Green Economy Plus 29mar2010

GREEN ECONOMY: There Really Are Non-Trivial Behavior Changes With Which We Can Approach Having a Sustainable Civilization… Draft Table of Contents Outline Acknowledgements and Heads-up

Part 1

Introduction What is (what are the “givens” and why; discovered truths and limitations of present system) Green Economy The oxymoron of “sustainable economic growth” True sustainability is not possible except with tiny human population Practical sustainability can be approximated Why things are they way they are… Qui bono? Human Nature Examples “Climate Change” Lobbying …

Part 2

Four Old Paradigms to Outgrow and Replace Constructive sedition What to do to work with the “givens” to accomplish what should be happening A “Systems Polity” versus a “Process Polity” How to change the way we deal with the “givens” in a “Systems Polity” Return to an empirical human-values-centric public morality (A common theme/meme these days, but usually offered without specific means) Recognize the real power-dynamics in our polity However… Motivation Enroll the True Wielders of Power Social and Cultural Engineering-and-Breeding Enterprise Starting the conversation “Phase-shift” transitions in human affairs However Again… Tools and Means Memes

Part 3 By what operational means? Using a “Social Technologies Toolkit” As opposed to “social marketing” advocacies without means Process Tools that are Values-Centric yet Content-Neutral Social Enterprise Planning (SEP) structured by a Model for Community Change (MfCC or Model) connected to reality by a Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) Content-Rich Values Tools Permaculture Spiral Dynamics Evolutionary Psychology

Deming and Goldratt Principles How these tools work together

Part 4 Change-Management Practicum Pain and Pacing Organizational Development insights

Appendices [[Separate: Workbook on application of Model]] Glossary Quotations Detail on Social Enterprise Planning Detail on Model for Community Change Distinctions Model for Social-Benefit Sector SEs Model for Business SEs Model for Government and Community SEs Model for Personal Development SEs What’s your Model for Community Change? Detail on Metaphysics of Quality

Assembled and written by Alexander Carpenter, Santa Rosa, California, [email protected], with World-cultural and American perspectives enriched in depth and breadth with AspergerSyndrome precisionism, truthfulness, and disregard for political niceties. Compilation and Original Creation Copyrights 2007-2010 All Rights Reserved With core-material-thanks to Jay Hanson, Michael Rivero, Paul Chefurka, Phil Arreguin, Andrew Sullivan, Antal Feket, M. King Hubbert, Robert Hickerson, Martin LeFevre, Charles Eisenstein, et al., including the KillerApePeakOil, DieOff, and TheOilDrum list members. And especially, profound appreciation to all the giants upon whose shoulders we all stand. Also thanks to Walter Collins for reminding me of LILA; and to Doug Commings the yoga teacher at Vertex Climbing Gym in Santa Rosa. Special thanks to Patience F. Auer for her generosity, courage, and wisdom. A Thematic and End-Game Heads-up: New technologies of communications and governance, such as the values-centric, empirical Model for Community Change (MfCC), can facilitate the re-creation of our polity. With this Model, the delivery of value is directly connected to the expression of community values, through feedback-rich functional processes that describe natural relationships. For more information about that Model and its application as the template for a definitive communitywide conversation, contact Alexander… Another helpful modern technology is the sophisticated, well-grounded, values-centric, empirical post-post-modern philosophy to be found in LILA: An Inquiry into Morals, by Robert M. Pirsig (Bantam, 1991) — the Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ), in which value is not inherent in objects, but in the relationships between them. The MoQ is a world-cultural synthesis of experience and philosophy, of empiricism and generalization; a new paradigm for patternrecognition and priority-balancing. Because it codifies values and experience common to all 29 March 2010

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human societies, it represents a universal human values-system embedded through evolution into the human genome, and expressible at any time with appropriate environmental cues and conceptual support. Social Enterprise Planning (SEP) — is replacing stand-alone operational tools such as “strategic planning” and “SWOT analysis” derived from market and business practices. As a methodology, it can integrate the human enterprise into a less-corruptible and more-sustainable “systems polity.” The MfCC provides the basic universal framework for a community-wide alignment, commitment, and engagement conversation that generates and implements an enterprise’s plan, and the MoQ connects the whole process to sufficiently objective reality (including science), and compassionate clarity based on human values (instead of market values). That enterprise can be an individual’s life, an organization’s operations, or a community’s existence. Applying all three technologies together provides power to facilitate recognizing and deconstructing our behavioral algorithms while re-creating and re-structuring a conscious, responsible, realistic, and chosen consensus engagement with our world. That consciousness is distinct from the amorphous results of special-interest “social marketing” campaigns, such as politics in general, standardized education, global-warming indoctrination and religiosity, and justifications for war.

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What would it take to accomplish a “Green Economy?” Part 1: “What is” Non-teleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but rather with what actually “is” — attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why. ... In the non-teleological sense there can be no “answer.” There can be only pictures which become larger and more significant as one’s horizon increases. John Steinbeck, Log From the Sea of Cortez, 1941 This essay is a barely (but increasingly) coherent diatribe about sustainability that seeks to slip below the surface platitudes and status quo propaganda. To get a better look at what a first iteration toward sustainability would entail requires an unflinching answer to the question, “What would a true “green economy” require?” If and how a person or institution addresses the real issues tells us a lot, and there is less and less time for equivocation. Most are trapped in the paradigm they claim to try to seek to transcend, focusing almost always on the “Green” part and not on the “Economy” part, and supporting “greenwash” enterprises with nothing sustainable but surface that will accomplish little worthwhile but conventional profit (still their principal focus). Here’s a slogan-revealing, cant-smashing, fluff-exposing look into the hard physical and social science of sustainability. When a person or institution talks about a “green economy,” now one can either expose their shallowness or confirm their probity. For the most part, the superficial and the phonies can’t even enter this conversation, because most have neither the physical nor moral courage to confront the myths and illusions of our time. We as Americans are disadvantaged for entering this conversation because political realism (realpolitic in the rest of the world) is almost unknown in our society since we are genetically biased against it and it’s not taught anywhere. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell (apocryphal) This diverse “Red Pill” material may appear disjointed (it’s not; it’s iterative and inter-threaded) and perhaps even extreme; however, given all that we know about human nature — the history and science of our species, culture, and civilization, this synthesis is the best-fit hypothesis to explain the facts in evidence. This part is not advocacy; it is seeking to accurately identify and describe “what is” in a systematic way, so advocacy can become sane, relevant, and effective. Advocacy happens in Parts 2 and 3. That “what is” also includes our own feelings and emotions, somatic awareness, thoughts and beliefs, individual and social conditioning, automatic (algorithmic) behaviors, and expectations. This trans-disciplinary essay is based more on cumulative direct experience than authority, “social science,” or the “conventional wisdom.” It is an invitation for you to examine your own experience to see if it is consonant with the descriptions herein — for you to practice pattern recognition. To look at this process somewhat differently, this essay is not intended primarily to inform you or convince you; it is to help you de-condition yourself so you can generate an authentic personal experience of an increasingly self-evident reality — for you to have more degrees of freedom to practice untrammeled pattern recognition. And as always, if you want to understand what’s really happening, watch the action without the distracting and trivializing sound-track — the chatter, the patter, and especially the twitter. The truth will become increasingly evident, eventually even obvious. Instead of paying attention to which myth, ritual, or rationalization the established powers are using, observe their actual 29 March 2010

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behavior and then try to fit a plausible evolutionary adaptation to the behavior. Instead of manipulating (“lying to”) millions of people on television, whom would they be manipulating in a tribe of 200 hunter-gatherers? What function would these manipulators (“liars”) serve for the group? Lying, after all, is the principal art of politics, as politicians serve their true masters. Qui bono? The goal is re-conditioning into a paradigm shift in values, insight, and interpretation, not merely “learning new material” or advocating a “program” or a “techno-fix.” The result is the beginnings of a new body of power from asking the right questions so different behaviors can be chosen. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973

A “green economy” must, by definition, be sustainable That means it cannot manifest a structural commitment to “growth.” Economic growth has relied on population growth. That cannot continue. This is the most evident (and most disregarded) truth of all: there is not one single social, political, economic, or environmental “problem” that is not exacerbated by more people and alleviated (but not solved) by fewer. When all the problems are regarded together in a system of multiple parallel-andconverging threads, this truth becomes even more obvious. That population pressures are not a major focus for the few sane humans still involved tells us that ideology and denial have totally corrupted political discourse. More on this below... Ever since the dawn of time, what we now call economic growth has relied on increasing energy use: from eating meat, from burning wood, from cooking foods, from domesticated animals (including human slavery), from horticulture, from monoculture agriculture, from coal, from petroleum, from electricity. With Peak Oil, that cannot continue (unless all that space-alien technology escapes from Area 51). Per capita energy consumption in the US peaked in 1973 and has been erratically declining ever since (per capita energy production had peaked earlier). The mid-70s appear to have been a critical turning point in the history of our civilization; that’s also when real wages started declining and US national debt (and personal debt) began their exponential rise, a rise that is reflected world-wide. Growth has implied improving quality-of-life. That has not been happening for 50 years, not even for the elites. This may be the best large-scale example of how market values and human values have diverged. Instead of concentrating on the supply side of the balance-sheet by increasing production of necessities (as basic “economics” would have it) to meet growing demand, reducing population will reduce demand. That reduction in organic demand, coupled with conservation and efficiency of resource use, will make constraints on resources less compelling and less (but not significantly less) of a predicament. The limitations to growth from “Peak Oil” are a lot easier to understand, and much more marketable, than the Tragedy of the Commons. Easiest to understand, however, and most marketable of all, is the “anthropogenic global warming” cult of “climate change,” whether or not we can explain it scientifically. If the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had cut through the fog of ideology and said, “Cut economic activity by 90%,” instead of “Cut Carbon Dioxide by 90%,” then more people might have gotten a useful message, for the two are inextricably linked. Our Lords and Masters, the true owners and rulers of our civilization, who hide themselves from our immediate 29 March 2010

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view, who operate a neo-feudal regime through several major factions that both compete and coöperate as they find advantageous, and who are also known by the honorific titles “Oligarchs” and “Plutocrats,” might have been led closer to confronting their own denial and habits of narrow self-interest. But what else could anyone expect in a world where politicians and academic economists would rather die than tell the truth? And that’s only partly because they would be assassinated if they did. It is totally contrary to established patterns of ruthlessness, shortsightedness, and self-serving for the established powers to ever pass laws to limit economic activity, thus there is no hope the ruling Oligarchs can maintain their own present situation or preserve anyone else’s. Oligarchy? A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it. Plato (428-347 B.C.), The Republic, Book VIII It gets bad. Peak oil means peak food. The much-vaunted agricultural “Green Revolution” in global food production starting in the 1960s has been as much a black revolution as anything else, with its intensive reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as petroleumbased fuels for farming, processing, and distribution. A resource-limited volumetric effect independent of market-force equilibrium will give us “stagflation” in foods, where no amount of new or old money (the medium for expressing demand) will be able to drive an increase in — or even maintain — food production (supply). There just won’t be enough energy to continue to produce and deliver the food we consume now. Entirely aside from commodity-supply manipulations (such as the Iraq occupation), monetary manipulations (such as “quantitative easing”), and temporary artificial price supports, genuine supply limitations will drive true prices up relentlessly. Any significant increase in energy production will require major reallocation of social resources and with it a major rebalancing of economic (and thus political) power. There will be stagflation on oil and other commodities, as well, which will affect the entire economy with cost increases from substituting more-expensive natural resources for the easy-toaccess resources we have been consuming. If substitute material resources are unavailable or too energy-expensive, we will be unable to maintain production, much less increase it. Anything that requires energy or matter to make will be harder to make when there’s not enough energy or matter to make it with. As money becomes less valuable, its price may go up in terms of money, but increased demand won’t and can’t increase supply. Producers will be able to charge higher prices, but they won’t be able to do anything with that additional “money,” which our “economy” has decoupled from its former parity relationship with the energy, effort, and material it has represented. [SIDEBAR: Commodities already in net constraint (for various reasons): maize, rice, fresh water, ocean fish, rare-earth metals such as Neodymium and …, Indium, Tellurium, Palladium, Barium, Lithium, Titanium, Tungsten, Gallium, Molybdenum, Chromium, Gold (!), Uranium, Helium 3, hardwoods, petroleum, arable land, … It is important to recognize that materials shortages (especially of metals) and difficulty of substitution will aggravate energy scarcity. This bi-modal, bi-directional squeeze play means we can essentially forget large-scale conversion toward alternative energy sources, and forget large-scale electrification of personal land transport. Also see http://www.warsocialism.com/ContinuouslyLessandLess.pdf] Stagflation will be willfully mis-construed in a growth-addicted polity with a culture of denial fueled by “leadership” self-interest. In the general economy, stagflation will challenge the ideology, myths, and sustainability of growth. In the biosphere, stagflation is the new boundary condition: if you have to dig it out of the ground, it’s inherently unsustainable. It gets worse. Peak food means peak people. If you are going to grow more people, it will require 29 March 2010

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more food. If you have less food, you will grow fewer people. Producing ammonia for fertilizer from coal and natural gas is an inefficient energetic and economic activity that is responsible for about half of all the protein humans consume. Much of the other half comes from increasingly exhausted fisheries in seas that may be warming and acidifying. Factory-farming of mammals for protein is famously toxic to the environment. Here is an example of converging effects — peak oil, over-population, environmental instability, and climate change. If the rate of decrease in food production is faster than the natural death rate, people will begin to starve in large numbers. Population size goes negative through several inevitable processes, and not without a lot of graceless turmoil (that’s intended as dramatizing understatement about “Peak Death” and resource wars). More on this below… Even if a steady-state economy — an economy neither growing nor shrinking — is accomplished, it might not be sustainable if that state is too demanding of resources (including energy). It’s not just about growth; it’s about overall size, too. Efficiency of resource use (and re-use) and conservation of energy become of paramount importance on a finite spherical planet.

Two Growth Scenarios with Math No intentionally sustainable population of animals (including Homo) has ever evolved, nor could one. Evolution doesn’t conserve “individuals,” it conserves “genes” and “genomecomplexes” or “modules.” Here’s a thought scenario to demonstrate what kinds of behaviors will tend to evolve: Assume that two fundamental "genetic sets" (strains of people) exist in a post-Pleistocene tribe living in a large village supported largely by horticulture and approaching a critical-mass size where competition for resources intensifies. For starters, each group is represented by ten mating pairs, for a total of 40 people in the tribe. Further assume that each tribe loses 30% of its population every twenty years due to war, disease, and famine. Members of Gene Set 1 are intelligent, honest, and forward-looking. The mating pairs in this set only have two children each and limit personal consumption because they know the tribe is over carrying-capacity (many die of starvation). After 20 years, this set has 20 original adults + 20 children = 40 members. Members of Gene Set 2 are stupid, corrupt, chronic liars, and only care about the present. The mating pairs in this set consume ten times as many resources as the first group and have an average of ten children before the females die of overwork. After 20 years, this set has 10 original adults (the males) + 100 children = 110 members. A famine kills 30% of the tribe. We assume it affects both Sets equally. Now, Set 1 has only 28 members, while Set 2 has 77 members. The tribe has grown: it now has a total of 105 members. The fraction of Gene Set 1 will continue to shrink through time until it dies out. What kind of people will be selected during this competition-constrained population growth? Obviously, it’s people who are stupid, corrupt, chronic liars, and only care about the present. The ancestors of everyone alive today were selected by a process something like this one, which includes all the epi-genetic, gene-interactional, multi-level (group and cultural), and environmental variations active within the system. Alpha-clan dominance and resourcesequestration only exacerbate the trend. Our species is not well-equipped to deal effectively with over-population stress because instead of evolving to avert or avoid previous population bottlenecks, our ancestors evolved to survive them by attacking (and killing) the competition and taking their resources. It was nature that evolved to regulate populations, and it does that ruthlessly. The complex human subset of nature is regulated within that larger, vastly-more-complex system. Both co-evolved 29 March 2010

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together, with the system tending its contents. Through a similar selection process, human beings have been bred over hundreds of thousands (even millions) of years to have a strong tendency to stratified authoritarian tribal power dynamics, which we now call “religion” and “feudalism.” Here’s some more math, of an engineering nature: It would take approximately 50% of the entire present industrial capacity of our country exclusively focused for 20 years to build the wind-power infrastructure to replace the amount of energy we are deriving now from our principal high-density energy source, petroleum. Similar investments would be required for tapping solar, tide, and other ambient energy flows. Where would the energy and the material to build that infrastructure come from? What would become of the “growth” conversation under such a regime?

That means that it cannot maintain the extreme resource-use inefficiency of “the market” A “market” may be efficient at the price mechanism (i.e., efficient in using money, of which, ironically, there is no shortage except in our conditioned habits of thought — there are only political shortages) were we ever in a market not distorted or manipulated by concentration of power in the hands of a few command-and-control Oligarchs. However, there are no Adam-Smithtype “free” markets anymore, given corporate consolidation and corporate-government convergence and engagement (also known as “fascism”). So “price efficiency” is a meaningless virtue. Thinking mankind will run out of “money” is like thinking we will run out of inches or feet. The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any controlling private power. Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, Message to Congress, 29 April 1938 However efficient they are at the price mechanism, existing markets are 50% to 90% inefficient in resource use: Financially, this “overhead” is the enormous edifice of banks, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and all other institutions associated with money, economic competition, and distribution of resources in terms of money. The most debilitating aspect of this is that the ‘financial sector” actively subtracts significant actual value from the general economy while diluting monetized value through structural inflation. When financial-sector profits are 40% of total corporate profits, that calibrates the maximum theoretical (not the actual) resource-use “efficiency” of contemporary market capitalism at 60%. Physically, a large part of the overhead is redundant infrastructure, including all the “competitive” manufacturing duplication and decentralization of facilities for product development, design, manufacture, and distribution. The overhead increasingly includes avalanching complexity costs within which plummeting net energy is a major factor. It includes the absurd losses from “planned obsolescence,” disposability of goods, and “mean-time-tofailure” designed to happen just before a warranty expires; and the extreme wastefulness, toxicity, and disruption of the environment by industrial processes — made invisible and deniable by externalizing costs (and more on this below). It includes diffuse suburbs and the 29 March 2010

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transportation infrastructure required to serve them, suburbs that take from productive use the lands most readily accessible to cities. A truly sustainable civilization would only produce products that are really needed, and those products would last indefinitely. However, thermodynamically and practically speaking, all economic activity wastes non-renewable resources, so in an absolute sense sustainability is only an ideal to be approached as best we can. Combined, these factors and parameters contribute another, say, 50% efficiency loss, for an overall efficiency at energy and resource use of around 10%. The second-most debilitating corruption of the entire “market system” may be the religion-like ideology of “marketism” (with its co-dependent handmaiden “consumerism”) and its widespread crippling of social and personal human values. It is important to note that in his various writings, Adam Smith’s overwhelming concern and anxiety about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged are strikingly prominent. To Dr. Smith, the most immediate failure of the market mechanism lay in the things that the market leaves undone. His economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education and poverty relief, he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might emerge in an otherwise successful market economy. Smith and the other classic English and Scottish economists (David Ricardo, et al.) believed that a business enterprise should inherently be an agent of social benefit, in that it creates goods and wealth but also has obligations to its workforce and to society as a whole. We will examine these values more in Part 2. Lack of clarity about the distinction between the necessity and sufficiency of the market has been responsible for some misunderstandings and corruptions of Smith’s assessment of the market mechanism by many smash-and-grab Capitalist ideologues who would claim to be his followers. At its worst, this combination of inefficiency and inhumanity leads to treating human resources as expendable commodities, and exemplifies how “market economics” replaces human values with market values (denominated in Dollars, Euros, market-share, ROI, etc.). Moreover, the act of someone buying a car, commuting to work, manufacturing or selling anything solely to “make a profit” (rather than serve a personal need or social mission) is the part of overhead and waste that is generated by vanity, ego, and social conditioning in a values vacuum. Unrealized social benefit is the opportunity cost of “profit.” Financial profit is inherently inefficient, as one look at the American health-care system will show, with insurance-company overhead at 34%. Profit is a penalty. Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the Austrian School Military redundancy is another example of profitable inefficiency. Yet another is modern food production: the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of waste generated by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossilfuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Every “market solution” increases complexity. As complexity increases linearly, the energies and material required to maintain it increase exponentially, and overall efficiency declines dramatically. The marginal return from supporting increased complexity eventually drops to (and below) zero, and the system (the “economy,” the “civilization”) falls apart. Capitalism can’t be 29 March 2010

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run in reverse; we know of no way to bypass our genetic mandates and allow that, despite overt and covert social and cultural engineering, so there is no “soft landing,” only wars for resources, infrastructure and supply-line collapse, and general disintegration. The “market” knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This represents the distinction Karl Marx stressed between “exchange value” and “use value,” with the second originating in the Commons and the first arising out of scarcity (through destruction of the Commons, inefficiency and waste, and manipulated resource controls). A green economy must resolve this false dichotomy and abandon the conventional “market ideology;” since that is simply politics by another name (and how our neo-feudal Lords and Masters manipulate us). To accomplish a “green economy” we must fundamentally change the operating basis of our polity, evolve the net cultural and personal values driving it, and express them in a grounded and rigorous way.

That means that it cannot continue to hide its inefficiencies and distortions by shifting costs to un-monetarized “externalities” and hiding them outside an artificially closed financial system The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of nature. “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP) and profit are measures of destruction of the planet. A green economy must have internalized all closedsystem costs and benefits, and expanded the boundaries of that system to include the entire planet as a Commons. “Natural capital” must become as important (or more) than capital. Economists in particular, for the most part, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate consequences of the transition from the open to the closed earth. Kenneth Boulding, 1966 “Quality of life” itself has become an economic “externality.” Our civilization has monetarized social, personal, and spiritual values, and has devalued non-monetarizable human and ecological (“systems-integrity”) values. Not everything can be valued in currency, and currency-value alone cannot adequately reflect human efforts to express human values with their un-marketable priorities. …untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values to all areas of life are endangering our open and democratic society. George Soros, 1997 Let us not forget that work is the primary form of capital, and that all work requires energy. To avoid the inbred tautology of after-the-fact valuation of capital in terms of its own “money,” the cost of energy must be measured in terms of energy (the key metric is ERoEI — “energy returned on energy invested”), with proper consideration given to use of other limiting resources such as land and water, and to opportunity costs such as food not grown on that land with that water. Many limiting resources are not part of the market economy (they are “externalities”) and will need to be brought into the matrix. Such an energetic reality-check would facilitate establishment of a right-sized steady-state “economy” with a new form of cooperative “systems” government — explicit political decisions not based on concentrating wealth, but actually dedicated to the common good (a good made more attainable through reducing population as one of many parallel threads). Some of the ideas of the Imperial Chinese system look attractive (although not totally attractive) to advance the common good. Late Imperial Chinese government maintained a viable self-myth as a “meritocracy” and it was known as “examination hell.” To a large extent, it was a “systems 29 March 2010

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polity” that was largely values-based. Morals (Confucian, et al.) were taught to everyone — especially the political leadership, in a classic example of Alpha-class socialization-indoctrination. Principle-based leadership is a long-term survival strategy to stabilize an ecosystem of fractious factions of the Oligarchy. The English aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries is another good example of this. Most Proletarians don’t think dynastically, and tend to not understand this. For the most part, their conditioned minds are consumed with the operational logistics of their pursuit of the illusion of social status, also known to biologists as “inclusive fitness.” The Chinese Imperial system was in principle almost the opposite of our “everything for sale” government and society. We, on the other hand, have gotten greedy, using petroleum to exploit the past, and monetization and debt to exploit the future.

That means that it cannot continue to use a debt-financed currency in a central-bankcontrolled financial-and-political system The global debt-currency system (inaccurately called a “fiat” currency system) is inherently unsustainable and unstable, requiring pyramid and Ponzi manipulation, endless dilution with “new” money levered off existing debt, and periodic re-initializing by the feudal elites (the “economic cycle” of bubble and bust). It totally distorts all relationships between capital, work, and energy, and between wealth, power, and value. It conceals the facts of political governance behind the religiosity of economic “science.” This debt-currency system requires “growth” in the monetary value of assets to absorb the increase in the number of monetary units and conceal the structural inflation (which the government must under-report) that is necessary for the system to work for its owners, our neo-feudal Lords and Masters. Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790 (apocryphal) We need to dispel the notion that somehow Government is in control of money-making. The banks create money for the benefit of their ultimate owners, their already-rich Lords and Masters. They are not acting as a shill for Government; governments have completely ceded this power to them. We also need to dispel the myth that there is any significant difference between major private banks and government doing the printing. The upshot is the same, very few people controlling the system, making new money from nothing, and not distributing it evenly (seigniorage, inflationdilution, and “riding down the multiplier”). Money is “created” when a fractional-reserve bank makes a loan; in other words, our “money” is backed by debt — mortgage debt, consumer debt, “national” debt, corporate debt, currency debt, debt on debt, debt on debt on debt. There is no “money,” there is only debt (called “notes”). That these notes can be characterized as “capital” and considered to be “assets” is the most toxic involution of the disease of “finance,” and the culmination of our disconnect from reality. If the American People ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the bankers and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Third President of the United States (Letter to James Monroe, January 1, 1815) Debt is “discharged” by rolling over into new debt (which defines “new” “money” as the interest accumulates), not paid or “redeemed” with representative value such as labor-productivity, 29 March 2010

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precious metals, commodities, energy, information, and other directly useful things. This represents a limitless increase in claims against finite planetary resources. In other words, the Oligarch’s “financial system” is collateralizing and selling monetarized “value” representing several orders of magnitude of the value of the planet itself. The tremendous volume of such debt simply cannot be redeemed with real-world value. As with all bubbles, this one too will feed on itself until its Ponzi pyramid collapses, and with it, much of what we consider “civilization,” for this is the first time that all the other “peaks” are occurring more or less sumultaneously.

The End-Game of Irredeemable Debt Established economics ignores the effect of irredeemable debt (as opposed to redeemable currency) on productivity. It watches debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is happy as long as this ratio stays below 100% by a fair amount. However, what should be watched is the ratio of additional debt to additional GDP. The increase in GDP brought about by the addition of new debt to the economy is called the marginal productivity of debt. That ratio is the only one that matters in judging the quality of debt. After all, the purpose of contracting debt is to increase productivity. If debt volume rises faster than national productivity, big trouble is brewing, but only the marginal productivity of debt is capable of revealing it. Precipitous decline Before 1971, the introduction of one Dollar of new debt used to increase the GDP by as much as three Dollars or more. Since 1971, this ratio started its precipitous decline that has continued to this day without interruption. It went negative in 2006, a tipping-point forecasting the financial crisis that is breaking now. In January of 2010 the ratio was at —$0.60 per Dollar. That’s a loss of sixty cents for every new Dollar of debt. The reason for the decline is that irredeemable debt causes capital destruction. It adds nothing to the per-capita quota of capital invested in aid of production. Indeed, it may take away from it. As leveraged debt displaces real capital (which represents the deployment of more labor, more material, and better tools), productivity declines. The laws of physics, unlike human beings, cannot be conned. Irredeemable debt can only create make-believe capital, capital that eats itself through self-trading and “quantitative easing.” By confusing natural capital and credit, economics obliterates facts of nature. It conceals the cost of running the debt-breeding merry-go-round. It makes capital destruction invisible. The stock of accumulated capital supporting world production, large as it may be, is not inexhaustible on a finite planet. When it is exhausted, the music stops and the merry-go-round comes to a halt. It does not happen everywhere all at the same time, but it must happen everywhere sooner or later. The marginal productivity of debt is an unimaginative taskmaster. It insists that new debt be justified by a minimum increase in the GDP. Otherwise capital destruction follows, a vicious process of deflation followed by rampant inflation as more and more debt-based “money” is pumped into the system to shore it up (until it collapses). And if “government” and “the economy” are joined at the hip or are effectively the same as in the West, then government stops functioning along with the economy, and anarchy results. At first, there are no signs of trouble. If anything, the picture looks rosier than ever. But the seeds of destruction inevitably, if invisibly, have sprouted and will at some point paralyze further growth and production. To deny this is tantamount to denying the most fundamental laws of our known universe — the law of conservation of energy and matter, and its handmaiden, the second law of thermodynamics. The minions of the Oligarchs who run the banking system can only temporarily deny and defy that 29 March 2010

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natural law. In service of their Lords’ and Masters’ power, they are leading a blind crowd of mesmerized people to the brink where momentum may sweep most of them to their financial and perhaps even physical destruction. Yet not one university economics department in the world has issued a warning, and not one court of justice has allowed indictments to be heard from individuals and institutions charging that the issuance of irredeemable debt is a crude form of fraud, and calling for the punishment of those apparently responsible, whether in the government, in the central bank, or elsewhere. Although entirely predictable (economists are High Priests within the Oligarchic system, and judges are employed to regulate it), their behavior in this regard could not be more reprehensible and unsustainable. Rather than acting to protect a universal common good, they act as chattel servants of their Patrons to advance and conceal further power concentration by the already mighty. The marginal productivity from additional debt is exactly analogous to Joseph A. Tainter’s notion of “marginal productivity from increases in complexity” presented in The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, 1988). As complexity advances linearly, the cost of maintaining coherence increases exponentially. The energy cost of additional complexity returns less and less productivity, which eventually goes negative (as has the marginal productivity of additional debt). Society begins to fall apart in both cases, and that collapse accelerates. Having both go negative at once contributes to a Perfect Storm of change that is intensified by global climate-change, Peak Oil, environmental instability from climate change and industrial toxicity and disruption, potential (likely) microorganism epidemics, and energy-cost- and over-population-exacerbated resource shortages. Tainter, by the way, refers to himself as an “ecological economist.” Growth and complexity have always been fueled by more and more matter and, more important, more and more energy (from meat, wood, slaves, domesticated animals, wind, monoculture agriculture, coal, petroleum, electricity, etc.). When existing complexity is no longer supported by energy sufficiency, and “money” growth can no longer maintain energy (and material) production, society collapses (as it has so many times in history); in our case, blind-sided by an ideological obsession with "growth." Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. Kenneth Boulding, Economist The inconspicuous beginnings of irredeemable debt have blossomed into a colossal edifice, a complex inverted pyramid of debt (in the form of “markers” such as “credit default swaps” and other “derivatives” and derivatives of derivatives) precariously balanced on a tiny and evershrinking foundation of real material value. Increases or decreases in the level of money supply are thought to influence the level of production in the economy. However, this is true only if the ‘externals’ to the economy — i.e., sources of energy from outside of the money circle — are constant. When the availability of energy changes, the economy changes in ways not correctable by manipulations of the money supply. H.T. Odum in A Survey of Ecological Economics, Krishnan, Harris, and Goodwin, editors, Island Press, 1995, page 205 This pyramid could remain stable as long as there was unlimited inexpensive energy (or, at least, the illusion or promise of such energy) and material to represent at least some working value in all that debt. Complexity requires energy to maintain, much less expand. When the marginal energy cost of energy goes negative, there is no amount of “money” (whether as irredeemable debt or as gold-backed currency) that can produce it. The same applies to material goods. Peak Oil means Peak Capitalism. 29 March 2010

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So “money” (as the notion is used today) cannot be made “sustainable.” Either: Money is “limited” (pegged to gold or some other commodity) and ultimately in such short supply that it leads to war over resources and power (World War One, c.f., Karl Polyani). OR Money is “unlimited” (a central-bank debt-based “fiat” currency) and ultimately in such oversupply that it causes hyperinflation and leads to war over resources and power (World War Two, c.f., Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler, and now...). Next is more war to sequester resources, eliminate excess population, and prop the “money” system in place (and with it, its owners’ grip on power) as long as humanly possible.

The Straw Dogs are Paper Tigers “War” is politics by another name. (von Clauswitz) “Economics” is politics by another name. (Hazel Henderson) “Sociology” is politics by another name. (Jay Hanson) “Political Science” is politics by another name. (Alexander) None of those is “science” at all; they are components of a neo-feudal confusion-and-control system. One must not call economics a creationalist cult (“creating wealth”), one must instead refer to it as Darwinian and scientific — survival of the “economically fittest.” Economics is a “social construction.” Humans did not co-evolve with money or markets. There were no economists in the Pleistocene, nor “money.” There were “politics,” defined as “getting people to do things.” Since humans did not evolve with a “medium of exchange” (except, perhaps, meat for sex), no a priori reason exists for us to have a monetary system and all that it entails. Like other religions, economics was invented by rich and powerful Oligarchs to serve their own interests. Just look to see what institutions hire economists to see the truth of this. Economics professors and economists are professional dis-information agents who claim that “money” is just a “medium of exchange.” In a society where even the formal political system floats on a sea of money, this lie can’t even pass the “straight face” test. If economics, money, and the monetary system were invented by our rich and powerful Lords and Masters, why did they do it? Obviously, for political purposes — to externalize and objectify their whims and commands, to make the rest of the world do their bidding without the uncertainties of unsystematic lies and more literal forms of force. It also makes it easier for the competing factions of the Oligarchy to cooperate when advantageous (i.e., when extracting and concentrating wealth from the productivity of the rest of us). Money to gain Power; Power to protect Money. de’Medici Family Motto (apocryphal) Thus, economics, the financial system, and money has become a “hidden political system” that pretends to be something else. It’s the perfect political system for the Oligarchs, who make social decisions that affect us all, are not held responsible for those decisions, and get others to pay for those decisions with their earnings and their lives. Obviously, the Oligarchs do not want a one29 March 2010

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person, one-vote political system (a “republic,” and certainly not a “democracy”) when they can have a one-dollar, one-vote political system (an “economy”). It is natural that the country whose theories of government are the most unrealistic in the world should develop the greatest and most powerful sub rosa political machinery. Thurman W. Arnold Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944) thought the “key step” was to overturn the belief that social life should be subordinated to the market mechanism. Once free of this “obsolete market mentality,” the path would be open to subordinate both national economies and the global economy to democratic politics based on “human values.” Whole dimensions of what it means to be a human being and be treated as one are not incorporated into the economic calculus of capitalism. Peter F. Drucker, Managing in the Next Society Originally, corporate charters were not “to make a profit at any lawful purpose;” they were a license to accomplish some quasi-governmental task (with political overtones for the ruling elite) like “pacify” colonial subjects, build public works that would otherwise require too much private investment and promised to generate revenues, and do things that could be “plausibly deniable.” General share ownership among the elites has distributed and diluted (if not outright concealed) responsibility and eliminated accountability for the cost to the commons and the opportunity cost to the polity of exercising that license. Rather than quarrel about booty, owners could share even more wealth by concentration and collaboration outside a zero-sum game. “Economic change” may in practice be “regime change” with attendant violence and blood (however artfully obscured) if driven to occur before it happens naturally from evolving culturechange. Since economics is just politics by other means, then a Steady State Economy must actually be an expression of Steady State Politics (or some steady-state social equilibrium, however punctuated). What that would mean in practice in our post-modern world is a great mystery, but when there is true “green power” practiced in a “green culture” expressing “green values,” there could emerge a “green economy.”

Red is the Opposite of Green Our rich and powerful Lords and Masters are animated by, and indoctrinate us in, a form of religion whose god is the unencumbered self-regulating market. Economic historian Deborah Redman explains: Because the order of nature is providential, the free market that reflects natural order also reflects the workings of providence. In this way the spheres of morality, theology, jurisprudence, and economics become hostages to nature, so to speak. Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science, MIT, 1997, page 237 Like all gods, this economic god is an abstraction; it doesn’t actually exist. Nevertheless, we evolved to fight and die for such an economic god just like a suicide bomber fights and dies for his religion’s God. In essence, Western elites are missionaries with the biggest and best weapons. Even though scientists and philosophers have been pointing out inherent flaws in our economic god 29 March 2010

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for over a hundred years, we have been — and will remain — stuck in a tight loop that goes something like this: First, Western elites demand a world organized around the god of self-regulating markets: All over the globe, we have recently witnessed a return to religious fundamentalism. In my view, the return to the equilibrium price-auction model in economics represents a parallel development — a desire for psychological certainty in a world that is, in the last instance, uncertain. (page xix) No discipline except economics attempts to make the world act as it thinks the world should act. But of course what Homo sapiens does and what Homo economicus should do are often quite different. That, however, does not make the basic model wrong, as it would in every other discipline. It just means that actions must be taken to bend Homo sapiens into conformity with Homo economicus. So, instead of adjusting theory to reality, reality is adjusted to theory. (page 21) Lester C. Thurow, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, Random, 1983 When the failures of self-regulation of these markets become intolerable problems, elites blame outside “interference:” There is at the core of the celebration of markets a relentless tautology. If we begin, by assumption, with the premise that nearly everything can be understood as a market and that markets optimize outcomes, then everything else leads back to the same conclusion — marketize! If, in the event, a particular market doesn’t optimize, there is only one possible inference: it must be insufficiently marketlike. This epistemological sleight of hand is an astonishing blend that blurs the descriptive with the normative. It is a no-fail system for guaranteeing that theory trumps evidence. Should some human activity not, in fact, behave like an efficient market, it must be the result of some interference that should be removed or a stubborn human refusal to appreciate markets. It cannot possibly be that the theory fails to specify accurately how human behavior works. Everything for Sale, Robert Kuttner; Knopf, 1997, page 6 Our Lords and Masters then demand that governments and central banks mitigate these intolerable problems by cutting interest rates, providing bailouts, regulating every aspect of society, and if necessary, going to war to maintain the grip of fear of the unknown and of the “Other” and maintain their own grip on power. This caused World Wars One and Two. Our “leaders” are now talking about what would become World War Three. They are seeing red, and intend to have more wars, because they have developed a cultural and psychological “war technology” that advances their agenda and effectively deceives all but the Oligarchs. One good example of this is the use of corporate media to propagate official “conspiracy theories” about “false flag” events to justify endless and unwinable war in the name of “national security.” Taxes are not raised to carry on wars; wars are raised to carry on taxes. Thomas Paine (apocryphal) State-against-State wars are now superceded by culture and economic wars, because the States themselves are chattel to the Oligarchy, with a few notable regional and cultural exceptions. The fake but very expensive Wars on Poverty, Drugs, Tobacco, Cancer, Guns, Privacy and Private Property, Terror, ..., and ... are all systematically designed to perpetuate its “enemy” and the “special interests” who control it. They also perpetuate the livelihood of the warriors engaged in an enforced stable equilibrium with that enemy, while providing grist for media manipulation as 29 March 2010

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“public policy” is defined and re-defined to generate huge profits for the owners and controllers of the corporations involved. This is intensified by “privatization:” Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable. Greg Palast After any one (or set of) these intolerable problems have been mitigated or equilibrated, we all go back to the first step and initiate a new subject-matter loop, whose subject is some enterprise the Oligarchs wish to strengthen their hold over — a new “War on Whatever.” One man’s conspiracy is another man’s business plan. And as we know full well, the tools one is willing to use against one’s “enemy” are the same tools one will eventually use against one’s “friend.” Ultimately, there is one fundamental reason why another world war is inevitable: human leaders didn’t evolve to tell the truth at a population bottleneck (and its consequent wars) — they did evolve to survive bottlenecks by sending lower-ranking others to die in the trenches. When huge problems confront human societies, the “leaders” of those societies inevitably resort to ad-hoc governance, with a constant eye to their own immediate benefit (and that of their clan or “identity-group”) over that of anyone else, even to the extent of redefining who qualifies as “human” and who is a “non-person.” Human rights and other flowery rhetoric will thrive — it's just that “human” will exclude most categories of Homo sapiens sapiens which are not in the group favored by those with power.

The War on “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” The present media-conversation about a “climate change” consensus is based on modeling projections and social engineering, not on systematic data, and not on any actual science of falsifiable hypotheses. “Consensus,” after all, is not part of the scientific method; it’s part of the political method. Multi-cyclic climate change is a very real phenomenon, and has always been happening. It’s important to always distinguish natural causes from man-made ones, as best we can. The present state-of-the-art in climate science is inadequate to tell us any more than that our global climate could go either way (toward more warming or toward more cooling — or toward more cooling after more warming) depending on our time-scale for gathering and integrating data and which data we emphasize. That was true in the 1970s and it remains true now, despite considerable advances in climate science over the last forty years, and despite considerable warming until around a decade ago. It’s hard to imagine anything more difficult than scientists whose livelihood depends on their expertise saying, “We simply don’t know what’s going to happen,” much less, “We simply don’t know what’s happening now.” “Cognitive dissonance” and “confirmation bias” are rampant in this conversation. This “war” is a political process. There is no substantive scientific “consensus;” there are legitimate demurs not based on corrupting conflicts of interest, but rather on anomalous patterns of data and inconsistent convergences. In fact, there are as many conflicts of interest to corrupt “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) proponents as there are to corrupt AGW skeptics. Vastly more grant-funding has flowed into the coffers of AGW proponents than into those of “deniers;” and funding of another order of magnitude has been used to pay for the cultural and social engineering from mainstream media and government, as factions of the existing entrenched Oligarchy vie for supremacy. [SIDEBAR: If one looks carefully, one can see that the entire AGW “controversy” (pro and con, but especially the pro part, which has been funded by the Oil faction to an order of magnitude greater 29 March 2010

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than everyone has funded the “deniers”) may have been designed to extend the profitability and control of the petroleum faction of the Oligarchy into one last grasp of status quo in the face of Peak Oil; to extend their “Age of Oil” as long as possible, whatever the consequences. This faction has the active collusion of the government and mainstream-media factions, for all will share in the bounty. The “deniers” are a shallow straw-dog opponent who have been intentionally set up to be not credible and to distract through confusion. They provide confused non-science to counter a covertly-corrupted-science argument. This is called “poisoning the well” by propagandists. As Ezra Pound pointed out, “The technique of infamy is to invent two lies, then get people arguing heatedly over which one of them is true.” A third voice uses genuine science to expose the corruptions on both sides and the political agendas behind them. Also see http://www.prwatch.org/node/8664 and http://spectator.org/blog/2009/12/04/whos-crusdaddy.] Given the unsettled science and the unclear vectors in various global-energy budgets (e.g., chaosnoise and average temperatures, solar-activity cycles, the Carbon cycle, thermal inertia and heat capacities, and general environmental instabilities), almost all the current noise about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is incremental window-dressing to advance one political position in a strange pervasive emotional climate of fear-shock and denial-numbness. It may be principally to advance yet another layer of taxation (the “carbon tax,” primarily for wealth re-allocation and, only secondarily, to reduce resource-consumption), manipulation (a marketing fad for more profits and maintenance of monopolies), and political control (from generating beliefs and aligning “true believers”) — in addition to all the other successful such gambits. The conversation is not scientifically substantive because that aspect is too indeterminate; a better explanation is that it is controlled-media propaganda and customized hype to serve a political agenda, one that takes advantage of a general sense of unease and genuine caring in our general population about our environment (which is harmed far more by disruption and toxicity from industry and population than by human-generated greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, so it delivers its promoters an additional distraction from their other activities). This AGW hysteria and religiosity is another triumph of pre-scientific Positivism, using mathematical models to “predict” outcomes we prefer for political (i.e., economic) reasons, independent of complexity-confusion, instabilities not modelable, and adequate (or not) and consistent (or not) data. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1953 in a different but analogous context (economics): To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions. In other words, to have any predictive value at all, a model of a complex non-linear open system with emergent and discontinuous processes and events (such as a national economy or a planetary climate) must be so oversimplified and constrained by its simplifying assumptions, arbitrary parameters, and artificial boundary conditions, that it will no longer reflect reality. Even more troubling, such modeling cannot predict anything that is not already within its paradigm — sudden discontinuous events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, a break in the oceans’ thermo-haline circulation (the “Atlantic Conveyor Belt”), or a magnetic-pole reversal — not to mention cascading smaller-scale disruptions such as Colony Collapse Disorder in bees, dead-zones in the oceans, resource-wars, implosion of monoculture agriculture, collapse (i.e., involuntary simplification) of complex societies, and the like. In the Fifties, “chaos math” had not yet been developed, and still hasn’t penetrated into the agenda-bound mainstream. It provides us a deeper insight than Friedman’s that such “predictions” are wish-fulfillment masquerading as science — “confirmation bias” made all the easier when an audience is habituated to believe in what it thinks “science” is, has no training or experience in rigorous critical thinking, or has some social advantage to gain thereby. Yes, we certainly can manifest confirmation bias in true hypothesis-falsifying science, but we have been alerted to it and are not pretending it’s not a distraction (whence genuine peer review and independent 29 March 2010

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confirmation). [Essential Distinctions: Predictions (extrapolated data with some accommodation to non-linearity) versus projections (calculations based on algorithms in models) versus scenarios (exemplary thought experiments) Problems versus predicaments: if a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but simply a fact, a situation, a predicament — not to be solved, but to be coped with over time, and dealt with by broadening our approach to it, by enlarging the context in which we hold it. Thermal inertia: the reservoir of, or sink for, heat in the circulatory systems of the planet (oceans, atmosphere, mantle). This, in addition to the dilution effects as heat is transported away from its concentrations, causes delays in changes, and damps them. Complexity inertia: using sunk-cost infrastructure without including any of that cost in marginal productivity rates or ERoEI.] Positivist “science” is not only vulnerable to confirmation bias; it can have a hard time distinguishing cause and effect — the illusion of post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after that therefore because of that”) caused by observation sequence and cognitive inertia more than actual events in the real world. The classic example of this in the present conversation is the connection between ocean temperature and Carbon Dioxide levels in the atmosphere. First, we observed the air-temperature rise, then the CO2 rise, and then looked for a connecting cause. Some of us found burning fossil fuels a politically attractive cause, and attributed both air- and ocean-temperature rise to that cause. However, the paleo-climate record (from before humans burned fossil fuels) shows ocean-temperature rise to lead (not follow) an increase in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels. This is just what one would expect from elementary chemistry and physics, which also tell us that a rise in ocean temperature would drive CO2 out of solution in the oceans and would also increase the atmospheric concentration of water vapor, which is overwhelmingly (70 to 94+%, depending on the source) the primary “greenhouse gas.” What has caused the oceans, and the planet at large, to warm and cool in the past? The Earth's climate is driven almost entirely by the receipt (largely in equatorial regions) and redistribution (largely by the oceans) of solar energy, the obvious primary external source of heating. 500-, 210-, 80-, 22,- and 11-year cyclic variations in sunspots, solar irradiance, and magnetic-field interactions, all well-known phenomena, are strong factors in the variability of earth temperature (and other cycles are thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands of years long). Other factors are certainly involved. What is causing climate change in the present, and where is it headed? All the current solar factors are at 50-year and historic lows, suggesting cyclic cooling and a potential repeat of the Maunder Minimum (the “Little Ice Age” between 1645 and 1715). Human contributions appear to be very small, with particulate pollution a stronger driver of climate change than any CO2 contribution, especially in the northern hemisphere. Occam’s Razor is not particularly helpful when we don’t know all the factors involved… If you don’t understand how things are connected, the cause of problems is solutions. Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute There are very real benefits to the commons from a “conservation and efficiency” conversation, whatever the actual climate vectors and outcomes: a reduction in use of finite energy (and other) resources, largely through greater efficiency in conventional modes of use and re-use, so we can preserve at least some of the remaining high-energy-density fossil fuels to provide the energy for building both supply-side and demand-side infrastructure for replacement energy technologies, 29 March 2010

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and to provide a time and energetic buffer for a potential “soft landing” through values-evolving culture change and consequent physical accommodation to climate change, whatever its drivers. Fossil fuels are essential as sources of the raw materials for making medicines, plastics, and petrochemicals, among other things. In both the medium and the long run, conservation benefits us all more than simply burning these resources. The short-term benefit to the orchestrators of the pseudo-religious AWG distraction is greater concentration of wealth and more solidly entrenched political control through generating and regulating fear-driven obsessions, even greater control of essential (and shrinking) resources, and dominance of the “public-policy” conversation. Fortunately, that dominance is not uncontested. The bottom line is that our civilization needs to change some of its most fundamental behaviors whether or not “global warming” is in any way at all anthropogenic, and whether the present netoverall climate-change vectors are toward a warmer or cooler part of the natural cycle. In this light, the standard AGW conversation becomes entirely moot (except, of course, for the most desperate AWG cultists, who are probably already lost in a shocked fog of narcissistic selfimportance, liberal-guilt projection, original-sin transference, fear-damping frenzy, and selfrighteous sanctimony), and stands further revealed as a political/economic manipulation. The media-promoted indoctrination and popular belief that human activity is the main cause of imminent catastrophic global warming is essentially a return to the religious, guilt-ridden mythology of the pre-Copernican age. Also in 1953, Friedman said, “Confusion between positive [“scientific”] and normative [“political”] economics is to some extent inevitable.” In fact, we have every reason to believe the “science” of economics was designed or systematically re-balanced for that useful, even willful, confusion to be available for manipulation. The main purpose of the fiscal symbolism in this country as it existed after the World War was to preserve the independence of the great organizations which controlled the production and distribution of goods... As the symbolism got farther and farther from reality, it required more and more ceremony to keep it up. The business corporation built more elaborate cathedrals and endowed greater colleges to keep its theology moving along the right lines. … It was these influences which created a separate science of economics, designed to prove that it was not organizations but principles which were operating in the field of the production and distribution of goods. Of course, it seemed important to these economists just what principles they thought up and advocated. Actually, however, the only important thing was the little pictures in the back of the head of the ordinary man. So long as they existed the great organization was secure in its freedom and independence. Thurman W. Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism, 1937, page 196 (emphasis added) [SIDEBAR: For an additional contemporary case study in how the psychology and religiosity of “science” leads it to become politicized both socially and economically to serve prior interests, see “Does the Vaccine Matter?” by Brownlee and Lenzer in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, November 2009 (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1). The phenomenon is inherent in the algorithmic structures of human nature and its societies, and expressed through individuals, groups, and institutions maneuvering for status and power advantage. More documentation of this pattern abounds, including the well-known story of how “intelligence” was fixed around a pre-determined Iraq-war policy…]

The Hypocrisies of Desperation There is actually something like a consensus among most of the modern “conservative” Statists 29 March 2010

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that “Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive.” Note the passive voice: “...to be kept alive” (by someone else, that is, by the government, that is, to serve the interests of its owners and your owners). This is hardly a self-responsible, self-empowered ethic. That’s a very long way from “Give me liberty or give me death,” one of the mythological slogans of rebellious “democracy.” The “culture of life” as the theocons call it does not, alas, mean a deep respect for human life, from cradle to grave, with prudence as the guide to the grayest areas at the very beginning and very end of life. It has come to mean an absolutism with respect to maintaining life and survival — even to the point of absurdity, as in the Terri Schiavo case or opposition to RU486. And to the other wing of America’s contemporary conservatism — the authoritarian “Federalist” wing — it means sacrificing basic liberties (such as habeas corpus) and basic moral principles (such as the prohibition on torture). But it remains a staggering sign of how so-called conservatism has abandoned what were once its core principles, and shamelessly manipulates fear of terrorism and adherence to religious fundamentalism to infantilize the masses. If the right to be kept alive by the government is the single most important civil liberty, then there are no other civil liberties. If the government’s primary job is keeping people alive, then anything which can be potentially perceived as dangerous to life can be prohibited and “warredon:” “dangerous” speech, “dangerous” press coverage, the habeas corpus rights of “dangerous prisoners” held without trial, “dangerous” property rights like the right to buy or sell “dangerous” products (i.e., guns, drugs, cigarettes, McDonald’s, books, etc.). And this says nothing of the socialist implications of such an ethos, since the “right to be kept alive” by the government necessarily implies that the government must provide its chattels free proprietary healthcare, free proprietary education, free food, free water, and free anything that would tend to “improve” and preserve an individual’s life. Anything short of death, then, becomes a small price to pay to be maintained, in effect, as the property of the State. This harks back to royal families owning the State and their chattel subjects. This “ownership,” explicit or implicit, overt or covert, is an essential feature of both traditional and neo-feudalism. For one illustrative thought experiment: why is suicide illegal? Any general instinct to sustainability, then, becomes lost in an irresponsible ideology of immediate gain (Dopamine fixes, “Bread and Circuses,” “inclusive fitness,” and even an obsession with an imminent “Rapture”) that obviates all considerations of personal, social, and environmental integrity and well-being. Human rights are more important than national security. After all, what is national security for, if not to secure human rights? The Constitution of the United States of America lists the rights that the nation was intended to preserve — against, incidentally, an assault from the same sort of government that would have us abandon human rights for “national security.” In actual fact its main interest is in preserving the power and increasing the wealth of its owners. So it contrives a campaign of hype and fear, and shocks and indoctrinates its people to obey its dictates for the chimerical promise of security. Sadly, it believes its own lies, and implodes into manic selfdelusion (except, perhaps, for a few ruthless architects at the helm) in direct proportion to its religiosity. One should never underestimate the power of genetically mediated inter-personal and tribal automatic behaviors (algorithms), both at the Alpha top and the servile bottom. [SIDEBAR: Statist, Islamist, Christianist, Marketist... are all a metaphor for each other, and all are identities and beliefs that are manipulated by ruthless factions whose sole motivation is power at any cost, even infantilizing themselves as well as their own followers. The principal function of modern government is to keep people apart. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)] 29 March 2010

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Human values are more important than market values. “Economics” is the religion of the modern corporate State, and the new opiate of the masses — even for those already narcotized by other fundamentalisms. Statist Oligarchs rely on religiosity (the pretense of objectified external absolute authority — the automaton behind the curtain of Oz) whatever its form or content, and are not shy to layer it on. Ironically, religion originated out of authoritarian tribal power dynamics, so marketism and traditional religion are natural feudal bedfellows, especially in their Statist denominations. This is ironic because of the legitimate pretensions and aspirations of political philosophy and of spirituality. Add corporatist prelates of the marketist religion owning the government (“just another big corporation” or “just another profit center”) and its chattel “citizens” (or, now, “consumers”), and one has a neo-feudal fascism committed to concentrating wealth and power in as few hands as possible, as ruthlessly as Alphas have ever propagated their own agenda in history, and with more serfs than ever convinced they are “free.” None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods ‘till wrong looks like right in their eyes. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Cartago Delenda Est Cato the Elder was a patrician member of one of the Alpha clans of the hereditary Roman Senatorial class, and in a position to have private armies and navies at his command to take advantage of State-mandated “wars;” in this case, against Carthage, Rome’s principal commercial rival in the Mediterranean basin. He was also in a position to drive those wars politically (“Carthage must be destroyed,” an historical example of the “national security” scam), by selling off pieces of the not-yet-vanquished “enemy” to other patrician Oligarchs acting collectively as “The State,” with the Equestrian and Proletarian taxpayers and soldiers of Rome heavily subsidizing the enterprise. Largely unnoticed in the background was the patricians’ efforts to accomplish personal conquest and gain governorships as representatives of Rome, to loot the kingdom until they got replaced politically in the Senate (or, later, and similarly, at the imperial Court), militarily as part of a dynastic coup, or by assassination covert or overt. Some Roman Oligarchs so fully filled their most wildly imagined coffers that they became conflicted and inclined to disengage the fray (if not outright inbred and decadent), making them even easier prey for the next, hungrier band of ever-more-ruthless brigands. The same thing is happening now over the oil-rich Middle East, as one dynastic clan or multi-clan Oligarchic faction exploits a credulous “nation” of ignorant and naive people infantilized by conditioning and blocked emotionally and neurologically near a mean developmental age of twoto-three years. Grown men do not need leaders. Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) Diluting the Dollar to death is just setting up for the next regional “fiat” currency, the “Amero,” controlled by the next ascendant faction of Oligarchs, positioning its own currency so they will have complete mastery of the polity. Not only have they evolved to define State policy and sequester State resources for their own purposes, but to negotiate a relatively bloodless transition to an ascending Clan from another in decline.

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Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... and when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate. U.S. President James A. Garfield Chinese Imperial policy docked noble families one level of rank per generation unless they maintained or advanced their rank by playing by the Emperor’s rules. This is the original meaning, the etymology, of the word “disparaged.” The first thing a faction or Clan does when it comes to power is block the pathway or loophole which they exploited to gain their power (so no-one else can come up their base, given that all the prior ruling Clans had each blocked their approaches). The last thing they do is loot the kingdom on the way out (unless they’ve been finessed or blocked). Gradually, every aspect of the entire polity becomes locked down under control of one faction or another. There is another ritual that goes way back to primate bands in the forest and savanna: in their natural settings, silverback gorillas and hoary chimpanzees have been seen running the same basic scam — hyping-up fear of a bordering band of “others,” and then defusing actual conflict through “safe” Alpha-culture conventions while appearing within their own band to be “defeating” that “other” band (and exchanging genes through slavery, which was also the principal vector for cultural and technological diffusion). Competing Alpha Clans (“factions” of the Oligarchy) conspire together (“coöpetition”) to maintain in “the people” the illusion of external “warfare” to maintain their primary position through fear and covert internal “class warfare” against everyone else (and each other when expedient). This is a significant evolutionary behavioral and cultural advance over the silverbacks who had to run solo with their flock of females and offspring. Such archetypal primate-band patterned behavior is certainly poly-genetically mediated. It’s a great example of evolutionary psychology (or “behavioral genetics”) at play — expressing algorithms deeply embedded in our entire human reality. This behavior-pattern is just as genetic-derived-impulse driven now as then, with that impulse at least 800,000 years in evolutionary development (more likely a few million), with barely 4000 years of civilization’s re-conditioning unable to overcome the inbred power of both the aggressive Alphas’ impulses to command, and the impulse in a different population, the herd, the flock, the band, the Proles, to submit and obey. Or else. Breeding matters, and please note that is an Alphavocabulary word, not a proletarian one. The only fundamental difference between this atavistic situation and modern society is that the serfs in a traditional feudal system knew they were serfs, while in our neo-feudal system the serfs believe they are “free.” The collective mind of the serf class with its politically correct belief-structures has imploded itself with the self-delusion that they are “surrendering” of their own free will to be “kept alive” by the State, and so it’s not a loss of integrity or sovereignty and degrees of freedom. The cognitive mind cannot experience the difference between “submit” and “surrender,” although it can certainly spin symbological froth and frenzy ad infinitum. The purpose behind any action is to feel something or to avoid feeling something. When a being is motivated by avoidance to feeling something, he acts out of fear. Fear will eventually move one into this intellectual level, where symbols have been substituted for feelings. Feelings are no longer safe. People who have the purpose to create feel; people who have the purpose to avoid feeling think.

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The most creative people not only feel, but they can translate feelings into symbols that will arouse feelings in another. In answer, the one who is avoiding feeling often imagines the creative person is enforcing feeling on him, and he usually counters with some act of resistance. This causes suffering. What is the meaning of life? Life is. Life doesn’t come with a meaning. You can study the symbols or you can go out and feel alive. Harry Palmer, Avatar So “Iran must be destroyed” is nothing new on the face of the Earth, nothing new at all. In fact, this entire story is thousands of years in developing. Its contemporary players are simply the most adept and the most obscure. Iran is “déjà vu all over again” of Iraq, which is a mirror of all the pretext-driven-and-fear-driving power grabs used by various United States administrations, various Zionist Israeli administrations, Nazi (and pre-Nazi) Germany, the Roman Empire and Republic... the list is endless. [SIDEBAR: Who are those players? Who is the “King of the World?” Who are their Generals and Ministers? The “richest” lists as a distraction... Distinctions: Ownership versus control Trusts and foundations Dynastic wealth and power versus new riches Hidden-influence style versus open-status style The CEO is just another hired hand. J.P. Morgan People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) See The Global Elite- Who are they? for a look at the second and third tier of the Oligarchy.] The Alphas are becoming increasingly masterful at their covert rule, as they define the listening as well as the speaking; the myth making as well as the myth fulfillment. Yes, the 20th Century was the century of technology, but far beyond the physical technologies like electronics, petroleum, and metallurgy, it was the century of the technologies of propaganda, socialization, education, and psychological and social conditioning. Combined, all these have given the Alpha elites mastery of communications and weaponry, and of the very thoughts and drives of their chattel serfs. They know what to say and how to be heard with no un-orchestrated noise, since no-one else is allowed to speak in the “main-stream media.” Our Lords and Masters offer the seductions of bounty and the illusion of power for the paper-tiger “loyal opposition,” and assassination if that doesn’t work. Pop Quiz: What two things do U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and Kennedy all have in common? Assassination is a political tactic alive and well in our Twenty-first Century, perhaps more than ever. Anyone who is dancing in the highest circles of power is always at risk for his life. It has always been so. It’s structural: when one is newly and increasingly powerful, one must kowtow to the stronger. When one is powerful, others kowtow. If the struggle for power is too even and too intense, and if one knows and speaks more than one’s power can protect, it’s up or out, and out can be very definitive. There are many deaths that fit a political-assassination profile (starting with a qui bono test) in the past 50 years (and more); what does it take for naïve Americans to see that as a realistic possibility much less a routine actuality? 29 March 2010

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The only sustainability the dynastic Oligarchs are committed to is to sustain their power, even if it kills them. That it might kill anyone else, or even everyone else, appears unimportant: “We’ve bred our children to know what to do...” and “We have secrets you’ll never find out...” and “Trust us (or our proxies, the “experts”), and “Do as we say (or else).”

A Green Economy is Simply Not Possible in our Polity The Founders of the USA, for excellent reasons, didn’t trust government, so they founded a government that was defined by and controlled by their own wealthy class — the principal “minority” whose interests the Republic is designed to protect from the democratic mob. The main concern of our Founders was how to prevent “the people” from revolting in the face of large disparities in wealth. They could see what was happening in France and it scared the hell out of them. Starting with Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10, the design grew out of three core assumptions: 1. The best way to solve social problems is through economic growth. Growth seems inevitable and eternal when one has a virgin continent at one’s feet. 2. Individuals know best how to improve their lives. 3. The best way to increase economic growth is to simply ask people who are good at it for advice. That’s why lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our corruptible-but-otherwise-unqualified elected officials and their appointed minions would have absolutely no idea what to do. In other words, elected officials ask the factory owner what government can do to increase his profit so he will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make themselves better off. Keep giving the rich a greater fraction of the economic pie and they will keep increasing the size of the pie. This is the fundamental assumption of so-called “supply-side” economics (now thoroughly discredited through bitter experience). That’s how our Founders designed it, and that’s how “public policy” is made today: The policy formation process begins in corporate boardrooms... where problems are identified as issues to be solved by new policies. It ends in government, where policies are enacted and implemented. G. William Domhoff, University of California at Santa Cruz Our Founders saw the “common good” as the sum of “individual goods” which could be measured by spending — the more, the better. Today, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures that spending. It’s literally a measure of money (not materiel, not value) changing hands. What we use to describe our “Standard of Living” is simply a measure of how much money one spends, with no necessary connection to our quality of life, or to our purpose in life. As the Marketist ideologues pursue policies that are “good for the economy” — that is, for their economy — they do not look to see if those policies are good for the people within it. Obviously, now that we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity (in the physical resource sense — not in the currency-denominated GDP sense), most of our Founders’ core assumptions are being shown to be incorrect. The lesson of the Tragedy of the Commons is that the “common interest” is neither “the sum of individual interests” nor “any sum of special interests.”

Biophysical Laws 29 March 2010

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Thermodynamic laws, theories of evolution, and modern genetic sciences were unknown by our Founders. Today, these laws and sciences signal the end of our form of government. The first law of thermodynamics (conservation law) states that there can be no creation of matter and energy. This means that the economy is totally dependent upon natural resources for everything: it is a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of nature. The German physicist Helmholtz and the British physicist Lord Kelvin had explained this principle by the middle of the 19th century. The second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) tells us that some energy is wasted in all physical and economic activity. In 1824, the French physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law’s concepts while working on “heat engines.” The English Lord Kelvin and the German physicist Clausius eventually formalized Carnot’s concepts as the second law of thermodynamics. Part of the second-law overhead goes to maintain complexity, which consumes additional energy exponentially as it increases linearly. Our government was designed to require more-and-more energy (endless economic growth) to solve social problems, but the thermodynamic laws described above limit the available energy. Energy “resources” must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called “sinks” (this is known as the “net energy” principle). In other words, if it costs more than the energy in one-barrel-of-oil to “produce” one-barrel-of-oil for energy, then that barrel will never be produced — the money price of oil is irrelevant. Thus, the net-energy principle places strict limits (in the physical sense) on our government’s ability to solve social problems. Although central bankers can print money, they can not print energy. Biologists have found that our gene-complexes strongly predispose us to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. These are “adaptations,” and they operate algorithmically, automatically, unconsciously, and modularly (as sets). This explains why history repeats itself and why humans have engaged in war after war throughout history: from time-to-time an environment emerges when “inclusive fitness” is served by attacking your neighbor and stealing his resources. This social aggression is further rewarded by the same Dopamine and other neurotransmitter pathways in the brain activated by sex, food, psychoactive drugs, and intense exercise. Since our civilization and government were designed to require ever-growing energy resources, but energy resources are strictly limited by thermodynamic laws and a finite planet, sooner or later our civilization is headed into the collapse of another global spasm of resource wars. It’s just a matter of time unless we can improve the internal values-coherence of our polity.

Elections Don’t Matter — What Matters Are Lobbyists A “genetic” face-to-face algorithmic process called “reciprocal altruism” guarantees that elected officials and their cronies will nearly always come around to agree with the “suggestions” of lobbyists and each other. It’s a natural, automatic, and subconscious process. Only a sociopath is immune. Unfortunately, no lobbyists or even government men represent the common interest: they are mid-rank subjects of the feudal Oligarchs, bought and paid-for. Our Founders assumed that the common interest was the sum of individual interests. Our Founders based our system on the ideas of the French Physiocrats, which were formulated before the laws of thermodynamics were understood, before the insights of evolutionary psychology, and before the technologies of the corporation for concentrating wealth and power through social control were developed. Now we behave as though the common interest were the net sum of all “special interests.” Local Government: No Public Advocate! Local government policy begins in corporate boardrooms, too, but additional structural aspects of our political system guarantee that local communities are powerless to stop the Oligarchs and the merely “rich” from converting local neighborhoods and that hole in the ground you’re digging for 29 March 2010

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them into cash. Our present system of government is designed so elected and appointed officials serve as both public advocate and judge, a situation that makes it structurally impossible to advance the common good. On the one hand, “leaders” are expected to evaluate the impacts of complex economic proposals; on the other hand, they are supposed to be non-professionals — just plain folks. The result is that, say, county commissioners can’t personally evaluate the proposals in front of them with any expert or objective expertise, nor do they get objective opinions or studies from a public advocate (the government’s professional planners are known to not represent the public interest, even though elected commissioners are supposed to act as a watchdog on government). Similarly, even though Supreme Court justices are intended as a watchdog on the rest of government, in this same regard they have upheld the power of eminent domain for giving private property to private, corporate parties, nominally for the “public good.” Yes, commissioners do hear from a few citizens of unknown motivation and expertise who are able to take a day off work to testify. But since these individuals rarely bring “studies” (with explicitlystated assumptions, etc.), it’s always unclear how much weight to give to their testimony. Moreover, commissioners are acutely aware of their impossible double role of judge and advocate, bend over backwards to give the appearance of objectivity, and thereby nearly-always give the benefit of the doubt to a “developer” or an advocate for the interests of the established powers. Some “reasonableness” can always be found to justify anything. “National security” is relentlessly the best example. A good analogy for our present “public policy” system is a court trial composed of a “defendant” (the public), a “prosecutor” (the developer), and a “judge” (elected officials or commissioners.) In this analogy, the public has no professional advocate and there is no jury. Moreover, the judge frequently accepts gifts from — and takes the advice of — the prosecutor (the developer’s lobbyists). No one would argue that a defendant could ever get a fair trial with a legal system like this. Our Founders assumed that since economic growth was always the best way to solve social problems, the public didn’t need a professional advocate to ever question special interests. The point here is that since our government was specifically designed to rely on perpetual economic growth to solve social problems and maintain public order, the political system is selfreinforcing and literally out of human control. When economic growth becomes impossible — as thermodynamics tells us it must — then our present form of government becomes impossible too. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise. Reinhold Neibuhr Those after-the-fact arguments rationalize primary behaviors that are complex automatic algorithms derived from poly-genetic imperatives.

The ACGT Man Behind the Curtain... When most people look around the world today they see a lot of problems. If they are clever, they see sets of interacting problems. They see energy and technology problems; they see ecological 29 March 2010

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and environmental problems; and they see economic problems. If they are somewhat deeper thinkers, they may see population problems. The simple truth is that they are all suffering from vision problems. What most people see as technological or social problems are more correctly seen as a set of symptoms of a systematic underlying problem, symptoms that are manifesting themselves in the social and technological arena. In the same sense, what people are interpreting as “ecological problems” are the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world’s ecology. And what people are interpreting as “economic problems” is merely the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world’s economy. The underlying problem is the same in all three cases. It is not merely that there are so many of us, it is that Homo sapiens is a hyper-aggressive species with no effective predators, the ability to manipulate its environment on a planetary scale, and the ideological perception that it is apart from, and superior to, that environment (a projection native to feudal Alpha self-identity). In all of nature, such imbalance leads to the instability of expansion-and-collapse cycles — Gaian precursors of the “economic cycle” — as Gaia dances with Shiva. Humanity is its own predicament. The spreading perception that the core environmental problem is human population growth is useful, but woefully inadequate. Population growth is just another aspect of the predicament stated above. One can demonstrate this with a simple thought experiment: imagine that we stabilized our population tomorrow, at our current seven-plus billion people. Would that fix the problems of resource depletion, ecological devastation and the economic instability caused by our insistence on continual material growth? It wouldn’t, because those problems are still worsening where populations have already stabilized or are even in outright decline. Addressing any one of the problem-areas — energy/technological, ecological, economic, or population — would still leave us with problems in the other three. Addressing all areas will reveal additional problems. When we add up all the individual interacting “problems,” we have a predicament, a complex non-linear system of inter-related problems. Problems have solutions, predicaments don’t. We can (and will) tinker around in each and all of these areas, because that's our Buddha-nature: human beings are innate tinkerers. We will do things to ease the situation in each and all of those symptom domains. But none of that tinkering addresses the fundamental predicament, which is that humanity appears to have evolved without a crucial internal self-restraint mechanism (Our Buddha-nature doesn’t extend that far). Our entirely typical evolution happened because, as with every other species, those restraints were readily available within the environment — mainly resource scarcity, predation, disease, and, later, war. Because those external restraints were available, selection didn’t endow us with internal restraints because they weren't needed. In fact, during our early time as a species, an internal self-restraint mechanism acting in addition to the external restraints would have been counter-productive, and would have been actively selected out of our makeup. However, as we developed the physical, mental, and cultural abilities to circumvent those external restraints — through extinguishing all large predators, and developing agriculture, mining, medicine, and “social science” — we outfoxed ourselves, because in the absence of either internal or external restraints we are left with no effective way to reign in our genetic urge for unlimited expansion and the automatic algorithmic behaviors it generates. All that remains is our intellectual capacity to foresee outcomes and to regulate our behavior through “reason,” which is not strong enough to counterbalance our innate behavioral imperatives. Human beings are prioradaptation executers, not fitness pursuers: their programming and conditioning are always stronger than their ability to learn and change in real-time. 29 March 2010

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Alpha conditioning is very strong, as the selection pressures have been more concentrated and stringent than for the Proles. Since the intensity of the conditioning and genetic-behavior enforcement are stronger in the Alphas, their algorithmic behaviors have become narrower, more specialized, more rigid, more unstable, and less adaptive. Hence the continuous turnover as Alpha clans become “decadent” and cycle through factions, and the ingrained habit of Alphas to see the problems as being other Alphas rather than the system itself. And hence the obsessive expression of simplistic market values over more subtle and demanding human values, and of “inevitable” apocalyptic end-games over adult relationship with our selves and each other. And hence the strong ingrained tendency of human societies to feudal structures (whatever their guise): both the Alphas and the Proles were bred to it. There may be no hope whatever that our tinkering will solve the real predicament of humanity. We are behaving exactly as our evolution has defined us, and it’s unlikely that we will stop. Our challenge is to figure out ways in which our feeble minds can create the conditions for the continued survival of our species and perhaps some of our civilization, despite both our unconstrained, innate urge to grow and our glorious but tragic ability to “reason” after the fact. Collectively, we are barely able even to distinguish these countervailing aspects of our fundamental nature, much less change them. They are at the root of all our troubles, and we will need to be enormously cunning to outmaneuver them. This gives new meaning to the notion “think outside the box,” and requires an integration of individual and collective thinking, feeling, and action that has not yet happened in our culture.

There are Viable Alternatives, but not Easy Ones The late Dr. Marion King Hubbert is probably the geophysicist best known to the world’s general public because of his startling prediction, first made publicly in 1949, that the fossil-fuel era would be of very short duration, and his remarkably accurate predictions in 1956 that US oil production would peak in about 1970 and decline thereafter and world Peak Oil would occur “sometime after 2000.” His social thesis is that our civilization is seriously handicapped because its two most important intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are incompatible. A reasonable co-existence is possible when both are growing at approximately the same rate. That, Hubbert said, has been happening since the start of the industrial revolution but it is soon going to end because the amount the matter-energy system can grow is limited while the growth of “money” is not. “I was in New York in the Thirties. I had a box seat at the depression,” Hubbert said. “I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. Back then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it’s not.” The man known to many as a pessimist was, in this case, quite hopeful. In fact, he might be the ultimate utopian, contributing to a social movement called the “Technocrats.” We have, he said, the necessary technology, including making use of abundant low-cost energy available from the sun. “All” we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative to “money.” This means abandoning two fundamental axioms of our culture: the fear-driven Puritanical work ethic used so effectively to herd the Proles, and the idea that growth is the normal and only healthy state of affairs. Hubbert challenged the latter mathematically and concludes the exponential population growth of the last two centuries is the opposite of the normal situation: 29 March 2010

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“It is an aberration. For most of human history the population doubled only once every 32,000 years. Now it's down to 35 years. That is dangerous. “During the last two centuries of unbroken industrial growth we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture. Our institutions, our legal system, our financial system, and our most cherished folkways and beliefs are all based upon the premise [and ideology] of continuing growth. “Since the tenets of our exponential-growth culture (such as a non-zero interest rate) are incompatible with a state of non-growth, it is understandable that extraordinary efforts will be made to avoid a cessation of growth. Inexorably, however, physical and biological constraints must eventually prevail and appropriate cultural adjustments will have to be made.” Work is becoming increasingly unimportant: “Most employment now is merely pushing paper around. The actual work needed to keep a stable society running is a very small fraction of available manpower. “Since the energy-cost of maintaining a human being exceeds by a large amount his ability to repay [in monetary terms], we can abandon the fiction that what one is to receive is in payment for what one has done, and recognize that what we are really doing is using the bounty that nature has provided us [not God, not Our Lords and Masters, and not our hard work]. Under these circumstances we recognize that we all are getting something for nothing, and the simplest way of effecting distribution is on a basis of equality, especially so since production can be set equal to the limit of our capacity to consume, consonant with adequate conservation of our physical resources. “On this basis our distribution then becomes foolproof and incredibly simple. We distribute purchasing power in the form of energy certificates that bear the identification of the person to whom issued, and are non-negotiable. They resemble a bank check in that they bear no face denomination, this being entered at the time of spending. They are surrendered upon the purchase of goods or services at any center of distribution and are permanently canceled, becoming entries in a uniform accounting system. Being non-negotiable they cannot be lost, stolen, gambled, or given away because they are invalid in the hands of any person other than the one to whom issued. If lost, new ones may be had for the asking. Neither can they be saved because they become void at the termination of the two-year period for which they are issued. They can only be spent. “Contrary to the rules of the Price System, the purchasing power of an individual would no longer be based upon the fallacious premise that a man is being paid in proportion to the socalled ‘value’ of his work (since it is a physical fact that what he receives is greatly in excess of his individual effort) but upon the equal pro rata division of the net energy degraded through the production of consumer goods and services. In this manner the income of an individual is not dependent upon the nature of his work, and we are then left free to reduce the working hours of our population to as low a level as technological advancement will allow, without in any manner jeopardizing the national or individual income, and without the slightest unemployment problem or poverty.” Hubbert went on to calculate that following a transition period, the work required of each individual need be no longer than about four hours per day, half the days of the year, from the ages of 25 to 45. Income would continue until death. “Insecurity of old age is abolished and both saving and insurance become unnecessary and impossible."” We then see that the proposals for Negative Population Growth should be implemented 29 March 2010

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immediately, so that the steady state equilibrates at a sustainable level and the per capita share of available resources increases — a good motivator for behavior change. We also see that all attempts to reduce the deficit, balance the budget, or pay off the national debt are futile. The deficit and the “national debt” represent the subsidy the government has paid in its attempt to keep growth and unemployment at the level of social tolerance. No government has ever paid off such a debt.

Wealth is not “Created” One idea that underpins all modern Western social philosophy is that people can “create” wealth. This basic idea has been the focus of economists for as long as they have existed and philosophers for thousands of years. The vision that humans can “create wealth” results in an “ever-expanding pie” view of the world. This creed when applied to population is “the more creators, the more wealth.” This kind of wealth is represented almost exclusively by “money.” The opposite vision is that the bounty of nature including its energy resources is the ultimate source of wealth. Moreover, a vision of energy as wealth, when combined with an understanding of thermodynamics, results in an “ever-shrinking pie” view of the finite spherical planet and its human world. More people equals less wealth per capita. Human beings can create money, and to an infinite extent. As long as we have access to sufficient natural resources (including energy) for that money to represent (together comprising usable wealth), we can build a polity that has a purpose greater than acquiring “wealth.” When resource availability falls behind money availability, we have an infinitely corruptible system in which any social purpose becomes lost in money manipulations for political power and “inclusive fitness.” A healthy monetary system closely aligns money with resources, and aligns growth with success at accomplishment of social ends and improving all dimensions of the quality of life of human beings. The steady-state economy into which we are being inexorably forced implies an interest rate of zero, which means the end of any monetary system configured for exponential growth. The only way of satisfying the desires of those with less (and securing more resources for the already privileged) is economic growth, which has “kept the peace” because people have believed that they were, or could be, increasing their “inclusive fitness.” Without economic growth, the competition for resources will be seen as a zero-sum game. When growth of actual wealth stops, people will become violent (as they have throughout all of history). They will no longer be conditionable into fighting over money when winning that fight will clearly not increase their well-being (as fighting over natural resources can). The “work-ethic” would no longer be an ideology to get some people to concentrate wealth for others. The dogma of “growth” would no longer be useful to placate the poor by tantalizing them with the “get rich” pie in the sky, thereby suppressing their natural tendencies towards violence. We are approaching “Peak Capitalism.” We are being forced to completely rethink our cultural ideas about how to organize our economy and distribute purchasing and political power. Social conditioning would require a different basis, as would status. Applying the “opposite” vision would de-couple political and economic power and would leave the present elites with no basis for their control. They would have to generate another, and that population is probably the least suited for creative social engineering. Their first instinct will be to maintain control through the traditional means (largely fear-based) our species has evolved to apply — contrived wars against an arbitrary “other,” socio-religious manipulations, manic intensifications of Statist “Federalism” in the United States, and central authority masked as necessary to deceive the complacent, the conditioned, and the naive.

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[United States’ governance was] born with a bias against democracy... ‘Inverted totalitarianism’ lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. [Such a form of political power makes the US] the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 2008 Hubbert’s synthesis shows there are ways to re-organize the fundamental (and not-so-fundamental) bases of our polity. However, getting there from here is no simple matter, and some polities are potentially more amenable to such changes than others. For example, Britain’s type of government and different history might have fewer obstacles in finding a sane, potentially effective way such as rationing to respond to an energy or general resource shortage. If one is looking for a traditional term for a social system based on the state taking care of all its people, what has been called “socialism” is a probably the closest. England has a long history of aristocracy-led “socialism” directly derived from its feudal past, but America does not. Despite its secularist rhetoric and prattle about “democracy,” the American political system and its military are integrated with fundamentalist religion much like Islamist states such as Saudi Arabia. The British Parliamentary system of government allows minority views to be heard in government (e.g., “Greens”) but our one-party-two-factions “Christianist/corporate” system does not. Thus the only voices readily heard in Washington, DC are corporate spokesmen with profit agendas or preachers with religious agendas. At the level of appearances, the Oligarchs and their minions would actively hate rationing because it would demolish their self-myth and self-worth as it dismantled their status displays. Worse, they would hate it because they would lose their wealth-and-power-concentration advantage (which gives them their “inclusive fitness”). It would be extremely difficult even for England to change, because of our human nature. In our one-corporation-one-vote political system, it would require a majority of corporate board members and their minions to adopt a new world-view and then believe their social status would increase by giving up marketist Capitalism, and then an equal revolution to overcome the objections of a hundred thousand fundamentalist preachers and their minions. [SIDEBAR: Certainly tens of thousands, and probably a hundred thousand bright technical folks, including economically trained professionals, know at some fundamental level that our “economy” is basically one gigantic illusion. For instance, economists have known for certain that their assumptions and models were wrong ever since Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in 1978 for pointing it out in 1955. They probably also know that it is going to lead to global war over the remaining natural resources. So why don’t a significant number of these experts go to the public? Why don't some of their professional groups start taking out full-page ads in the New York Times? It may be that their relentless drive for high status prevents them from doing anything that might jeopardize their social position, and, thereby, their prospects for survival. It may be that even moderate, normal drives for status are adequate to do that. It may be that the prospect of actively losing status through apostasy, by challenging the established equilibrium of denial and avoidance, is adequate deterrence. If that isn’t, then assassination would be. Historically, high-status people were more likely to make it through population upheavals. In other words, these bright technical folks are genetically biased to say and do nothing while their 29 March 2010

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neighbors die by the millions around them (e.g., the Japanese and Germans in WW2). The ability to foresee a disaster like this coming and change business as usual for the common good never had a chance to evolve. Technical and systems insight and moral courage are not the same. Professional education is in itself an initiation into the status quo, a “normalization” ritual that weeds out, as best it can, people whose emotional makeup is potentially divisive, or who cannot embrace “go-along-toget-along” compressions. A “cult of mediocrity” rules the squeaky wheel. In other words, fear of being shunned by one’s tribe is more compelling than fear of adverse worldly outcomes from out-of-control instabilities and reactive and reactionary changes. So global war is inevitable because the people who do understand the big lie (with few exceptions) are paralyzed by their relentless striving for, and clinging to, social status. What other explanation is there for their overwhelming silence? Individual moral cowardice, perhaps, or simply a collective abandonment of values leading to a collapse of social morality? Do we have any cause at all to believe that this is not already being engineered, as a tactic within the Oligarchy’s own paradigm?]

Vision and Spirit Philosophy can be defined as the uncovering and examining of hidden assumptions — premises that haven’t been vetted. The entirety of America’s political leadership running ahead with (and away from) premises they haven’t examined with regard to America and its economy. They are trying to “jump start” a junk economy, but it’s dead and gone. How many trillions of Dollars will they flush down the drain before they realize it? When they finally do see the light, they will face a choice — articulate an entirely new vision for America in the context of the global economy (that is, humankind as a whole); or stay stuck in reflexive “zombie” doldrums for years, maybe decades. One of the unexamined ideas of the Oligarchic-Economic establishment is that economic activity is solely a function of buying and selling, and that if they can just “jump start” the buying and selling again, economic health will return — and with it, social accord and cultural vibrancy. In a glutted market, economic activity isn’t primarily a function of demand and supply. At some point (which we’ve reached), the pursuit of glut runs out of gas. Then it becomes a matter of people’s values and the priorities they define. Americans are finally beginning to realize that things can’t fill their emptiness. After people have enough food, and adequate shelter and clothing, the market must eventually reflect what they think is important: people’s human values. It’s an interesting exercise to speculate what percentage of unnecessary stuff comprises the American economy. The percentage of junk (unnecessary stuff people buy with “discretionary income” or on credit, out of advertising-whetted status-seeking, class consciousness, or fads) went from an estimated 35% of GDP in 1965 to 65% in 2005. That’s a lot of glut, which is a word you never hear in America. Economists and politicians use words like “overhang” to describe an excess of things. This reflects another unexamined assumption about economic activity — that it can be reduced to mechanical analysis, terminology, and correction. Simply put, the rich and powerful of America have promoted for decades our buying as much junk as possible, big and small, and have provided seemingly endless lines of credit to do so. The 29 March 2010

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housing bubble was just the latest, greatest expression of this trend, turning millions of formerly solvent people into speculators, while selling mortgages to anyone who could put a signature to paper. No amount of “jump-starting” will put life back into a battery that’s dead. As some astute economists (not necessarily an oxymoron) have said, we don’t have a sub-prime loan crisis; we have a sub-prime economy crisis. The standard economic conversation revolves around a false choice: to choose between the divisive — if illusory — partisan politics that characterized the Clinton and Bush eras, or a patriotic appeal to “put the urgent needs of our nation above our own narrow interests” and do “what’s good for the economy.” At the core level, our most-enlightened leadership thinks we can all come together as Americans to solve our economic problems, but there are tens of millions of people for whom being an American no longer means much. On one side are the countless ranks of the completely self-concerned, people who are patriotic when it serves their interests or appeals to their transitory emotions; on the other side are people who emotionally perceive themselves first as human beings and world citizens rather than American citizens or consumers. The latter are a distinct minority, to be sure, but their numbers are growing. It is too late to “jump start” the largely mythological America we’ve known since World War II, and it has been too late for well over a decade. It isn’t, however, too late for humanity, and that is one way ahead for America. In short, it’s not the economy, stupid; it is the fact that the American spirit died years ago, and that’s just showing up in the political economy now. How can America regain its soul (or, to put it in terms the typical conditioned American will understand, our economic vitality)? Only when enough of its people, its leadership, and its Oligarchic Owners, place America deeply in the context of humanity, and cease putting humanity in the context of America, will this nation have a rebirth. Only when the purpose of this country is larger than the personal purposes of Americans, and only when that the success of that purpose is expressed in terms of human values (rather than market values), will we find the meaning and satisfaction in our personal lives and in our civilization that all our comfort-junk, all our partisan ideology, all of our statusseeking hypocrisies, have failed to bring us. Our civilization’s “vision-builder” has been highjacked by the contrived religion of economics masquerading not only as “science,” but as social policy in a covert class war. Without a transformation in how we identify and express our priorities, we can only continue trapped in the same dead-end paradigm. New social technologies are being developed for identifying shared values and for crafting shared visions and applying both with skillful means motivated by direct experience of human life on a finite spherical planet. These technologies include the Model for Community Change used to inform community-wide Social Enterprise Planning processes guided in connecting to reality by a Metaphysics of Quality. The Model has begun in philanthropy and is working outward to embrace a world without “externalities.” These technologies are fundamentally connected with human values, and apply “quality-control” with metrics and feedback to maintain clear focus on the benefit our society can provide us all. A shared vision is not an idea. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power.

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Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Summary Economics is nothing more than politics in disguise. It is the art of privatizing gains and socializing losses. It is the State Religion of the United States (and much of the known world). Its god is lust for power; its idol is growth. When personal and clan power becomes less important than quality of life; when a critical mass of humanity wakes up and takes responsibility for its genuine needs over its Pleistocene emotions and its socially conditioned wants; when the love of money and power is no longer the root of evil; then we could have a green economy. The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself. David Orr, environmental philosopher, in Adbusters, Sept/Oct 2002 There is an elaborate hierarchy of Oligarchs and their proxies who are the decision-makers on social-resource allocation. Acting largely without malice but with a narrow vision, they have their own set of motivations, algorithmically expressing their “inclusive fitness” for clear and ruthless advantage. What counter-motivators are they even able to recognize and perhaps internalize, to expand their own sustainability advantage to include larger and larger domains, perhaps even a planetary one? As we enter deeper into this social conversation, we will become more and more able to distinguish those counter-motivators. What conscious choices they are even able to make is unclear. The big picture is over seven billion people struggling to increase their social status by controlling and using natural resources. All organizations within a country work to support the ruthless genetic drive for more status by its leading members while suppressing dissenting opinions. Because the “selfish genes” drive for status in the primate band and tribe has been so successful in providing a survival advantage, it is enormously powerful, with people willing to go so far as to kill themselves (e.g., hara-kiri) and family members (e.g., “honor” killings) to maintain and advance their own status and that of their families and clans (their “us”). If people will even kill their own children to preserve their social rank, they will certainly kill unrelated others. Besides being one of the most powerful, the genetic drive for status can never be satisfied: …I put for the generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1660, Chapter 11 All leading people within a social paradigm simply lie (mostly subconsciously) to further their drive to increase status. In fact, they are leading because they lie so well. Moreover, no one is willing to voluntarily lose social status (“lose face”) by explicitly or even implicitly admitting they were fundamentally wrong all along. Subjectively, “Peak Capitalism” will be more disruptive to the conditioned ideologues than Peak Oil, Peak Food, or Peak People, which, along with climate change and other ecological consequences, will establish the operating parameters for any new world order. All these “peaks” are not the causes of our situation; they are symptoms of a civilization gone intrinsically astray as it has separated from its humanitarian values (as opposed to our genetic “us versus them” power values expressed in “economies”). As an example, we are more peaceful today than in, say, the Middle Ages, because we have more 29 March 2010

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energy and natural resources. In the future we will be less peaceful than we are today because we’ll have less energy and resources. This is not rocket science. Civilization and human society are a product of the energy supply. It dictates everything. All human history, since the first protohumans started a fire, has been about using more energy. All of humanity’s progress (including decreasing violence) has resulted from access to more and more energy. Unless some surprising new source appears, that’s going to reverse. History and natural laws tells us that systems that experience rapid and massive growth see a proportionally rapid and massive collapse to actual sustainability. With plunging energy supplies (and natural resources), it follows that peace will also plunge. We are genetically the same humans as those in the Middle Ages. They burned people alive at stakes for being witches. They enrolled in fanatical ideological wars for resources and power for their “leaders.” This behavior resulted from the social tensions around controlling a very small (compared to today) and largely stagnant energy supply. When our energy supply heads downward, such behaviors will become common once again. When individuals and tribes are frustrated in their endless drive to increase “inclusive fitness,” they resort to violence. The only familiar alternative to public violence is the sublimation of endless conversion of natural resources into ever-more-marvelous status displays, and then into garbage. But the laws of thermodynamics and the rampant consumption of the past few hundred years show us that there are fewer natural resources available for conversion into these displays, and far fewer on a per capita basis. The genetic drive for more-and-more colliding with thermodynamic laws and physical limitations allowing less-and-less must lead to growing wars over natural resources (eventually global in extent), unless there are some very powerful interventions delivering compelling counter-motivators to Our Lords and Masters — such as withdrawal of a critical mass of our consent and an erosion of denial of compelling natural limitations. Anytime we can’t figure out how to find a win/win solution to a problem, it just means we haven’t really learned the rules of the game we are playing. Dr. Eliayhu Goldratt, Avraham Goldratt Institute The required criteria for success in the 21st century are ecological integrity, effective decision-making, and social cohesion. These are progressively replacing current commitments to maximum economic growth, compulsive consumption, and international competition. Robert Theobald, Reworking Success The active presence of open markets is a necessary but not sufficient condition for social equity. Market values alone are not sufficient to assure social justice and ecological integrity. Only when human and spiritual values have embraced our entire eco-system and effectively superceded market values, while preserving the practical, operational wisdoms of the marketplace, can we make the choices that will bring us closer to a sustainable future. This will require a deep and inevitably disturbing re-examination and re-application of our shared values, motives, and choices, as well as of our aspirations and behavior in the world. Only then can “what’s good for the economy” also be good for the people whose human presence and productivity make it possible. That will address the equity challenge; and then, when “what’s good for the economy” is also good for the commons, we will have addressed the sustainability challenge. In 1543 Copernicus announced to a startled Europe that the Earth was not stationary, but was sailing rapidly through space as it spun around the Sun. This was difficult news to take in all at once, but over time the Europeans reinvented their entire civilization in light of this strange new fact about the Universe. The fundamental institutions of the medieval world, including the monarchies, the church, the feudal economic system, and the medieval sense of self, 29 March 2010

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melted away as a radically different civilization was constructed. We live in a similar moment of breakdown and creativity. The cosmological discovery that shatters nearly everything upon which the modern age was built is the discovery that the Universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and is so biased toward complexification that life and intelligence are now seen to be a nearly inevitable construction of evolutionary dynamics. Our new challenge is to reinvent our civilization. The major institutions of the modern period, including that of agriculture and religion and education and economics, need to be re-imagined within an intelligent, self-organizing, living Universe, so that instead of degrading the Earth's life systems, humanity might learn to join the enveloping community of living beings in a mutually enhancing manner. This great work will surely draw upon the talents and energies of many millions of humans from every culture of our planet and throughout the rest of the 21st century. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Story of the Universe Not around the creators of new noise doth the world revolve, but about the creators of new values. Silently doth it revolve… Friedrich Neitzche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1884

Compilation and Original Creation Copyrights 2007-2010 All Rights Reserved

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Resources http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279 http://www.moneyasdebt.net/ http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild291207.htm http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/hubecon.htm http://www.warsocialism.com/ http://www.warsocialism.com/SelfDeception.pdf http://www.warsocialism.com/thermogenecollision.pdf http://www.warsocialism.com/founded.htm http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0208/S00055.htm http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0901/S00135.htm?ref=patrick.net#a http://www.solari.com/ http://www.solari.com/blog http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/24/eco-junk/ http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1834 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness http://www.augustreview.com/news_commentary/global_banking/the_twilight_of_irredeemable _debt_2008050890/ http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02132009/watch.html http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-flynt/common-sense-2009_b_264706.html http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/0105.html http://www.australia.to/story/0,25197,23040467-060,00,00.html http://www.newsweek.com/id/130637/output/print http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com (especially the primers in the right-hand column) http://www.globalresearch.ca/ http://www.theoildrum.com/ http://members.optusnet.com.au/~lionelorford/Peak%20Capitalism%20exec%20summary.pdf http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html http://www.canada.com/Complexity+Theory/1286263/story.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090409/ap_on_bi_ge/lobbying_return_on_investment Social Enterprise Planning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_enterprise www.ecell.iitkgp.ernet.in/resource%20pages/SocialEnterprisePlanning.pdf http://www.cognos.com/pdfs/whitepapers/wp_best_practice_planning.pdf

http://www.redf.org/learn-from-redf/tools/539 http://www.slideshare.net/xmergnc/social-enterprise-planning-guide/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Return_on_Investment http://www.threelawsofperformance.com/ Steady-State Economy and Sustainability 29 March 2010

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http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5464#more http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5559 The Investment Professional - Moving Toward a Steady-State Economy http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5925#more http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6051#more Lauderdale Paradox http://www.monthlyreview.org/091101foster-clark.php Climate Change http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/24/could_australia_blow_apart_the_great_ global_warming_scare_97148.html http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/ http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/01/ross-mckitrickdefects-in-key-climate-data-are-uncovered.aspx http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5389461/the-great-global-warming-scam-ctd.thtml http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/03/lawrence-solomonthe-end-is-near.aspx http://yelnick.typepad.com/politick/2009/06/co2-in-the-atmosphere-is-decreasing-how-will-theglobal-warming-crowd-explain-that.html http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6613938246449800148&hl=en# http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught%20GreenHanded%20Climategate%20Scandal.pdf Significance of the “Hockey Stick” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxmo9DskYE http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-is-earth-worth.html George Carlin www.youtube.com/watch?v=#368519 Green Revolution http://WW4Report.com/node/7980 Technocrats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy http://www.technocracy.org/ http://www.technocracy.ca/simp/begin.htm 48 Laws of Power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cg/Courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws_of_power.htm http://books.google.com/books?id=tmmOvqV4MboC&printsec=frontcover&dq= %2248+Laws+of+Power

Oh, and one last thing: Gravity is matter’s urge to snuggle.

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Quotations on the Theme… Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow. John C. Polanyi You just have to be able to drill in very hard wood… and keep on thinking beyond the point at which thinking begins to hurt. Werner Heisenberg The ability to support a tension that can occasionally become almost unbearable is one of the prime requisites for the very best sort of scientific research. Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension Newly acquired insights are at first only half understood by the one who begets them, and appear as complete nonsense to all others... Any new idea which does not appear very strange at the outset, does not have a chance of being a vital discovery. Niels Bohr Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. ... Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance ... [this puts] up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one’s ignorance. George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, Appendix 1 Evolutionary psychology is not just one more school of psychology. It is a perspective on the whole of psychology that claims that we are human animals, and that our minds, no less than our bodies, are products of the forces of nature operating on a time frame of millions of years; human nature was forged from our ancestors’ struggle to survive and reproduce. David Livingston Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind Scientists search for truth by forming statements that can be tested. If a statement cannot be tested, then it is not “scientific.” Testable statements are known as “hypotheses” and take the general form “If [I do this], then [this will occur].” For example, the hypothesis “If I drop a rock, then it will fall to the ground” can be tested to see if it is “false.” In 1934, Sir Karl Popper proposed a criterion of testability, or falsifiability, for scientific validity. Scientific theories are hypotheses from which can be deduced statements testable by observation; if the appropriate experimental observations falsify these statements, the hypothesis is refuted. If a hypothesis survives efforts to falsify it, it may be tentatively accepted. No scientific theory, however, can be conclusively established. Popper’s mode of thought — the habit of attempting to prove oneself wrong — is the only path to knowledge about the real world.

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Consider first a phenomenon I call the deontic effect in human reasoning (Cummins, 1996b, 1996c). Deontic reasoning is reasoning about rights and obligations; that is, reasoning about what one is permitted, obligated, or forbidden to do (Hilpinen, 1981; Manktelow & Over, 1991). Deontic reasoning contrasts with indicative reasoning, which is reasoning about what is true or false. When reasoning about deontic rules (social norms), humans spontaneously adopt a violation-detection strategy: They look for cheaters or rule-breakers. In contrast, when reasoning about the truth status of statements about the world, they spontaneously adopt a confirmation-seeking strategy. This effect is apparent in the reasoning of children as young as three years of age (Cummins, 1996a; Harris & Nuñez, 1996) and has been observed in literally hundreds of experiments on adult reasoning over the course of nearly thirty years, making it one of the most reliable effects in the psychological literature (see Cummins, 1996b, 1996c, and Oaksford & Chapter, 1996 for reviews of this literature). Denise D. Cummins & Colin Allen (Editors), The Evolution of Mind, Oxford, 1998, pages 39, 40 Evolutionary psychologists have found that humans evolved to naturally use a “falsification strategy” with respect to the social world, but use a “confirmation strategy” with respect to the physical world. Our innate social-world “falsification strategy” causes us to instinctively reject social anomalies and attempt to “falsify” claims about the real world that might jeopardize social beliefs (e.g., the claim that global oil production will “peak” soon). On the other hand, our innate physical-world “confirmation strategy” allows us to defend social constructions of reality (e.g., the “free market”) to the death, even if the ideals they represent are far from physical reality. Jay Hanson Ends are ape-chosen; only means are man’s. Aldous Huxley ...underlying all the other reasons for warfare is almost always this fundamental imbalance of resource stress and population growth. Steven LeBlanc, Constant Battles, page 169 The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic. E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, 1992, pages 328-329 To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory. Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, Viking Press, 1980 Great scenes inspire great Ideas. The natural mightiness of America expands the Mind, and it 29 March 2010

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partakes of the greatness it contemplates. Thomas Paine, letter to Sir Joseph Banks, 1789 Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress: eco-villages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on. Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems maladaptive. ... Why do people seem incapable of doing the simplest things without making them into projects, preferably ones that involve some element of new technology? Dimitry Orlov, Our Village ...[R]emember that this out-of-control global financial system is a man-made artifact, a political regime devised over many years by interested parties to serve their ends. Nothing in nature or, for that matter, in economics, requires the rest of us to accept a system that is so unjust and mindlessly destructive. William Greider, in The Nation Economic students are programmed (using modern “doublethink” techniques) to believe that there are no “limits to growth.” Plenty of Gloom, The Economist, Editorial, 20 December 1997 Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. Robert F. Kennedy, 18 March 1968 We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless. Abraham Lincoln, in a letter of 21 November 1864 to Colonel William F. Elkins [With the development of modern physics] it became possible to see orthodox economic theory for what it really was: a bowdlerized imitation of nineteenth-century physics… It was not the methods of science that were appropriated by the early neoclassicals as it was the appearances of science, for the early neoclassicals possessed a singularly inept understanding of the physics they so admired… [Neoclassical economists attempt] to reduce all social institutions such as money, property rights, and the market itself to epiphenomena of individual constrained optimization calculation. All these attempts have failed, despite their supposed dependence upon mathematical rigor, because they always inadvertently assume what they aim to 29 March 2010

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deduce… Conservation principles are the key to the understanding of a mathematical formulation of any phenomenon, and it has been there that the neoclassicals have been woefully negligent. Philip Mirowski, Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Science, Rowman and Littlefield, 1988, pages 5-6 The mind is a squadron of simpletons. It is not unified, it is not rational, it is not well designed — or designed at all. It just happened, an accumulation of innovations of the organisms that lived before us. The mind evolved, through countless animals and through countless worlds. Like the rest of biological evolution, the human mind is a collage of adaptations (the propensity to do the right thing) to different situations. Our thought is a pack of fixed routines — simpletons. We need them. It is vital to find the right food at the right time, to mate well, to generate children, to avoid marauders, to respond to emergency quickly. Mental routines to do so have evolved over millions of years and developed in different periods in our evolution, as Rumi noted. We don't think of ourselves as of such humble origins. The triumphs that have occurred in the short time since the Industrial Revolution have completely distorted our view of ourselves. Hence, the celebrated triumph of humanity is its rationality: the ability to reason through events and act logically, to organize business. To plan for the future, to create science and technology. One influential philosopher, Daniel Dennet, wrote recently: “When a person falls short of perfect rationality...there is no coherent...description of the person’s mental states.” Yet to characterize the mind as primarily rational is an injustice; it sells us short, it makes us misunderstand ourselves, it has perverted our understanding of our intelligence, our schooling, our physical and mental health. Holding up rationality, and its remorseless deliberation, as the model of the mind has, more important, set us along the wrong road to our future. Instead of the pinnacle, rationality is just one small ability in a compound of possibilities. The mind evolved great breadth, but it is shallow, for it performs quick and dirty sketches of the world. This rough-and-ready perception of reality enabled our ancestors to survive better. The mind did not evolve to know the world or to know ourselves. Simply speaking, there has never been, nor will there ever be, enough time to be truly rational. Rationality is one component of the mind, but it is used rarely, and in a very limited area. Rationality is impossible anyway. There isn't time for the mind to go through the luxurious exercises of examining alternatives. Consider the standard way of examining evidence, the truth table, a checklist of information about whether propositions are correct or not. To know whether Aristotle is a hamburger, you would look up “Aristotle” or “hamburger” in this table. Now think of the number of issues you immediately know well — what Yugoslavia is, whether skateboards are used at formal dinners, how chicken sandwiches should taste, what your spouse wore this morning — and you will see that your own truth table, if entered randomly, would have millions of entries just waiting! [pages 2-3] A mind built up with countless specific adaptations can never be rational. We piece together the results of a small set of probes to judge the world, picking up a few signals and making quick assessments of what is outside, in the case of marauders, and inside, in the case of memories and dreams. Such a mind will never be rational; but it will always try to adapt. And it cannot always be correct either. If we consider a mind that has evolved to meet most situations adequately, say 95 percent of them, we may have a better idea of what being correct is. [page 221]

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Since the mind evolved to select a few signals and then dream up a semblance, whatever enters our consciousness is overemphasized. It does not matter how the information enters, whether via a television program, a newspaper story, a friend’s conversation, a strong emotional reaction, a memory — all is overemphasized. We ignore other, more compelling evidence, overemphasizing and overgeneralizing from the information close at hand to produce a roughand-ready realty. [page 258] The [mental] system we recruited had the primary aim of reacting quickly to immediate danger — those who did lived long enough to produce us. Those who acted more thoughtfully and with due deliberation of the proper course, who could avoid panic when confronted by mild threats — who acted rationally, that is — probably lived shorter, and thus less generative, lives. The survival argument against rationality in primeval conditions is that payoff is very lopsided: Fail to respond to a real danger, even if that danger would kill you only 1/10,000 as often, and you will be dead. A few years later, you will be deader in evolutionary terms, for fewer of your genes will be around. However, an overreaction to danger produces only a little hysteria, a little stress, and maybe a little embarrassment — probably little or no loss of reproductive ability. Maybe the excitement would even recruit a little more reproductive effort! Running from every snake or tiger or loud noise probably doesn’t disrupt life too much. Not running, while it might kill you only slightly more often, can eventually produce major changes in the population. The same numbers hold in this example as for the height difference cited earlier. If panic in response to a threat in all cases improved survival by even 1/10,000, those who panicked would be 484 million times more populous than those who did not. And so it was good to respond emotionally and quickly to the average dangers threatening most of our ancestors. Rationality is a great idea and ideal, but we never had the time for it; we don’t have time for it now, and thus we don’t have the mind for it. [page 262] Robert Ornstein, The Evolution of Consciousness, Prentice Hall, 1991, ISBN 0-13587569-2 The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L. Mencken I’m an old man and I’ve had lots of problems, most of which never happened. Mark Twain Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. Japanese Proverb The Visionary is the only true realist. Frederico Fellini It is not information or knowledge, but vision, that equals power. Dominique Goupil, President, FileMaker, Inc. If we are to have vision, we must learn to participate in the object of the vision. The apprenticeship is hard. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French Aeronaut and Writer

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The only limits are, as always, those of vision. James Broughton Hypotheses and other forms of theory are not to be confused with the dominant paradigm within which the theories and hypotheses were constructed and tested. A paradigm is a perceptual model or operational system that is acquired by the brain all of a piece, which reorganizes all previous experience and knowledge in a way more satisfying (and often more elegant) than a previous operating system. It is usually acquired by the working through of exemplars that use the new paradigm. It is not, however, acquired by the brain by conscious decision or argument but rather by the workings of the brain which are not even accessed by the conscious mind. It is acquired and it immediately changes the whole perceptual universe — all conscious thought afterward is transformed by it and it usually is such a transcendent experience that people may go days or even weeks on little sleep and food, while they totally throw themselves into all the implications of the new paradigm. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, 1969 You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it. Thomas Kuhn (seconding Julian Jaynes) Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. …the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for — a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. Joseph A. Tainter, Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, from Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, 1996; at http://www.dieoff.org/page134.htm A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776, page 1 I often think about why and how this culture values permanence. So often we hear this culture described as a throw-away culture and that’s certainly true. But there’s a larger sense in which permanence is valued above all else. People want to make a mark. They want to build some monument that will last. They want to stop decay. They want to cheat death. It’s all based on that disrespect for nature you’ve written about and worse, a fear and hatred of nature and of death. ... Even in conversations about “green” products, permanence is valued. ... I should prefer structures that will be eaten by termites and fungi (and lived in by birds and mice along the way), and valuing that permanence interferes with my attempts to live sustainably. I think part of the problem is that civilization constantly tries to turn circles into straight lines. Ultimately, the circles close, but it can take a long time. Derrick Jensen, quoting Terry Shistar in What We Leave Behind, 2009 As for pointing to our mental failures with scorn or dismay, we might as well profess disappointment with the mechanics of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the degree of disillusionment we feel in response to any particular human behavior is the precise measure of 29 March 2010

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our ignorance of its evolutionary and genetic origins. Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene James Tobin, the American Nobel Prize winner in economics, has questioned very seriously whether it makes sense from the point of view of American society as a whole to divert so much of its young talent from the top universities into financial markets. This debate is not new. John Maynard Keynes considered the same question in the 1930s, and expressed the view that on the whole the rewards of those in the financial sector were justified. Many individuals attracted to these markets, Keynes argued, are of a domineering and even psychopathic nature. If their energies could not find an outlet in money making, they might turn instead to careers involving open and wanton cruelty. Far better to have them absorbed on Wall Street or in the City of London than in organised crime. Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics, John Wiley, 1997, pages 3-7 ...a society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle. David Ehrenfeld It was futile to work for to work for political solutions to humanity’s problems because humanity’s problems were not political. Political problems did exist, all right, but they were entirely secondary. The primary problems were philosophical, and until the philosophical problems were solved, the political problems would have to be solved over and over again. The phrase “vicious circle” was coined to describe the ephemeral effectiveness of almost all political activity. For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s greed. Both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion. The monkey wrench in the progressive machinery of primate evolution was the propensity of the primate band to take its political leaders — its dominant males — too seriously. Of benefit to the band when it was actively threatened by predators, the dominant male (or political boss) was almost wholly self-serving and was naturally dedicated not to liberation but to control. Behind his chest-banging and fang display, he was largely a joke and could be kept in his place (his place being that of a necessary evil) by disrespect and laughter. … Of course, as long as there were willing followers, there would be exploitive leaders. And there would be willing followers until humanity reached that philosophical plateau where it recognized that its great mission in life had nothing to do with any struggle between classes, races, nations, or ideologies, but was, rather, a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. On that quest, politics was simply a roadblock of stentorian baboons. Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990 When confronted with ever-declining resources, the preservation of social order requires moreand-more cooperation, but individuals are genetically programmed to reduce cooperation and seek advantage. This genetic legacy sets up a positive feedback loop: declining common resources cause individuals to reduce cooperation even more, which reduces common resources even faster, which leads to collapse even faster.

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Jay Hanson, http://www.warsocialism.com/thermogenecollision.pdf War analyst Stanislav Andreski concluded that the trigger for most wars is hunger, or even “a mere drop from the customary standard of living.” Anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember spent six years studying war in the late 1980s among 186 preindustrial societies. They focused on precontact times in hopes of collecting the ‘cleanest, least distorted’ data. Andreski, it seems, was right. War’s most common cause, the Embers found, was fear of deprivation. The victors in the wars they studied almost always took territory, food, and/or other critical resources from their enemies. Moreover, unpredictable disasters-droughts, blights, floods, and freezes — which led to severe hardships, spurred more wars than did chronic shortages. This also holds true among modern nations. In 1993, political scientists Thomas E Homer-Dixon, Jeffrey H. Boutwell, and George W. Rathjens examined the roots of recent global conflicts and concluded, “There are significant causal links between scarcities of renewable resources and violence.” In short, many wars seem to be a mass, communal robbery of another social group’s life-support resources. Michael P. Ghiglieri, THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, 1999 (page 190) The dynamic characteristics of complex social systems frequently mislead people. … [Urban policies for example] are being followed on the presumption that they will alleviate the difficulties. … In fact, a downward spiral develops in which the presumed solution makes the difficulty worse and thereby causes redoubling of the presumed solution so that matters become still worse. The same downward spiral frequently develops in national government and at the level of world affairs. Judgment and debate lead to programs that appear to be sound. Commitment increases to the apparent solutions. If the presumed solutions actually make matters worse, the process by which this happens is not evident. So, when the troubles increase, the efforts are intensified that are actually worsening the problems. Jay W. Forrester, _______________ , 1973, p. 93-94 The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple. It operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences. Andrew Gelman

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_____________________________________________________________________

Topics Economics Religion Global Financial Crisis Physics Psychology Culture Politics

Categories Business Research Academic Work Change

Tags Green, Economy, Environment, Economics, Thermodynamics, Sustainability, Population, Peak, Oil, Growth, Market, Energy, Debt, Money, Political, Power, Class War, War, Capitalism, Memes, Collapse, Realpolitic, Resources, Feudalism, Fascism, Values, Freedom, Human Rights, Natural Rights, Lobbyists, Evolutionary Psychology, Wealth, M. King Hubbert, Inclusive Fitness, Social Status, Control, Inflation, Deflation, Stagflation, Social Enterprise, Planning, Interdisciplinary, Science, Model for Community Change, Morals, Morality, Politics, Government, Climate, Change, Anthropogenic Global, Warming, Metaphysics of Quality, Propaganda, Conditioning, Socialization, Media, Phase-state, Complexity, Technocracy, Constraints, …

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Part 2: “What could and should be” and how to get there… The problem before us: The goal of increased consumption (“growth”) for a “strong economy” is in direct opposition to the goal of decreased consumption for reaching ecological balance (between our species and its environment) and sustainability of the human enterprise. If we don’t revisit our values, and align our behavior with more carefully chosen values, and choose to reduce consumption while we have some chance to do it gradually, nature will reduce it for us, abruptly and ruthlessly. True overall-system sustainability is inevitable. A means approach to a solution to that problem: What is the social structure or arrangement that requires minimum work and energy? What is the social structure or arrangement that requires minimum natural and human resources? What is the social structure or arrangement that exists in harmony with all the other life on the planet and with the planet itself (the “Web of Life”)? What is the social structure or arrangement that displays collective responsibility and rationality, while recognizing and sufficiently accommodating individual irresponsibility and irrationality, whatever its origination (as the structure erodes its power and evolves it)? What is the social structure or arrangement that defuses the n-Prisoners’ Dilemma (also known as the Tragedy of the Commons)? In short, what is the social structure that is sustainable? What values will be applied in that society to guide the transition and accomplish sustainability? How will they be applied? There is a lot of vague talk these days about a return to more human-oriented values; however, in that conversation there is little or no grounded methodology, and no practicable means to accomplish that. That is the solution offered here. There’s also a lot of talk about a “techno-fix,” referring to information, material, and energy technologies that could solve our operational problems. Without a doubt, that kind of fix will make a significant contribution. However, all that advantage is for naught without social evolutions to solve the fundamental physical problems and address the core predicament of humanity — the application of social technologies to provide structure and guidance for valuesdriven evolution of cultural choices. Those are the technologies offered here, to add dimensions of liberation and sanity when combined with the established and otherwise controlling and suppressing technologies of propaganda, socialization, education, and psychological and social conditioning. Expansive breadth can erode narrowness and implosion; this system is selfrewarding with positive feedback loops. What’s in it for us? Let’s find out…

De-Condition Ourselves from Four Paradigms Myths of Humanity Is there an innate “human nature,” and if so, what is it? Nature versus nurture (a sophistry — nurture is part of nature) Tabula rasa versus algorithmic “firmware” “Selfish genes” and neurotransmitter addiction Evolution at play… Myths of Governance (including Myths of Money) Is there an innate social organization, and if so, what is it? Unconscious primate-band power dynamics versus “chosen” rules for society Realpolitic versus ideology History versus mythology Corporations (and “corporate personhood”), fascism, and feudalism 29 March 2010

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Common interests versus special interests Myths of Science Is there an innate way of experiencing, figuring-out, evaluating, and engaging reality, and if so, what is it? Positivism versus science Modern science versus ideology and politics: religiosity Philosophy and science Myths of Energy What is the true energy budget of humanity? How much energy does each of us really use? Bring science and engineering into the otherwise entirely political conversation. Dispel cultural inertia from 150 years of “unlimited” energy Where does most of that energy come from, how much is available to accomplish work (“exergy”), and who controls it? Energy sources versus distribution infrastructure Energy, politics, and war Relationships between work, energy, matter, wealth, and money Net energy and Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI)

Systems Politics versus Process Politics A feeling arose by the seventeenth century that moralizing and preaching religious doctrine could no longer be trusted to restrain the destructive and “irrational passion”" of men. A new means of restraint and regulation had to be found.

Rational Interests Bernard Mandeville (1670?-1733) laid the political foundation for what would be called Libertarianism when he suggested that a society based on “rational interests” (like a bee hive) would suppress irrational passions. Mandeville’s ideal society was one where the unwitting cooperation of individuals, each working for his or her own interest would result in the greatest benefit to society at large. This was to be done through the mechanism of the “invisible hand,” a mechanism “identified” by John Stuart Mill as a hypothesis to explain the patterns he saw, much as gravity was hypothesized by Isaac Newton to explain the planetary (and other) motions he saw. The “invisible hand” is a “meme” or “metaphor” that is useful to organize thinking and action around a shared vision.

Powerless Government The French writer Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), further developed Libertarian politics with a notion of division of political powers in government. The division of power would, in effect, neutralize government and prevent citizens from gaining power over each other; conversely, citizens could easily make power powerless by changing parties. This is what Montesquieu called “liberty.” Today, we call Montesquieu’s philosophy “Social Darwinism,” a term which is most closely associated with the writings of Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” — a phrase that describes Montesquieu’s state of “liberty” perfectly. The development and application of Montesquieu’s ideas prefigured Modernism, with its separation of religious, political, and scientific values and practices, and in parallel with 29 March 2010

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Modernism came the separation of powers in society. Whence the multi-cameral, multi-branch republic (which, as we have discovered, has corrupting cross-talk between the various camera and branches). The effectiveness of the principle of “division of power,” from isolation from other tracks of each track’s decision-makers throughout the parallel-tracking and expression (application) of powers, while apparently successful for a while, has been dispelled by spontaneous humannature cross-influencing (“reciprocal altruism”), by advances in transportation and communications technology, and by increases in complexity, all factors that the structural separations native to the Eighteenth Century have been unable to withstand to prevent corruption of the basic vision of society.

Fundamental (but Convenient) Errors Prevailing beliefs derived from the practice of unrealistic and corrupted “process politics” assert that Homo sapiens (and life in general) is a fitness pursuer (which in econo-speak means “rational utility maximizer”). However, in actual practice Homo is an adaptation executer. [SIDEBAR: By “rational” we don’t mean the facile after-the-fact “reasonableness” (which includes the “prove it” mentality of the pseudo-scientific) of the adaptation-routine executer, who is sometimes “unconsciously” very clever in synthesizing new combinations of standard algorithms. We mean the oblivious “rationalist” psychopathology of the damaged being that is teleological — goal-fixated — in its “moral” justification through rationality. The “heartless libertarian” as opposed to the “compassionate conservative;” both are illusory identity-myths.] When learning does happen, it happens primarily in service of adaptation-execution (“new execute-logic” that can be very synthesizing of “standard” algorithms, and thereby innovative in an immediate sense), and only with great difficulty in service of pursuing longer-term fitness (the “teleological” approach), even in response to changing circumstances. In individuals in response to changing circumstances, the inertia (“habits”) of executing standard permutations of adaptation-algorithms tends to over-ride any tentative new improvised modified-algorithm-syntheses from consciously pursuing fitness. In the collective (the “mob”) in response to changing circumstances, the established adaptationalgorithms and the behaviors they determine do not change except under the influence of adapting individuals of high status and immediate power, or when a common threat is so obvious and immediate that different action becomes unanimous. In all cases, the patter and the chatter (the “soundtrack”) happen almost entirely independent of the actual behaviors (the “action”): individuals and the mob can rationalize any behavior (which rationalizations are almost always after-the-fact, and almost always based on externalized and objectified abstractions — “reifications”). The Nazis and the Communists had their “special” theories of biology; the “special” biology that Capitalists invented is the standard economic model of Homo oeconomicus, which is characterized by the following assumptions: 1. Action is centered in the individual (methodological individualism). Everything that happens in institutions and society can be traced back to the actions of individuals. 2. A strict distinction is to be drawn between preferences (i.e., values which form the basis of motivation) and restrictions (i.e. external stimuli and constraints on the scope for action). 29 March 2010

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3. An individual’s preferences are given and inalterable. The individual’s actions are determined entirely by restrictions. 4. Only self-interested, not pro-social, preferences are assumed to exist. The preferences of other people do not concur with one’s own preferences. 5. The cognitive perception of restrictions is identical in all individuals. 6. Individuals behave entirely rationally. They are able to determine their own maximum utility according to their own preferences within given restrictions. The assumptions in economics are of absolute importance because that’s what public policy decisions are based on (and not on the results of the few inconclusive economics “experiments”). If a realistic model were used for the human brain, mind, and behaviors, it would nullify all arguments for “free markets” and “democracy.” A new scientific model of the human brain and mind would have far-reaching political implications. Modern Neoclassical Economics is founded on “logical positivism.” It seeks “confirmation” of expectations rather than “falsification” of hypotheses. That’s why no one except professors and economics students cares about their compromised experiments involving “rational calculation.” It is on the basis of these assumptions that the standard economic model is applied to all spheres of life, for instance, to the family, drug abuse, abortion, criminality, art, sport, religion, suicide, you name it. This is tied to the withdrawal (or, more accurately, the ejection) of psychology from economics. Neoclassical standard economics has thus developed an imperialistic understanding of itself as the “queen of the social sciences,” a view which has provoked significant aggression and criticism among its social-science peers. Criticism of standard economics refers chiefly to these assumptions about people, and to assumptions about the “market.” Particularly pernicious is the combination of the assumptions regarding the cognitive and motivational characteristics of Homo oeconomicus and the assumptions regarding the transferability of the economic model from anonymous market relationships to the relationships within organizations and between individuals. The criticism of the assumptions about the cognitive characteristics of Homo oeconomicus is the least controversial. It has led to the idea of bounded rationality as a consequence of people’s limited capacity to process information. Individuals do not maximise their utility, but can at best achieve satisfactory results. It is on this basis that the institutional economic approaches have been developed. However, the idea of bounded rationality remains vague in institutional economics. The research of psychological economics into decision anomalies, developed over twenty years, has not been considered. Instead, the same assumptions are still in place as the cornerstones of economic analysis, even though the research on decision anomalies provides precise and situation-specific differentiations of bounded rationality. Economics is correctly seen as a core aspect of the sophisticated and elaborate disinformation campaign (shown in Adam Curtis’ films) that has been run by Our Lords and Masters against the middle classes and poor for at least the last 100 years, and probably much longer in more-primitive forms. As far as I know, no economist has written a book based on realistic evolutionary biology. The “Ecological Economists” explicitly rejected Darwinism while they were organizing. Needless to say, without a realistic model of human nature, they haven’t come up with realistic public policy. As far as I know, the only political people who have incorporated Darwin into public policy (and even then, only gingerly) are Albert Somit and Steven Peterson in Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy and Human 29 March 2010

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Nature and Public Policy: an Evolutionary Approach. As far as I know, the only philosopher who has systematically adopted Darwinism is John Gray in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and other works. Since people are unaware of the real determinants of their behavior, and believe myths and illusions such as those from the Standard Social Sciences Model of the 1960s and the Cult of the Individual (which are earlier rationalizations), among other ideologies, they pretend that they are acting on the basis of those after-the-fact calculations and rationalizations. Behavior can be changed by changing the conditions of which it is a function. B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity They give priority to their internally-consistent rationalizations — especially shared rationalizations — over any objective evidence of failure or success of their behavior, individual and, especially, collective. They do not learn. They make their interpretations into comforting ideology (“consensus delusion”), seek alignment from their peers, and maintain and gain social status. No traditional myth is as untruthful as the modern myth of progress. All prevailing philosophies embody the fiction that human life can be altered at will. Better aim for the impossible, they say, than submit to fate. Invariably the result is a cult of human selfassertion that soon ends in farce. John Gray, Gray's Anatomy, Introduction Unless one is trained as an engineer or scientist, one will not try to falsify one’s own rationalizations and political agenda (i.e., “test” it against some “objective reality”). Potential status-gains almost always over-ride practical and ethical considerations, and certainly immediate personal gains over-ride amorphous and future collective gains. In the best case (scientists and engineers trained in critical thinking and nominally without prior agendas), it takes at least three years of hard work to re-program/de-condition/learn a new paradigm (if it ever happens at all). Human nature itself and socializing education have made a widespread voluntary “power down” of our civilization’s excesses literally impossible. Such a shift would include the re-balancing of Dopamine (and other neurotransmitter) rewards in the Limbic System to come from collective “us” success instead of from status-seeking personal or clan success — a social and cultural re-balancing of motivators and rewards. The best way to obtain that is through natural consequences. Natural consequences are non-arbitrary, nonspecial-interest, and arise organically out of a flow or pattern or dynamically evolving situation. Ceasing operations and liquidation upon bankruptcy when one cannot meet one’s obligations and no-one will accept one’s notes is one such natural consequence. Receiving huge salaries, bonuses, and job security for excess causing such a consequence is not. Rich people owe their “status” (one of the most-powerful social drives) to “business as usual” (BAU). They will do everything in their power to prevent an intelligent “power down” if that means losing their social status. They hire the lobbyists to write the legislation to be enacted by elected pawns who will insure their personal status is secure. Given the opportunity, any of us would do the same, expressing our impulses exactly as they have evolved. The Mandeville-Montesquieu-Quesnay-DuPont-Jefferson-Franklin-Madison ideal of governmentby-economic-growth was brilliant when it was conceived 250 years ago. These men invented a 29 March 2010

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social and moral system — complete with justifying abstractions — that will now protect itself from fundamental change until it collapses from its own internal contradictions. It has a “cultural immune system” to defend itself from change. Economics didn’t start out as pure disinformation — the Physiocrats were trying to figure out how we create wealth. Nowadays, with the understanding of energy laws on a finite planet, we know that the only way to obtain wealth is to take it from someone else — from one’s own serfs or someone else’s — increasingly through perpetual debt bondage that is cheaper to obtain and maintain than through military conquest or explicit political subjugation. A sane world wouldn’t need “economics,” and an honorable one wouldn’t need the kind of politics that fronts for the Oligarchs. Contemporary capitalism, the conversion of nature into garbage for money and power, will shortly reach its logical conclusion: a century of wars picking over what’s left, indeterminate 1984-style wars fought as false-flag operations just like the Punic Wars of old, by increasingly totalitarian governments fronting for ever-more-obscure Oligarchs in a system of increasingly unstable complexity. Peak Capitalism represents the tragedy of the commons in a very large setting — the planet itself.

Consider two basic types of political systems: “process” politics and “systems” politics: As the name implies, process politics emphasizes the adequacy and fairness of the rules governing the process of politics. If the process is fair, then, as in a trial conducted according to due process, the outcome is assumed to be just — or at least the best the system can achieve. By contrast, systems politics is concerned primarily with desired outcomes; means are subordinated to predetermined ends. Ophuls & Boyan, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited, 1992, page 24 [William Ophuls is a former United States Foreign Service Officer. First published in 1977, this volume received widespread critical and popular acclaim, winning the Gladys M. Kammerer Award as the year’s best book on public policy, and a similar prize from the International Studies Association.] Examples: “AMERICA” (Madison, principle-based, process politics) Suppose ten “rational utility maximizing” men were in a lifeboat with just enough water to keep them alive for ten days. Further, suppose that all ten men were required to row on a direct course to make land in ten days. These men are completely rational and understand (“calculate”) that they must restrict their own water rations if they are to survive. All ten men self-restrict their own rations, spontaneously row in shifts, and survive. This is simply not credible… [It is a small example of the n-Prisoners’ Dilemma] DICTATOR (Captain Bligh, pragmatic, systems politics) Suppose nine men and Captain Bligh were in a lifeboat with just enough water to keep them alive for ten days. Further, suppose that all nine men were required to row in a direct course order to make land in ten days.

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Bligh knows that these men are not “rational utility maximizers,” and sits on the water barrel with cocked pistols to protect the water. Bligh restricts everyone’s rations, organizes and enforces the rowing, and they all survive. This actually happened… Because the internal contradictions of its process have finally and fatally undermined it, the time has come to replace our current system of “process” politics with a new “systems” politics with a new system that develops, applies, and maintains the integrity of an improved process, one with compensations for the weaknesses of the old one. The new system must be administered by the most-qualified entities, with strict separation of powers, functions, and persons, and without abandoning the potential process integrity of process politics. In fact, more systems integrity may contribute significantly to more process integrity. The authoritarian excesses of experimental “systems politics” polities (all of which have failed) must be avoided: Ruthlessness (of the Mob) [versus ruthlessness of the Alpha Oligarchs] Personal-power-cult values overriding human and social values Oligarchic Alpha-clan arrogance A pernicious “Cult of Mediocrity” hiding behind a leadership “Cult of Personality” Hijacking by special interests, with Obsessive secrecy Arbitrariness and cronyism Covert manipulations Fear-mongering Concentration of wealth and power Ideology and abstraction replacing engagement with reality (This is also common in process polities)

Outline of a “systems polity” branch-structure: • • •

Motivation and justification through religious and secular philosophy Regulation through science Enforcement through the State

or, more elaborately • • •

Religious and secular philosophy and values applied by a “wisdom” cadre, to define operative shared values, vision, and mission(s), Science to objectively and pragmatically set explicit and specific operational priorities and means (and recognize limiting parameters) to accomplish that vision through those missions, Government to implement those means for those missions and accepting and working with those parameters (to “execute” them: the original meaning of the “Executive Branch”)

What are the practical requirements and consequences of this? Forget about “rights” and “ideologies” and normative “shoulds.” For instance, the rather shallow conventional wisdom is that scientists shouldn’t make policy, and for good reasons. From practical experience, we have learned the hard way that politicians shouldn’t make policy either (and for even better reasons), turning that conventional wisdom on its head. With this systems-polity approach, neither 29 March 2010

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scientists nor politicians would set policy (that would be done by the values-applying visionsetters). Scientists would, however, define the operational parameters and goals for implementing that policy, and the politicians would execute or implement those goals, with feedback loops to all three branches. It would be sensible to have operational input concerning biophysical systems from scientists and engineers and some process to ensure that outliers with paradigm-overturning ideas were not frozen out. But that input would be to values-applying decision-makers such as poets, novelists, philosophers, magicians, senior primary school teachers, craft-workers (cabinet makers, blacksmiths, weavers) and acknowledged wise elders (preferably ones who understand science and the scientific method). We would get far better results than from policy and objectives decisions made only by scientists and engineers and politicians paying only lip service to religious and philosophical values. In a systems polity the system itself is autocratic rather than politicians or leaders being autocratic. Its leadership is principle-based, with the principles and those who apply them held to the highest standards. This autocracy is committed to optimizing individuality in balance with collective requirements, in a culture of liberation rather than subjugation (to the tyranny of the majority under the “leadership” of the Oligarchs). This is contrast to the totalitarian culture of the Han Chinese tribe (which has its own set of Oligarchs) and, only apparently at the other end of the spectrum, the illusory “freedom” culture of the American “nation.” The system polity would maintain a compartmented rule of law that is relatively incorruptible, since its mostcorruptible components are only making tactical and technical decisions about implementation rather than principled and strategic decisions about larger issues. In a slightly different mode, redefine “freedom” to be about “freedom to… whatever (accomplishment)” instead of “freedom from… whatever (boogeymen).” “Freedom from…” is the disempowering and paralyzing corruption that arises from fear manipulations, and from irresponsible “entitlement consciousness.” “Freedom to…” is the perfect libertarian model, and the fundament of the original American system based on English Common Law. [Jefferson quotation on doing no harm…]. Generate social-status and neuro-transmitter rewards to re-balance pursuit of “Freedom to…” over “Freedom from…”. Thinking almost exclusively in abstractions is one major problem with our present polity. Without some fairly constant reality-check through a working Model, those abstractions become simple, ideological, and self-serving, even narcissistic. No complexity in one’s internal mental models leads to no ability to experience and manage complexity outside. If the internal model is inadequate to structure the experience of “reality,” then the choice devolves to stick with what we appear to have mastery of and presents no apparent risk: our habits around socially acceptable shared abstractions. In other words, religion and its surrogates, such as political ideology and “social science” (including economics). This gives us inclusive fitness and maintains a stable position within the system (until the system itself collapses from internal instabilities and lack of adaptability to external changes). I discern a disturbing historical pattern — the crack and fall of civilizations owing to a morbid intensification of their own first principles. [Paraphrased] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), The Philosophy of History

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How (by what means) can we re-structure the fundamental organizing conversation of America? Apply Social Enterprise Planning (SEP) using the Model for Community Change (MfCC) to provide a constructive working platform for expression Social Enterprising Planning is a values-rich (i.e., more than market values) and feedbackrich process for organizational and community planning and implementation of means (strategies, tactics, and activities) to integrate and realize both social-value and market value missions in the context of its larger environment. It starts with shared values and ends with evidence of delivered value (in terms of those values). In a sustainable polity, all organizations (especially corporations or whatever kind of entity succeeds them) must become explicit social enterprises, and all must participate in a real-time and transparent community conversation committed to an appropriate human or commons outcome. Instead of a “business plan,” “corporate” entities would have a “Social Enterprise Plan” showing how they would return social and environmental benefit in exchange for their governmentgranted license to profit. The Model for Community Change is a mental and visual framework (or, more simply, a template) to structure a community’s conversation around its explicitly stated values, align around shared visions, and enroll in, and commit to, active missions to make real those visions. The model then guides the community’s attention and structures the community’s actions so there is some individual and collective learning happening as it acts, and then uses the evidence from that learning to advance the community’s collective conversation and its success at realizing its vision. It provides the perfect structure for an ongoing Social Enterprise Planning process. It’s an iterative process that can progress through time, with structures that tend to reflect human experience and reality instead of ideology or wishful thinking. The Model (or something very like it) would be essential for coherence and for diluting and eroding the advantages even of desperado special-interest sociopaths, large and small. The Model relies on direct experience in the community and is empirically knowledgecentric, an advance beyond the pseudo-science of the “social sciences:” it does not rely on “data” to obtain that knowledge; it gathers data for evidence to strengthen its value proposition. It is not an hypothesis of change; it is actually a model that describes the functional flow of change we already know is happening, how we have observed it to occur, and where we want it to lead. We know that from our direct shared experience, continuously and transparently calibrated against our values, vision, and mission accomplishment. The Model is scalable to provide coherence in a larger setting than originally intended (program evaluation in the social-benefit sector); it can structure an entire community conversation about what is important in the community and how to make it real. That is true no matter how small or large the community; the Model can scale down to model a single individual’s personal evolution, or scale up for an entire nation. Return to a constitutional-republic governance instead of corporate-government governance Distinguish the “United States” (a federal corporation) from the “United States of America” (a constitutional republic). What we ordinarily perceive as “government” has become “just another big corporation” and “just another profit-center” for the Oligarchy to covertly control through its proxies and agents. “State” and local governments are also corporations, and all separate their operating budgets (whose deficits they use to justify taxes) from their capital budget (which they conceal). Just try to obtain a “Consolidated Annual Financial Report” (CAFR) from any government in this country… 29 March 2010

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Question all assumptions and beliefs and ideologies; re-educate and re-condition, provide new archetypes and rewards for self-re-creation, and link those to new missions, through an experience-based Metaphysics of Quality that actually connects to reality. Present social and economic myths co-evolved with their blind assumptions and conflict-ofinterest corruptions. They are based on intentional conditioning and ignorance-manipulation. [Dewey quotation] It is extremely difficult to clear them all out and create mind-space for a new paradigm. It takes years of hard work even when a young person is trying to do it. Qui bono? The Oligarchs, the “economy,” or “The People,” and in what proportion? And how? Apply the “precautionary principle” as opposed to the “profit principle” Distinguish between human values and market values Trust our cultural and social “instincts” around fairness and equity Make explicit all values and visions (using SEP with MfCC) Make transparent all transactions and all value Develop standards (“parameters”) for wealth concentration and requirements for its use (as with “foundations” now, but non-token) Abandon the chimera of “self-equilibrium” and embrace a dynamic and responsible model of change regulated according to a chosen vision. Come out from the shadow of the mythologies of our present “process” (which in practice relies on secrecy around what’s actually happening) and pay more attention to the result through substantive content and results tracking. It is natural that the country whose theories of government are the most unrealistic in the world should develop the greatest and most powerful sub rosa political machinery. Thurman W. Arnold It may be “fair” and “lawful,” but is it effective (as opposed to token lip-service) in advancing the general good? And is it efficient in resource use? Eliminate the excuse of the Oligarchs’ servants (human and corporate) that their actions are “legal” even if everyone knows they are “wrong,” unethical, and harmful, even sociopathic. The worst excesses of the Oligarchy don’t come from groups plotting in smoke-filled back rooms. They come from the dynastic sociopaths that naturally climb to the top given the social systems we (they?) have constructed, who lie without compunction and isolate themselves from everyone they can. People with no conscience have a tremendous advantage because of the aggressive values inherent in dog-eat-dog neo-feudal capitalism. In the same way, networks of sociopathic corporations naturally evolve into coöpetitional fascism, with the government their straw-dog front-man. Return physics and evolution theory to the “social sciences.” De-condition people out of the myths and illusions of pseudo-science and the manipulations therefrom. Design a social system around the way people actually are, not idealized and ideological wishful thinking (and not around straw-dog “idealism” and mythological distractions), and around the actual workings of a closed-system planet. Be congruent with the physical realities of the human and para-human worlds. Reconsider that Seventh Generation timeframe: we have rejected it; bring it back.

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Include a total-systems-integration overview with no externalities… Our relationship with the entire planet becomes a Social Enterprise for humanity. Communities, nations, and international organizations and alliances would have a Social Enterprise Plan structured with the Model. This would illuminate and defuse the n-Prisoners’ Dilemma (also known as the Tragedy of the Commons). Adopt and apply other metrics than monetary Quality-of-life metrics (unto the Seventh Generation?) in the context of the Model for Community Change. Model and make explicit and transparent all value-transactions (not just money-transactions) in the entire open system. Use the Metaphysics of Quality to generate and apply realistic values based on the inter-relationship and utility of the things that are presently valued only as themselves. Apply relative overall systems values openly and with deliberation. Embrace just enough mental-framework complexity to clarify accelerating worldly complexity without compounding it. Return to explicit personal (and collective) responsibility for the human condition Public-good “lobbyists” replace special-interest and corporate lobbyists to influence the dynamic application of values into policy, not the rote implementation of covert policies by the State. Eliminate face-to-face contact between the values/vision/mission, parameters-and-design, and implementation tracks, while maintaining a general broad “liberal” education so all are conversant with the principles and challenges of all tracks without immediate substantive interference with others. Encourage religion-like secular human-oriented belief-systems that provide experiential feedback and reward for people still in this world; systems that are open and explicit about their values. Man’s economy is, as a rule, submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives. Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation, 1944 If we can get people openly talking about their shared values, all else will follow. Without a values conversation, we get the sterility of self-reflexive lowest-common-denominator selfserving “reasonableness,” and projection of habitual assumptions found in economists’ political philosophy: To the free man, the country is a collection of individuals who compose it ... He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens 29 March 2010

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severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom If the “consensus” goals presently in place really did represent the conscious and chosen aspirations of the “free man,” instead of conditioned indoctrination and algorithm execution, then this philosophy could succeed at generating a national purpose that was more than the class-serving agenda of the conditioners. Instead, “consensus goals” default to the lowestcommon-denominator market values that have proven inadequate for social equity and integrity, much less sustainability. Shift the focus on “freedom” from “freedom from…” toward “freedom to…” express and accomplish collective shared missions rather than solipsism and self-aggrandizement. This shifts focus away from fear (“what we don’t want”) and toward love (“what we do want”). It would liberate creativity and caring, while limiting the natural downside of the widespread cultural and individual disorder of our time: narcissism (“Not just your father’s pathology,” but found in Gen-Xers as well as Boomers, and especially in the aggregate behavior of corporate entities, where it becomes sociopathic). Change the values, change the behavior. Avoid demagoguery and “keeping people apart” within the values/vision/mission part of the conversation, within the regulation part, and within the implementation part. However, keep those parts separate operationally even though in principle all persons can participate conceptually and in expressing values in all three parts. In practice, the actual working processes of those parts can be mostly isolated so inter-branch corruptions will not rule. Another way to look at this is to create a government with separation of economy and state at the policy-making level, leaving only implementation in the hands of the government. This is exactly analogous to the 17th and 18th Centuries’ separation of church and state at the policy-making level, and represents the next level of social evolution. What entity or entities would set economic policy? Ones dominated by consensus social values (not special interests, expressing human values over market values), addressing a collective mission, and relying on transparent feedback for reality-testing. Adopt new “national missions” (and even “missions for humanity”) so people can feel they are part of something greater than themselves and their solipsistic self-absorption. Base this on explicit shared values and visions that all can relate to and benefit from. Properly speaking, “Economic Growth” is not a mission; it is a means. A means to accomplish what? Have we forgotten? This is an example of how the distinctions of the Model provide necessary clarity otherwise lacking. What would be the purpose of growth (if it were even possible in real terms)? What is the purpose of our polity? For whom? Why and how? Hidden within the present system is the simple fact that the Oligarchs have replaced any nominal goals of our civilization with their own goals: power for its own sake, at any cost, with a thin scrim of ideology for cover. Replace the corporation with a different kind of entity. A “Social Enterprise” whose charter is more sustainable and Commons-supporting than the typical corporate charter “to make a profit at any lawful purpose.” In other words, “deprivatize” corporations into well-balanced, time-limited, ad hoc public-private enterprises 29 March 2010

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with explicit goals, methodologies, and opportunity costs, and with open processes and no externalities, all guided by the systems-polity decision-makers. Take corporations back to their roots. Eliminate “corporate personhood” and “one dollar, one vote.” Perhaps require that all organizations be Social Enterprises in form and function, and maintain and implement a Social Enterprise plan based on, and working to express, the explicitly recognized shared values of the polity (including some approach to sustainability). Have clear divisions of “public services” versus “private services:” some functions basic to the well-being of the polity and its people must be performed with no “profit” overhead (i.e., by streamlined global or national governments or “administrations,” since smaller local and state governments are too easily corruptible by corporate and Oligarchic interests). This is essentially the same notion as Adam Smith’s “social goods.” A two-tiered system with guaranteed basic services and for-profit “luxury” services might work best at accomplishing our net social and human purposes; and each tier would stimulate and limit the other. Money (using a true “fiat” currency, instead of a debt-based pseudo-fiat currency) Basic banking (vs. “investment banks” and the like) State-owned banks (vs. private banks like most central banks such as the Fed) Applying Sharia’h principles (!?) With demurrage instead of interest? (J.M. Keynes advocated this in the 1890s) Basic liberal-arts and trade/professional education (as opposed to class-oriented indoctrination in a Cult of Mediocrity) Apprenticeship in critical thinking across disciplines Health care and prevention (“wellness,” distinct from the present medical system’s sick-care insurance), making medical insurance as such unnecessary Disaster (fire, flood, storm, and earthquake) insurance Retirement-pension and medical-care floor Essential life-support infrastructure (for water, basic energy, basic housing, basic diet, basic work) Distributed-source personal-use electrical power that cannot be centralized, monopolized, and metered by the Oligarchs: either broadcast (a la Tesla and others) or distributed (a la Jeremy Rifkin, with “alternate sources” and “micro-generation,” with energy-recirculation over “smart grids”). Distributed generation recovers the transmission losses of a centralized system, at the cost of the illusory economies of scale from central generation and control. Fire protection Police and “Justice” system, emphasizing rehabilitation and minimizing incarceration (especially for victimless “crimes”) Recycling and reusing resources to reduce the junk-to-garbage effects [International functions: military, diplomacy, commercial treaties, …] All gains from investment in these basic activities must be socialized. Most private alternatives should be discouraged (except at a specialized “high end”), lest they subvert the effectiveness and efficiency of use of the public resources (the “commons”) and distract from the vision we are seeking to accomplish. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and when your only tool is money, everything looks like it can be bought. If and when we allow our basic needs to be traded for profit, inevitably we ourselves will one day be sold for profit too, or left to die for a lack of profit. Have clear title to, and have all gain from, use and re-use of “Commons” resources such as air and water, oceans, minerals on/in publicly owned lands, etc., be part of the public 29 March 2010

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wealth to be shared appropriately. This “natural capital” must not be sequestered or concentrated in the hands of the Oligarchs or any other special interest, and its value must not be exclusively monetarized. Have rigorous standards for maintaining the integrity of the Commons, and be uncompromising in their enforcement. Have clear title to, and have all gains from, “social capital” resources such as intellectual property, government-gathered information, and government-sponsored research be part of the public wealth to be shared appropriately. For example, patents and copyrights would expire way earlier than 75 years and couldn’t be sequestered by corporations outside some system-approved Social Enterprise rôle.

The Challenge How can we connect decision-makers to reality without corrupting influences like lobbyists from corporations and other special-interest groups, all in a relatively ideology-free conversation grounded in actual experience? Have powerful consensus lobbyists from "the people" and weak narrow-interest lobbyists from corporations. Contra the way special "economic" interests always divide the public to get what they want: reverse that process and unite people around explicit and specific common interests (organized around shared values) published and tracked in implementtation. Have all branches explicitly and specifically (with quantitative calibrations and feedback) dedicated to the common good, with adequate transparency; anything that overly benefits any subset of that entirety must pass “exception” tests. Reverse the willful misinterpretation of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (118 US 394, 1886) that resulted in giving corporations some of the same constitutional rights natural persons have. This will eliminate the one dollar = one vote corruption of the political process; go back to net-best-good for people (one person = one vote, plus a strong vote for the net-consensus collective good), measured in other values than market values, and compared to standards previously set for the Social Enterprise. The “market” in its ideological mode has failed to improve the lot of mankind. What’s “good for the economy” is usually not good for most of the people in it, especially for those whose labor and productivity make it possible. Open markets are essential but not sufficient for a just polity. Markets are fundamentally a predatory wealth-concentration mechanism for separating the masses from their money. Without actively engaging other, more human, values, markets alone are dangerous. Functioning “markets” are a small and vital part of a success-enhancing feedback system; we must always have human values and vision in mind and with highest priority. This would be a change from omni-present and plenipotentiary “market” values, which would be valuable to provide some of the more operational measurements of human success. But then, what become the principal metrics? Quality-of-life and human-fulfillment values instead of profitability or market share or ROI or 29 March 2010

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sequestered resources or concentrated wealth... How do we know? We apply the Model for Community Change, which maintains a valuescentric conversation based on four distinct kinds of evidence from within the overall process. We also apply an evolved values ethic, such as the Metaphysics of Quality, to ground and maintain public morality and choice-fields. The Model can provide feedback and a unifying structure for the entire conversation of a values-based systems polity. This Metaphysics and the Model work together: both are values-centric and give priority to experiential knowledge. Both are non-materialistic, in that things are not valuable in and of themselves. Value in the Model is identified from Distinctions in relationships defined by the functional flow of the Model; in the Metaphysics values arise from the relationships between things in dynamic and static equilibrium. Specificity and Precision in the Model is the equivalent to Quality and _______ in the Metaphysics. Establish shared values, vision, and mission(s) Commit and align and organize Express specialized personal involvement in institutionalized roles: Branch: Archetype: Values husbanders (lovers & priests: ) Priority measurers and reminders (priests & philosophers: ) Parameters definers (shaman: science and engineering) Engagers (kings: organizers and administrators) Monitors (everyone: ) (feedback in real-time, with “time-value” discounts for long-term vision/outcomes) All branches in strong, information-rich interaction within branches without face-to-face contact between branches to be corrupted by “reciprocal altruism.”

However…

motivation

We must never forget that it’s not only the “human nature” of people that prevent us from recovering our polity’s natural-systems integrity, it’s the design of the system our Founders built, coupled with those individual and group algorithmic human-nature behaviors. Moreover, the Oligarchs have “tuned-up” the system over the last 200 years, to their own advantage above all others. All classes’ lives have improved, but less for some, and much less for most. Now with Peak Capitalism all quality of life will decline, with more decline for the lower class — to the point of resource-sequestering conquest-wars, plus deaths from famine and pestilence — and, as always, less decline for the higher classes and least decline at the top. Even in the most wildly-optimistic scenario — in which Americans elected a “common good” government into the present structures — the government would be unable to actually act in ways that fly in the face of Oligarchic interests. Our current government has neither the power nor desire to carry out radical new policies. Many environmental and energy activists and advocates [shall we call them lobbyists, too?] realize this, but they can’t escape their conditioning around the myths of governance (“democracy,” the “rule of law,” …), the false idols of their polity (“home-ownership,” “freedom,” the “individual,”…., and the illusion of due process (jurisdiction, authority, standing, and even “fairness,” ….). So they continue to focus 29 March 2010

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their efforts on: 1. Educating elected officials with complete and correct “information.” 2. Convincing these officials that action needs to be taken or else “The People” (or “the planet,” or some victim-identity group, or some Oligarch’s pocket entity that is “too big to fail,” or …) will suffer. Their ineffectiveness reveal both strategies as fatally misguided. The first one assumes that politicians have the power to implement the kind of change required. They do not. Politicians are basically charismatic puppets, representational figures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful, and who always, in one way or another, do the bidding of their Lords and Masters (or else). The puppets are pleasing to look at, and give the audience great “bread and circuses” theater in the mainstream media, but they have no real power. They are not in control. The second strategy assumes that policy is motivated by a concern for the well-being of the masses or of the “commons.” Rarely (if ever) do activists and advocates explicitly frame their proposals in terms of the interests of the rich and wealthy (although often in implicit and deepsubtextual ways). They are pitched as being for the “common good” or for “The People,” with an implicit recognition that the Oligarchs can take care of their own well-being. “The People” is that part of the State that doesn’t know what it wants. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 1821 In a “systems polity” with a universal Social Enterprise Planning process given operating form by the Model for Community Change and moral form by the Metaphysics of Quality, “The People” would know what they want, through a participatory general community conversation that expresses their values and choices while educating them in the realpolitic of the processes of governance, de-conditioning them from the myths of governance that they have become accustomed to accepting so blindly, and providing them meaningful feedback on their progress toward realizing their vision for the lives they wish to lead. In a “systems polity,” any non-governmental entity in private hands that is “too big or too complex to fail” shows us that it’s too big to trust, and too big to allow to exist. Our present governments are actually parallel profit centers for owners of the “financial sector” and “big business.” “Government” will be unable to reinvent itself from within; that will require outside intervention. There must be some parity of power between groups of private interests and a government that truly represents the interests of the general population as well as of the commons, or those groups will be the dog wagging the government tail (as is presently the case) instead of being a tail being regulated (“restrained”) by the government dog. Imagine a world of falling net energy, global commodity stagflation and shortages, and everscarcer natural resources. Will the rich voluntarily give up their social status (political power) for the common good — switch from a special interest political system to a systems political system? In other words, will the rich voluntary give up something that others will even kill their own children to preserve? Absolutely not. It’s literally impossible. Unless some workable alternatives can be put in practice, falling net energy and materials shortages will cause people to revert to a fundamentally different set of behaviors. These are expressions of the genetic biases that evolved during the thousands of periods of overshoot and dieoff that have occurred during our millions of years as animals. Those in power will use every tool at their disposal — including nuclear weapons — to preserve their control of their portion of the remaining energy and goods, thereby maintaining social advantage for their kin and clan. 29 March 2010

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To be successful, social, environmental, and economic (that is, “political”) mitigation will require the full cooperation of the rich and powerful Oligarchs, acting, as always, through their minions. There are two ways to get people to cooperate. Force them, or inspire them to want to do it themselves. Forcing them is almost completely out of the question (but remains the ultimate alternative if all else fails): Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ...is simply not a possibility in the modern age. George F. Kennan It would lead to social chaos (and, paradoxically, disaster for everyone), compounding sequential-complexity harm. The only viable option is to make them want to do it, perhaps reinforced with a vague implied threat of potential rebellion lurking around the fringes (“withholding of consent,” 10thAmendment anti-Federalist positions, and the like). At this late stage, the chances of mitigating the worst are very small. For activists and advocates to stand a chance, they would have to focus more of their efforts on: 1. Penetrating the secrecy and lip-service routines that propagate the status quo through increasingly explicit values, vision, and mission-and-means conversations and invitations. 2. Educating and enrolling the richest and most powerful people in the country and the world (as well as everyone else) to commit to change. 3. Convincing these people that their ultimate inclusive fitness will be best served by the proposed changes, and that their interim inclusive fitness won’t suffer, either. 4. Providing credible evidence through time of the benefits to Oligarchs, their positions, and their property. 5. Making a compelling argument that a well-regulated “systems polity” is the right thing to do, morally, aesthetically, practically, and even selfishly. “well-regulated” means the right number of people, living as sustainably as practicable, with the right level of power-sharing, for the net-highest fulfillment, and with the greatest grace and joy — all consonant with an accord around specific standards of fairness and equity practiced in a healthy Commons. 6. Finding ways to have face-to-face meetings with actual leaders within factions of the Oligarchy, adopting the traditional social dynamic of the Oligarchy. 7. Building individual relationships of trust and aligned interests, and making alliances for expansion. 8. Finding ways to escalate individual meetings to gatherings of leaders, wherein a new consensus can be formed. 9. … Whence the Model for Community Change, which enables a systematic answer to the community’s and the Oligarchs’ “What’s in it for us?” questions, an answer that would also support the quality of life of the general population, which will become fewer in number and thereby more affordable. The Model bridges and informs both the public and the private decision-making conversations. The general good becomes better for the fewer people remaining, while “enlightened” rulers continue to enjoy their advantages from ruling a new neofeudal “systems polity.” How do we initiate the conversation? How do we apply the Model? Once we see that the important “us” in “What’s in it for us?” isn’t really the community’s or the nation’s “us,” but the Oligarch’s “us,” we can take an entirely different approach. 29 March 2010

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What motivates the Oligarchs? Why do they seek control? The greatest fear of the Oligarchs who founded this country was that their wageslaves/“consumers”/average citizens/chattels would discover how they lived and would take their riches away (see Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10). Accordingly, 1. The rich want even “well-informed” citizens to focus on political personalities (Obama, Cheney, etc.) and “celebrities” instead of, say, the board members of the Federal Reserve Banks, the members of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, and their ultimate Lords and Masters. That’s the primary function of our formal political/economic system: a distraction, a circus, and a multi-layer buffer between the masses and those really in control. 2. The rich want citizens to focus on motives (debunkable “conspiracy theories,” for example) rather than the tactics the rich use to maintain control (actual conspiracies). The universal conspiracy of the Oligarchy is to indoctrinate the masses that there are no conspiracies, so they can characterize anyone who uncovers and exposes one of their actual conspiracies as a crackpot. If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus, by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945 3. The Oligarchs want their chattels to focus on individuals rather than systems, and on ownership rather than control (for instance, “The Ownership Society” as a pretext for deeper financial exploitation). [SIDEBAR: “The richest” lists as a distraction, and the use of trusts by dynastic wealthy families and clans…] 4. The rich want citizens/“consumers” to see everything in terms of dollars and cents, and then betray their values and friends and social and environmental ecosystems for money as an illusory surrogate for existential value and social status. 5. Similarly, the Oligarchs want the masses to calibrate their social status in terms of material goods (junk that quickly becomes garbage) instead of their fundamental human purpose, creative accomplishments, and quality of life. 6. The last thing the plutocrats want is "protectionism" to impair exploitation of natural and social resources; protectionism represents and results from the subversive notion that what’s good for the Oligarchy-controlled “economy” is not what’s good for anyone else. In an unprotected economy, everything that can be, is converted to material goods (mostly excessive junk) and money. The junk becomes garbage and sticks around but the money flows up the pyramid to the world’s richest people. When something is “protected” (land, borders, people, minerals, jobs, etc.) those money-flows are slowed. The ambition of contemporary capitalism is to convert as much as possible of the world to garbage and money (and, thereby, power). This is the ancient and medieval project of alchemy transposed to a modern abstract domain.

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[SIDEBAR: Evolution scientists have caused a lot of confusion with the jargon “domain.” Domain means “problem.” “Domain-general” means “problem-general” or “general-problem.” They should have used ordinary words. Humans evolved no “problem-general” reasoning architecture. All adaptations exist to solve specific (and immediate) environmental problems or challenges. Specific problems might be how to obtain food or a mate, kill something, keep warm, and so on. Economic models claim that all animals evolved “problem-general” reasoning. In other words, humans are supposed to be contain an unbelievably fast math processor that is able to calculate all the various probabilities of success for all the various decisions that might attain their goals. This represents an instinctive habit of using teleology as a political manipulation, as part of other-worldly religions invented to externalize and objectify the social powers of the Oligarchs. “Economics” is one such religion, AGW is another.]

By what means do the Oligarchs gain and maintain their power? Basically, through control and coercion, largely covert (by manipulation, conditioning, hiring high-ranking servants, the enforced “rule of law,” the rule of men under “color of law,” assassination, and indirect ownership) and rarely overt (through direct participatory ownership and explicit force). Overt force, however, is always just a drop of the hat away. By working as a self-aligning “web of interest” (in addition to outright conspiracy) of interlocking factions in “coöpetition” mode. Control

Means

Control Money

Central Banks

Advantages Debt-based “Fiat” Currency (drives out other metrics) Fractional Reserve Banking Vertical integration (banks, equities, insurance, etc.) Can objectify, reify, promote, and regulate debt-bondage

Control Government Republican form No risky Democratic “Mob” Plausible deniability Fewer “Representatives” to buy or kill Custom lobby-defined legislation Monopoly on force (Police & Military) Use “government” as proxy for the Oligarchy Make people financially dependent on “government” Control Culture

Propaganda

“News” and Advertising Media Myths of governance Religion (“sacred” and secular) “Entertainment” Distraction (“Bread & Circuses”) Fear and conditioning Make people emotionally dependent on “government” “Education”

Control “Stuff”

Corporations

Irresponsible “Veil” concealment Impersonal sociopathic behaviors & officers Forum for “coöpetition” Corps have the same “rights” as natural persons Clarifies territorial and subject-matter domains

What are the centers of mass of the interlocking factions of the Oligarchs? 29 March 2010

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Big Pharma (“medical addiction-drugs”)/”Health” Insurance/Medical/Hospital Petroleum/Extraction/Transportation/Manufacturing/ Banking/Government/ Military/Police/Incarceration/Religion/ ”Organized Crime”/”criminal addiction-drugs”/ Media/News/Cinema/Politics/”legal behavior-drugs”/Education/Fear-obsession Various covert Zionist alliances FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) ___??

Who are the Oligarchs? How many of them are there? Observations through the veils… A powerful clue: Who is conspicuously missing from the “richest” lists? The Queen of England The Pope Other “Great Names” from our feudal past… The (relatively) nuveau riche… The roles of their representatives we can see…

How could anyone prevail against the Oligarchy? The traditional way: divide and conquer their “web of interest” Further split the Oligarchy into competing factions and take them on one by one Erode the “coöperation” aspect of their “coöpetition” and force the “competition” aspect of the existing factions Generate emergent new factions within the Oligarchy (e.g. the next generation, but most are disenfranchised from their principal by their dynastic financial managers) Compounded by massive civil disobedience and withholding of consent Always with the subtext of rage and rebellion Constitutional resurgence: a true rule of law rather than a myth of law Attraction: protection from other fctions De- and re-conditioning into the next generation Build a system that is self-evidently net-better for all stakeholders; allow at least one generation for that self-evidence to manifest itself. There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

And just who would that “anyone” be? 29 March 2010

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1. Existing factions and sub-factions of the Oligarchy, especially ones who see an opportunity to advance their own agenda behind a “populist’ drama 2. Newly rich potential-but-not-quite factions of the Oligarchy (despite their evident and necessary intensified ruthlessness) 3. New coalitions of factions of the Oligarchy with different coöpetitional balances 4. Organized masses of The People who, despite all the Oligarch’s social-engineeringand- dilution efforts, have figured out what they want and have a good-enough idea how to get it. 5. Organized masses of The People who have been more-or-less coöpted by a faction (or group of factions) of the Oligarchy. 6. Organized masses of The People who have become galvanized by ideological fervor (religion, Cult of Personality, desperation to survive, etc.), sometimes by representatives of factions of the Oligarchy — a “proletarian revolution” organized and led by defected upper-class persons. Most historical revolutions have manifest this pattern. 7. Space aliens, perhaps escaped from Area 51 8. The Second Coming, through “The Rapture” 9. Something new and unforeseen… 10. Some combination thereof…

What could motivate them? We want the Oligarchs’ “us” and its vital infrastructure to increasingly include more of everyone and everything else as direct complex-systems experience broadens, and the Oligarchs’ vision to gradually enlarge to include the entire planetary human-life-support system that is the source of their well-being: 1. Show that there is no longer any place to run, and no-place to hide. There are no communities gated to air and sunshine. When there are no fish at all, there are no fish for anybody. All issues are now global issues, and need to be engaged with local integrity: think locally, act globally. 2. Show that a sufficiency of ignorant and naïve conditioned serfs are necessary for the Oligarchs’ well-being and too great a quality-of-life and standard-of-living difference between the classes is increasingly unstable. Never forget the rage and latent violence of social revolution. The Eloi-and-Morlocks kind of scenario found in Brave New World and 1984 is too extreme, and meta-stable. Moderation consciously chosen to maintain advantage, balancing the limitless lust for power with the energy cost of suppressing more and more complexity overhead. 3. Show that a better social model with somewhat evolved myths and more-wise conditioning will give them more “plausible deniability” as they pluck at the Pleistoceneheartstrings of their vassals. This leads to a new politically correct rhetoric, a greenstained rhetoric that is really the same old story in its core power-politics, but modern in its apparent (yet genuinely increased) inclusiveness. [Example: failure of the Shah of Iran] 4. Show that “collapse of civilization” (and consequent social revolution) is now credible (even if primary revolution isn’t), despite techno-fix myths and denial. Although overdramatized, collapse is the great counter-motivational stick in this conversation, with compelling historical and physical-science evidence. 5. Show the Oligarchs that in history the ruling classes have fared significantly better than the under-classes during times of upheaval. This is true even though those at the very top are usually eliminated. That threatening fact is now mitigated by the Oligarchs’ use of 29 March 2010

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expendable puppet leaders who stand in front of the fan. 6. Train the Oligarchs to recognize, take responsibility for, and deal with their tendencies to denial and their algorithmic behaviors (such as their instincts through breeding and indoctrination to apply the “Laws of Power”). 7. … Paradigm-shift for well-defined sub-populations takes generations, a time-frame that the urgency-hysteria in the current crisis-speak discourages. That style also constrains its participants to shallow thinking and over-simple discourse; to the attention-span of a scared four-year-old. There’s a lot of “brinksmanship” in flirting with gradual exposure of the “old lies,” if only rolling semi-exposure as new, more-appropriate illusions are spun to replace the ones we let be “revealed” to former “outsiders.” Paradigm-shift for individuals takes a minimum of three years when consciously and actively working at it from a pre-adapted basis, and longer (if ever) without that motivation and predisposition. It is not a “rational” process. It ordinarily happens when an older generation of believers (secular or religious) dies out and their younger successors take over. How to promote these shifts? By developing new self-myths and new social archetypes for people to substitute for their old self-myths, self-identities, and social rôles, and by conditioning people to adopt them by delivering rewards they can directly experience, in both classes, with variations, and with different starting myths. In the Oligarchs and downward, a new principlebased regulation, a modern, updated “English Aristocracy” ethos. The “green” anthropogenicclimate-change hysteria provides a good ground-swell of emotion (principally fear, yet much genuine caring and an instinctive sense of what supports well-being) to ride this on. It seems tragically necessary to couple a factional power-maneuver to motivate the practice of conservation: is there some way to de-couple the two? Also by showing real improvements in their quality of life for all from the practices of the systems polity; and, in a polity with a reduced population, greater operating efficiency and effectiveness, …, … The social-conditioning infrastructure is in place now (“education,” “media,” pharmaceuticals [“Soma”], habits of fear, irresponsibility, and dependence, …) to do this. A conventional ad hoc and superficial “social-marketing campaign” aimed at “everybody” will reach the Oligarchs as well, and a sub-campaign can be tailored to their particular listening. Their children will carry a new paradigm into practice, and their children will advance it. Do we have any cause at all to believe that something like this is not already happening, but on the Oligarchy’s own old-paradigm terms? And if it is to happen using and developing a new paradigm, what memes will carry the content?

Where might our values lead us? We could end “the economy” and replace it with a global system of rationing “necessities,” as Hubbert and the Technocrats have proposed. At a macro level, rich nations can give poor nations “necessities” if they reduce population numbers and reduce consumption of non-necessities, protect ecosystems, etc. This represents a serious political challenge: the old paradigm will interpret that as class war between nations (or entire cultures), so it must be very carefully aligned around a shared vision of and for humanity at large. 29 March 2010

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Away from affluenza, that painful condition, the bane of middle and upper classes worldwide, defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of “more.” More what? More anything that seems to give status (“inclusive fitness”). What happens to “more” in a nongrowing sustainable economy? More becomes “less.” How can this be re-interpreted to gain status? With new social and personal myths that people can be conditioned to fulfill and thereby receive a reliable Dopamine hit. A fundamental change in values might shift our relationship around “stuff’ and power away from getting and having it toward using or even giving it. To what ends? For what purpose? Some newly promulgated and explicit personal, clan, tribal, community, and human missions based on our common values and shared vision. And in fact, without such an intentional focus, our civilization will maintain its current death-spiral of involuted micro-gratification. A values-centric system of value might provide a key to unlock the currency conundrum involving efforts to ground currency in real, meaningful value. Ultimately this sets us back to fundamental questions of what is of real and meaningful value, how can such value be measured, relied-on, and distributed, and what is its relationship to operational productivity and quality of life. It is important to keep in mind that deck-chair moves such as changing currencies will do absolutely nothing to change the driving engine of depopulation by aging in the Western world and its rearguard competition for resources with the surging (for now) populations of the “developing world.” It has that in common with peak oil (although the causes and outcomes are completely different) in that the driving engine of the economic change is a parameter built into the world and will have to be adjusted to and cannot be changed (except over generations). Had we listened to the Club of Rome 30 years ago, we would have had more time to express more choices, but cornucopian techno-fix “idiot savants” like Julian Simon, and even relatively enlightened persons such as Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken, have won the debate and destroyed through delay the system they sought to preserve. James Lovelock observes that it’s much too late for mitigation; it’s time to give up capitalism and retreat. What if, instead, we advanced to a “Capitalism 2.0” or “Human Civilization 2.0” or “America 2.0?” That might require a conscious engineering project combining parallel and inter-operative social revolution, cultural evolution, and human breeding, through natural selection in dieoff and civilization-collapse circumstances. Ir would require consciously and rigorously applying cultural- and social-selection parameters: define a set of workable universal values, generate from those a vision for a workable culture and society, build a complex mission with associated means (complete with strategies, tactics, and techniques), elicit alignment and commitment to that vision and mission, and track activities and outcomes (with lots of feedback loops all over the place). That’s a great example of social change through cultural change, increasing responsibility and accountability on an intrinsic-motivation basis more than the current extrinsic-motivation basis. This is the largest-scale application of the scalable, iterative Model for Community Change. After all is said and done, can we answer the question, “What is the mission of humanity?” We haven’t been able to answer that question so far, and the myths of “The Economy” only interfere with any explicit vision and mission for all humanity. We haven’t even been able to answer that question for the mission of our own country, and the breeding of the Oligarchy to actively and relentlessly divide and conquer gets in the way. It all starts with an explicit conversation about shared values. What is the purpose of those values? What is the purpose of humanity? Everything follows from that…

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First ask why, then what, then how. Not the usual sequence, as most start with a relatively unexamined what determined by habit and inertia, conditioning, and immediate advantage. That why is native to the cultural and biological levels, the least-conscious and poorestexamined part of the human enterprise [See the Intersection.ppt illustration]. It is through applying philosophy to those levels that genuine sustainable solutions to human problems will be found, not at the social, economic, and technical levels. By philosophy I mean grounded experiential, empirical, trans-disciplinary, open-systems human engineering with transparency and generosity, and based on human values rather than market values. It’s more philoandry than philosophy, and it is more powerful and valuable than philosophy. [SIDEBAR: Can it be true that the best approximation so far to answering the purpose question is religion, corrupted as it has been by unconscious primate-band power dynamics and conscious Statist (in the US, “Federalist”) manipulation by Oligarchs, and requiring reified externalities outside the human eco-system and direct physical experience, externalities such as “God,” and “Heaven and Hell”? I propose that humanity can now do better than that, and on its own terms.]

Phase-State Shifts in the Social Environment Thurmond Arnold made several practical observations: If one wants to make social changes, the context one sets and the terms one chooses are of utter importance. The actual content and effect of your change is of secondary importance. That’s evolutionary psychology expressed in realpolitik, with context analogous to environmental cues. Evolutionary science holds the key to human behavior manipulation — for switching from one established organic behavior module to another, from one suite of adaptive algorithms to another, at both the individual and collective levels. Environmental and contextual cues are all-important, as they epi-genetically trigger shifts from one behavior-algorithm to another. Changes in environmental cues are able to redirect feelings (behavior) from one behavioral module (one set of algorithms for “THEMs” — “competition”) to another module (another set of algorithms for “USes” — “cooperation”). This can be done surprisingly easily, given that the differences between “USes” and “THEMs” are largely arbitrary and often objectively insignificant. [The pernicious and distracting myth of the “Unique Individual” — divide-and-conquer identity-politics atomized to the personal level…] Examples: The Rwanda Tutsi massacre is instructive since it was well documented, and it was easy to see the transitions from people living side by side, to one side hacking the others to bits with machetes, and then back again. One striking thing was that the same people who had killed most of a woman's family re-bonded with the woman, who had managed to escape the country, and they all carried on as they had before. Both the woman and those who had chopped her siblings and parents into hamburger explained it as “that was then, this is now,” and they were obviously sincere. The spontaneous “Christmas Truce” in trench warfare during the first winter of the First World War. It was just a phase shift that temporarily took them out of the prior context. This represents the opposite shift from the Rwandan one. A similar behavior switch occurred during the Cold War. One day the US and the USSR were rattling missiles at each other, the next we were cooperating — sending ships and aircraft — to save a whale and calf trapped in the Arctic ice. This, too, was temporary, as the prior 29 March 2010

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relationships (about the Cold War and about whaling) reinstated themselves almost immediately. When universal economic principles are threatened, government finds itself powerless to take practical action. Arnold illustrated this point by reference to a shanty colony in New York City which was being removed to make way for a new building. The newspaper reports of impoverished people leaving their makeshift dwellings evoked sympathy, but nothing could be done about it. To give them a dole would have a tendency to undermine the principle of rugged individualism. After the demolition work began, two unconscious men were found under one of the dwellings. As if by magic, Arnold said, principles were forgotten and “pure benevolence took charge.” The most expensive medical equipment was employed without delay. The objective was to get the men to the hospital, not to discuss abstract philosophy. Note that in this example individuals more-readily triggered the shift than an abstract “class” of the homeless. Clearly, the “Us versus Him” module is very different than “Us versus Them.” A woman comes into a store and says to the shopkeeper, “One Dollar for a bottle of milk is outrageous! I am going to take it but am only going to pay you fifty Cents” (The shopkeeper calls the cops...). Compare with, “I need that bottle of milk for my starving child, but I only have fifty cents. Please help me save my baby...” (The shopkeeper gives her the milk...). This represents the same physical transaction, but different shopkeeper behavior because of different evolved brain domains being engaged. Salesmen have been exploiting this domainswitch forever. Here’s how growing corporations have been exploiting Americans for the last 100 years: The Century of Self Part 1, Adam Curtis on advertising. Thus, the perception of context can have a huge bearing on how humans react to, and engage with, a situation. The dynamics of these phase shifts may share many features with the sort of phase-state transitions seen in inanimate systems, both behaving as complex non-linear open systems with emergent properties (e.g., the phase shift). Slowly-driven systems in which the individual units have a binary choice of states and are affected by the units around them, tend to produce similar critical-point behavior whether the units are human or nonliving. That’s why we see a Pareto distribution in the number of people killed in wars: a war doesn't know how big it’s going to be, just as an earthquake doesn’t. When humans switch context, they are switching brain “domains” (problem-solving algorithmsets). How a situation is cognitively framed can make a big difference in the shift itself, and in its stability and longevity. [SIDEBAR: Evolution scientists have caused a lot of confusion with the jargon “domain.” Domain means “problem.” “Domain-general” means “problem-general” or “general-problem.” They should have used ordinary words. Humans evolved no “problem-general” reasoning architecture. All adaptations exist to solve specific (and immediate) environmental problems or challenges. Specific problems might be how to obtain food or a mate, kill something, keep warm, and so on. Economic models claim that all animals evolved “problem-general” reasoning. In other words, humans are supposed to be contain an unbelievably fast math processor that is able to calculate all the various probabilities of success for all the various decisions that might attain their goals. This represents an instinctive habit of using teleology as a political manipulation, as part of other-worldly religions invented to externalize and objectify the social powers of the Oligarchs.] This context-switch is used all the time by the elites on the proles, but who will do it for the elites? [Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? with Plato’s “noble lie” inverted, or perverted in realpolitic.] 29 March 2010

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Since people make decisions not on the basis of reasoned discourse, and certainly not on the basis of science, but on the basis of affiliation (“self-context”) and direction from their tribal leaders and their front-men, then the shift-maker will be social-marketing, a propaganda campaign to change the affiliation, the “US,” to a larger system, contributing to the integrity of which requires certain changes… A “movement,” a re-connection to some visceral primordial earth-experience, some primateband social archetype pumped up into today, to motivate and mobilize the narcotized masses. Incentives from the Pleistocene: dopamine, not money. The AGW campaign is trying to be something like this, but there are too many “USes” and too few “THEMs” in the fray (in fact, the “Them” is mostly “Us,” anyway), so focus is diffused and outright impaired. Faction versus faction of the Oligarchy, each with its own agendas, and patterns of conflict of interest. Ordinarily the Oligarchs work on the Proles; they also work on each other. Proles originate little movement-motivation, but can sneak into the “reasoned discourse” side of the conversation, the least powerful part. What is it that determines factional ascendancy? How can we know? Plus, the dread AGW end-game scenario isn’t really credible on its own terms to motivate change: beyond being an increasingly transparent fabrication, it’s just too slow, abstract, and distant. I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience. Al Gore We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. Stephen Schneider, climate scientist and environmental activist, in Discover, October 1989 It’s not immediately viscerally scary enough, and it’s only an illusion of change anyway, for the AGW promoters want business as usual with Cap-and-Trade-like wrinkles, not substantive change (i.e., any departure from a petroleum-based energy-regime under their control). They don’t want people to get too connected to the earth, and most of all not to each other. “Divide and conquer” taken to the ultimate level: divisions of one. But the AGW and similar conversations are useful to provide reifiable “objective” principles to distract attention away from the Oligarchic players’ corporate proxies and practices, and provide pictures in the heads of both the elites and the Proles. Pictures like convenient “THEMs” to counter our “USes” against, even if those THEMs are innocent bystanders such as natural forces, the Commons, Acts of God, or contrived noise to make it unclear which is which. It is important to always keep in mind that these are all reified abstractions to be manipulated like a squeeze-box — the pictures, the principles, the USes and the THEMs — with most of their effect pre-conscious and pre-choice. Notwithstanding the above, the AGW indoctrination, religiosity, and consequent “public policy” changes may be the Oligarchs’ systematic attempt to limit economic activity, put a workable part of a shrinking population on rationed welfare in debt-bondage, and move thereby toward a rebalanced polity — all while maintaining and advancing their hegemony. In the worst case, that 29 March 2010

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polity is covertly totalitarian corporate fascism in its operations, run with a stratified and rigid neo-feudal class structure. The best case isn’t even in the conversation, because the veils of illusion are impenetrable to people who are already convinced they are “free,” and lack the knowledge and critical capacities to perceive other dimensions of the simple facts of governance in place. No a priori reason exists that prevents a "public authoritarian government" from incentivizing as much as "private authoritarian government” (corporations). In actual practice in our polity the distinction has essentially disappeared, with the private covertly subsuming the public. [Intersection.pdf]

However Again…

tools and means

Some genomes are, in net, naturally superior Some phenotypes are, in net, naturally superior Some cultures are, in net, naturally superior Resiliant versus dogmatic Self-limiting (despite such limitation not being available at the genetic level) More or less manipulable Denial-resistant Low-corruptibility Courageous Have a dynamic elite Openly cyclic from less power-desperation Rote dynasticism versus genuine meritocracy, which is only possible if detached from market values, if power is detached from market values We can put an end to oligarchy and plutocracy, by assuring adequacy of livelihood and meaningof-life enhancements no matter what. This would require: General sustainability or not credible Reduced population and different ambitions Redefined US, broader with more systems- and other-inclusion Social engineering (standards, rules, and laws) versus cultural engineering (mores and memes) Cultural engineering versus genetic engineering Present culture on death-spiral Can’t make conscious realistic collective choices Individual choices, yes, but mob-drownable by the Oligarchy

Memes Memes are constructs that have cognitive and emotional hooks into all levels of human existence (biological, cultural, social, personal). They contain elements that engage pre-existing values, visions, missions, means, and knowledge. They capitalize and ride on pre-existing identifications and relationships. See the Intersection.ppt document. 29 March 2010

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Memes occur and arise spontaneously from the community conversation (mostly implicitly, but they can be made explicit). A consciously-directed conversation can discover spontaneous natural memes consonant with the community’s net shared values and vision, which be used as a tool for social evolution and healthy relationship with the Commons. Memes can also be synthesized and planted into the conversation to effect a pre-defined policy. Just as the Iraq war and the War on Terror were assembled memes (for which the “intelligence” was fixed to support a pre-established policy), the War on Global Warming is an assembled meme (for which the “science” has been fixed to support a pre-defined policy). Memes carry codons that represent associations of content that link experiences from multiple levels with an action invitation and a promise of status. Memes represent a suite of associated symbols that cross levels (cultural, social, personal), with consciousness appropriate to the level. Some symbols glyphic, some action/motion connected, some syntactical. Memes are capsules of tightly-connected, language-connected symbols to activate standard preadapted impulses directed toward social settings and people to elicit action. So a meme is a story-line that connects pre-existing, well-selected-for, standard somatic and mental algorithmic reactions through images and words, (mostly simple “names” and verbs). Like an iceberg, most of any given meme is invisible, deep under the surface of self-aware consciousness, in the warm bosom of the Pleistocene tickling the twitchy perineum of the mind. All are grounded in the biological level, engaged at the cultural level (through religiosity and tribal affiliation), implemented in the social level (through indoctrination and regulation), and supported in the more-or-less conscious personal and identity-group level through manipulated “facts” and identity politics. The Oligarchs (or a significant alliance of factions of them) use memes for cultural engineering to accomplish social-behavior change. This, coupled with selection events (civilizational collapse, climate change, political upheaval, famines, etc.) will result in, and inform, genetic change, by expanding the range of behaviors (algorithmic and de novo) triggered by different environmental cues and expressed for selection to act through. Wilber: up-holon, up-Spiral, MoQ: _______ Abandon post-Modern no-values relativistic nihilism that has resulted in over-reliance on simplistic market values (memes in themselves), so we must, for the most part, abandon economics as value-set, as it is a rationalization and concealment of the Pleistocene absolutism of power Adopt post-Post-Modern operational superiority of value-sets Transition: how to give old-paradigm kinds of power to new-paradigm persons and groups Find, invent, plant memes to activate up-Spiral instead of down-Spiral The old myths are set in place as archetypes New myths, transmitted as memes, replace the old myths (archetypes) for the individual (the identity, the self) and for the collective,

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Memes have content native to all levels in Intersection.ppt Blood: Personal, family, clan, tribe, Affiliation: Nation, species, Family and Order, “Gaians,” “Whole-Earthers,” … Can build the dynamic meme: several whole suites of interlocking associations intersecting with several armies of adaptive algorithms, taking advantage of pieces from other, prior, conditioning, the more emotive and experiential the better (e.g., movies versus history), preconscious associations versus chosen “reasonableness,” … Building memes is a craft, as it moves and assembles protons and electrons (not to mention photons, …) and has behavior- and social-change results that are evidentiary measurable in terms of human-values and as basis for vision, mission, means, outcomes, benefit, etc., etc. (that useful Model for Community Change, again). How powerful do we want this to be? Plant a meme, and then fine-tune it in real-time (“media,” buzz, groupthink, indoctrination, fear-reactiveness and induced (partly chemical, partly entrainment with electromagnetic, visual beats, rhythm, …) shock and immobilization and sense of disconnection and disengagement so no-where to start to act otherwise, no fulcrum remaining for a lever of intention and activity not consonant with that meme: forcibly implant that meme into the culture. And here we have the thing replicating itself in a fractal of self-imaging, building the component-array itself builds the complexity and the productivity and the integration with the energy demands and collapse latent in any such balance of all the components. Health begets health. That’s one reason why “sacrifice” doesn’t work. You can’t prepare for peace by making war, etc., etc. … Law of attraction: what you focus on is what tends to happen, so live and focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want and (especially) what you are afraid of. Just be afraid, it can’t be “handled” by doing. So fear memes are inherently unstable and must be escalated until they collapse (as with the money meme, market values, and irredeemable debt). Can we say that memes codify a desired result? Are they teleological? Certainly the manufactured memes are. That memes are a shorthand for an evocable experience and advocacy? That memes are in a fractal relationship to their up-and-down-holon counterparts? Social memes carry codons that represent associations of content that link experiences from multiple levels with an action invitation and a promise of solidified or improved social status. Memes are capsules of language-connected symbols to activate pre-adaptive impulses organized around social symbols and people to elicit action. Capsules work like a virus sheath, carrying antibodies and activation-sites into any eukaryote cell or organism, its interface, sensor-array, its fortress/prison, its operational identity, its self-myth, its family/lineage myth, its tribal myth, its animal myth, its creation myth. Somewhere in there is a “purpose” myth, but buried deep, except when evoked by warrior-kings, priest-kings, shamans, and so forth through the social pantheon, who want to pre-empt that general purpose to their own private ends and advantage. Are memes inherently advocative? Not the natural, spontaneous memes. Most synthesized, social-manipulation memes are, and almost always covertly… Are there primordial “pro-Commons” memes that could be counter to anti-commons behaviors? (and undermine the memes that are used to exploit them by concentrating benefit from the commons in the present by exploiting the past and borrowing from the future – no algorithms for prediction and extrapolation, although some individuals can sort of build a more-or-less likely result-field from any set of known behaviors — a “model” that has to fly blind about all the 29 March 2010

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influencers it doesn’t know about (two parts to these, those we know we don’t know, and those we don’t know we don’t know (by far the majority). [Pro-commons meme example: biblical injunction to care for God’s Creation (conflicted...) => environmentalist fundamentalist Christians. Concept of “usufruct.”] Interlocking symbols in what arrays? Exploding-complexity n-dimensional factal-geometry examples, and their arrays to see/project associated symbols and their interoperations… Triangle Pentagram Geodesic Matrix Mandelbrot (all as rotations & projections & epicycles onto each other… Kepler and Dali, get to work!) Are jokes a low grade of meme? Do jokes rely on memes? [Number-of-Joke Joke… the ultimate reliance on association for communication] Are your ordinary, everyday political, commercial, and religious slogans a low grade of meme? CLUE: Sense of participation and perhaps even a whiff of power in each holonic level… Memes to synthesize for planting on behalf of the Commons, originating in a guided and structured community conversation using the Model and applying the MoQ. A good meme will ride the selection process as population declines; A good meme will tantalize with potential for increased social status (money is a sterile and distracting surface surrogate for status); A good meme will promise reward for earned merit; A good meme will feel good (which demotes the fear-based memes); A good meme will “carry;” it will “float” through the diffusion-infrastructure (media, education, hysteria, et al.); it will have legs… A good meme will self-replicate, “virally.” A good meme will hook into all levels (biological, cultural, social, and personal), be energized by pre-existing values in all, and synergized by the “cross-talk” of inter-connecting symbols and visions between them all. A good meme will activate energy for action on the missions that are archetypal, grounded in the lower levels and symbolized in the higher. A good meme will call for a giving-over to the sublimations for the ancient impulses, to obey, 29 March 2010

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to command, to flee, to fight, to attack, to cower, to embrace, to eat, to fuck, to kill, to whatever; and to reconcile the complicated associated algorithm-fields that interoperate to generate the actual net-resultant behaviors. This is pretty complicated and non-linear, and is getting more-so, and accelerating at it, too. A great meme will send shivers up and down properly pre-indoctrinated people (tribes, cultural groups, language groups all roughly equivalent, activity, religion, association) and generate a larger future (in human-connectivity terms, not population-numbers and moneytransaction (GDP) terms), a larger future whose richness will actively embrace every participant in a healthier Commons. [SIDEBAR: An enrollment invitation that promises more affiliation (with and for higher status) for participants if they surrender (as distinct from submit) will deliver an evoked surrender that is ten times more powerful (in terms of unconscious commitment and follow-through) than any social-level compelled submission (that will evoke resentment and resistance). Once again, we see we can’t legislate morality.] War, plague, and famine will be too unselective in generating change, and too fast to control without the right memes in place. Oligarchy will seek to propagate itself through advantage and immunity. The Oligarchy will want war, plague, famine, even at significant cost to itself and its members. Memes are its hook into the human psyche. Again, how can we show humanity its larger self, its larger identity, its larger myth (in the psyche, personal and cultural) and sensation (in the culture and in the body) all linked in a meme. It’s the culture that links the two, the dancing electrons and the dancing protons. Culture uses language (that’s the ground of being of culture) and complex symbols and evoked sensations from pre-conscious conditioning and association, and observed, noted, and at least semi-consciously adapted and influenced chosen modifications to the standard algorithmresolutions. So a meme is a story-line that connects pre-existing, well-selected-for, standard somatic and mental individual and group algorithmic reactions through images and words, (mostly simple “names” and verbs). Like an iceberg, most of any given meme is invisible, deep under the surface of self-aware consciousness, in the warm bosom of the Pleistocene tickling the twitchy perineum of the mind. Meme-mediated neurotransmitter rewards are greater than those from more purely symbolic or material successes. One key to making sense of this application of evolutionary psychology is to “see” —and to incorporate that view into our systemic thinking — that, although they vote, elected officials are not the “deciders;” they are the noise-makers. The "deciders" are those who control both the “environmental cues” (information flows into the decision-making process), and the memes we use to signify those cues during that process. Besides governmental officials, corporations also control the behavior of other humans (e.g., employees, customers) by controlling environmental cues and the memes we use to interpret them in the so-called “marketplace” (itself a meme). It’s how corporations came to rule the world: As corporations gain autonomous institutional power and become more detached from people and place, the human interest and the corporate interest increasingly diverge. It is almost as though we were being invaded by alien beings intent on colonizing our planet, reducing us to serfs, and then excluding as many of us as possible. David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World 29 March 2010

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Sociopathic cyborg Corporations have conquered the human world by controlling the environmental cues to which we respond algorithmically, and by defining the memes we use to respond to those cues. It's that simple. We didn’t co-evolve with corporations. We didn’t stand a chance against their covert memeregulated coup because we didn’t evolve the concepts or eyes to see them the way we can see tribal leaders and religious figures. And now that they rule the world, the puppet masters no longer care if we see the strings. The challenge for activists and advocates is to find viral memes that will originate deeper than, and ride on, exploit, and reveal the contradictions in the establishment memes. They will compel critical comparison of the nominal social reality with actual reality. They will be Commons-centric in a nominal world that has no Commons (only the “sum of interests”); they will invite a new kind of experience for people who have long been running on automatic, an experience hungered-for by the very cells of humanity from time immemorial . For example, a meme can be used to teach people to see the very corporations (i.e., “juristic persons”) that use other memes to distract from their hegemony. We can align the interests of elected officials to ours by substituting “ecological” environmental cues for “economic” cues, by building a firewall between the “political” and the “economic,” by redefining the criteria for meriting higher social status, and by placing and maintaining memes that tend to support the Commons. From that point, our unencumbered political system can go about the business of dismantling growth capitalism as gracefully as possible.

Miscellanea… LIST OF COMMON MEMES Them versus Us memes “Holocaust” Sub-memes: “Nazi” and “Hitler” “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” Us versus Nature memes (Anthropogenic) Global Warming is an us-versus-nature meme (nature = “climate change”) that has been translated into an us-versus-them meme (and maybe even into a divide-and-conquer us-versus-us meme). Us versus Them memes Image of a bi-racial couple “Atrocity” by pre-established antagonist Super-shock (like 911 hyped by media) increasing susceptibility to nomination of any villain “War on …” metaphor 29 March 2010

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Political Mythology memes “Freedom,” “Democracy,” “…,” “ Money War on Terror Religion memes Resurrection Heavenly Father and Earth Mother Afterlife memes (an integral part of religion memes) Manifest as both natural, biological memes and social-control memes. If you indoctrinate a man to believe in a reward in the afterlife, then you can suck him dry in this one. This has been happening long enough that this behavior has entered the genome as an algorithmic behavior at both the individual and group levels. All aspects of this gestalt have co-evolved, at the biological level and the cultural level, and the social level, and so it isn’t apparent that the manipulative ones are still active and being fine-tuned every day. The continuance of strong biological memes isn’t dominant enough, however, to cover the tracks of the social-construct memes for manipulation and control by the elites. Reproduction memes Control biological memes through cultural (religious) and social (regulation) memes Dystopic Tipping Point 1984 Stratification and ossification Brave New World Stratification and ossification KEY ISSUES: Net energy (and exergy), human nature (evolutionary psychology), realpolitic

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Resources A Great History of Social Manipulation http://adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com/ http://www.amazon.com/Century-Self-2-DVD-Set/dp/B000VA5Z9A The whole set of four Century of the Self videos is available online; each is 59 minutes long: Century of Century of Century of Century of

Self Self Self Self

-

Part Part Part Part

1 2 3 4

http://tinyurl.com/wzz4x http://tinyurl.com/8zjhus http://tinyurl.com/crbqcq http://tinyurl.com/2avwuo

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? context=viewArticle&code=HED20090324&articleId=12880 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality http://books.google.com/books?ei=_PLKSbrYBZ3gsAOwiPG1Cg&ct=result&q= %22Bounded+Rationality%22&btnG=Search+Books http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12880 http://www.amazon.com/Darwinism-Dominance-Democracy-AuthoritarianismIntelligence/dp/0275958175 http://www.amazon.com/Human-Nature-Public-Policy-Evolutionary/dp/1403962855 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html?_r=1&emc=eta1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Lincoln_Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12zencey.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13133 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13055 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/philosopher-john-gray-were-not-facingour-problems-weve-got-prozac-politics-1666033.html http://www.amazon.com/Straw-Dogs-Thoughts-Humans-Animals/dp/0374270937/ref=sr_1_9? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238513786&sr=1-9 The “Science of Change:” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1889153,00.html Why Isn’t the Brain Green? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19Science-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Global Cultural Evolution http://www.integralworld.net/abundis1.html 29 March 2010

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The Quiet Coup http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice On American Sustainability - Anatomy of Societal Collapse Summary http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5381#more>http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5381#more On American Sustainability – Complete Paper http://www.wakeupamerika.com/PDFs/On-American-Sustainability.pdf Evolution and Human Society http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/pdfs/Alexander2008HBES.pdf Ralph Nader, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us http://www.truthout.org/1014091 America 2.0, Jay Hanson http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5859#more Spiral Dynamics

Technocracy

48 Laws of Power

Compilation and Original Creation Copyrights 2007-2010 All Rights Reserved

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Part 3: The Social Technologies Toolkit SEP MfCC MoQ

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