to have relationship with anything else — without ‘real’ time or space in which that relationship can arise.

Thea: Exactly. That’s why I was so puzzled when your grandfather hit upon a different word than ‘relationship’ to describe the essential nature of reality, and then quickly seemed to abandon it. That word was manifestation. He used the word a lot, but only in the ‘transitive’ sense of ‘manifested in relation to’. He even said: “It is possible to think of the manifestations of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself.” My grandfather used the word appearance to describe everything that is seemingly (but not really) happening — he might just as easily have used manifestation, but in the ‘intransitive’ sense. So it seems that they might have actually been very close to agreeing on the nature of reality.

Carla: The thing about quantum science is that it’s proved to be immensely useful in all kinds of practical areas. I wonder if my grandfather would have been unwilling to go all the way to radical non-duality because it kind of renders everything moot — it’s a pretty much useless message. It leaves a lot of the critical questions and problems of science not only unanswered, but declares them unanswerable.

Thea: I suppose. Though I suspect if your grandfather had suddenly lost his sense of any kind of self or separation, the way mine apparently did, willingness to accept something useless wouldn’t have been an issue — it would simply be obvious, and there would be no ‘un-seeing’ it. Though that would probably be pretty ghastly for an established scientist to come to grips with.

Carla: That’s the part of radical non-duality that is hardest for me to fathom, although the message does resonate intuitively and it has a certain intellectual appeal. Isn’t it possible that, instead of suddenly being ‘liberated’ from the illusory veil of self, your grandfather simply had a psychic break, and glommed onto the message of radical non-duality as a means of coping with the sheer terror of facing the meaninglessness and emptiness of life? I mean, people, especially under great stress, come to believe all kinds of absurd things, like reincarnation and alien conspiracies and gods in the skies with long beards.

Thea: Well, I guess anything is possible. During the early collapse times people felt awfully hopeless and helpless and guilty and ashamed for what they thought they’d allowed to happen. But radical non-duality seems to me a pretty poor choice of security blanket — my grandfather seemed to live his life pretty full-on, pretty unsheltered by what he said he saw to be “everything just happening, without meaning or purpose”. But then born-again Christians and spirituality converts don’t seem to have chosen a terribly easy message, either, given public animosity to their ‘extremist’ beliefs. So maybe radical non-duality is a form of last-gasp ‘salvation’, though I’m skeptical.

Carla: There have been ‘glimpses’, I think they’re called, where it seemed clear that there was no Carla, no anyone, nothing real, just things apparently happening. They came with a sense of tremendous relief, of “Duh, this is so obvious, how could I not have seen it before?”. But if that’s the ‘natural reality’ then the illusory Carla would seem to be enormously obstinate about accepting it, because she seems to be still here, in spades.

Thea: Well, maybe not obstinate, but instead, just conditioned? If we have no free will — if there is no free will because there’s no one to have it — then the illusory Carla, despite her intrigue with the radical non-duality message, has absolutely no control over what she believes. Conditioned behaviour may be just an appearance, though it’s a pretty compelling one.

Carla: Except of course that if there’s no purpose or meaning to anything, conditioned behaviour could only be just a story, another pattern we only think is real, like faces in clouds or characters in dreams… You know there are other scientists from my grandfather’s time who said some very similar things. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, for example, argued that what we “experience” as being “the world” is merely our mental model of it. He said: “When we agree on our hallucinations, we call that reality. And the experience of being a self is also a controlled hallucination generated by the brain… We ‘predict’ our selves into existence.” And then there is physicist Sean Carroll saying that all explanations about the nature of space and time fail to pass scientific muster and that the most credible explanation left is that “the universe just is” and we cannot know how or why — that there is no time or space, just an “infinite field of possibilities”.

Thea: Yes, but Sean also argued for a “multiverse” explanation of reality, and my sense is that “the universe just is” was his fallback if that explanation didn’t pan out. There’s a big gap between “we don’t know what reality is” and “we can’t know what reality is, because there is no one to know anything”. I think it’s a bit like Stephen J Gould’s lifelong desire to convince the world that religion and science were “non-overlapping magisteria”, that they could both be “right” and valuable in their own domains. Everyone really wanted to believe it, but, unlike his other work, it never really held water.

Carla: So you’re saying that we can’t have it both ways? That if radical non-duality is true, then science is no more than a story with some apparently useful lessons, but no answers for the larger questions like the nature of reality or the self. In which case belief that science is in any way ‘true’ is just deluded groupthink…. And if science is on the right track, then radical non-duality is just a mental disorder, an unprovable, unrealistic fairy tale that sweeps all the hard questions and issues facing the world under the rug as being moot and “without meaning or purpose”.

Thea: I don’t like having to label either science or radical non-duality as some kind of mental illness, though I agree they’re incompatible, irreconcilable. They can’t both be right, unless we redefine what ‘right’ means in some equivocal way. But nevertheless, I have no problem seeing the ‘logic’ in both of them, and acting ‘as if’ either is true, depending on the circumstances of the moment. After all we’ve been through, if we can’t live with a little ambiguity, uncertainty, and cognitive dissonance, we’re not going to be able to cope.

Carla: I guess so. But even if science were to gain a little humility, and radical non-duality were to become a little more compassionate, I can’t see that there could ever be a bridge between the two. If our grandfathers had actually met, it’s possible that they wouldn’t have got along at all. Tim’s message, and Carlo’s theory, really had no common thread.

Thea: Yes, except that they both cared deeply about other people, and about the world. And they were both inveterate skeptics, constantly challenging everything, including their own assumptions and beliefs.

Carla: Maybe they could have been like David Bohm and J Krishnamurti, who worked so hard to appreciate each other’s ideas about the world and reality and human nature, even though they came to those ideas from utterly different perspectives. Perspectives arguably as irreconcilable as our grandfathers’. Maybe some kind of half-way ‘convergence’ is the best one can achieve.

Thea: Hmm. Makes me think of the lines from TS Eliot: “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Carla: What an astonishing world this is, where more than 8 billion people can manage to convince each other that they have some kind of basic shared view of the truth about themselves and the world, when it’s entirely based on a mental model that is, at best, a very ragged representation of what is really true, and at worst, is a complete misconception.

Thea: Yeah. If only we could be more like the wild creatures around us, whose brain cycles are mostly focused on perceiving rather than conceiving, and which accept everything as it apparently is, instead of trying to attach meaning and make sense of everything.

Carla: My grandfather was intrigued by the famous article by Thomas Nagel asking “What is it like to be a bat?” I think he concluded that science could never answer that perfectly fair and important question. But my sense is that, if the bat, like everything else, is simply an appearance, a manifestation, then being a bat isn’t “like” anything. If there is no bat “self”, and there is no real time, then there is simply being, in the same perfect, inseparable, timeless, wondrous way that there is for very young children. There is no need for anything to have to be real, for anything to have a self, for there to be real time or space, or for anything to be ‘known’. Everything is enough.

Thea: Wow. Maybe that’s the bridge.

Carla: Hah! Well, it will have to wait for now. We have a soil reamendment workshop to attend. After you.

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