Three things are needed for a person to act:
1. The action has to be effective
2. The actor has to be capable of performing the action
3. The actor has to feel worthy of the consequences of acting
Let’s examine how human beings will have to differ, in order to adjust to be Planetary Managers.
The first step to taking charge of our own evolution is admitting that our current evolutionary design is not optimized to manage our entire planet. Accepting emotionally that, as we are, we’ve failed and will continue to fail to cope with the challenges of keeping Earth livable, leads to depression and inability to act. To admit design failure seems to be admitting failure as human beings. It seems to mean that we don’t deserve a habitable planet because we can’t take care of one (as we are now). In the language of Eric Berne’s Games People Play it seems to be taking the stance “I’m not OK, You’re not OK” which is self-destructive and can’t be maintained.
To understand why this isn’t so, let’s begin with Riane Eisler’s Cultural Transformation Theory. A competitive basis for self-esteem, as in “I’m OK, You’re not OK” or “You’re OK, I’m not OK” or “I’m not OK, You’re not OK” arises from Dominator Culture. Dominator Culture evolved out of our primitive brain hierarchical social instincts. The reptile brain conducts dominance and submission behaviors. Partnership Culture, on the other hand, seems to be based in maternal behavior of the lymbic system, seat of cooperation and nurturance. Only by realizing we’ve been living entirely subsumed by Dominator Culture and grasping the “I’m OK, You’re OK” of Partnership Culture can we build a global society that transcends the limitations of reptile brain socialization.
Once we embrace “I’m OK, You’re OK” emotionally, we’re in a position to ask, with our higher brain, whether the criteria against which we’ve declared ourselves unworthy aren’t impossible. Are we not facing a dilemma that all sentient species that conquer their planets must face? Let’s not compare ourselves presupposing Darwinian competition amidst unlimited natural resources, but compare ourselves in the challenge to transcend our native evolved limits. We have outgrown that Darwinian-instinct-based environment, where predators and temporary localized resource shortages are the main challenges. Now that we’ve conquered our planet, we ourselves are our own worst enemy. Our instincts to overproduce and consume are the real threats.
So let’s feel ourselves on the threshold of every sentient species first great challenge, not as unworthy but as ready to step up to our first self-controlled transformation. It’s time for Humanity 2.0. We need now to work together to find work arounds for each of the evolved limitations that hold us back. We do have tools. We are inventive. Let’s reinvent ourselves.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
The human evolved design isn't up to planetary civilization.
Climate Denial Normalcy Bias is ignoring signs of danger, like a gazelle who keeps munching grass while lions lurk and storms skirt the horizon. It includes keeping the danger as background while focusing on your immediate interests. It includes checking to see if others are reacting, before you decide there's really danger. Like a herd of gazelles, we stay calm and deny danger until it's really threatening life and limb, and then we all get scared together. We evolved only to respond to short-acting danger, not to large scale slowly unfolding dangers of planetary scale. Our evolved responses don't work when the threshold for response occurs early and later, when the danger is severe, feedbacks make it out-of-control.
Flight or Fight When we finally get scared, we're hardwired for either flight (become a refugee) or fight (run out of water and kill each other for it), or sometimes freezing (Climate Destabilization isn't a predator so easily fooled). We'd have to take a hand in our own evolution to rewire a "plan and execute plan" response to fear and panic. The response that might work is just missing.
Jaron's Paradox Technological innovation can't save us, because every time we make a process more efficient human beings exploit it even more. We're like a gas that expands to fill every volume. We just improve our lifestyle and make more people.
Neural Architecture Triune brain anatomy: each of us has three parallel processors, a reptile brain, a lymbic system, and a higher brain. The two primitive brains have no language or symbolic thought, but they make decisions such as what's true, what's important, reproduction, and response to danger. Our higher brain can think in language and make plans, but has no emotion. We just aren't wired to emotionally respond to statistics and computer models. We respond to pain and puppies, sex and food. Reading about projected global climate destabilization feels dry and intellectual, distant. We get no gut reaction, unlike WWF.
Civilization is a Heat Engine Climate Destabilization is much larger than CO2 rise. The flow of energy defines civilization. Constructal Theory is beginning to quantify this flow. If we organized miraculously to eliminate fossil fuel use, we'd still keep heating up the Earth. We'd have "cooling towers" from nuclear power plants dumping their excess heat into the air, or the rivers. We'd send microwaves from space, but that would still pump excess energy into the air/water/soil of Earth. We just don't know how to run an economy that doesn't keep using more and more energy.
Selfish Institutions We're so easy to manipulate by spin doctors and the media, by our entertainment, our corporations, and our religions. Every institution of the modern globalized world puts its own prosperity and growth above the commons, the ultimate commons of a sustainable planet. Primarily governed by short term profits, our institutional structure is fundamentally incompatible with the long view. Each one promotes its own truth, i.e. the view that serves its myopic self interest.
What hope do I see? First we have to admit our design failure. Then we have to reinvent ourselves, as Steven Hawking says, control our own evolution. This doesn't have to involve human/machine integration or breeding experiments. It could mean co-evolving with our information systems, involving the entire population of the planet in education... personalized visualizations about the future we're building or not for their town and region ... and in working together to create a plan we can all live with.
Flight or Fight When we finally get scared, we're hardwired for either flight (become a refugee) or fight (run out of water and kill each other for it), or sometimes freezing (Climate Destabilization isn't a predator so easily fooled). We'd have to take a hand in our own evolution to rewire a "plan and execute plan" response to fear and panic. The response that might work is just missing.
Jaron's Paradox Technological innovation can't save us, because every time we make a process more efficient human beings exploit it even more. We're like a gas that expands to fill every volume. We just improve our lifestyle and make more people.
Neural Architecture Triune brain anatomy: each of us has three parallel processors, a reptile brain, a lymbic system, and a higher brain. The two primitive brains have no language or symbolic thought, but they make decisions such as what's true, what's important, reproduction, and response to danger. Our higher brain can think in language and make plans, but has no emotion. We just aren't wired to emotionally respond to statistics and computer models. We respond to pain and puppies, sex and food. Reading about projected global climate destabilization feels dry and intellectual, distant. We get no gut reaction, unlike WWF.
Civilization is a Heat Engine Climate Destabilization is much larger than CO2 rise. The flow of energy defines civilization. Constructal Theory is beginning to quantify this flow. If we organized miraculously to eliminate fossil fuel use, we'd still keep heating up the Earth. We'd have "cooling towers" from nuclear power plants dumping their excess heat into the air, or the rivers. We'd send microwaves from space, but that would still pump excess energy into the air/water/soil of Earth. We just don't know how to run an economy that doesn't keep using more and more energy.
Selfish Institutions We're so easy to manipulate by spin doctors and the media, by our entertainment, our corporations, and our religions. Every institution of the modern globalized world puts its own prosperity and growth above the commons, the ultimate commons of a sustainable planet. Primarily governed by short term profits, our institutional structure is fundamentally incompatible with the long view. Each one promotes its own truth, i.e. the view that serves its myopic self interest.
What hope do I see? First we have to admit our design failure. Then we have to reinvent ourselves, as Steven Hawking says, control our own evolution. This doesn't have to involve human/machine integration or breeding experiments. It could mean co-evolving with our information systems, involving the entire population of the planet in education... personalized visualizations about the future we're building or not for their town and region ... and in working together to create a plan we can all live with.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Fourth Wave Civilization: Global Heat Engine
Definition: When the energy and matter streams of an entire planet are subsumed into a planetary civilization which, as a heat engine, destabilizes the planet’s ecosystem, and climate, making the planet uninhabitable. It’s like a primitive engine with no governor, which runs faster and faster until it explodes.
Alvin Toffler introduced us to the Information Age, Third Wave Civilization. We’ve since outgrown that before it consolidated. “History is a succession of rolling waves of change.” he said. Civilizations can coexist and interpenetrate.
Timothy Garrett of the University of Utah writes, “So, perhaps surprisingly, changes in population and standard of living might best be considered as only a response to energy efficiency. As part of a heat engine, creating people and their lifestyles requires energy consumption. Doing so efficiently merely serves to bootstrap civilization into a more consumptive (and productive) state by increasing the dimensions of the boundary separating civilization and its environment.” The Jevrons Paradox applies to civilization as a whole, gains in energy efficiency accelerate global energy consumption instead of slowing it.
Chris Hedges says, “The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits.”
From the perspective of Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory, in our globalized economy, all of the energy resources and material resources of the planet flow into one stream, corporate profit as measured by the stock market.
The obvious objection, that noneconomic institutions such as religions, journals, news media, and nonprofits compete with global profit flow, providing feedback, turns out to be superficial and misleading. In past civilizations when institutions serving noneconomic functions had independent structures, this was true. Today lines between entertainment, news, politics, business advertising, and religion are superficial. Religions and nonprofit entities thrive or disappear on quarterly returns, media cycles, and politics as much as banks.
While we’ve invented smart appliances, we haven’t invented smart institutions. Corporate entities know only how to survive short term. They’re memeplexes, despite the intelligence of human role players, institutionally no smarter than viruses. Our corporate entities can’t imagine self interest in stopping global climate destabilization. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. Their environment is a free commons to externalize costs and risks. If one nonprofit begins to assume costs which its competitors offload, it chokes off flows of money, goods, information, or people which kept it viable. No matter how noble the cause, if a nonprofit doesn’t raise funds, pay its bills, advertise, and attract new members, it quickly loses market share. As long as religions have an institutional incentive to overpopulate the planet, they will.
In sum, more efficient wind turbines won’t save humanity. We need to reinvent civilization at the roots, adding feedback loops to internalize Planetary costs to institutions which generate them.
Alvin Toffler introduced us to the Information Age, Third Wave Civilization. We’ve since outgrown that before it consolidated. “History is a succession of rolling waves of change.” he said. Civilizations can coexist and interpenetrate.
Timothy Garrett of the University of Utah writes, “So, perhaps surprisingly, changes in population and standard of living might best be considered as only a response to energy efficiency. As part of a heat engine, creating people and their lifestyles requires energy consumption. Doing so efficiently merely serves to bootstrap civilization into a more consumptive (and productive) state by increasing the dimensions of the boundary separating civilization and its environment.” The Jevrons Paradox applies to civilization as a whole, gains in energy efficiency accelerate global energy consumption instead of slowing it.
Chris Hedges says, “The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits.”
From the perspective of Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory, in our globalized economy, all of the energy resources and material resources of the planet flow into one stream, corporate profit as measured by the stock market.
The obvious objection, that noneconomic institutions such as religions, journals, news media, and nonprofits compete with global profit flow, providing feedback, turns out to be superficial and misleading. In past civilizations when institutions serving noneconomic functions had independent structures, this was true. Today lines between entertainment, news, politics, business advertising, and religion are superficial. Religions and nonprofit entities thrive or disappear on quarterly returns, media cycles, and politics as much as banks.
While we’ve invented smart appliances, we haven’t invented smart institutions. Corporate entities know only how to survive short term. They’re memeplexes, despite the intelligence of human role players, institutionally no smarter than viruses. Our corporate entities can’t imagine self interest in stopping global climate destabilization. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. Their environment is a free commons to externalize costs and risks. If one nonprofit begins to assume costs which its competitors offload, it chokes off flows of money, goods, information, or people which kept it viable. No matter how noble the cause, if a nonprofit doesn’t raise funds, pay its bills, advertise, and attract new members, it quickly loses market share. As long as religions have an institutional incentive to overpopulate the planet, they will.
In sum, more efficient wind turbines won’t save humanity. We need to reinvent civilization at the roots, adding feedback loops to internalize Planetary costs to institutions which generate them.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Loss Aversion and Global Climate Destabilization
Behavioral Economist George Loewenstein describes loss aversion in Discover (Jan/Feb 2010, p 33): “In a lot of competitive situations, people look at others whom they perceive to be at a higher level, which forms their reference. They feel themselves to be in the domain of losses, and they are desperate to get out. Much cheating, it seems, occurs not because people just want more but because they feel ‘in a hole’ that they can get out of only by cheating.”
Here we are, plunging headlong into a “hole” so terrifying and permanent that to most people it’s literally unthinkable, destabilizing Earth, making our planet incapable of supporting civilization. Yet because our fear systems are “not very good at dealing with gradually unfolding threats”, as he says on page 32, our prospects are bleak.
Why aren’t we reframing Earth’s danger in terms of getting into a terrifying hole? Why can’t we present it in feelings a gambler or an underprivileged child understands?
This brought to mind the story of an African poacher, an ordinary nice guy trapped in self-perpetuating poverty. He felt his only option was to do illegal poaching, just this once, to get out of the hole.
Thing is, there’s no cheating Nature. This time self-perpetuation is the climate change mechanisms we start by default (do-nothing-different is the easy option) and we can’t ever stop. The default effect, he says, is that people tend to be lazy decision makers, taking the path of least resistance.
moar funny pictures
Here we are, plunging headlong into a “hole” so terrifying and permanent that to most people it’s literally unthinkable, destabilizing Earth, making our planet incapable of supporting civilization. Yet because our fear systems are “not very good at dealing with gradually unfolding threats”, as he says on page 32, our prospects are bleak.
Why aren’t we reframing Earth’s danger in terms of getting into a terrifying hole? Why can’t we present it in feelings a gambler or an underprivileged child understands?
This brought to mind the story of an African poacher, an ordinary nice guy trapped in self-perpetuating poverty. He felt his only option was to do illegal poaching, just this once, to get out of the hole.
Thing is, there’s no cheating Nature. This time self-perpetuation is the climate change mechanisms we start by default (do-nothing-different is the easy option) and we can’t ever stop. The default effect, he says, is that people tend to be lazy decision makers, taking the path of least resistance.
moar funny pictures
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