Risky Business

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Dave Pollard

UPDATED: Jan 26, 2018 1pm replacing last year’s ‘maps’ with this year’s, just released.

This year’s Davos Global Risk Forum “landscape”. Last year’s for comparison purposes, with legend here. 

Every year, an organization called the Global Risk Forum presents the corporate and political elite attending the Davos World Economic Forum conference with a snapshot of their assessment of the greatest risks this elite and its vested interests should be aware of. This is all about risk mitigation (ie avoiding anything that would dampen profits or impede re-election). But they pretend they also care about the welfare of the world’s people, and spend millions of dollars (kindly provided by you in the form of customer profits and taxes) preparing this report.

The full report (PDF) is here, and it’s worth a look. It tells you some things about the thinking and the (arrogant, naive, ignorant, mistaken) beliefs of the rich and powerful: notably that ‘they’ the leaders can control these risks, and that there are relatively simple ‘solutions’ to these (and other, unmentioned) complex predicaments facing our crumbling industrial civilization culture and our ravaged and desolated planet. They demonstrate that they are utterly short-term focused (their assessment of risks’ likelihood and impact varies enormously from year to year, largely based on the past year’s headlines).

Nevertheless, though the list of risks is far from complete, it is worth considering from a local community preparedness and adaptation perspective. We know we can’t control or prevent these crises, but it’s helpful to know what we might be facing, when, and to what degree.

It is interesting to note what has appeared on the list of risks in past, but has dropped off the radar in these ‘experts’ minds more recently.

At one point, the explosion in the incidence of chronic diseases (as distinct from infectious diseases, which are still on the list) was high on the chart, mainly because it was realized that this is leading to the inevitable bankruptcy of public health systems worldwide — if the cost of medical care, pharmaceuticals, and end of life care continue to skyrocket, and the incidence of chronic illness also continues to soar (and there is no evidence to indicate these trends won’t continue), there will soon be insufficient money, no matter how much premiums increase, to pay for the staggering costs of our increasingly global Civilization Diseases.

So why aren’t chronic diseases on the list anymore? My guess would be that leaders, such as the attendees at Davos, have been sufficiently successful in their PR propaganda campaign to convince the rest of the population that their illness, and their poverty (and hence inability to pay for even minimal chronic health care) is somehow their own fault. If the population doesn’t expect the powers that be to address the problem or pay for chronic disease related health care, and if, soon, only the elite will be able to afford it, then the elite can wash their hands of it. If fixing it isn’t profitable or essential to political success, then, to the Davos gnomes, it simply isn’t a problem.

Marine disasters are also notably absent from the list. It will take another Shell or Exxon disaster to get this, and the larger issue of the utter befouling of marine systems worldwide and its effect on marine life (including seafood we eat), back on the list. But it won’t stay on there long. There is no money to be made in saving our oceans (except for the ironic spike in GDP when massive cleanups are needed after major corporate disasters), and the peasants can always be told to eat farmed fish.

Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse are on the map, but they’re only in the middle of the chart, despite the obvious fact that human survival is utterly dependent on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. Why is the impact of this ongoing disaster not at the very top of the map? Because there’s no human solution to it, and no profits to be made fixing it. So, psychologically, it’s better to downplay its likelihood (which is already occurring, ie 100%) and its impact (catastrophic, even just considering the effects of the destruction of forests, oceans, soils and permafrost, which are already well-advanced and accelerating).

The “spread of infectious diseases”, in the middle left of the map, would seem to be the newest toned-down euphemism for pandemics, which were also once higher on the list, in the years after SARS. Absolutely nothing has changed since SARS, other than slightly better monitoring. A pandemic caused by either wilful weaponizing of diseases (so-called bioterrorism), or more likely the mutation of a potent disease like the influenza virus to become airborne and immune to known antivirals and antibiotics, would be far more catastrophic than anything else on the map, and it could happen very quickly. Why isn’t it rated higher? Again, because there are no answers and no profits to be made, so better to deny it’s a serious risk.

Nuclear reactor accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are now presumably relabeled and included in the term “man-made environmental disasters”. It is hard to know what all is encompassed in that enigmatic title, but to say that the potential combined impact of all such disasters is only average, as the map suggests, is a statement of utter denial. Why isn’t this ranked higher? Because a more precise term for “man-made environmental disasters” is “corporate-caused environmental disasters”. The egomaniacs at Davos don’t want too much attention drawn to their complicity in these problems. It would be unfortunate if the population were to discover, from a Davos report to the global business/political corpocracy, that one of the greatest risks to our planet is… the global business/political corpocracy. Wouldn’t want that. Let’s move this risk down lower on the chart and deflect responsibility by calling it “man-made environmental disasters”.

Our colossally bone-headed short-term thinking is also revealed in the demotion of peak oil (“energy price shock”) to a low-likelihood, low-impact risk. As I have explained often on these pages, the issue isn’t the availability of oil, or its (hugely fluctuating and artificially suppressed) price, it’s the availability of affordable oil (and other hydrocarbons). And many others have repeatedly smashed the myth that (even massively subsidized) renewable energy can replace more than a small percentage of hydrocarbon energy. But we’re desperate to believe that cheap oil won’t run out until we have “environmentally friendly” renewable energy available in abundance. So since the Davos gnomes have largely created our dependence on cheap hydrocarbons, who are they to tell us otherwise?

Apparently in Davos, technology is still our friend. Despite the lessons of history, risks related to technology, other than cyberattacks and data theft, are rated low. The innocuously named “adverse consequences of technological advances” barely makes the map at all. Really?

I could say much more about the weaselly logic and political expediency evident in the map, but enough ranting. The report, flawed as it is, makes fascinating reading, and is almost as educational and thought-provoking (eg some of the new risks) as it is infuriating. We could do worse than borrow the methodology and create our own maps of the real risks we need to be monitoring and preparing for.

The report has a second interesting map, reproduced below, which attempts to show the major interconnections between the various risks.


This year’s Davos Global Risks Interconnections map. Last year’s version for comparison purposes here.

Intriguingly, “rising chronic diseases” (faintly) make this second chart, though the associated risks identified with this trend are inexplicable. The main risks that are associated with this crisis are poor nutrition (ie our toxic, perfidious industrial food system) and stressful, low-exercise lifestyle (ie people having to work too long and hard in horrific, exhausting, soul-destroying jobs). But you’re not going to see these risks on the Davos map. Don’t want to bite the hand that feeds us.

You know what I’m getting at, of course. There is one underlying cause/risk for just about every dot on the Davos risk map: Untrammelled industrial capitalism. It is the very system that the business and political elite gathered in Davos have so carefully built up and defended, that is the ultimate risk to all of us. Will we ever see an admission of that, from these supposedly brilliant intellectual minds?

Don’t count on it.

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

Networking to Find Better Work

Posted on January 22, 2018 by Dave Pollard

I’m retired, and hoping I won’t ever have to return to the work world, but I know most of the world doesn’t have that luxury, and many aren’t happy with the work they are doing as employees, freelancers or contractors (or they are unemployed, or unhappily self-employed).

I recently had the occasion to read Orville Pierson’s book Highly Effective Networking: Meet the Right People and Get a Good Job, written in 2009 but pretty savvy about the use of current technology, which explains how much more effective a particular kind of networking (not social networking, not sales networking — work-search networking) is in finding better work than what you’re doing (or not doing) right now.

Orville knows his stuff, and the book is full of sound ideas, some pretty obvious but often not followed in the struggle to land a better position. We’ve been indoctrinated to think of the process as entailing usually-humiliating rounds of want-ad/job board reading, applications, cover letters with résumés, phone calls, rejection letters, and interviews. Orville explains that the easiest (at least psychologically) and most effective way to find work with a desired employer is through networking. The objective, he says is to get the position through having met the Decision Maker, via the “strength of weak links” and a series of conversations with their contacts, before the job is even posted or perhaps before it is even considered.

Networking as a job search technique, he says, is not about aggressively searching or selling yourself or asking for jobs; it’s about getting your name, reputation and credentials in front of potential Decision Makers through having low-stress, authentic, comfortable conversations about common interests that have reciprocal information exchange value to each person you speak with.

Your search will be more effective if the large majority of your time is spent planning and in direct conversations, rather than doing secondary research in front of a computer screen. It will also help if you have a few ‘personal coaches/confidantes’ (can be anyone you trust who knows you) to use as sounding boards in each of the following steps, and to talk with about anything negative you encounter or feel (keep the negatives out of your search conversations).

The book is IMO a bit wordy and cute (in the sense of superficially clever), and the process is described three times in increasing order of detail, which I found confusing. Here’s a summary that I think captures the essential steps in the process, dense but delayered.

Step 1: Decide to find your next job via networking rather than other methods (replying to ads, using recruiters, walk-ins, direct mail, applications, cold calling etc). This means most of your energies will be spent on networking activities often with no immediate obvious payback, rather than those other methods.

Step 2: Map your Personal Contacts network (basically everyone you know that you have a significant current or past relationship and/or known shared interests with, “anyone who would readily take your phone call”). Think about all your possible networks — organizations, interests, educational institutions, clients, employers, vendors, political, community, charity, sports, hobbies, professional associations, friends, family, neighbours etc. Identify those who are Active (regularly meet or talk with), Dormant (once close but not in a while), and Passive (distant connection enough to know your name or at least probably be able to recall you if you tell them what your connection is). Think about how you might start each call, to quickly help them place you if necessary when you call them. On that basis assess the strength of each Personal Contact in your total contact, and start your calls (step 6) with the strongest (easiest). Call Passive contacts only if there are continuing shared interests/relationships or if you think these “weak links” may have strong connections of their own relevant to your search.

Step 3: Plan your search and network activities. Identify your Professional Objectives (what kind of work do you want to do), your Target Market (what kind of organization do you want to work with) and your Core Message (why you are so well qualified for work that meets your Professional Objectives in organizations in your Target Market, put in words your Target Market can relate to).

Step 4: Begin to identify your Target Organizations (those in your Target Market), and gather information on what their culture and values and challenges and needs and prevailing trends are, and who’s who in them.

Step 5: Identify possible Decision Makers in your Target Organizations. If possible (using online research or asking people) identify who might be in their networks, to see if you have any in common. In large organizations the Decision Makers are usually not C-suite people; they are the people with the strongest voice in who gets hired at your level.

Step 6: Get the word out to your Personal Contacts. Let everyone (identified in Step 2) know that you’re available and looking, and what you have to offer. Make them comfortable* with an amiable and authentic introduction and update — don’t rush into your request or “ask for 20 minutes of their time”. Once you’ve established or re-established rapport, ask if they have ideas about your search, and show them your Target Organizations list. Ask if they know others who might help refine your list or your search (Secondary Contacts), or if they know other potential Target Organizations to consider for your list, and if they have comments about or know anything about your Target Organizations, and most importantly (and when appropriate) if they know anyone in your Target Organizations (Professional Contacts), and if they’d be comfortable introducing those people to you (not just giving you or emailing you the person’s name), and if they say Yes to both questions, add those others to your network. You should plan to get at least one introduction to a new relevant contact for every two calls (and talk with your coach/confidantes if you’re not meeting this target).

Step 7: Meet and exchange information with Secondary and Professional Contacts (people you already know in Target Organizations, plus “weak links” — people who have been recommended to you for help or information about your search, and people in your Target Organizations you have been offered an introduction to in Step 6). Ideally, the first Professional Contacts you meet in one of your Target Organizations will be insiders at or below your own level, working in areas that interest you or where you have strong competencies applicable to that organization. Inquire about the organization’s priorities, skill prerequisites and challenges. Keep it businesslike — avoid too much personal stuff, without being dishonest, and focus on your process and specifically your Professional Objectives and Core Message (don’t mention your Target Organizations list to Professional Contacts inside one of them). Learn from them what is going on in the organization, clarify who the Decision Makers might be and as much about them as you can. You should be able to talk with them as professional peers and offer information in return to reciprocate their time and energy. Give/send your resume, if appropriate, only at the end of your meeting or phone call.

Step 8: Get in touch with Decision Makers and Influencers before the job opening happens. These will almost always come from introductions in the earlier steps. You are more likely to meet Influencers before Decision Makers, but both are important. Some of them might be Sponsors — people you get to know who will be actively helping you find a way to join the organization. Let them know you have useful qualifications for them, that you’re available and that you’re very interested in working with/for them. Drawing on information from other Insiders and your own research, convey your knowledge about the organization. You want to come across as interesting to Influencers and other Professional Contacts, and interested and competent to Decision Makers. For this level at least, have a script. Decision Makers want to know: “What’s in it for me? What do you want from me? Is this going to be awkward or difficult? How long will it take and will it be worth that amount of time?”

Step 9: Keep everyone informed about your progress. “Loop ahead” (re-contact past networking calls and bring them up to speed on how you’re doing, and see if they have more info or additional referrals). Contact any Decision Makers you’ve met every 2-3 weeks until they hire you; mention new information about the organization or people you’ve recently met in the organization. [More info in the book about managing your way through actual job interviews if they’re needed] And when you get the job, tell everyone and thank them.

Step 10: Ancillary use of a website and social media. Use your website and professional sites like LinkedIn to articulate your credentials, character and reputation — and in your case to subtly clarify that you’re gainfully self-employed and hence looking for a job as a choice rather than out of desperation. Use social media and blogs sparingly and avoid online squabbles or arrogance. Have a Facebook page but it’s fine if it’s innocuous and just about your work. Use LinkedIn and other social media to identify people in Target Organizations but don’t contact them cold — gather information and use it in your networking conversations. Identify “friends of friends” who might be worthwhile adding to your networks, and identify who in your existing networks might introduce you.

*Making your networking contact comfortable entails the following (1) “Manage their expectations. Tell them at the very outset what you have in mind and what your goals are in the conversation. Explain how you’re doing job hunting, and which steps you’re working on right now.” That will relieve concerns they may have that you’re looking for job openings or other guidance they may not feel qualified to give (and that they’ll be letting you down if they don’t), or that you’re going to press them for referrals or otherwise “put the squeeze” on them. It might help to have a short script to accomplish this upfront. (2) Always be honest and authentic. (3) Only accept an introduction to a new contact if you are convinced they are completely comfortable making the introduction. (4) Express gratitude for whatever they offer.          The book contains several ‘scripts’ for making networking conversations with various types of contacts ‘comfortable’ — some are a bit unnatural but they do provide some good ideas on how to do this, more than I can capture in a summary.

The process is somewhat iterative as your contacts and knowledge grow. As a former employer charged with interviewing and hiring professionals, it makes sense to me. No guarantee — I’ve known people who’ve used a process like this who I’ve bent over backwards to hire, and others who’ve used the same process that I wouldn’t hire (because I didn’t think they had the right skills for the job) despite their work-search savvy and perseverance.

In short, this is a book worth reading if you’re at that point in your life, and I know a lot of people are. If you find the book, and/or the summary above, useful, let me know.

Posted in Working Smarter | 3 Comments

Letter of Termination

Posted on January 21, 2018 by Dave Pollard


image from Fill at Pixabay CC0

Dear Powers That Be Consortium:

This is to inform you that the services your organizations have been providing to us, as our agents, no longer meet our needs, and we are terminating our agreement (the Industrial Civilization Management Agreement) with you and will in future provide the needed services directly ourselves.

Following is a partial listing of some of the ways in which your consortium member organizations have abrogated the spirit and substance of our long-standing agreement with you, leaving us no alternative but to take this step:

Representative Democracy LLC: Your “representatives” have not represented us at all. They have lied to us. They have taken bribes, and in return lavished gifts, from money we entrusted to them, on rich and powerful interests, to our overwhelming detriment. They have not upheld the laws designed to protect us or our environment, and have instituted laws that do the opposite. They have incompetently managed our services and our resources. They are all herewith fired; we will henceforth manage our common resources and public services locally and directly. The experiment with their service delivery model of “representative democracy” has been an abject failure. We will try an “uncivilized” approach — community-based direct democracy — instead.

Industrial Growth Economics LLC: The “executive officers” you assigned to our account are utterly incompetent, narcissistic, and hopelessly corrupted. They seem utterly incapable of taking any action in the public interest. The model you instituted on our behalf ironically called the “free market economy” is the precise opposite: it is an oligarchy of obscenely rich and powerful overlords sucking up the commons — our resources — for their own personal enrichment, impoverishing us in the process. Their gargantuan fees for worthless and destructive “services” are unwarranted and must be returned to us. They too are all fired, and ordered to immediately return everything they have taken from us, including all assets they have purchased with the proceeds of their unconscionable “salaries”, bonuses, dividends and capital gains, and we ask that they leave our premises immediately. Their ruinous economy will be dismantled and replaced, gradually, with a non-hierarchical, egalitarian, locally-based gift economy.

Neo-Liberal Education Services LLC: The officers and “ministers” of this organization have created a massive and dysfunctional centralized system that has neglected our young people and forced many of them into indentured servitude to your other member organizations. We are abolishing the entire system. Some of the prison-like buildings they have constructed for so-called education will be converted into housing for those they have impoverished and for entrepreneurial offices to support the new gift economy. Over the coming years a system of locally-mentored, self-directed learning (deschooling and unschooling) will be introduced to teach our young people, finally, how to learn and how to discover what they are meant to do with their precious lives.

Public Private Health Services LLC: The “privatization” of public health by the czars of this organization is terminated immediately. Health services will hereinafter be a right of all people, and will be offered free of charge. The patients they have made dependent on the medical and pharmaceutical “industry” with its exorbitantly-priced products and specialist services catering mainly to elites with diseases of affluence, will soon learn how to self-manage their health through sound nutrition and exercise, simple self-diagnosis and holistic self-treatment, guided by local medical generalists. Our research indicates that this will increase the healthy life-span of our citizens by several years, at a fraction the cost the “industry”, and its parasitic insurance companies and lawyers, have been charging.

Monoculture Industrial Foods LLC: The titans in charge of this organization have perpetrated cruelty and caused illness far beyond anything in the history of our planet. They have addicted us to overpriced junk, monopolized and privatized on a massive scale a resource that truly belongs to all of us. They have confined and tortured billions of living creatures. They have poisoned our food, our water, and our land. They have replaced the nutritious staples of millennia of human adaptation and cultivation with over-packaged, over-processed, unhealthy, toxic foods that are responsible for the soaring rates of chronic diseases afflicting nearly all of us. They have ruined our soil, desolated our forests and exhausted and befouled our seas. We are taking it all back, and beginning the long road back to healthy, organic, diverse, locally-produced food using permaculture principles.

Centralized Utilities LLC: Along with good food, good health and a safe and healthy planet, our birthright includes the rights to light, warmth, clean water, and accurate information. The executives of this organization have stolen that birthright, charging us for modest use of what should be free, and using those charges to subsidize destructive and monopolistic corporations that have fouled the planet and its atmosphere with hydrocarbon wastes, production by-products and pollution, and exhausted these precious resources to the point our dependence on them now imperils our very existence. We are halting all utilities’ and other energy extraction activities that produce greenhouse gases immediately, and phasing out all non-essential and centralize utility operations as quickly as the shift to renewable, community-owned utilities can be put in place. We are immediately halting the production of bottled water, incandescent lightbulbs, and other inexcusably wasteful products using our precious resources. And we are dismantling the oligopolies of mainstream media, social media, and telecommunications.

Defence & Security Partners LLC: Your generals and chiefs and head wardens, and their business friends who manufacture weapons, have made our planet and people much less safe —unsafe in fact, squandered trillions of dollars needlessly, encouraged and armed wars between our people, militarized law enforcement, and made imprisonment into a cruel, profiteering enterprise. This is the opposite of what they were hired to do for us. With them gone, we will begin the hard, generations-long task of re-enabling local communities to look after their own security with minimal incarceration, and working with fellow citizens everywhere to demilitarize our world and destroy the massive arsenals of weaponry they created. We will do this work with the understanding that the best way to avoid conflict is through eliminating inequality and hardship.

You, the Powers That Be, have worked complicitly with each other and with the aforementioned consortium members to steal from, betray, defraud and intimidate us. You have clearly been counting on our unwillingness to terminate this agreement because of its centuries-long history and the massive task that will be entailed in untangling it and restoring the horrific damage you have done to us, our social fabric and our planet. We have finally come to realize just how much damage has been done, and that it must no longer continue.

What surprises us most is that we believe that your consortium and its members were, at least initially, doing what they thought was in all our best interests. As tempting as it is for many of us to find you to blame for your actions and the damage they have done, we have concluded that you were actually doing your best, based on what you have been taught, and in some cases brainwashed, to believe. So we don’t want punishment, just a return to us of the resources we mistakenly entrusted to you, so that we can begin to undo the damage. And for you to get out of the way so that we can do that work.

Respectfully,

The People of Earth

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 8 Comments

Improv

Posted on January 1, 2018 by Dave Pollard

my life is a play and my role, apparently
is as part of an musical octet
which sings three songs
as interludes in a vast improv performance, and
after each, acts out a short improv scene of our own,
a midsummer night’s subplot of sorts.

our songs are rehearsed,
sent to us weeks before the performance,
but for our short scenes
we are given only two lines each, per scene,
just before we go on stage,
which we are told should be spoken
at an appropriate moment during our scene.

we are not limited to these lines,
but are requested to be brief and thoughtful with any other words.

now, it would appear, our performance is nearing its end —
we have completed the third song,
a moving yet somewhat eager four-part harmony,
and we have started our third scene.

already I have delivered my penultimate line,
“but of course nothing matters”,
with what I thought appropriate Beckettian expression,
on the heels of my lovely colleague’s utterance of her line,
“it’s a shame that nothing can be done”.

since our previous scene, there has been a major shift
in the larger play — the principal characters seem to have lost their way,
and the tension has risen, a sense of anticipation, or dread,
and the orchestra’s been playing a more ominous accompaniment.

the final words of our third song seem designed to reflect this. they are:
“the time has ended now for play,
we walk along this dim-lit track;
the others have all gone away,
we sense there’ll be no journey back.”

the song ends on a sad and indecisive Fmaj7.

but while my colleagues are out-doing themselves
with their meagre final lines and fill-ins,
our last moments in the spotlights,
I have no sense of when to deliver my last line,
which is, ironically, “how will I know?”

this line does not seem to belong with my colleagues’ lines.

and so I wait, attentive to the words, the motions,
the language of faces and bodies and eyes,
and say nothing.

of course it isn’t important whether I say it at all —
only my seven fellow players will be aware of the omission,
and the audience and the major cast are all, I would expect,
anxious in their anticipation of the closing scene to come
when our small troupe has left the stage.

still, I wait; the words hang on my tongue.

and then, at last, as if perfectly planned,
our elder colleague steps to the front of the stage, breathes deeply,
and says a phrase, clearly not in our script at all,
addressed it seems to the audience,
to the well-made-up major characters waiting in the wings,
to our little troupe, and to me in particular:
“there is much to be done, and, my friends,
we must each do the right thing at the right moment.”

and with a look of relief and dismay I deliver my line:
“how will I know?”

and my dear colleague,
(the one for whom “nothing can be done”), walks across to me,
puts her hand on my shoulder,
and replies: “you will not — this is not about knowing”,
and whisks me, our troupe now moving as one,
gracefully off the stage.

image from the Pen Tarot

Posted in Creative Works | Comments Off on Improv

Links of the Quarter — December 2017

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Dave Pollard

New Yorker cover by R Kikuo Johnson

A dark time for me, finding myself absurdly triggered by completely ordinary events, and aware of the impossibility of letting go of my anxious, fear-driven, hypersensitive, reactive, stress-riddled self. Meanwhile, day to day events in the echelons of power get more and more surreal and alarming, and I can’t quite get myself to turn off the non-local ‘news’ completely; for no good reason, I just have to ‘know’. To know this is my biologically and culturally entrained self just doing the only thing it can do brings me no comfort. Not depressed about all of this; just drowning in the cognitive dissonance.

Feeling like a canary in the mineshaft, and something does not smell right.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE


Christmas card “José y Maria” by cartoonist Everett Patterson. Thanks to Dave Bonta for the link.

When There Is No Insurance Any More: The latest from td0s describes our investment in ‘stuff’ and what happens when we can no longer insure it against loss, because the risk of loss is now too great: “Is there a greater fear than being reset to zero after years and years of numb drudgery, all of it in the service of stacking up a bigger and bigger pile of things? The entire edifice of consumer society rests on the idea that we will work today and that the things we buy will still be ours tomorrow. No longer able to live in the world, to see the providence in the fields and streams, only the store shelves can keep us alive, and so we tithe the gods of chance praying that the future is long and uneventful.”

Listen for the Howl: If you didn’t read my short story that referenced td0s’ remarkable post Boldly Through the Darkness, take a moment to read it.

LIVING BETTER


Where you should live depending on your temperature preferences, from the inimitable xkcd. Before you move, you might want to consider how your new home will be affected by climate change

There Is No Jim Carrey: Thanks to his friend Jeff Foster, Jim embraces radical non-duality. And scientists continue to come up with findings that support this message; most recently comes the finding that the universe shouldn’t exist, and a biology book that asserts you have no free will.

Census Maps: Since a picture is often worth a thousand words, Census Mapper now allows Canadians to get a visual representation of census data by census division. The app breaks data down into deciles so you can see how your neighbourhood stacks up with others in income, home ownership, costs of living, demographics and other data. Thanks to Jens and Alejandro for developing it!

Best Science Books of 2017: The always-excellent BrainPickings (Maria Popova’s labour of love) lists her favourite new science books of the year; a tremendous list. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS AS USUAL


Taking a Knee at a Ravens Game — from Facebook, original source unknown

Enough is Enough: Satirist “Jonathan Pie” comments on the latest absurdities of 45. And here’s a very revealing interview with the man behind the satire.

Canada’s Doing Just Fine, Thanks: A writer humorously tells the US Ambassador to Canada that Canadians don’t need or want any help to be “as successful as Americans”.

Blaming the Victims: Millions of people turn to drugs or alcohol when there is no other way they can find to cope with their suffering. The cost of this is multifaceted: the health costs (money and misery) of and to the users, the misery they (mostly unintentionally) inflict on others as a consequence of their actions and inactions, the crimes some commit to pay for the drugs, and the massive cost of the absurd “war on drugs”. It is so easy to proffer simple solutions: mostly ban the drugs (this has never worked and actually increases the cost), and blame the victims. Thousands of people are now dying each year of fentanyl poisoning — toxins put into street drugs by uncaring dealers and pushers to reduce their cost and to increase the dose (to encourage ‘repeat customers’). Meanwhile millions of people suffering from chronic pain, who have been prescribed opiates for years for pain conditions that never let up and for which there is no known medical cure or effective alternative treatments, are now demonized and presumed to be addicts at a high risk for ‘abuse’, and deprived of essential pain relief under harsh hew prescribing rules in the latest blame-the-victim chapter of the endless “war on drugs”. What are they to do? If they can no longer get their prescriptions filled safely by their doctors (many of whom are being threatened by medical associations, insurers and political agencies to reduce opioid prescribing across-the-board), they are forced to turn to the streets, swelling the numbers exposed to fentanyl poisoning. Vicious cycle. We never learn.

FUN & INSPIRATION


Josephine Lake, Bowen Island (my own photo)

Hawk Raised By Eagles: The story of the tiny red-tailed hawk on Vancouver Island that muscled itself into a young eagle family in their nest, and ended up being raised as if it were an eagle.

Iconic Tree Replaced on Building Top: A condo in English Bay (Vancouver BC) has long been the home to a famous rooftop pine tree that the builder/owner insisted be there to recognize the average height (60m) of the temperate rainforest that had been felled to construct the English Bay community. When the tree died, it took two years to find a suitable replacement, and half a million dollars to get it up into place on the roof. Out on her balcony, Kelly Gavin snapped the shot at sunset just as it was being lowered into place, that the CBC used at the top of its coverage. Now waiting to see if the bald eagles return to nest there.

Fox and the Whale: Quirky, unsentimental animation from Robin Joseph.

Faster Growth Means Fewer Nutrients: Ironically, as the increased amount of CO2 in our atmosphere allows plants (which need it to live) to grow faster, they are producing food with fewer nutrients (less time for them to mature and metabolize). That means the food we eat is poorer too. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

I Want My Bonus Years: The writer urges men to start dating women their own age, for everyone’s benefit. (NB: This is a NYT article, so if you’ve used up your “10 articles per month quota” you won’t be able to read it, or re-read it.)

The Case for Not Being Born: Philosopher David Benatar argues that life and death both entail enormous amounts of suffering, so it is better not to be born (or have children) in the first place.

Trump’s Slurred Speech Tied to Low Battery in Putin’s Remote: Humour from Andy Borowitz on 45’s recent addled speech patterns.

Giving Up Butter: The 5 Stages of Grief: A hilarious take on the naming of butter substitutes. Thanks to Ben Collver for the link.

THOUGHTS OF THE QUARTER


Land art, Pūliki (“the embrace” in Hawai’ian), created using non-toxic biodegrading chalk, across a whole series of trees, by Hula (Sean Yaro). Also check out his ‘Ōwena. 

From Rachel Carson: “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.” (thanks to BrainPickings for this quote and the two that follow)

From Seneca: “There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

From James Baldwin: “You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all. That’s the only advice you can give anybody. And it’s not advice, it’s an observation.”

From Dave Snowden (thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link) on coping with complexity:

  • DO: Change the granularity (drill down or get up above the detail); Distributed cognition (get others to help you make sense of it); Disintermediated sensemaking (don’t rely on media/experts/leaders to make sense of things for you).
  • AVOID: Premature convergence (keep an open mind on what it all means); Retrospective coherence (rationalizing in hindsight); Pattern entrainment (getting into oversimplification and other bad sense-making habits learned from others).
  • ASK: What can I change? What can I monitor? What can I dampen and amplify? (provided you aren’t a non-dualist).
Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 3 Comments

Senseless Behaviour

Posted on December 10, 2017 by Dave Pollard

If you don’t like hopeless messages it might be best to skip this post.


Cartoon by David Sipress from The New Yorker

When you put too many rats together in a confined space in conditions of scarcity for a prolonged period, you get what appears to be highly dysfunctional behaviour — a spike in extreme violence, obsessive hoarding, top-down abuse from throughout the group hierarchy, anomie and suicide at the bottom of the hierarchy, abandonment of family, and ultimately killing and eating of the (weaker) young. What had evolved as a mostly-peaceful, sensible and sustainable group culture crumbles and collapses.

Five years ago I argued that there is no reason to believe human cultures should be any different. What Dmitry Orlov describes as the five stages of cultural collapse resonates almost eerily with Edward Hall’s description of the collapse in overcrowded rat societies.

Since I wrote that, my worldview has changed considerably. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I no longer believe we have the free will or agency (individually or collectively) to change our innate and enculturated behaviours.

So how does one explain the phenomenon of collapse in light of evolutionary theory? And what does this mean for the future of our species and planet?

It seems to me that cultural collapse is essentially the collapse of order into chaos. It takes an enormous amount of energy (in every sense) to maintain order, so ultimately collapse back into unorder (entropy) is inevitable. The astonishing evolution of a staggeringly complex, highly-ordered, diverse, self-sustained balance of life and environment on Earth was, if you buy Gaia theory, equally inevitable. So at many, many different scales evolution is essentially a lovely, eternal succession of waves of increasing complexity and then falling away (collapse, or devolution) into unordered chaos.

What happens at the point of collapse? There is no longer energy (food, fitness, force etc) to sustain the highly-ordered complexity that has been built up. Behaviours that had evolved over millennia to fit with the rest of the ecosystem and the environment suddenly no longer ‘work’. Is the increased aggression and hoarding of the alphas, the eating of the young and the depression and suicide of the lower-downs in the hierarchy (of rats, or humans) an attempt to enable a small number of alphas to survive once it’s realized (at least subconsciously) that the culture as a whole cannot hold? That’s an interesting theory, but it seems more likely to me that what we’re witnessing is just chaotic behaviour — instincts that evolved for one situation being applied (largely inappropriately and dysfunctionally) in a situation the creature (and the group) had never experienced and were clueless to know how to deal with. It is, in essence, senseless behaviour.

The evidence of financial, commercial, political and social collapse (Dmitry’s first four stages) has never been more obvious or abundant than what we have seen in recent months. What we are seeing is the desperate theft by the rich from the poor on a massive scale (the alpha rats hoarding, using offshore tax havens and buying up land in Hawai’i and New Zealand to escape to when living in the cities is no longer viable).

Mostly what we are seeing, everywhere, from the streets to the centres of power, is unprecedented rage.

We see it in the butchery by machete of nearly a million Rwandans by their neighbours. We have seen it in the staggering and nearly-unquestioned (at the time) cruelty exhibited in concentration camps since the dawn of civilization but increasingly as our human population has soared toward eight billion. We see it in monstrous factory farms where acts of unspeakable confinement and cruelty are meted out on a massive scale away from public scrutiny. We saw it in the multi-millionaire Las Vegas gambling addict/real-estate speculator’s shooting frenzy. We continue to see it in the multi-millionaire New York gambling addict/real-estate speculator’s tauntings on Twitter, while we continue to believe, astonishingly and nonsensically, that neither he nor his equally-deranged Pyongyang counterpart, will actually push the button that will bring civilization to a close much quicker than either economic meltdown or climate change could. And we’re all deranged by this culture.

Meanwhile, the US has more guns than people, many of which are or quickly could be converted to instruments of mass destruction. Our civilization is built (with the best of intentions) on the concentration of wealth and power and the capacity to wield it over those lower in the hierarchy, to keep us civilized, domesticated, to keep us, like the lower-hierarchy rats in the overcrowded cages, obedient, cowering in fear, driven to do as we are told by anxiety and adrenaline, and addicted and medicated the rest of our lives with dopamine-fuelled escapes we call “entertainment”.

This is final-stage collapse. We are just so used to the fear, the oppression, the obscene inequality of wealth and power, the corruption, the incarceration, the constantly but scarcely suppressed rage, that we can’t see it; it’s the only life we have known.

I would suggest that this collapse actually began to occur with the invention (which was essential for our species’ survival during past sudden climate changes that created severe scarcity) of the arrowhead and (what Richard Manning has appropriately called “catastrophic”) agriculture — unnatural patches of monoculture crops and confined animals maintained by constant high-energy interventions (work drudgery). The next essential inventions were settlement and (complex, abstract) language, and voila! — civilization culture. In short, I would suggest that civilization is a fascinating but ultimately unsustainable experiment in managing scarcity. We are not ‘meant’ to be (not naturally adapted to) living that way. And while the span of civilization is only a few millennia (an instant in geological time), since we have known nothing else, we are as ill-equipped to deal with (or prevent) its collapse as the clueless rats faced with sudden unnatural scarcity in their hopeless cages. In Darwinian terms we are not ‘fit’ to cope with it.

When you believe, as I do, that we do not have ‘free will’ to do other than what these bodies we presume to inhabit were going to do anyway, given the circumstances of the moment, what do you tell all the rats scurrying around desperately in the cage, acting more and more dysfunctionally?

You don’t tell them anything. For me, and perhaps for some of you, it is better, and enough, to know, to have made some sense of what is, than to just be bewildered (or disappointed) by everything horrific that’s happening. This is only a theory of course. I’m still anxious about it, hopelessly hopeful about changing it, escaping it. But somehow I feel a bit better with this ghastly theory. This corner of the cage is a little more comfortable, a little quieter, than it might have been otherwise.

Posted in Collapse Watch, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Calling the Cage Freedom

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Dave Pollard

This is the second of a series of three new short stories. Image below from wikimedia, CC-SA 3.0.

“I never want to have a job,” Sevi lamented, walking into the kitchen while staring at her tablet screen and almost bumping into me.

“I hope you never have to have one, unless you find something that so thrills your heart that you can hardly bear to wait to get up in the morning to get back at it,” I replied. I envisioned Seville growing up to be a scientist — she had the curiosity and the eye for detail, and the imagination and ability to visualize what most people couldn’t.

“You and Mom don’t have to work, and I don’t want to have to either.”

“I worked for a long time to earn my early retirement,” I replied. “And though your Mom’s family was rich enough she never had to do paid work, she’s put in as many hours doing volunteer work as many people do at paid jobs. Why are you suddenly concerned about having to get a job?”

“It’s the new blog post from td0s,” she replied. “He’s written about how your generations have created a world of drudgery for us to inherit and pay for. Listen to this.” She read:

Life in the modern, capitalist west is tedium. It is an exhausting bore. Without any substantial sense of belonging or meaning, stripped of spirit and tasked with an endless quest for money that buys less and less, people are miserable… The malaise of existence in this world where the wild is all but extinguished is felt far and wide, whether it is understood as such or not. Absent community and a deep sense of both autonomy and personal value, people become damaged… We industrial humans do not live. Living is active. We are only active in the pursuit of making someone else rich while we earn just enough to make it until the next paycheck, and then we are passive. We sit and stare, trading entertainment for experience, hoping that watching others pretend to live will suffice by proxy… If we all agree to call the cage freedom, then it is freedom.

What becomes of people when you strip them of everything that makes them human?… In my region there are those who want to cut the forests. They think that they have observed the forest long enough to know how to control it. They think they have the wisdom to manage a forest better than it can manage itself. How does one argue? The only words they will accept are in their own language, the language of domination, the language that insists on seeing only disparate pieces in a grand machine, the language that has exorcized the sacred.

I cannot convince you to leave the forest be, in that language. I cannot convince you to seek the wild with those lifeless words. I cannot convince you to abandon this culture in the language that it birthed. You have to feel it. Perhaps you do already. Perhaps you aren’t sure what you feel, other than a general sense that something is not right. Do not snuff it out. Nurture it. Breathe life into it. Let it guide you to others. Give yourself permission to feel even if it is only the pain. Move boldly through the darkness, and listen for the howl.

“That’s just awful,” she added. “How can you have done this to us, to our world, and then expect us to work in it, this dead place you’ve created, all our lives. And we can’t even be wild — there are no wild places any more, just cities and factory farms and war zones.”

“Guilty as charged,” I acknowledged. “We had no idea what we were doing. We did our best, what we thought was right and possible. It took me most of my life to discover that what we sought was soul-destroying, life-destroying, planet-destroying and unsustainable. I used to quote an anarchist writer named Wolfi Landstreicher extolling humans’ yearning to be wild.” I brought the passage up on my laptop and read it to her:

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.

“You understand that when td0s says to “move boldly” and Wolfi says to “fight” they’re exhorting us to exercise our free will, when as we discussed yesterday we don’t actually have free will. They’re great sentiments, but all they can do is make us feel even worse about our own impotence.”

“Is that why you never had any kids of your own, and why you got ‘fixed’ when you and Mom split up? No free will in that choice, huh?” She wrinkled her nose at me and smiled, getting in a little dig about our previous day’s discussion. “No regrets about that decision?”

“Not sure the question ‘why’ ever has a satisfactory answer, rather than one that serves to reinforce whatever cause or blame we’re culturally inclined to lay in each circumstance. I never really felt a drive to bring kids into this world, though I will tell you that having you as my daughter is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’ve led a charmed life. As for regrets, how can one regret what one had no real choice over?”

“I thought you said there was no ‘you’ and no ‘me’? So you have no daughter, and I have no parents. Just appearances, like you said. Cop-out.” She looked like she was going to cry.

I drew her into my arms and gave her a long hug, and after a while I replied: “Several times in my life, the most recent of which happened since I met you, there has been a ‘glimpse’ of that true oneness with no separation, no time or place or person or thing or happening, just everything, still and awesome and astonishing and perpetually new. And everything was perfect, eternal love. And even though there was no ‘me’ and no ‘you’, there was absolute exquisite joyful love for the miracle of what is, including the magical appearance in ‘what is’ of Ms Seville Thorn. Does that make any sense?”

“About as much sense as knowing what’s wrong with the world and being sure there is nothing that can be done to make it better. I admire you and love you but I don’t want to see the world the way you see it, or, how do I put this, the way it is seen when there is no ‘you’. I have to believe I can be wild and free, that I won’t be condemned to a lifetime of awful work, that things at least don’t have to get any worse. You get that, don’t you? I’m just a kid, I have a whole lifetime ahead of me and I have to believe it can be good, that I can ‘move boldly through the darkness and listen for the howl’. That I can be the howl.”

I was lost for words. I wondered whether my grasping at the belief that we have no free will, that nothing we seem to experience is actually real, and that what actually is is perfect and endlessly full of wonder, was just wishful thinking, a way of coping with the dread that the world that Sevi would have to deal with when we were long gone would be ghastly, terrifying, violent, even not worth living.

“You can be the howl,” I assured her then. “Maybe you can even show me how to be the howl too.”

I loved her resilience. One moment she looked like she was justifiably falling apart, and the next she was scanning her tablet over my shoulder while extracting herself from my hug. “Both these guys talk about civilization and domestication as being evils, which is not how most people see them. What’s the deal with domestication anyway?”

“Well,” I replied, “the words civilize and quiet have the same etymological root — kei, meaning to lie still. Likewise the words domesticate and dam have the same etymological root — dam, meaning to build and enclose. There could not be anywhere near 8 billion humans on this planet if we were not thoroughly civilized and domesticated — if we hadn’t been indoctrinated to lie still and be enclosed, held in. It makes total sense that human domestication and civilization were evolutionarily successful. At the same time it’s increasingly apparent that these recent evolutions are no longer serving the vast majority of humans. An increasing number of us are realizing that this isn’t quite how humans were ‘meant’ to live, not our natural and healthy state. The opposite of civilized and domesticated is wild and free. Losing our wildness and freedom, td0s and Wolfi are saying, is too high a cost to pay.”

We were quiet, then, for a few moments, except for some mutual sighs. “I have a project to do,” Sevi said, after that. Another sigh and she added: “Thanks, I guess.” And she was gone.

~~~~~

That evening, Sevi dragged me away from my laptop and took me outside to the edge of the forest abutting our house. It was a warm summer evening with a light but steady rain, just after dusk. “Time to howl,” she said. She howled, with a voice so clear and powerful it made me shudder. I looked up at where the moon would be if it weren’t overcast. I howled, but it was pathetic, timid and unconvincing. Sevi demonstrated again. A dog down in the valley suddenly took up the call, and the two of them, taking turns, showed me what to do. I howled, calling up a voice I didn’t know I had. Sevi had pulled off her soaking wet dress and with one hand pulled herself up onto a tree branch, and from up there she resumed howling.

Another dog now joined in, making us a foursome. Sevi jumped down and pulled me into the forest, breaking into a run. She was barefoot, but was running sure-footedly and effortlessly, landing on the edges of her feet seemingly to feel the earth for stones before placing her full weight down and launching into her next step. The sight of her, this wild little creature, so strong, so determined, filled me with love and pride. I ran behind her, ridiculous and incompetent.

Suddenly she stopped. She motioned me to be silent and pointed into the darkness. I could barely make out eyes in the distance. Sevi howled again, her whole body puffed up and panting, alert and electric. “Ah-wooooooh!”

And from the darkness the long lean body behind the two eyes returned the call, a wild plaintive cry, a howl that penetrated the falling night air and went right through my rain-soaked body, somehow stirring something in me, a remembering.

A coyote.

“She’s calling us home,” Sevi said, breathless. She laughed, turned to me, and shook her head.

“Now how can you tell me you have no choice, no free will? You can move boldly through the darkness. You only stay civilized and domesticated if you choose to. You know what my choice is.”

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

The Project

Posted on November 23, 2017 by Dave Pollard

This is the first of three short stories featuring two new characters. The others in the series should be coming up later this month. Image below from skeeze at the wonderful pixabay CC0.

“Daddy… I need to ask you about something. Phoenix says there’s no such thing as free will, and that the scientists now all agree about that with the philosophers. But that doesn’t make sense, does it?”

The joys of unschooling a step-child! A group of us parents, mostly living here in Hawai’i, had been sponsoring a youthful version of ‘TED Talks’, presented by the astonishingly bright and curious group of youngsters we had agreed to set free from the ghastly institution of schooling. Just as each child in our collective group picked their own curriculum, each child selected and practiced their own 10-minute “talk” on a subject of their own research, which was broadcast and recorded for the group on Skype or Zoom. Nine-year-old Phoenix had just aired his “There is No Free Will” talk, and as part of the program we’d all agreed to discuss each subject with our kids, and to submit comments.

“Well, Sevi, if ‘all’ scientists and philosophers ever agree on anything I think we’re in trouble. There is absolutely no consensus on the subject, though it does seem like some new discoveries and theories in physics and biology are winning a few more over to the ‘no free will’ side.” I had been well-trained for what I said to her next: “What do you think?”

“When we decided that I’d be unschooled instead of going to a ‘teaching-school’, that was free will for sure. We had a choice. I’m glad we made that choice. The kids in the teaching-schools are mostly dumb; they don’t know how to think.”

“Suppose we look at that decision in a bit more detail, then. Your mother and I are both fortunate enough to have heard and learned about unschooling, and to have enough time to spend with you as sounding-boards, answering as best we can your very challenging questions. And we’re both curious, skeptical of institutions and independent-minded. And you’ve always been strong-willed and self-motivated; you’ve been reading almost since you were born. And you’re restless, always moving, walking and dancing and singing while you study. One could say it was absolutely inevitable given those biological and social circumstances that that we would ‘decide’ on unschooling.”

“But it was still a choice,” Seville insisted. “We talked about all the options, the plusses and minuses, and we didn’t even all agree at first.”

“Suppose there was a choice, some free will. What exactly was it that made the choice? Something in your brain? Something in your heart?”

“It was a collective decision. All my neurons, together, after sleeping on it and thinking and feeling and learning and trusting instincts. It was just ‘right’. At least for me.”

“So if we looked at all those neurons we’d see some communication among them, some assessment and consensus voting? Those would be very smart neurons.”

“All right, then. They delegated the decision to the brain. The feelings and intuitions weighed in and then the brain made the rational decision. I know Phoenix said that the brain doesn’t actually decide anything; it just rationalizes the decision that has already been made, but still that means a decision was made. And if it wasn’t made by ‘me’ and my brain, who decided it?”

“What if it was inevitable, and the brain just rationalized it so it would look smart and could act like it was in control? No free will, no decision, just what was inevitably going to be done by that lovely little watery bag of bones and organs you call ‘you’?”

Sevi thought for a moment, and then said: “Well let’s take a more difficult decision then, one that could go either way. When Devon came up to me and asked if he could kiss me, for example. A million things went through my head. He’s cute, but a little too full of himself. I liked that he asked, but I didn’t like that he stood so close to me and made me feel pressured. I ended up telling him ‘No, but you can ask me again another time’. That was a heavy decision. No way my genes and my culture could have determined that outcome in advance.”

My turn to think. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I’d say your biology played a pretty big role in not punching him when he asked.” (I presumed she had not punched him, since I knew she liked him, in that ancient way females intuitively like, or dislike, males.) “And your culture told you not to be too quick to agree to anything, to be polite, and probably, sad to say, not to bruise his male ego. If he’d stood any closer you probably would have stepped back or pushed him away, but your elegant ‘decision-making’ really smacks of your unique biology and the way you’ve been enculturated, up to that exact moment.”

“I think Phoenix’s point,” I went on, as Sevi pondered this, “is that when you look inside for some ‘thing’ that is ‘you’, the thing making the decision, you can never find it. Not in the brain, not in the neural pathways or body chemistry or anywhere else.”

“Whoah… that’s heavy. Now you’re saying not only do I not have any free will, but there is no ‘me’ to have any free will. You think people are just zombies doing what they’re programmed to do?”

“Nope, not at all,” I replied. “Remember that Robert Sapolski article that you showed me last month? He wrote…” (I brought up the article on my laptop and read it to her:)

Ultimately, words like “punishment,” “justice,” “free will,” “evil,” “the soul,” are utterly irrelevant and scientifically obsolete in terms of understanding our behavior. It’s insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency… The idea that we are more than our brains, that there’s something inside of us, a being that is in our brain but not of our brain, a “me” that is more than just biology. And that is as grounded in reality as alchemy or astrology… And our culture impacts the biology of our brains in enormous ways too.

I went on: “And then we bought his book and read the chapter where he recommended doing away with the criminal justice system because we have no choice about our behaviour. That doesn’t mean we’re zombies. It just means that, given our biology and our culture, how we will react, and what we’ll think and do each moment isn’t anything we have control over. But our biology and culture are constantly changing us. If Devon had asked to kiss you a year ago, or waited until a year from now, and stood just exactly in the same place and asked the same way, I bet you’d have reacted differently.”

Sevi blushed a bit and did a self-conscious spin. “How do you think I’d have reacted then?”

“A year ago you would have pushed him away and made a face at him. If he’d waited until next year you’d have smiled and said ’Since you asked nicely’ and then you’d have kissed him.”

She frowned a bit and then took us back on topic. “OK, maybe we don’t have free will and we should be nicer to criminals and not so nice to people who, like, self-sacrifice. But the whole ’no me’ thing is something else. That has major implications. Like, if we really accept that we’re not responsible, won’t we all misbehave and procrastinate and party like there’s no tomorrow?”

I smiled at the ‘no tomorrow’ suggestion but managed to restrain myself. Instead I said “If we believe we’re not responsible and if we really have no free will, we can’t make the choice to misbehave and party, any more than we can if we believe we are responsible.”

“But wouldn’t it change us, make us believe like nothing matters…” (she caught me smiling at these words) “… and that we have no control over anything and that life is pointless?” (She’s so smart she scares me sometimes.)

“If our biology and our culture have entrained us to believe nothing matters and life is pointless, that’s what we will believe. But what we do is what we would do anyway. A change in intellectual belief won’t change that. The scientists’ view now is that it’s our actions that determine our beliefs, not the other way around. What we ‘believe’ is just more rationalization, trying to make sense of what we do. Or appear to do, anyway, since there is, in this line of logic, no ‘we’ that does anything.”

“You’re making my head hurt. If I thought that nothing I did was my choice, my control, I’d be depressed all the time. I’d steal cars and race them down blind alleys. I’d kill myself!”

“No you wouldn’t. You have no choice about what you believe, any more than you have about what you do. You are by nature a curious, social, brilliantly-intelligent little optimist, and if you come to believe there is no free will and no choice you will find some way to rationalize and reconcile that belief with your inherent nature and your constantly amazing actions.”

Sevi scowled. “Not so sure…” she said. “So you really buy this shit, huh? If there’s no ‘me’, who is talking with you right now?”

“There is a lovely play apparently going on in which two characters are having an unusual conversation, saying what they have no choice but to say. No me, no you, and, more surprisingly, no tomorrow, and nothing that matters.”

“Then why do I have this overwhelming sense that there is a ‘me’ here talking with a nonsense-speaking ‘you’ here and now, and that it matters a lot?”

“Ah, that’s the mystery. My guess is that the sense of a separate self was an accident of evolution. Mother nature likes to try stuff out, and when our brains got big enough she must have evolved a sense of separate existence and the sense of passage of time as a means of making sense of all the stuff the brain was processing, to see if it would help the brainy creatures survive better. Unfortunately, while the big brain helped keep humans out of some short-term trouble, mostly by inventing stuff, it created all kinds of trouble with the trauma of believing we were separate from all-that-is, and the false belief we could control ourselves.”

“So you’re saying all this is an illusion, a trick of the brain, this sense of ‘me’ talking with ‘you’. Seems pretty far-fetched to me.”

“Yup. To the ‘me’, the idea that there is no ‘me’ is always going to be incredible. But when you think of it, it’s a pretty simple and elegant theory of everything. A lot less complicated than the scientific, philosophical and religious explanations, and impossible to disprove.”

“Hmmm. So what happens next, with all of these eight billion people believing they exist when they don’t?”

“Big brains are a very recent novelty in evolution, best as we know. The sense of separation has created all this suffering, so I don’t think it will last much longer. The lovely play will apparently continue, but without humans and others who think they are what they are not. It will be a better play without us; more ‘just beingness’ and less drama.”

“But if there is no one conscious, will there still be a play?”

“There is no one conscious. That’s all part of the play. So yes, without consciousness, the play will continue, apparently. It’s timeless, eternal, complete, it’s everything. Always has been and always will be.”

“And you really believe all this?”

“Makes more sense than anything else I’ve come across. So yes, for now.”

“And what about love. Does love still exist?”

“Yes of course. Beyond our imagining. Love is everything.”

“Seems pretty empty, this meaningless ‘everything’. So far I kind of like the messiness of the ‘me’ world. I like music, painting, cute boys, running in the rain, baby ducks. I don’t think I could give all that up for your ‘everything’. As Uncle Frederick says…” (she mimicked his deep voice) “… ‘It’s the particular that matters.’”

“Nope, ‘you’ couldn’t give any of that up if you wanted to. ‘You’ have no choice. And ‘I’ can’t either. So for now I’ll just have to love you, and the messiness and particular-ness of our life.”

“Works for me.” She paused for a moment. “What if my Zoom talk was about ‘There is no me’? Do you think people would like it? Would you help?”

“Not sure your heart would be in it, and I think it would be very unpopular. You might want to pick something more particular.”

“OK, then how about ‘Love is Everything’?

“Works for me.”

 

Posted in Creative Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 1 Comment

A Future Without “Us”

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Dave Pollard

This is a modestly revamped version of a thought experiment I wrote five years ago entitled Several Short Sentences About Earth’s Distant Future. At the time it provoked a lot of interesting and mostly positive comments, so I thought I would update it to reflect how my thinking has evolved since then.


image: earth during the eocene epoch, the last time the average surface temperature was 25C, via bbc nature

Imagine this:

  1. Imagine that, a few millennia from now, down the steep slope that followed Peak Everything, the sixth Great Extinction is finally winding down. The pace of species extinction is slowing, and landscapes, while still often showing the signs of many recent ecological catastrophes due to ongoing tumultuous climate change, are beginning to show more patterns of succession. Our lovely planet has been through this kind of change many times before: At least twice it’s been choked in dust after meteorites or volcanoes that produced a global night that lasted a year and soaked the planet in a deluge of rain with the pH of battery acid. At least once it’s been totally encased, pole to pole, in a sheet of ice miles thick.
  2. Imagine that this Future Earth looks about as different from the way it did in the 21st century as it did the last time the average surface temperature was 25C rather than 15C — during the early Eocene epoch about 50 million years ago. Imagine that more than half of the planet is therefore now desert, including the Western US, Southern Europe, the Western 2/3 of all tropical areas, and all of the areas that were already desert in the 21st century. Much of the rest of the planet is now rainforest, subject to torrential and relentless monsoons, including former Arctic and Antarctic areas. There are no ice sheets or glaciers now. Rising sea levels have engulfed the formal coastal areas and reduced overall planetary land mass by about 20%, and coasts are now mostly steep and mountainous.


image: depiction of eocene rainforest in the antarctic, from this site, original source uncredited

  1. Imagine that human population has declined to about 50 million, and is still declining, though much more slowly than during the earlier stages of the Great Extinction. The remaining humans have abandoned all technologies, in part because there is no cheap accessible energy to power them, and in part because with a population now so small and declining (and hence abundant food and warm places to live), there is no real need for technologies for a full and healthy life. Population is still declining because humans are just not naturally well-adapted to very hot or changeable climates, whereas many of the succession species that now feed on humans (jaguars and crocodiles, for example) are much better adapted to prevailing climates. Nuclear radiation from abandoned 21st century power plants has also created ongoing birth rate and illness problems for humans and other species.
  2. Imagine that humans have readapted to living in the trees (because it’s safer and more comfortable), to gathering rather than growing food (because it’s healthier, more reliable and easier), and to a vegetarian and insect diet (because it’s better suited to our digestive system and more accessible in post-tool-use societies). Humans still look much like they did in the 21st century (and, for that matter, much like they have for the past million years), but they behave much differently. They have given up abstract languages because such languages are no longer of value or use, though they can communicate essential messages very accurately through vocalizations (whistles, calls and songs) and gestures. They retain a passion for art and music and practice these extensively. They live in small, autonomous tribal cultures, each with a territory large enough to provide abundant food even when catastrophic climate events occur, and little or no contact with adjacent human cultures, which are, as a result, very diverse. With a small and declining population, migration outside each tribe’s established territories is (except after local climate disasters) neither necessary nor wise.

baraka
image: from the documentary film baraka

  1. Imagine that such humans have lost their sense of time, again because they have no need for it. They live entirely (except for brief periods when under attack by predators) in the present, joyfully, in the moment. They have, of course, memories (so do most creatures) but their minds, without clocks, calendars and abstract language, now evolve differently from the way they did in the old “civilization” times, so they cannot and do not dwell on the past, nor fear nor long for the future. They live lives of great joy, leisure and abundance, and are unaware of the trajectory that will inevitably lead, many millennia hence, to their ecologically maladapted species’ slow and final extinction. And they are unaware of how humans live/lived in other places and times. It doesn’t concern them. They do not fear death; they accept it. Their curiosity is focused on here, and now.
  2. Imagine that such humans have begun to evolve cultural and coping characteristics more aligned with their forest-dwelling bonobo cousins than their savannah-dwelling chimp cousins. Their best-adapted societies are peaceful, gentle, matriarchal, affectionate, and egalitarian, and resolve internal conflicts and stress through embrace, caress, and sexual calming methods rather than through the expression of violence.
  3. Imagine that, despite the apparent similarities between these post-civilization humans and prehistoric tree-dwelling humans, there are a number of qualities that clearly distinguish them. These differences are not physical but behavioural, due to differences in selected genetics, learned behaviours passed between generations, and differences in environment. Post-civilization humans are still not as intuitive as prehistoric humans, but they are more imaginative and hence more playful. They are more empathetic, because they still pass on the embodied grief of having experienced massive suffering and hardship just a hundred generations ago. They still retain vestiges of skill at abstraction and capacity to synergize, that comes through in and is practiced in their art and music composition. They also ironically retain vestiges of competitiveness, even though this no longer serves a useful purpose. While they have varied embodied and enculturated characters, like babies and wild creatures they do not perceive of themselves as separate from all-that-is, or of life having any start or ending, boundaries, purpose or meaning. They are just one with everything.

Imagine that.

This is a future freed from the terrible affliction of “consciousness”. Yet it is the opposite of dull. It is life full on, eternal, vivid, wondrous and endlessly new. It is intuitive, sensuous, fearlessly wild, passionate, and unveiled by the brain’s abstraction of what is and isn’t real.

When I imagined this five years ago, it was impossible for me not to add that, despite the hopelessness of preventing civilization’s collapse and the inevitability of a subsequent long road back to planetary sanity, “we” needed to imagine what we could do now to “prepare us to cope better, to be hurt less, to do less harm”.

I no longer have such conceits. We can and will only do our best, in our own way, in the moment, as events unfold. But while I no longer profess to offer advice or suggestions about what “we” should do, the above flight of fancy fills me with questions. So, in lieu of answers, here are some questions I am thinking about:

  1. What might it be like to be truly wild, free of the terrifying illusion that we are separate and in control of our own fate?
  2. Why is it so hard to imagine a future utterly different from anything we’ve known (we tend to imagine the future being like the present “only more so”, or, even worse, imagine it being like the recent past played in reverse)? Why does the idea of future human societies that use substantially no technology, have no abstract language, and aren’t incessantly violent, strike us as so preposterous, even impossible?
  3. Is there something in the essential nature of the human animal and its oversized brain that makes us inevitably dissatisfied with just being, makes us endlessly want and strive for more, disconnects us from the rest of life with which we’re co-dependent, and inevitably fosters overreach, hierarchy and struggle with our own kind? These would seem to be evolutionary disadvantages.
  4. Why do so many want to live in cities? It wasn’t always that way — what’s changed?
  5. Our art, languages, dance and music, and the way we adorn our bodies, demonstrate the enormous cultural diversity of our species, despite the effects of our modern monolithic industrial culture. Why do we strive so desperately to make everyone and everything the same? And, with enough time and enough distance between them, how staggeringly and delightfully different might the many tiny far-flung cultures of humanity millennia from now evolve to be?

I watch the body language of the fawns that come each evening to nibble at the edges of my garden and sleep in the secluded mossy patches of my back yard, for clues. I listen to the intricate songs of the birds that feed outside my window, and wonder. I look into the faces of purring cats, crows huddled together, the astonished looks of babies, for signs of what is really going on.

They’re not telling.

Posted in Creative Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

The Paradox of Self-Management

Posted on October 28, 2017 by Dave Pollard

If you are a student of complexity theory, and of philosophy, you can quickly arrive at a place of great cognitive dissonance: On the one hand, our culture is driving us, for quite compelling reasons, to take actions that make things better for the rest of the world, and to “self-improve” — to change our own unhealthy and destructive behaviours. But on the other hand, some of us have come to believe, intellectually at least, (1) that our personal actions will have no discernible sustained impact on the rest of the world (complex systems tend to self-perpetuate and to counter the effects of even the most persistent and well-conceived interventions), and (2) that we have no free will, agency or choice in what we do in any case — rather than making decisions, the brain/mind/self is merely rationalizing decisions that have already been ‘made’ and started to act upon by the conditioned creatures ‘we’ presume to inhabit and control.

The former dilemma — that we feel driven to make the world better through personal actions even though we may know in our hearts that that won’t make any enduring difference — has been hashed over a lot in activist circles. The argument is that we have to try anyway; that it’s in our nature. Direct action certainly seems to make a small difference, at least for a while, so why not (protest local polluting projects and entities, clean up a river, blockade a destructive development etc)? It’s not our business to worry about what will happen when we’re gone, or what is happening beyond our sphere of influence. Though we may be by nature preoccupied with the needs and imperatives of the moment, still we do our best. It’s both enough and necessarily to try, even when it may be, in the longer and broader context, hopeless.

The latter dilemma — that we feel an obligation to “improve ourselves” through personal behaviour change, even though some of us have come to ‘know’ intellectually we have no real agency over what we do or do not do — is the subject of this essay.

The question here is not whether our behaviour changes or not; it’s about whether personal volition plays any role in that change, or whether, given our conditioning and the events and options presenting themselves moment-to-moment, what we do, or don’t do, in each moment, is the only thing we could possibly have done, and therefore all the angst and anguish we have about our decisions is pointless, and changes nothing.

That’s not to say that we can rid ourselves of this needless angst and anguish — it’s just one more thing we have no agency over. In the long run, the human mind seems compelled to be unhappy with the apparent sub-optimality of ‘its’ decisions, and with the apparent unfairness of its situation. Hindsight is perfect, and nothing can ever match the ideals we can imagine — not for very long anyway.

You may find this preposterous — we certainly seem to have personal volition over what we do. It’s a paradox, and in that sense it is preposterous. But bear with me for a few moments.

Over the years this blog has recommended a process called “self-management” for taking charge of your own situation, informing yourself with personally-collected data, and acting in accordance, in a number of situations:

  1. Managing your own health and fitness: I used statistical analysis to identify what treatments seemed to work best for my body when it was coping with debilitating ulcerative colitis. And annually I review, plot and analyze the data from a comprehensive blood test (here in BC you are able to access your health records and test results personally online). Possibly as a result of that, I am now 10 years symptom-free.
  2. Making healthy/helpful behaviours easier and/or more fun: Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour asserts that we do what we must (our personal imperatives of the moment) and then we do what’s easy and/or fun; there is never time left for what is ‘merely’ important. So I made exercising easier and less tedious by investing in a treadmill desk that allows me to multi-task (reading, writing, watching videos) while working out. Even my upper-body and core workouts with weights are done while listening to podcasts I particularly enjoy. For the first time in my life, my exercise is done regularly, and it’s something I actually look forward to. My long history of maintaining my times for 5k and 10k runs over the past 40 years (sometimes being a data geek really is useful), adjusted for the inevitable slowdowns that come with age, also enables me to know in advance when I’m getting sick (my times go well over the regression line) and to take steps to heal.
  3. Eating better: While the statistical analysis referred to above had already helped me improve my diet, I have more recently shifted further to a whole-plant based diet (persuaded by the science of nutritionfacts.org) with less salt, less sugar (especially processed sugar), less fat (especially saturated fat) and less processed food in general. This was at least as challenging as going vegetarian and then vegan had been years ago, since I really do like salt, sweets and oils, and I am generally a lazy chef. But I’ve managed to make the changes, again by making it relatively easy:
    • a meal a day of varied raw veggies and salad stuff with a tasty low-fat dip takes little preparation or clean-up
    • fruit and veggie smoothies
    • keeping useful ingredients like turmeric and ground flax seeds handy and adding them liberally to meals
    • keeping a pill-pack of B12 and D3 vitamins so it’s easy to remember to take them regularly, and
    • finding several one-pot, 5-or-less (but variable) ingredient, 20-minutes-or-less prep time recipes that fulfil my “daily dozen” (see graphic above)
      Taken together, these discoveries have made it easy and even enjoyable to eat healthier.
  4. Increased self-awareness of stress: I’ve learned that I can’t avoid stress in my life; nor can I avoid the anxiety that arises in me because of it. But I’ve learned to become aware of when I am getting reactive to a situation (bad weather, vexatious people, a loved one’s distress etc). Just being self-aware helps, though it doesn’t eliminate the reactivity. I have a list in my wallet of the things that I know trigger anxiety, fear, distress, shame, anger and sorrow in me, and recognizing the trigger reaction (it helps that those I love know the symptoms and point it out to me as well) seems to be enough to bring some perspective and at least lessen any overreactions.
  5. Reducing personal environmental impact: Over the past year, by monitoring my daily household energy consumption, informing myself about opportunities for reducing consumption, and tracking consumption against temperature (my heat is electric), I’ve reduced my electricity consumption by 40%, effortlessly. I didn’t think such savings were possible without discomfort and inconvenience, but the data made me do it!

So there have been changes, for the better, in my personal behaviours, apparently as a result of this “self-management” process. What’s going on here? If I have no free will, agency, control or choice over my actions, how did these changes come about?

My guess is that they were inevitable. By nature I’m a data collector. I’m curious and imaginative about trying new low-risk things, and that’s led to me being an avid reader of books on health and self-management. I’m averse to pain and suffering so I was really motivated to do the statistical analysis to manage the colitis. While I hate exercising, I’m vain about my appearance, and that, along with the personal, statistically verified health benefits (less illness, less pain, more resilience) made it inevitable that once I found an easy way to exercise, I’d do so. And the people I love showed me, by example, how a higher level of self-awareness reduces their reactivity and hence their stress, anxiety and suffering, so it’s only natural that I would over time pick up this skill from them and apply it to my own life.

No free will was really involved. If you had been watching me over the past ten years from a distance, and could see inside my head, these self-improvements would have seemed inevitable, given my basic nature and the circumstances that I was presented with over that time. I really had no control over, and no say in the matter. There are probably other apparent ‘self-improvements’ that didn’t happen to me, because they weren’t in my nature, or because the right circumstances didn’t present themselves. If I hadn’t met the people, or read the books (all happy accidents) that have influenced me so much, my life would probably have unfolded very differently.

So if it’s all dependent on our inherent or enculturated nature, and on the circumstances that arise in our lives, and we have no control over either, what’s the point of talking about any of this? Or more broadly, what’s the point in aspiring to any ‘self-improvement’ whatsoever?

The following could perhaps be a circular argument, or an oxymoron, but it seems possible to me that if it’s in your nature to experiment, and to want to learn, there are two things you might be able to do to increase the probability that the circumstances that arise will be more auspicious towards the changes you are hoping for than they would be otherwise:

The first of these is to learn more — about yourself, about your body, your health, your nature, what motivates you, what (perhaps for reasons buried in your past) triggers unreasonable and unhealthy reactions in you etc. Better self-knowledge would seem to open you to possibilities that otherwise might not arise. For example, knowing that a chronic physical or emotional illness is inflamed by something in your diet (or something missing from your diet) would seem to make it more likely that you would change that diet, even if you might not be that excited about the change. Or, if you discovered that walking an hour a day on a treadmill would reduce your risk of heart disease by 75% (helped by personal blood test data showing improvements in LDL cholesterol etc), it might be more likely that you would take up and stick with a regular walking regime.

It could of course be argued that we are either curious enough by nature (and fortunate enough to have the time and capacity) to learn, or we aren’t, and that therefore there is no free will involved in this either. If you’re going to stumble on this article and find it useful and act on it in some way, that is all because of some combination of your inherent or enculturated nature and happenstance — no free will or agency involved.

It’s said that people who seem exceptionally lucky make their own luck. That’s perhaps saying the same thing — we don’t make choices; it’s either in our nature to learn and try things that increase the likelihood of good fortune befalling us, or it isn’t.

That brings me to the second thing we might be able to do with some degree of volition to increase the probability that the circumstances that arise will be more auspicious towards the changes we are hoping for than they would be otherwise: to make space for a change of behaviour — to open up the possibility for it.

How might we do this? Again, I think it comes back to self-awareness. If we’re aware of what motivates us, of our propensity for certain behaviours, and about our inherent nature (curious, courageous, persevering etc, or not) and our enculturated nature (to be defensive, to procrastinate, to judge people in certain ways etc, or not), then perhaps we can use this self-awareness to create opportunities for us to act in ways that are better for ourselves and those around us.

Complexity theorists argue that while human-scale interventions will have little or no impact on a complex system (which is inherently unknowable and unpredictable), it may be possible to influence the initial conditions of a small system in its early stages before it becomes ‘unmanageable’. So for example, ensuring that we get enough sleep might affect us in all kinds of positive ways. Putting a list like the graphic above on our refrigerator door might cause the uncontrollable creatures we believe we inhabit to engage in slightly more healthy eating behaviours (or to tear down the list and throw it away, depending on our nature).

This could also be a circular argument. Perhaps it’s either in our nature to get enough sleep or not, and to maintain and use lists, or not, and we’re just fooling ourselves believing that the apparent ‘decision’ to go to bed earlier or to post the list or to change what we eat depending on what the list suggests, would be any different without the intention or the list. It’s probably impossible to know.

All I do know is that ‘self-management’ seems to be in my nature, though it’s only very recently that I’ve begun to use it, and reaped the astonishing benefits it’s given me. If we see our lives as a play, with all the parts already written (though not given to us more than a line or two in advance of us acting them out), then agency, self-control, self-management, volition, free will and choice had nothing to do with me being, and becoming, such an incredibly blessed agnostic. Hard, but not impossible, to believe.

No wonder then I am increasingly averse to giving advice, and more and more inclined to just tell my own rather tedious and ordinary story, mostly so I can get (as my nature drives me to seek) the gist of how the plot seems to be unfolding. No wonder I am increasingly silent, here on this blog and in my interactions with the world. If there is no free will, then freedom, it would seem, must lie in some other, possibly unknowable, unimaginable place.

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