Those mysterious forces beyond our control

How complicated problems and helplessness can lead to distorted reality

In How the Mountain of Climate Change Evidence Is Being Used to Undermine the Cause, Bill McKibben says the successful techniques of climate deniers resemble those of OJ Simpson's Dream Team of lawyers. When a mountain of evidence gets big enough, there will be a few cracks. Just "spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be." But, he says, the main reason for climate deniers success is, "They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control." [emphasis mine]



From Extreme fear: could you handle it? "The more control a person has over a threatening situation, the less anxiety it provokes. Numerous experiments have shown that being out of control of a negative situation leads to the release of the stress hormone cortisol."



Michael Bader says that paranoia arises as people try" to make sense of and mitigate feelings of helplessness and worthlessness." "People can't tolerate feeling helpless and self-hating for very long. It's too painful, too demoralizing and too frightening. They have to find an antidote. They have to make sense of it all in a way that restores their sense of meaning, their feeling of agency, their self-esteem, and their belief in the possibility of redemption. They have to. They have no choice. That's just the way the mind works."



"The paranoid strategy is to generate a narrative that finally "explains it all." A narrative -- a set of beliefs about the way the world is and is supposed to be -- helps make sense of chaos. It reduces guilt and self-blame by projecting it onto someone else. And it restores a sense of agency by offering up an enemy to fight. Finally, it offers hope that if "they" -- the enemy, the conspirators -- can be avoided or destroyed, the paranoid person's core feelings of helplessness and devaluation will go away."



Climate Destabilization and Corporate Control of Civilization generate this situation



Blaming the patronising liberal elite and intellectual snobs misses the point, and embeds a self-defeating hierarchy (they understand stuff that I don't, so I must be dumb). All of us humans, including the highly educated and those who claim various expertise, are out of our depth. The world has become far too complicated for our evolved perceptions and our innate responses to grasp and respond adequately. Even coroporate institutions with their vaster resources, designed to maximize short-term profit, fail to forsee economic and ecological catastrophies of their own making.



We need new institutional structures designed to cope with civilization-on-the-edge-of-self-destruction. We need new human identities, that do not demand the impossible in order to avoid intolerable cortisol levels.

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.

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.