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.

Separate functions for social structures

Fred W. Riggs's 1964 Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society maintained that developed countries operated efficiently by having separate structures for each function. Politics, religion, finance, manufacturing, entertainment, news, etc. were distinct. So an elected leader couldn't just waltz into a bank and demand money, or into a religious institution and tell them what to worship. By not comingling functions within one structure, each function could be performed most efficiently. A manufacturer taken over by powerful politicians would have its corporate officers replaced by political friends and relatives. Incompetent, they'd soon bring bankruptcy. Because private property was protected from those with religious or political power, the society was stable and more prosperous.

Now the US government has been taken hostage by corporations, who also control mass media news and the entertainment industry. Government financially supports banks, who pay lobbyists to influence government.

All of those formerly distinct functions intermingle. Nation states pale in comparison to interlocked international corporations. Is Globalization emerging on the basis of which interlocked corporate entities most efficiently externalize costs? How this be more efficient, even in the short term?

Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory is the most advanced approach I've seen to modelling change. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. His disciples don't seem to notice the corporate assumptions that people are goods whose value is determined by the free market and the environment is a free commons. If the first assembly line is analogous to the first street, to what is the first corporate interlock analogous?

All flows converge to one common destination, money in the stock market. Everything can be converted, one way or another, into this corpporate lifeblood stream. Hence the erosion of separate functions for structures.