George Mobus: A Winter Solstice Observation (or Two)

[GliderGuider]

A Winter Solstice Observation (or Two)

When I was growing up I thought surely the people running the show (government) must be the most intelligent and wisest people on the planet. The US had shown the world the way to progress and it was called capitalism. Growth of the economy was considered a good thing. And with good reason. If you are going to keep exponentially increasing the number of people you'd better also figure out how to feed, clothe, shelter, and entertain them. A growing economy was necessary to accommodate a growing population. Seemed simple enough.

Then I learned systems science and it all changed for me. I had long been curious about why, if my assumption about the leaders' intelligence was correct, were we not using our progress to significantly better the lives of less fortunate people around the world. Why, I wondered, were we constantly making the same kinds of mistakes our forefathers (and foremothers) made — repeating history as it were? Once I grasped how human civilizations were systems and that true intelligence and wisdom had absolutely nothing to do with anything, I realized that the system was destined to failure. A quick study of prior more localized civilizations and their collapses sealed my conviction on this. Our modern global civilization would follow suit only this time there would be nowhere for anyone to escape to.

Global leaders, economists, business people, and most everyone else seem incapable of grasping even the simplest truths about biophysical system dynamics. Growth is only a way to get to a point of system stability, it is not an end in itself. Yet you hear it everywhere — growth is good, we need more growth.

So clearly the world isn't run by the best, brightest, and most knowledgeable minds. Indeed it is quite the opposite. But then again, that seems to be the way everyone wants it, whether they realize it or not. Corporate money may be taking a giant leap in molding the political landscape in the US after “Citizens United”, but actually the trend of putting stupid, willfully ignorant people into positions of authority was well under way long before the Koch brothers figured out how to manipulate political action committees and the minds of some truly ignorant people. The people are easily duped by rhetoric (well not even rhetoric - more like slogans and sound-bites). And they get what they deserve.

George nailed it with this snippet:

"Once I grasped how human civilizations were systems and that true intelligence and wisdom had absolutely nothing to do with anything, I realized that the system was destined to failure. A quick study of prior more localized civilizations and their collapses sealed my conviction on this. Our modern global civilization would follow suit only this time there would be nowhere for anyone to escape to."

Thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and systems science all point to the same ineluctable conclusion. 90% or more of all human behavior is driven by these impersonal, unconscious forces - and we are largely blind to that that fact. Those few who do see it simply realize that human volition is mostly a comforting illusion that is powerless against the dissipative, self-organizing forces of nature. As a result, the human race is pretty well run.

Merry Christmas to all!

[kristopher]

1. Sex, gluttony and hoarding marked evolution of flowering plants

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112760627

[GliderGuider]

3. Sure - it's the Odum-Lotka Maximum Power Principle at work

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle

Suitably colored with human value judgments of course.

It looks like this behavior may be built into the structure of DNA itself, given that all living organisms display self-interested growth-oriented behavior patterns. Including humans.

And this innate behavior is naturally used as the template for building human societies. In turn, our societies become templates for building our globalized, techno-industrial, cybernetic civilization.

[Bigmack]

2. Thanks for posting this

I love this guy…..went over to meet him at the U of W, Tacoma, and he's a wonderful listener…real gentleman, and obviously BRILLIANT! I ALWAYS follow his web site. Ms Bigmack

[Warpy]

4. I came to the same conclusion years ago, albeit less elegantly stated

and it gives me a great deal of comfort to know empires, especially the personal empires as designed by rich men like the Koch boys, have their ultimate failure built right into them. So do empires created by overreaching and greedy tradesmen.

The species as a whole continues to grow, albeit two steps forward, one and a half steps back. Nature has come down on the side of the progressive, but only just. Even if we are thrust back into a new dark age by a regressive, backwards looking repressive system, it won't last, either. Climate change will throw a spanner into the works nicely and rigid totalitarianism will be only a very local phenomenon as adaptation becomes the key to survival.

I won't see it, of course, but I do envy the young a bit because they will.

[Iterate]

5. Sapolsky's baboons

I've always liked the title of Mobus' blog, 'Question Everything', because it implies question-turtles all the way down; for some people it's job security, for others it's a path to unemployability.

Yet, there will always be things he doesn't question. He frequently leaves out infrastructure as the main variable of consumption, even though it has a far larger and more immediate effect. And here he's forgotten that there is no such "thing" as "global civilization"; that idea is a human construct, a useful shorthand. The truth is in one person, making one action, at one time and place, based on the available resources and a culture which carries the knowledge of using those resources. Smaller bites, chew slowly.

I'm reminded of Robert Sapolsky and his glucocorticoid study of the Keekorok baboon troop. If there could have been such a thing as a wise and sentient baboon among the troop, on the day before the alpha males ate the TB-tainted meat the world must have looked impossibly grim: glucocorticoid deterministic, no escape from the cycle of violence, and doomed to a collapse through that violence, especially when the garbage dump was gone and other skills had been lost. A true Hobbesian nightmare if there ever was one.

Yet, the next day, the now majority females and remaining non-alpha males began building a thriving new baboon culture based on cooperation; glucocorticoid levels in their blood plummeted. That particular baboon culture had had a reset. Now the next generation of baboons in that troop didn't need to know that backstory, they didn't need to all be wise and sentient. They only needed to have part of the new culture transmitted to them: groom each other often, and no hyper-aggressive males need apply for membership.