A good summary of the problem. And of course, there is irony in that we could not have a discussion of our complexity problem without the complexity that makes the discussion possible.
If there was some way I could submit myself for study, I would! I had a stroke in 2022 and as I slowly started to heal and have new neural connections form, I have felt a pretty distinct shift towards dominance of the right hemisphere, and I feel like it's a shift back towards how I was as a young person before the bureaucratic world sunk its hooks into my psyche. My partner says my personality has changed pretty dramatically. The different ways of thinking/interacting with the world McGilchrist describes checks out in my personal experience.
This is a subject that is of great interest to me. How one has societal complexity without hierarchy and dominance, if such a thing is even possible.
Of course, your list of steps isn’t exactly implementable on a human-scale level (we’re not exactly policy makers here). I think that the solution is a maximally anarchic society capable of preserving its autonomy at all costs (free access to weapons, mobility due to ‘escape crops’ (per James C Scott’s work on this), egalitarian values and ideals that are supported by their subsistence mode, and a few more I can’t recall rn.
But then this needs to be combined with some sort of elected leadership that is heavily influenced by brain altering practices designed to promote right hemisphere thinking. Like they have to ritually consume psychedelics and perform shamanic trances to continue office, to ensure they are not going down an egoic path.
Now of course, the question would be why the former group even needs leaders at all. A lot of the people I’m learning from these days are predicting some kind of biological-based society forming, rather than a resource extractivist one. Leaders in these societies could be helpful to coordinate the spread of biological resources between regions.
But writing this all out like this, I’m seeing the simplistic way of looking at it. I’m basically just slapping our current way of looking at things (which is currently maintained by dominance and control or hoarding of resources) onto some kind of anarchic future. A better question might be, what does a leaderless society that still has specialization look like? (Or perhaps no specialists, but still large coordinated groups). With climate change preventing grain based farming and the formation of most kinds of states, perhaps a decentralized and egalitarian network of groups could simply direct themselves and coordinate without needing actual leaders. But still maintain a caloric surplus through tree and tuber crops and ecosystem modification. This may indeed be necessary in our degraded and heavily disturbed world, where group coordination is necessary to obtain yields from the landscape and restore damaged ecosystems. Specialization could be a boon for experts on a subject or a bust with the average person unable to survive without the specialist elites. Perhaps everyone will need to be an expert, and able to survive on their own due to the aforementioned escape crops, but yields and stability are only possible with further working together? Definitely rewilding will likely be.
Anyway, this was just me rambling and putting some thoughts together. I’m not sure there’s a right answer this this problem or even one that is necessary (if we lay out the tools something unexpected and surprising may form organically without our input). I will say that I think “experimentation” will need to be a value of the future. Sedentary farming societies became specialists in a narrow range of crops and species and didn’t deviate from this ‘barely good enough’ yield (in large part to parasitic elites, but still). The original societies doing all the work to create these crops and species were likely sedentary Hunter-Gatherers with a lot of time on their hands to cross things or observe the landscape and intervene to make changes. A society that has the time and skill to continually ponder and experiment with possibilities for species and even social organization is one that will succeed in this rapidly changing and climate hazardous future.
The genuine spiritual teachers from both the east and the west use language that I think is synonymous to point us in the right direction..
"Rest in the I AM " - Nisargadatta
"Lucid attention" - Illie Cioara
"Presence" - Eckhart Tolle
"Passive awareness " Krishnamurti
"The observer is the observed" - Krishnamurti
"Open focus" - Jacob Lieberman
"Turning back the light " Taoist instruction
"Bathing" Taoist
"The kingdom of God is within" - JC
These can often seem esoteric and elusive but with a little persistence one can enter into this state of attention ( without needing a stroke!)
It's kind of like sinking below thinking and feeling into the realm of sensation while being completely lucid. Thinking subsides naturally and there is engagement with the tissues.
There is no control or will or concentration involved and it is nothing to do with self hypnosis or zoning out. In fact it is very intense and quite arduous but it purifies the heart and mind and you literally have to do nothing. Miraculous.
The only way we could have prevented the imminent and permanent implosion of civilization would have been for hunter gatherers to have strangled the baby in its crib many thousands of years ago.
When the first man or woman approached the tribal leader and exclaimed ‘look I have harnessed fire!’ - that person should have been put to death.
And anyone else who tried to innovate should have been burned alive because one thing leads to another and before you know it you have Steam Engines, Automobiles, Airplanes, Tee Vee, Computers, the Internet, Facebook, Snapchat, Tik Tok - basically a Clown World with 8+ billion chowing down on oil on the precipice of extinction.
A thought popped into my head the other day whilst tangling with my uncomfortableness with economics. Current economic motivation seems to be "how much can I take from others," i.e. maximizing the amount of your income (or credit) I can convert to being my income/credit.
What is the mechanism to instill a system wherein a person's compensation (and social status) is tied to the amount and quality of their contribution to the betterment of others? For example, a motivated, intelligent and well connected individual (CEO type) would be not be valued for collecting money from customers, but for the number of individuals their products and services elevated, with compensation proportional to the amount and quality of elevation. You could still achieve bill-trill-gazill-ionaire status in society, but only if you really helped a whole lot of individuals. You could still collect on patent rights to successful (helpful) systems and products, but the primary basis of compensation is the total number of individuals elevated. This removes the motivation to only help your kin and immediate network of associates.
I'm sure there's a bunch of downsides and loopholes to be explored, but even if it just makes a nifty board game, it's a start to figuring out alternative economic models.
I hear it on line all the time. It goes (and I am paraphrasing): “Gee, if we were not and did not think like human beings, everything would be fine. That is why the points listed by our host are so much silliness. We are human, and we will die human. Get used to it.
I will quibble on this point regarding healthcare: "which after having produced a remarkable increase in life expectancy"
They primarily increased life expectancy by fixing things centralized hierarchies and their cities initially caused. Like creating cleaner sewage systems, and not exposing people to toxic chemicals and dangerous equipment in labor, improving food and water quality...
Life expectancy after successful child birth and living through infancy wasn't much different for indigenous people.
Certainly an interesting subject, Tainter's book was illuminating, and so was a little known work penned by Marc Widdowson, The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age. He was a British Military officer turned author who researched the collapse of societies and the Dark Ages that followed. Giving a step by step analysis of the triggers leading up to them, what to expect during a collapse, and then after.
I found it a fascinating as it explained many things hitherto obscure to me. Interestingly was his assertion that the actual collapse phase typically takes no more that 10 years. From functioning government to every man and woman for themselves in basically an eyeblink. It's a period when the ruling classes flee the cities to fortified country estates, and I look at Bill Gates and George Bush's rural acquisitions, and most recently Mark Zuckerberg's estate built on a Hawaiian Island as evidence that these people are perhaps preparing for some sort of unraveling.
Psychology? More like a built in self destruct code where people's grow from highly moral agrarian family structures into highly immoral city states. Being an inbuilt human instinct I see no change in this pattern, the same as mice that over-breed into plague proportions and die back, we humans follow the same pattern. I for one have never considered the solution of such other that a personal solution. IE. Get out of the cities before the cycle repeats itself. 400 years is the typical cycle, and looking at our Western Christian church based Empire having begun with Spain 400 years ago, I think time is running out.
B thank you for expanding the cognitive boundaries of the human predicament. Here is a little note with very long pointers about the human mind, its abilities, its inabilities, the resulting behavior of 8 billion people and possible civilization viability.
Additionally, it is important to mention the limited natural resources, the inability to find adequate alternatives to fossil fuels, and the increasing environmental pollution. It's as if a perfect storm is upon us.
A good summary of the problem. And of course, there is irony in that we could not have a discussion of our complexity problem without the complexity that makes the discussion possible.
If there was some way I could submit myself for study, I would! I had a stroke in 2022 and as I slowly started to heal and have new neural connections form, I have felt a pretty distinct shift towards dominance of the right hemisphere, and I feel like it's a shift back towards how I was as a young person before the bureaucratic world sunk its hooks into my psyche. My partner says my personality has changed pretty dramatically. The different ways of thinking/interacting with the world McGilchrist describes checks out in my personal experience.
This is a subject that is of great interest to me. How one has societal complexity without hierarchy and dominance, if such a thing is even possible.
Of course, your list of steps isn’t exactly implementable on a human-scale level (we’re not exactly policy makers here). I think that the solution is a maximally anarchic society capable of preserving its autonomy at all costs (free access to weapons, mobility due to ‘escape crops’ (per James C Scott’s work on this), egalitarian values and ideals that are supported by their subsistence mode, and a few more I can’t recall rn.
But then this needs to be combined with some sort of elected leadership that is heavily influenced by brain altering practices designed to promote right hemisphere thinking. Like they have to ritually consume psychedelics and perform shamanic trances to continue office, to ensure they are not going down an egoic path.
Now of course, the question would be why the former group even needs leaders at all. A lot of the people I’m learning from these days are predicting some kind of biological-based society forming, rather than a resource extractivist one. Leaders in these societies could be helpful to coordinate the spread of biological resources between regions.
But writing this all out like this, I’m seeing the simplistic way of looking at it. I’m basically just slapping our current way of looking at things (which is currently maintained by dominance and control or hoarding of resources) onto some kind of anarchic future. A better question might be, what does a leaderless society that still has specialization look like? (Or perhaps no specialists, but still large coordinated groups). With climate change preventing grain based farming and the formation of most kinds of states, perhaps a decentralized and egalitarian network of groups could simply direct themselves and coordinate without needing actual leaders. But still maintain a caloric surplus through tree and tuber crops and ecosystem modification. This may indeed be necessary in our degraded and heavily disturbed world, where group coordination is necessary to obtain yields from the landscape and restore damaged ecosystems. Specialization could be a boon for experts on a subject or a bust with the average person unable to survive without the specialist elites. Perhaps everyone will need to be an expert, and able to survive on their own due to the aforementioned escape crops, but yields and stability are only possible with further working together? Definitely rewilding will likely be.
Anyway, this was just me rambling and putting some thoughts together. I’m not sure there’s a right answer this this problem or even one that is necessary (if we lay out the tools something unexpected and surprising may form organically without our input). I will say that I think “experimentation” will need to be a value of the future. Sedentary farming societies became specialists in a narrow range of crops and species and didn’t deviate from this ‘barely good enough’ yield (in large part to parasitic elites, but still). The original societies doing all the work to create these crops and species were likely sedentary Hunter-Gatherers with a lot of time on their hands to cross things or observe the landscape and intervene to make changes. A society that has the time and skill to continually ponder and experiment with possibilities for species and even social organization is one that will succeed in this rapidly changing and climate hazardous future.
Hope this is interesting to someone!
The genuine spiritual teachers from both the east and the west use language that I think is synonymous to point us in the right direction..
"Rest in the I AM " - Nisargadatta
"Lucid attention" - Illie Cioara
"Presence" - Eckhart Tolle
"Passive awareness " Krishnamurti
"The observer is the observed" - Krishnamurti
"Open focus" - Jacob Lieberman
"Turning back the light " Taoist instruction
"Bathing" Taoist
"The kingdom of God is within" - JC
These can often seem esoteric and elusive but with a little persistence one can enter into this state of attention ( without needing a stroke!)
It's kind of like sinking below thinking and feeling into the realm of sensation while being completely lucid. Thinking subsides naturally and there is engagement with the tissues.
There is no control or will or concentration involved and it is nothing to do with self hypnosis or zoning out. In fact it is very intense and quite arduous but it purifies the heart and mind and you literally have to do nothing. Miraculous.
Could this Grim Ending have been Prevented?
The only way we could have prevented the imminent and permanent implosion of civilization would have been for hunter gatherers to have strangled the baby in its crib many thousands of years ago.
When the first man or woman approached the tribal leader and exclaimed ‘look I have harnessed fire!’ - that person should have been put to death.
And anyone else who tried to innovate should have been burned alive because one thing leads to another and before you know it you have Steam Engines, Automobiles, Airplanes, Tee Vee, Computers, the Internet, Facebook, Snapchat, Tik Tok - basically a Clown World with 8+ billion chowing down on oil on the precipice of extinction.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-species-ever
A thought popped into my head the other day whilst tangling with my uncomfortableness with economics. Current economic motivation seems to be "how much can I take from others," i.e. maximizing the amount of your income (or credit) I can convert to being my income/credit.
What is the mechanism to instill a system wherein a person's compensation (and social status) is tied to the amount and quality of their contribution to the betterment of others? For example, a motivated, intelligent and well connected individual (CEO type) would be not be valued for collecting money from customers, but for the number of individuals their products and services elevated, with compensation proportional to the amount and quality of elevation. You could still achieve bill-trill-gazill-ionaire status in society, but only if you really helped a whole lot of individuals. You could still collect on patent rights to successful (helpful) systems and products, but the primary basis of compensation is the total number of individuals elevated. This removes the motivation to only help your kin and immediate network of associates.
I'm sure there's a bunch of downsides and loopholes to be explored, but even if it just makes a nifty board game, it's a start to figuring out alternative economic models.
I hear it on line all the time. It goes (and I am paraphrasing): “Gee, if we were not and did not think like human beings, everything would be fine. That is why the points listed by our host are so much silliness. We are human, and we will die human. Get used to it.
It's hard to do the right thing, because people doing the wrong thing often prevail.
Maximum Power Principle: Systems that maximize power consumption within a context tend to dominate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
Samo Burja's Great Founder Theory, the best analysis of bureaucracies over time that I have seen:
https://samoburja.com/gft/
I feel like this is missed the biggest point. Societies run on the backs of the enslaved.
They only survive because they are built on oppression. But eventually they implode as any thing built on slaves should.
Thank you B🙏
Nice article.
I will quibble on this point regarding healthcare: "which after having produced a remarkable increase in life expectancy"
They primarily increased life expectancy by fixing things centralized hierarchies and their cities initially caused. Like creating cleaner sewage systems, and not exposing people to toxic chemicals and dangerous equipment in labor, improving food and water quality...
Life expectancy after successful child birth and living through infancy wasn't much different for indigenous people.
Certainly an interesting subject, Tainter's book was illuminating, and so was a little known work penned by Marc Widdowson, The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age. He was a British Military officer turned author who researched the collapse of societies and the Dark Ages that followed. Giving a step by step analysis of the triggers leading up to them, what to expect during a collapse, and then after.
I found it a fascinating as it explained many things hitherto obscure to me. Interestingly was his assertion that the actual collapse phase typically takes no more that 10 years. From functioning government to every man and woman for themselves in basically an eyeblink. It's a period when the ruling classes flee the cities to fortified country estates, and I look at Bill Gates and George Bush's rural acquisitions, and most recently Mark Zuckerberg's estate built on a Hawaiian Island as evidence that these people are perhaps preparing for some sort of unraveling.
Psychology? More like a built in self destruct code where people's grow from highly moral agrarian family structures into highly immoral city states. Being an inbuilt human instinct I see no change in this pattern, the same as mice that over-breed into plague proportions and die back, we humans follow the same pattern. I for one have never considered the solution of such other that a personal solution. IE. Get out of the cities before the cycle repeats itself. 400 years is the typical cycle, and looking at our Western Christian church based Empire having begun with Spain 400 years ago, I think time is running out.
B thank you for expanding the cognitive boundaries of the human predicament. Here is a little note with very long pointers about the human mind, its abilities, its inabilities, the resulting behavior of 8 billion people and possible civilization viability.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s9/sh/44856155-5ea6-3f81-95dc-220663018ac9/MXmoStzRXKfb5aRlnkZj0ex1QtZEM_9MqbiJoRxk5eLuNAK1xzK6ILRmuQ
Jack Alpert www.skil.org
Additionally, it is important to mention the limited natural resources, the inability to find adequate alternatives to fossil fuels, and the increasing environmental pollution. It's as if a perfect storm is upon us.