Nate, I don't think you could change, add, or remove a single word from this essay and have it be any clearer of a summary for what we're experiencing in this current human predicament. It is precisely as clear and accurate as it can be, and that is amazing. Outstanding job.
The obviousness of the problem and our uncanny ability to disassociate our individual behaviour from its cause suggest that its roots are deeply engrained in what we are as an animal. The thin veneer of reason that we have used to allow us to exploit the surplus the planet has proven no match for the millions of years of evolved instinct that drives our core behaviours. The concept of sufficiency is foreign to our understanding of survival. The moral disconnect that allows us to rationalize the precedence of not just our immediate survival but the satisfaction of all our immediate desires over the needs of anyone or anything that will come after us is an Achilles heel that has taken an arrow. Obtaining more was the primary driver of our ancestors and it served them well in what once was, for all intents and purposes, an infinite world. Although the overshoot at a planetary level has only being going on for 50 or so years, the behaviour that has led us here has always been a hallmark of most of what we think of as civilization. We have repeatedly devastated local ecosystems wherever we have settled forcing us to move on to somewhere new where we can repeat the rape and pillage cycle. Unfortunately for us and the rest of life here we have now come full circle and although we are slowly (way too slowly) clueing into the fact that this is not a sustainable exercise we have in the meantime created (become)a blind monster consumption machine with no off switch. We are doomed to watch it collapse upon itself and hope that something might survive that just maybe will have a little smaller ego than us and a bit more forethought than we seem to be able to muster. I blame entropy for starting the problem and VMAT2 and its perhaps yet to be discovered partners in crime for coming up with a less than ideal solution to keep us from obsessing over the simple reality of our individual finiteness at the expense of remembering to eat and procreate.
I have some question marks over the dynamics of individual and collective action in relation to the superorganism.
First, you say "Unfortunately, at a global scale, individual behaviours and choices are “downstream” of the aggregate behaviour of the Economic Superorganism." Which I interpret as you saying our actions have little influence on the general action and direction of the Superorganism/machine/system.
Then later, you say if ~3% of us could change, then "maybe things could change".
Could you expand on this more? I'd be interested to hear your views.
In my view, the percentage of the global population adopting a low-consumption lifestyle that it would take to make a significant impact on the carrying capacity of the earth is so large that I believe it is beyond the scope of voluntary action. It's like one of those difficult but ultimately good decisions, like resisting another sugary treat or not just taking the car instead of cycling when it's cold.
Most of us don't have the will-power, and are too dopamine-addicted, distracted or in denial to make the difficult but good decision by ourselves and on the necessary scale. We're predisposed to familiarity and convenience as a result of calorie-conservation. I'm no expert on behavioural psychology, but it seems to me some extrinsic stimuli is required, we have to be able to see and feel that to change is better, or more convenient, than not changing.
I don't think we can rely on that extrinsic stimuli coming from "top-down" sources like our broken politics, either. I see a more likely source coming from social movements, “side-by-side” connections that link together the “bottom-up” actions. The decentralised networks that motivate, incentivise and invite collective action. Ideally with enough of a social component to appeal to the parts of our brain that prioritise belonging to the tribe. Maybe we need to hack our base mammalian brains at the same time as elevating our consciousness to motivate us towards the change we need?
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the nature-backed economy you mentioned in the antidotes, as well as syntropic technology.
Well crafted, Nate. You've pulled together major themes which should help those who are new to these concepts better grasp whole-system analysis. I question where the ~3% comes from, as the tail rarely wags the dog. I also note that several billion in INvoluntary simplicity rightly do all possible to increase their energy/material throughput. It seems the quadrupling of our numbers in 1C (lifespan of some living people) has made voluntary adjustment of the Superorganism impossible. Nature will rebalance, but global cooperation by Homo superstitious is unlikely to help in my view.
Thank you so much Nate! I really appreciate all your input. I was, however, also wondering about the 3% which I think must be clearer defined. There are many more than 3% of the world population living - involuntarily - simple lives, often in poverty or at least livelihoods without long term security. What I guess you mean is if 3% of the people being part of the richest 10% of the world population would start showing how it is possible to live simple, yet very good lives (maybe even better lives) - with much less consumption and energy use? But, I am curious to learn more about where the 3% came from and hear you explain this more!
Thanks. This is an excellent idea to create and publish these frankly essays. I appreciated in particular how you note longer term depletion of the carrying capacity.
"‘antidotes’ to our overshoot predicament will likely be forced upon us by biophysical constraints - such as depleting energy and mineral resources. "
This has been my working assumption as well but now I am not so sure. I think it is more accurate to think of it in terms of a trajectory in which we end up with a new feudalism or apartheid, characterised by mass immiseration vs obscenely wealthy elites
Pat, perhaps that will be a small price to pay if we survive as a species, which is not a certain outcome. William Rees will occasionally remind us that there has never been a muscle-based civilization that did not include an underclass to supply labor. Personally, my research indicates that the great sloughing off of population will be driven by opportunistic disease after months of malnutrition as explained by Ecologist Adam Fenech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKDjjX4v6Ds Nate, it would be great if you could search him out (has he gone dark?) for an interview.
“It is my opinion that the situation is hopeless, that the human race has produced an ecological tip over point… but assuming there is a possibility of changing the society’s “course in the darkness deathward set,” it can only be done by infection, infiltration, diffusion and imperceptibility, microscopically throughout the social organism, like the invisible pellets of a disease called Health.” -Kenneth Rexroth, “Radical Movements on the Defensive,” San Francisco Magazine, July 1969.
I agree with almost everything here, but I think we should be more skeptical of the teleological perspective adopted by some energy scholars (like Carey King in The Economic Superorganism, which is otherwise a great book that I enjoyed reading). Economic or technological systems don't have any fixed or or teleological destiny. They're not inherently aiming to "maximize throughput" or "maximize efficiency" or "maximize work" or any such notion. There are no laws of physics that say anything like that. Technological change in our current age is instead subsumed under the wider class-power dynamics and political conflicts of modern capitalism. In other words, technological and economic development are driven by the unique social, political, and economic conditions that prevail in a given historical age. The billionaires in Silicon Valley and Wall Street have decided that AI is the ultimate superpower and so they're pouring hundreds of billions in capex along with vast amounts of energy and resources into data centers and other related infrastructure. These moves will drive up energy use and resource consumption, but they're not predestined or anything.
Am obvious counterpoint to this kind of technological determinism is Tokugawa Japan in the late 17th century, a society that was facing a severe deforestation crisis which threatened to cripple agriculture and topple the whole social and political system. The Japanese state, in conjuction with local authorities, then implemented and enforced a series of major economic changes focused on promoting conservation and economic stability. This led to stable population trends, stable energy use, and stable resource consumption for a century and a half. The result was the reforestation of Japan by the 19th century, avoiding what would otherwise have been a catastrophic collapse.
I think it's important to emphasize this point because it underscores that we have some agency as human beings regarding the future course of our civilizational development. We are not destined for overshoot. We can make different choices. I absolutely agree that if we stay in the current capitalist trajectory then we are definitely heading for overshoot. But the hope is that, for one reason or another, we can break this dreadful trajectory at some point in the future and adopt new systems that are compatible with the long-run stability of our biosphere.
A good read, and no mention of Planetary Boundaries needed. It reminded me of your chat with Steve Keen about “Energy Blindness” a year ago.
With the huge increase in renewables adding to, not replacing, fossil fuel energy, I do wonder whether we are just moving from a carbon to a renewable pulse, with the latter capable of lasting a lot longer than the former? Our consumption, waste and pollution appears boundless, until physics steps in with “Enough!”
There are fewer smoke and mirrors outside, we exist under the veils of deception.
Confusion must be maintained at all cost, that is the plan in the war against the citizen.
The concept of punishing the gambling, (2008) was bipolar, either remove the substance and experience rage, or increase it to keep it quiet.
We have created super nerds in capes of their imaginary gift to cheat, the underwear is still on the outside of the tights, the jester is still of bipolarity, and the king still sleepless in mind blowing complexity, no single human could exist under, nor find a way to land the plane on auto pilot.
Carbon junkies short on experience, and modified by sterility and Teflon, nothing sticks, they walk freely among us to check the pulse.
(Meta data, or did we forget already the live uptick?)
Pathetic 7 misleading drivers. Why? Because you willy nilly forgot to mention the #1 driver of overshoot being Capitalism. Never to count the real overshoot of capital accumulation, war, imperialism, first world emissions, wealth inequality - all that which is collectively destroying the planet, the biosphere and poor people. Instead we have these great abstractions, of bourgeois planetary reform. Carry on, this bogus Capitalist Green Reform!
I'd suggest these 'drivers' are rather an emergent subset of the fundamental driver of #overshoot, which for all species, in ecological science, is access to a temporary energy surplus.
Other exacerbating elements, described here as drivers, are all emergent phenomena entirely premised on this fundamental.
Yes - our evolved human mind is entirely ill-suited to effectively grappling with our predicament which is why "on aggregate" we haven't, and why we won't.
Sure, hypothetically, if we'd evolved with different brains then we wouldn't be in this predicament but that all seems rather moot now.
No amount of 'changing our minds' or transforming our consciousness, or 'awakening our true natures', or whatever other new age voodoo, is going to change the reality that we are now approximately #8billion more humans on this planet than could've ever sustained long-term.
Perfect. I’ve been putting together my own “How we got here” piece, only to realize that with all of knowledge on these subjects, I find myself quoting you the most. Such clear communication. Naturally, I’ll just share this piece instead. Thank you. 🖖
Thank you Nate, great systemic overview of the dynamics taking us-global humanity toward overshoot. I think Donella Meadows arrived at the same conclusion. In point 4 Status, you mentioned "Humans are a social species" I would encourage you to expand our understanding of our human natures, and human predispositions for good and evil, such as Edward O Wilson has explained in his work, ignoring these predispositions makes us blind to our destructive behaviors. In one of your interviews with Ian Mcgillchrist, he explains the influence of the left brain in our current global predicament, this adds understanding to some of the roots-systems driving us toward collapse, There are many people , organizations and movements working to transform this global predicament , however the 3% is lacking in leadership skills, strategy, and collaboration , including money to ,make a significant impact at this moment. But there are people like Kohei Saito " Slow Down" and the Degrowth Movement. There are visions of a better world but we need an effective movement. Keep up the good work, Manuel
Nate, I don't think you could change, add, or remove a single word from this essay and have it be any clearer of a summary for what we're experiencing in this current human predicament. It is precisely as clear and accurate as it can be, and that is amazing. Outstanding job.
The obviousness of the problem and our uncanny ability to disassociate our individual behaviour from its cause suggest that its roots are deeply engrained in what we are as an animal. The thin veneer of reason that we have used to allow us to exploit the surplus the planet has proven no match for the millions of years of evolved instinct that drives our core behaviours. The concept of sufficiency is foreign to our understanding of survival. The moral disconnect that allows us to rationalize the precedence of not just our immediate survival but the satisfaction of all our immediate desires over the needs of anyone or anything that will come after us is an Achilles heel that has taken an arrow. Obtaining more was the primary driver of our ancestors and it served them well in what once was, for all intents and purposes, an infinite world. Although the overshoot at a planetary level has only being going on for 50 or so years, the behaviour that has led us here has always been a hallmark of most of what we think of as civilization. We have repeatedly devastated local ecosystems wherever we have settled forcing us to move on to somewhere new where we can repeat the rape and pillage cycle. Unfortunately for us and the rest of life here we have now come full circle and although we are slowly (way too slowly) clueing into the fact that this is not a sustainable exercise we have in the meantime created (become)a blind monster consumption machine with no off switch. We are doomed to watch it collapse upon itself and hope that something might survive that just maybe will have a little smaller ego than us and a bit more forethought than we seem to be able to muster. I blame entropy for starting the problem and VMAT2 and its perhaps yet to be discovered partners in crime for coming up with a less than ideal solution to keep us from obsessing over the simple reality of our individual finiteness at the expense of remembering to eat and procreate.
Thanks for this nicely structured summary.
I have some question marks over the dynamics of individual and collective action in relation to the superorganism.
First, you say "Unfortunately, at a global scale, individual behaviours and choices are “downstream” of the aggregate behaviour of the Economic Superorganism." Which I interpret as you saying our actions have little influence on the general action and direction of the Superorganism/machine/system.
Then later, you say if ~3% of us could change, then "maybe things could change".
Could you expand on this more? I'd be interested to hear your views.
In my view, the percentage of the global population adopting a low-consumption lifestyle that it would take to make a significant impact on the carrying capacity of the earth is so large that I believe it is beyond the scope of voluntary action. It's like one of those difficult but ultimately good decisions, like resisting another sugary treat or not just taking the car instead of cycling when it's cold.
Most of us don't have the will-power, and are too dopamine-addicted, distracted or in denial to make the difficult but good decision by ourselves and on the necessary scale. We're predisposed to familiarity and convenience as a result of calorie-conservation. I'm no expert on behavioural psychology, but it seems to me some extrinsic stimuli is required, we have to be able to see and feel that to change is better, or more convenient, than not changing.
I don't think we can rely on that extrinsic stimuli coming from "top-down" sources like our broken politics, either. I see a more likely source coming from social movements, “side-by-side” connections that link together the “bottom-up” actions. The decentralised networks that motivate, incentivise and invite collective action. Ideally with enough of a social component to appeal to the parts of our brain that prioritise belonging to the tribe. Maybe we need to hack our base mammalian brains at the same time as elevating our consciousness to motivate us towards the change we need?
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the nature-backed economy you mentioned in the antidotes, as well as syntropic technology.
With gratitude and hope.
Well crafted, Nate. You've pulled together major themes which should help those who are new to these concepts better grasp whole-system analysis. I question where the ~3% comes from, as the tail rarely wags the dog. I also note that several billion in INvoluntary simplicity rightly do all possible to increase their energy/material throughput. It seems the quadrupling of our numbers in 1C (lifespan of some living people) has made voluntary adjustment of the Superorganism impossible. Nature will rebalance, but global cooperation by Homo superstitious is unlikely to help in my view.
Thank you so much Nate! I really appreciate all your input. I was, however, also wondering about the 3% which I think must be clearer defined. There are many more than 3% of the world population living - involuntarily - simple lives, often in poverty or at least livelihoods without long term security. What I guess you mean is if 3% of the people being part of the richest 10% of the world population would start showing how it is possible to live simple, yet very good lives (maybe even better lives) - with much less consumption and energy use? But, I am curious to learn more about where the 3% came from and hear you explain this more!
Hi Nate,
Thanks. This is an excellent idea to create and publish these frankly essays. I appreciated in particular how you note longer term depletion of the carrying capacity.
"‘antidotes’ to our overshoot predicament will likely be forced upon us by biophysical constraints - such as depleting energy and mineral resources. "
This has been my working assumption as well but now I am not so sure. I think it is more accurate to think of it in terms of a trajectory in which we end up with a new feudalism or apartheid, characterised by mass immiseration vs obscenely wealthy elites
Pat, perhaps that will be a small price to pay if we survive as a species, which is not a certain outcome. William Rees will occasionally remind us that there has never been a muscle-based civilization that did not include an underclass to supply labor. Personally, my research indicates that the great sloughing off of population will be driven by opportunistic disease after months of malnutrition as explained by Ecologist Adam Fenech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKDjjX4v6Ds Nate, it would be great if you could search him out (has he gone dark?) for an interview.
“It is my opinion that the situation is hopeless, that the human race has produced an ecological tip over point… but assuming there is a possibility of changing the society’s “course in the darkness deathward set,” it can only be done by infection, infiltration, diffusion and imperceptibility, microscopically throughout the social organism, like the invisible pellets of a disease called Health.” -Kenneth Rexroth, “Radical Movements on the Defensive,” San Francisco Magazine, July 1969.
Nate, this is a fantastic summary of our current predicament. We all have a duty to share this far and wide. Thank you.
I agree with almost everything here, but I think we should be more skeptical of the teleological perspective adopted by some energy scholars (like Carey King in The Economic Superorganism, which is otherwise a great book that I enjoyed reading). Economic or technological systems don't have any fixed or or teleological destiny. They're not inherently aiming to "maximize throughput" or "maximize efficiency" or "maximize work" or any such notion. There are no laws of physics that say anything like that. Technological change in our current age is instead subsumed under the wider class-power dynamics and political conflicts of modern capitalism. In other words, technological and economic development are driven by the unique social, political, and economic conditions that prevail in a given historical age. The billionaires in Silicon Valley and Wall Street have decided that AI is the ultimate superpower and so they're pouring hundreds of billions in capex along with vast amounts of energy and resources into data centers and other related infrastructure. These moves will drive up energy use and resource consumption, but they're not predestined or anything.
Am obvious counterpoint to this kind of technological determinism is Tokugawa Japan in the late 17th century, a society that was facing a severe deforestation crisis which threatened to cripple agriculture and topple the whole social and political system. The Japanese state, in conjuction with local authorities, then implemented and enforced a series of major economic changes focused on promoting conservation and economic stability. This led to stable population trends, stable energy use, and stable resource consumption for a century and a half. The result was the reforestation of Japan by the 19th century, avoiding what would otherwise have been a catastrophic collapse.
I think it's important to emphasize this point because it underscores that we have some agency as human beings regarding the future course of our civilizational development. We are not destined for overshoot. We can make different choices. I absolutely agree that if we stay in the current capitalist trajectory then we are definitely heading for overshoot. But the hope is that, for one reason or another, we can break this dreadful trajectory at some point in the future and adopt new systems that are compatible with the long-run stability of our biosphere.
A good read, and no mention of Planetary Boundaries needed. It reminded me of your chat with Steve Keen about “Energy Blindness” a year ago.
With the huge increase in renewables adding to, not replacing, fossil fuel energy, I do wonder whether we are just moving from a carbon to a renewable pulse, with the latter capable of lasting a lot longer than the former? Our consumption, waste and pollution appears boundless, until physics steps in with “Enough!”
There are fewer smoke and mirrors outside, we exist under the veils of deception.
Confusion must be maintained at all cost, that is the plan in the war against the citizen.
The concept of punishing the gambling, (2008) was bipolar, either remove the substance and experience rage, or increase it to keep it quiet.
We have created super nerds in capes of their imaginary gift to cheat, the underwear is still on the outside of the tights, the jester is still of bipolarity, and the king still sleepless in mind blowing complexity, no single human could exist under, nor find a way to land the plane on auto pilot.
Carbon junkies short on experience, and modified by sterility and Teflon, nothing sticks, they walk freely among us to check the pulse.
(Meta data, or did we forget already the live uptick?)
Pathetic 7 misleading drivers. Why? Because you willy nilly forgot to mention the #1 driver of overshoot being Capitalism. Never to count the real overshoot of capital accumulation, war, imperialism, first world emissions, wealth inequality - all that which is collectively destroying the planet, the biosphere and poor people. Instead we have these great abstractions, of bourgeois planetary reform. Carry on, this bogus Capitalist Green Reform!
I'd suggest these 'drivers' are rather an emergent subset of the fundamental driver of #overshoot, which for all species, in ecological science, is access to a temporary energy surplus.
Other exacerbating elements, described here as drivers, are all emergent phenomena entirely premised on this fundamental.
Yes - our evolved human mind is entirely ill-suited to effectively grappling with our predicament which is why "on aggregate" we haven't, and why we won't.
Sure, hypothetically, if we'd evolved with different brains then we wouldn't be in this predicament but that all seems rather moot now.
No amount of 'changing our minds' or transforming our consciousness, or 'awakening our true natures', or whatever other new age voodoo, is going to change the reality that we are now approximately #8billion more humans on this planet than could've ever sustained long-term.
#TheEnd
Perfect. I’ve been putting together my own “How we got here” piece, only to realize that with all of knowledge on these subjects, I find myself quoting you the most. Such clear communication. Naturally, I’ll just share this piece instead. Thank you. 🖖
Enjoyed this -- thanks for sharing Nate. Good on you for writing!
Addressing these issues requires taking back control of the commons into community hands as a base starting point.
Thank you Nate, great systemic overview of the dynamics taking us-global humanity toward overshoot. I think Donella Meadows arrived at the same conclusion. In point 4 Status, you mentioned "Humans are a social species" I would encourage you to expand our understanding of our human natures, and human predispositions for good and evil, such as Edward O Wilson has explained in his work, ignoring these predispositions makes us blind to our destructive behaviors. In one of your interviews with Ian Mcgillchrist, he explains the influence of the left brain in our current global predicament, this adds understanding to some of the roots-systems driving us toward collapse, There are many people , organizations and movements working to transform this global predicament , however the 3% is lacking in leadership skills, strategy, and collaboration , including money to ,make a significant impact at this moment. But there are people like Kohei Saito " Slow Down" and the Degrowth Movement. There are visions of a better world but we need an effective movement. Keep up the good work, Manuel