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More complexity, more dealing with

May 11, 2024

This is really a follow up to the last post where some ways of dealing with features of complexity have been discussed. Some of this is a bit vague but that is because knowledge about complex systems is often symbolic and points somewhere, rather than finds its object easily..

  • Refrain from further disrupting an already disrupted system by pushing it towards disruption, unless there is a good reason to believe correction will kick in. Be experimental as such a procedure can be disastrous, without safety back ups
  • Cultivate diversity and redundancy. We can ask what redundancy might need increase? I suspect that rather than cutting back social security we need to prepare to increase it, to deal with the oncoming flood of disasters that will spiral through the system
  • Be aware that the system can be maladaptive and adjust it away from that as gently as possible, seeking the fictional balance, stopping imbalance and reducing the maladaptive tendencies. This may not be easy, and will probably take political action.
  • Be aware of the dynamic contexts of any challenge within complex systems. Boundaries are generally fictions.
  • Realise that changes will interact with different systems. Systems can only rarely be isolated. It is probable that systemic problems will require many different approaches simultaneously, so that many of the systems involved can change together. I’ve suggested that it is useful to consider seven mutually interactive systems.
    • Ecology and Planetary Boundaries – the donut in Donut Economics
    • Energy systems – as these are fundamental to what can be done, and are also often implicated in power relations
    • Technology, what is available, how much energy it takes, how much pollution and harm it enables, what it links that was previously separated, how it affects power/economic relations
    • Illth production: pollution, recyclable waste, harm to workers and users, dispersion of material, physical entropy, destructive extraction
    • Economics and power. Money and modes of organisation are inseparable from power and regulation.
    • Information – tells or hides awareness from people.
    • Psychology, most social behaviour cannot be deduced from psychology, but psychology is implicated in social behaviour.
  • Small changes can make big differences. Look for tipping points.
  • Knowledge is fundamentally uncertain and we will be unconscious, or unaware, of some important factors.
  • Information is always being distorted, by business, governmental and self-confirmation processes. It can never be certain, but we can try and make it as reliable as possible and not ignore all stuff we don’t disagree with.
  • We live with limited predictability, and inherent uncertainty, so wee need to be ready to find out how experimental policies work, rather than assume the policy must work.
  • Trends may be predictable, so check your trend prediction.
  • Try discover what patterns are emerging. They could point to trends.
  • If a trend going the way you want is establishing, it may be easier to work with it.
  • Systems cannot always be reduced to their elements. Reductionism can be useful, but is only useful up to a point.
  • Systems change, so is what you think you know about the system still relevant? What are the new and relevant trends?
  • Pay attention to the local as well as the global.
  • What steps can people take locally, and how can they be supported in taking them?
  • Will these local actions feedback into the main system, and support useful change?
  • Unintended consequences and ‘disorder’ can tell us useful information about how the system works. Do not ignore them.
  • Work with natural dynamics rather than just trying to impose willed control.
  • As systems tend to escape control, we even more need to work our way with the system and feel into it, to gain a sense of what we are working with.

Some general hints(?):

Activating the pattern seeking parts of the mind

  • Activate the pattern seeking parts of our thought, through quiet immersion and listening and then testing and evaluating that understanding.
  • Observing natural systems with care, is a good way of building up ideas and senses of how such systems work, how they can be surprising and so on.
  • Looking at, or listening to great art, (again with care) according to some, may also happen to produce the same kinds of effects. Art is often about patterns and patterning.
  • This should help in other parts of the world, as well as possibly calm the nervous system and help psychological integration.
  • Again, the patterns you might observe should be treated experimentally, not as truth.

Climate generosity.

  • Act without waiting for the situation to be fair.
  • Don’t expect that others will act first.
  • If others exploit you, that is ok, keep acting.
  • Set the example you would like others to follow.
  • Organise to act generously with others, build a community of generosity and see what happens.
  • Give people the goods and support they desire.
  • Compete in your generosity.
  • Be prepared to experiment and make mistakes.
  • Don’t expect people to like you for acting.
  • An example is organising to gift solar panels to public buildings. People in the industry might help for the publicity. The more panels you get out, the less pollution you deal with.
  • Try and set up community energy as generous community. This can be extremely hard work, but you are doing something.
  • Try promote circular economies.
  • Find people, departments and businesses who can help.
  • Generosity feels good, and if done well builds ties between people. Ties between people helps get people motivated and acting.
  • This might be easier for old people who don’t have to look after children or hold down a job, but everyone should be welcome.

Experimental Politics

  • Experiment. only by experiment can you learn much about how a system works.
  • Try things out. Expect failure. Keep what works.
  • Climate generosity is an experiment. We test it out to see if works in the situation we are in.
  • Look to other people and emulate what is working for them.
  • Change what you take from the ecologies and the ‘waste’ you put into them, if there are issues in your local area.
  • Look for unexpected consequences, some of them may support generosity, some of them undermine it. How do you engineer more of the support?
  • What moves local politicians. It may not be what “everyone expects.” See how they and other people react.
  • Try out new ways of being generous, or persuading others to help.
  • That people may look out for themselves does not preclude them being generous in some parts of their lives, if there is a perceived benefit for them.

Community

  • We live in community.
  • Community adds to resilience as people know and help each other in calamity.
  • Communities can become generous naturally, if people feel safe that their gifts will be return in forms that are useful to them.
  • With a purpose, communities can really gather together and act.
  • We can sometimes find the purpose through experiment. What gets people to act together? Is it better to have small groups working on different projects? or to allow a bigger group to develop to possibly do bigger things?
  • Communities can be built in niches which are concealed from the main fields of power and convention, and thus be more free to be inventive and not confined by the processes of power. They can also be self-destructive.
  • Communities can build a “scenius,” (or a culturally creative scene) which also helps invention and builds creativity, in both co-operation and rivalry.
  • Communities do have factions and rivalries, and there will be disputes, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Gives more views on life and what is happening.
  • The factioning gives experience with complexity.
  • The bonds may force people together to solve the problems, but beware of outsiders boosting factions for their own purposes.
  • Communities are pattern generating, again they help understand, or to recognise lack of understanding, of how systems work.
  • The psychologist Adler asserts that building community feeling is part of maturation and developing psychological balance and resilience.
  • It makes people feel good as well as have more support when needed.
  • Conversation and cooperation can help build community and mutual recognition. Is it safe to discuss climate change and feelings with each other? Are there forbidden topics and why? (Forbidden topics may be forbidden for a reason).
  • Community projects can include:
    • Community recycling projects.
    • Food composting projects
    • Community gardens
    • Community discussions on problems
    • Trying to restrict harm and ‘illth’
    • Cleaning rivers or parks
    • Community Renewable Energy

Communities can organise from the bottom up, responding to local conditions. Normally structured corporations and governments cannot, or more precisely will not, because they want to maintain authority.

The point is that everything you can do together helps, and may help in the future.

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Complexity: how to deal with it Again?

May 10, 2024

General features of complex systems

Complex systems are multiply interactive self-modifying systems. Participants in the system respond to events in the system.

This results in a few consequences, and challenges.

•Nothing exists by itself. The existence of elephants, for example, requires mutual evolution between proto-elephants, plants, predators, parasites, water, sunlight, genetic errors and so on. Elephants would not exist without the systems they exist within. Likewise, humans would not think they way they do without a history of politics, culture, gender roles, art, sciences, elephants, invasions, replication mistakes and modifications, and so on. Thought is a product of the system individual humans exist within. It does not exist by itself in an individual brain with no history or interaction. Social life exists similarly. Elephants and thought etc in some sense are distributed, because they are part of many overlapping systems. Hence we always need to be aware of the dynamic contexts of any challenge (as it does not exist by itself), and these contexts can also be considered to be complex. It may be possible to immerse oneself in the system to gain a sense of pattern and immersion, and of the mutual dynamics of participants. Traditionally sitting in nature and listening an dobserving is one way of doing getting a sense of the system and it could be useful, if only to train people in looking for connection and pattern. However, as always, any understanding gained has to be evaluated and tested.

Changing technology has effects on everything else. The big example being steam power, which not only allowed massive technological change but also organisational change which allowed capitalists to become dominant, and strip the workers of rights of place and skill. That transition required laws to enable a new form of exploitation and worker disempowerment. Computer tech was thought to challenge conventional social power relations, but the power relations seem to have won out, even the internet has produced instability of information and knowledge. It is a reasonable fear that climate technologies can also alter oranisation and future trajectories, Hence their is resistance and perhaps over-optimism..

•Existence is flux, with no permanent balance. Taking this point and the previous point we can say that being and existence are distributed, connected and ongoing processes. Another point is that there is no eternal balance of nature. The system shifts all the time. Joint evolution-conflict is inherent in complex systems and systems change. However this recognition of change and instability, does not mean there are not more stable and less stable ‘equilibrium trajectories’. The more the system is disrupted, the wilder the swings become as it journeys towards a new temporary equilibrium. If the system keeps being disrupted, then it will keep behaving wildly and take longer to settle down. So the less disruptive we can be of the global ecological system, or the more we remove disruptions and (in particular) continuing disruptions, the more time we have to adapt to inevitable change. In terms of planning, the more GHG we produce to keep on running as we are, the worse the situation will become, and the less likelihood of stability.

•Diversity, redundancy and resilience. It appears that diversity of participants is good for system resilience, because it allows a variety of responses. Monocultures are vulnerable to disease sweeping through them, or to parasitic invasions, because all participants respond in similar ways, and hence an invader, which can steer around those responses, will possibly wipe out everything destroying the whole eco-system (but allowing the possibility of an eventual new start after the destruction). If there are a number of different participants providing similar eco-services, then the chance of some of them surviving, and their ecology surviving with them, is greater. The more efficient the system, then the less ‘slack’ it may have, and the less capacity for useful and responsive behaviour. For example, ‘just in time’ economic supply systems work well when the system is stable, but when the system is inevitably disrupted, or some interacting system changes, the lack of redundancy makes the system vulnerable, and over-stretched. Many human organisations are now designed to work with their human participants at maximum stretch and tension, hence they become vulnerable. On the other hand, too much redundancy and diversity might also disrupt a system. We have to experiment to find the most healthy and likely balance in any given situation.

•Evolution and equilibrium without ‘harmony.’ Systems involve maladaptation and adaptation. As already stated, natural systems can be temporarily balanced, but that does not mean they are harmonious in the sense that the English use of that word requires. Creatures eat each other, avoid being eaten, can explode disastrously in numbers, can be killed off by ‘invading species’ and so on. The point is that, while systems adapt to forces and changes, the systems’ adaptation can often be considered to be maladaptive for some participants, or even for a subsystem, and become less welcoming, or even kill them off. Many current human systems, including the dominant systems seem to be self-undermining in this sense, and will lead (if not to the destruction of humanity and other participants) to the destruction of the patterns of organisation and survival they have developed and depended upon. Fossil fuel burning for energy, industrial agriculture, human and ecology crushing use of technology, production of pollution, neoliberalism (and the impact of business on government), corporate information systems, etc. all reinforce, and contribute to, those patterns of self-destruction. Consequently many human systems need change to diminish their self-destructive nature. A particular problem is that information systems rarely act to convey accuracy everywhere.

•Complex all the way up and all the way down. Complexity operate at all levels. For example, Humans are part of complex social and ecological systems, they are also built up of complex systems. Most of our body weight can be made up of participants who don’t share our DNA, such as bacteria which live within us. Some of our cells also seem to have parts which started evolving independently but then became part of us, like mitochondria. Killing bacteria we are not harmonious with, can also kill the bacteria that we need for proper functioning. Even though eternal balance is a fiction, this fictional balance of the system is important, and should be attended to, or disrupted minimally without due need (if, for example, the new arrival bacteria or virus is absolutely harmful or lethal). Imbalance needs to be curbed or compensated for. Neoliberalism might be thought of as a harmful virus which has penetrated the system and is killing it. When installed technologies can disrupt the complexity differently at a different levels. For example turbines may kill apex predator birds, or cause migration problems, while keeping the land fairly unchanged and the air unpolluted. Coal dust may bring lung problems at the same time coal offers reliable levels of energy.

•Boundaries are unclear. Different fields interact. Different systems have ‘fuzzy boundaries.’ As implied above, ecologies are no longer independent of human economic and production systems, and economic systems are not independent of ecologies and planetary boundaries. Information is not independent of economic or political actions. In a not entirely accurate slogan “Everything Interacts.” Solutions to current challenges can only be isolated from their effects on other systems in rare and particular cases. Hence we look for disruptions that our response set is causing.

Overlapping fields are a big problem when it comes to climate technologies. Modern society has been powered by fossil fuels, that has enabled development, military superiority, technology, long ‘efficient’ trade routes, transport, suburbs and so on. As the basis of this society, and as largely now owned and controlled by a relatively few extremely rich, ruthless and powerful corporations (some governmental most private), there is an inbuilt resistance to taking climate change seriously, replacing the main cause of climate emissions, or developing climate tech in itself. This is generally supported by other industries which use fossil fuels or provide electricity and by governments. All sides seek to generate economic stability within complexity. The most popular technologies in terms of policy are imaginary technologies or technologies we know will make no difference to fossil fuel sales. Similarly big agriculture (particularly livestock ag) tries to inhibit the important agricultural transition to less polluting mass farms and feedlots. Smaller regenerative and organic farms challenge the agricultural dominance, just as community renewable energy challenges the power of corporate electricity. Likewise, fossil fuel companies can cash on on the illth system which supports many other businesses or sources of power, that have depended on pollution and poisoning from GHG, to oil spills, plastic, micro-plastics, fertliser overflows, industrial chemicals, dumping pollution in rivers, tire dust in the air and so on. Restrictions on ecological damage, damage profits all over the place. Pollution discussion is fairly rare, as is still decent discussion of climate change and options. Corporately installed renewables, can cause resistances, as it is cheaper to destroy the ecologies rather than live with them, different locals get different paybacks which generates social upheaval and discontent, and there is little consultation because businesses have not needed to make consultation and many climate technologies do not have a planned lifecycle, and there is little provision to deal with end products when they are not longer in use.

•Small changes can make large differences. This can be known as the ‘butterfly effect’ or as ‘non-linearity’. Because everything interacts (and the system seems multi-causal), then small apparently irrelevant changes can have unpredictably large effects as the change works its way through the system. Changes do not always even-out as in an averaging effect. Part of working with the system is finding out the difference between averaging and consequential changes. Tipping points occur when stress accumulates and there is a sudden change of state, which is magnified through the system and sends it into instability. We are pretty certain that a massive release of methane as tundras melt will increase the rate of global warming, completely destabilise the weather, and make it impossible to return to what used to be normal. Furthermore the ‘tipped’ change will probably be so rapid, that we cannot adapt or catch up with repairing the destruction it produces. Tipping points, that feed into disruptive and maladaptive change should be avoided. However, the idea that small changes can have big effects should also be taken as encouragement. Even small actions against climate change or for adaptation may have large ‘positive’ effects. They may not, and due to limited predictability we may not be able to tell in advance, but do not be discouraged by the smallness of your individual actions.

•Not completely knowable The ‘world and human systems’ are too complicated to be known in detail. The only accurate model of the system is the system itself. In this situation, knowledge has a tendency to become primarily symbolic, which is difficult if the symbols are tied into a symbolic system of self-reinforcing dogma and distraction. However, different people in different positions in the system will inevitably see things differently. This is extra-information not necessarily to be condemned in itself. For example it is reasonable to assume that followers of Donald Trump are actively reporting their discontent and sense of the failure of the system they live in, even if they cannot theorise it in a way which non-followers understand, or if Trump proposes solutions (such as more pollution, greater corporate power, more riches for the hyper rich, and persecuting illegal immigrants and trans people), which will not solve any of their problems. Ignoring their sense of system precariousness is folly. Change may need to be cultivated which they can recognise as benefitting them. As information is never complete, we all (not just our opponents) have an unconsciousness of vital knowledge. This unconsciousness can be reinforced by the unconsciousness and consciousness of others, forming a social unconscious, which leads to problems. Hence a degree of humility about one’s knowledge is important.

Neoliberal economist F.A. Hayek agrees with much of this unknowability in economics and the world. This is the formal reason for his dislike of government planning. Governments cannot know or anticipate everything, which is quite true. However, he tends to ignore corporate planning or cartels, and he reduces all relevant or important information to the price system. This reduction is an unintended way to increase unconsciousness, because not everything essential to the system is priced in capitalism. Power relations even force some ‘externalities’ (illth creation, pollution, health effects etc) outside the price system, so capitalist destruction can have no recognised destructive effect. Power relations constantly distort the price of products. Cartels force up prices, some businesses can temporarily force down prices, to drive others out of business. And it is not certain that everything can be priced, such as the atmosphere, or especially future events and shortages. Events may be vital later on and worth nothing now. So he ends up using proto-complexity theory to reinforce capitalism’s own destructiveness by removing information and removing any consideration of other interacting non-priced systems which are dismissed..

•Systems have limited predictability. They are unpredictable in specific, but possibly by trend. Because of these multiple interactions, maladaptation, cross interaction between apparently different systems, butterfly effects and tipping points, in general, we cannot predict specific events with much expected accuracy. Economic predictions are notoriously unreliable, the classic example being the predictions that economic crashes could no longer occur, because of free markets seeking perfect balance, or because we know how to prevent them. Events take people by surprise. We may, however, be able to predict trends. We know that the weather will get wilder and more intense the more we issue GHG and the more we keep destroying the ecology, but we don’t know for sure what the weather will be like in a specific palce in exactly two weeks. Limited predictability and lack of total knowledge, implies uncertainty is normal, and must be taken as normal. This then means that policies have to be experimental, tried out and tested to find out if they work. Policies may have to be abandoned, despite emotional attachments. Ideal dogmas are likely to lead people astray. People who have different knowledges, from their different locations, must be listened to. Local residents may understand local areas better than people at a distance.

•All systems take in energy and produce ‘waste’ Energy sources can vary from food and use of other organisms to nuclear. The Waste is important. Waste is material or energy which can be recycled: such as organic excretions, dead bodies etc. If the systems produce more waste than can be recycled or produce pollution (waste which can not be recycled), then they will eventually come to points of strain, transition to something else, or decline from self-poisoning. This can be an example of cumulative small changes making a big difference

•Emergent patterns. Patterns emerge from system interactions which cannot be predicted by the actions and behaviours of participants. The system is “greater than the sum of its parts.” Trying to understand the systems by reducing them to parts is often not helpful, although it can help to understand participants. Reductionism is only useful up to a point. Introduction of a new ‘system’ can change the patterns of emergence. As systems can be maladaptive, we cannot assume that the emergent patterns are friendly towards all current participants

Technology, energy and physical entropy may add to the problems. Technologies can add to problems by adding links, breaking links or strengthening links between systems and thus altering the system without intention. The more energy expended, the more the system may be changed. Energy, not already part of the natural system, easily generates illth. Some technology may tend towards high physical entropy, in that it wears out or decays quickly or encourages the decay of other events, again changing the system. The effects of technology are likely to be unpredictable, hence we cannot assume that a technology will be beneficial until it is used at a large extent.

•When complex systems are undergoing change, previous knowledge may no longer be helpful. When the system is moving into a new state, history may not be enlightening and nothing is the same. For example, in agriculture, changed and unstable weather conditions, with no continuity with previous experience, make it difficult to know what and when to plant. It may stretch a farmer’s finances. It may be hard to get good years which compensate for the bad years. If the system stabilises, this may start producing a new set of traditions and regular behaviours. Similar problems occur with insurance. Insurance is based on history, knowing what is likely to happen and charging the insured so that the risks of payouts are covered by the income. When you don’t know the likelihood of disaster this can no longer be done with any ease or certainty. It means insurers have a higher risk of going bust. One way to deal with that is to lower coverage for floods, fires etc, or massively increase charges, just to make sure the insurer can survive. Neither is good for customers, and insurers may find that people decide it is not worth paying for what they perceive as unreliable coverage. Loss of custom further drives up prices and the cycle keeps getting worse. This means, that while we cannot ignore history, again we have to be experimental, within the boundaries within which we can survive. We have to be ready to change, and to support people from being severely hurt by unexpected change. Social services almost certainly need to be changed, increased and improved to help people handle, and survive, the problems we face.

•Complex systems escape control. This should be pretty obvious by now. The firmer we try to control things, then the more likely the system will follow its suppressed dynamics and ‘rebel’. People have tried to enforce a mode of economy, living and control which disrupts the natural dynamics and boundaries of the system we depend on for life. People are still trying to enforce that system, despite it not working. The systems as a whole always react to what we do, and can appear to disrupt the process of control. The implication is that we need to be gentler, and work with the ‘human’ and ‘natural’ systems in ways which are sensitive to the response of those systems, and which may then generate a modified course of action. It is possible that one way of doing this is to relax centralised government and corporate control, and let locals experiment with what to do. The central authorities main job should be to help locals respond, and provide backing financial and informational, to allow people to experiment. For example community power is likely to increase local revenues to enable more adaptation and to provide resilience when the main grid system collapses. But this needs helping. At the moment it can be quite difficult to achieve, because the system is set up for corporate large-scale operations, and that system acts as an inhibiter and obstacle to change. Useful local change may give support for politicians who want to cultivate local responses, and the change may be able to be transferred elsewhere.

•Unintended consequences are normal. If we live in a system with uncertain knowledge, and which escapes control. Then we will always generate unintended consequences. These consequences must be looked for (as they will be present), and not ignored as they tell us something about how the system works, or how it responds to our actions and ideas. What appears to be disorder is useful for understanding system processes. Repressing that disorder not only does not remove the system disorder, but it stops us from dealing with it until it is too great.

Dealing with the challenge

While this can make everything seem impossible we should remember that:

People deal with complexity all the time

  • In conversations – who knows where they will end up?
  • In daily life. Life seems to always be suffering some disruption.
  • Community is always complex, yet we generally live successfully enough with others.
  • Community can sometimes be built in “niches” outside the notice of the main power and economic systems and create its own “scenius” which helps experimentation.

We have always lived within complex systems. We have evolved within complex systems. They make up our normal environment. Problems may largely arise when we go out of our way to ignore complexity, we aim for complete control over a system and attempt that control through force, when societies get so big that our understanding is overwhelmed, or we as a society refuse to change to meet new conditions.

The next page discusses this… some more

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Toynbee cycle again

June 7, 2023

I’ve already argued that Arnold Toynbee’s work is useful for looking at whether societies will collapse or not. Here is a slightly differen version.

One reason for societies failing, is that people, in particular the intellectual, power or riches elites, cannot face up to new problems that arise during periods of change. Given that change is always happening in complex systems (such as social relations, ecological relations etc.), this is a problem itself. Societies may be especially resistant to solving problems generated by the established elites of that society, who have made the society a success.

This seems more likely to occur in societies with a ‘conservative culture’, because

  • They believe all problems are old problems or similar to old problems and can be solved in the old ways, which have always worked previously.
  • New solutions would imply uncertainty, and conservatives do not like uncertainty, as it disrupts established patterns of behaviour, everything could change including their power and status.
  • The elites of that society will be those who are good are the old ways, and using the old solutions.
  • The Elites will discourage any investigation of their role in creating the problem through their mastery of the old ways.
  • If they control the media then they will denounce or hide information dangerous to their rule and thus most people will be unaware, or not applying their abilities to solve the problem.
  • They will probably enforce their elite position and the ‘class system’, and stop society from challenging their actions or powers, and thus entrench the problems, which will keep getting worse.
  • The government will side with the elites as they have the riches and status. The elites can buy government members, or bless them, if its a religious elite.

The policies used to get a society through a period of growth, or maximal power, are generally not the same policies that will get a society through problems it is not faced before, or it has generated through those previously succesful policies. The tendency is that new problems will be ignored until its too late and the society cannot flex enough to get around them. Conservative society will fail if there are new problems. Otherwise it might do ok.

On the other hand a less ‘conservative’ society should be able to:

  • Admit the existence of new problems, and embrace the uncertainty around finding new solutions, and experimenting with new solutions.
  • Accept the likelihood that problem solving often leads to social change.
  • Have a circulation of elites, which allows the elites to change depending upon ability, and the flexibility to deal with new situations, as new situations are always arising. The elite is not completely hereditary.
  • The presence of new members in the elites can help old elites to see the probable need for change, that old solutions have not worked, and the need for new approaches.
  • People will be prepared to accept this probability of change, and get on with problem solving, not enforcing a set of non-working solutions.
  • The government will think about the solutions independently of the other elites.

Unfortunately, as we can see through climate change, most societies on the planet are conservative and are busy not responding to the problems, and certainly not thinking about how to use the change for everyone’s advantage.….

The Polluter and Market elites, especially fossil fuel elites, have way too much power, and too much control over governments. Circulation of elites seems to have declined. Nowadays people have to start rich to get anywhere. The Polluter elites just repeat endlessly that more free markets, and more suppression of ‘workers’ and protestors is all that is needed, Any interference in the economy, which is not support of them, is to be condemned. The attitude is that nothing need change for success, or there is no problem.

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Some comments on complexity and its consequences

February 20, 2022

Every now and again I just try to give myself some summary of my understanding about complexity. This was originally written for the Anthropocene Transitions Project

Definition

A complex system is a system in which “nodes/beings” in the system alter their behaviour (automatically or consciously) is response to the activity of the rest of the system.
All living systems are complex systems.

Interconnection – systems

  • Everything that exists is interactive, or inter-being.
  • All beings depend on other beings for their existence in complex webs of inter-connection.
  • Therefore human beings depend on Earth systems, ecologies and other humans.
  • Often nodes or beings in a complex system are composed of multiple complex systems – all the way down.

Minds

  • As nodes do not exist in themselves, minds are present in systems, not in individuals alone. There is no originary or individual consciousness.
  • Humans become intelligent through interaction with others, and through sharing and competing with others.
  • Culture is essential for intelligence, and seems to be born in dispute and instruction.
  • Minds are not always harmonious – they contain dispute and contradiction.
  • Human psychologies are complex systems. Our attempts to impose order on our minds, or suppress pain, can create a disruptive personal unconscious – which is probably similar to other people’s personal unconscious.
  • This is like a microcosm of human action in the world – attempts to impose order can create the very disorder we fear.

Flux

  • Every being is in flux or process. Nothing is static forever.
  • Small events can produce big changes at tipping points.
  • Systems tend to seek equilibrium, but equilibrium processes change over time, with changes in other systems, and accidents.
  • The system can depart from equilibrium fairly quickly. Sometimes the disruptions to equilibrium are the result of chance ‘external’ events, such as an intense fire, an introduced plant seed, or a meteor crash. Tipping points are not always identifiable in advance.
  • Change is not always a “linear” process. Because nothing much has apparently happened yet, does not mean we are not approaching a tipping point in which change radically accelerates.

Harmony?

  • While the system can be thought of as ‘one,’ it does not have to be harmonious.
  • Nodes can compete, destroy each other and have differing aims.
  • Systems do not have to ‘aim’ to benefit humans.
  • While it is common to talk of Complex Adaptive Systems, as they change and adapt to change; from a human point of view some systems can be considered maladaptive or destructive.
  • Many economic systems, for example, do not seem to be geared to human survival.
  • Human organisation and power relations, can distribute harms and risks as well as ‘goods.’
  • Evolution occurs because of failure, to reproduce identically, or to survive.
  • It is probably worthwhile to try and identify maladaptive systems, and see if they can be modified.

Boundaries are not always clear

  • Many categories are not sharp and firmly bounded.
  • Beings and their categories are interconnected.
  • Everything affects everything.
  • Categories overlap.
  • Hierarchies are not always mutually exclusive and may overlap. The ‘upper’ levels of a hierarchy may be heavily influenced by the ‘lower’ levels.
  • Humans are ‘conditioned’ by planetary, social and cultural functions – but they can also influence those conditions in certain circumstances.
  • It does not always appear easy, appropriate or entirely accurate to separate a system from its ‘environment’ for purposes of study. This is especially so, if we then proceed to try and render the environment inert or without ongoing interactive effect on the system.
  • But you have to simplify. We cannot include everything ever.

Uncertainty is normal

  • The only true models of complex systems are the systems themselves.
  • Humans cannot always make exact predictions of events, but they can predict trends.
  • Hence human actions will likely have unintended consequences. This is fundamental to understanding human interaction with reality.
  • That a system is unpredictable in detail does not mean it is purely random – there are constraints at any moment. However these constraints may not continue forever.
  • None of this means a system cannot be modelled usefully, just that the models will not be the system. “The Map is not the Territory.”
  • We can, for example, predict that some bad human behaviours will affect your life deleteriously, but not exactly how or when. We can predict that weather will get more and more unstable if humans keep releasing greenhouse gases in increasing quantities, but we still cannot exactly predict the weather on a certain day, in a certain place, in a year’s time.
  • Lack of perfect models does not allow us to assume that everything will remain the same, or not be maladaptive, as when people argue that because climate models may be inherently inaccurate, we should do nothing. Nothing changing for the worse is an even more dubious model.

Some problems with Complexity

  • This view of complexity undermines a morality which seeks its justification in predicted consequences.
  • It implies lack of perfect control or domination, and hence the possibility of existential crisis, if human progress and control is central to human life.
  • As unintended consequences are normal, we may need to look for them as part of the system. For example, Ruskin’s idea of ‘illth’ the harm produced by the production of riches, cannot be ignored if we want to understand economics.
  • It implies politics should be experimental rather than dogmatic. We should expect policies to need adjustment or abandonment. Failure can be a learning experience.

Dealing with complexity

  • Slow down.
  • Be receptive to what is.
  • Lessen demands on reality, that it should be a certain way. “It is what it is.”
  • Lessen requirements we be in control.
  • Learn to live and work with the flow.
  • Suspend attempts at total understanding, as all understanding is provisional.
  • Accept a level of ignorance and expect contradictions, they are informative.
  • Be prepared to ‘feel’ your way through. You may fail, but it may just help you get there.
  • Create redundancy rather than “just in time” mechanisms.
  • Try to recover that which you have made yourself unconscious of.
  • Allow yourself to become aware of possible unexpected consequences of your acts no matter how well intended they are.

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Basic Complex Systems for eco-social analysis again

December 25, 2020

This is another go at formulating a list of basic systems which need to be considered for eco-social analysis. For earlier versions see here, here and here.

Introduction

As a guide to the factors involved in eco-social relations we can point to a number of different, but interacting systems. This list is not claiming to be complete, but it can be used as a set of reminders when we try to make analyses of our contemporary situation, and we may be able to make some general statements about how they interact. The order of relative importance of these systems is a matter for investigation, and the order of their presentation, in this blog post, is not a claim about their relative importance.

The seven main systems, discussed here, are

  • Political;
  • Economic (extraction);
  • Energy;
  • Waste, pollution and dispersal;
  • Information;
  • Technological;
  • Planetary Boundaries (geography) :

All these systems are complex systems, and it is generally impossible to predict their specific course. They are also prone to rapid change, gradual instability, and the ‘seeking’ of equilibrium.

Political System

The political system, includes:

  • the modes of struggle encouraged, discouraged, enabled or disabled,
  • the patterns and divisions (the ‘factioning’) within the State and wider society,
  • the differing effects of different bases of power: such as monetary power, communication power, power through violence or threat, hierarchical power, religious and cosmological power (the power to delimit the official views of the way that the cosmos works), organisational power, etc.,
  • who gets into positions of power and how, and so on,

Politics can affect all the other human systems. What activities (extraction, energy use, organisation etc.) are encouraged or discouraged, the kinds of regulation that apply, what counts as pollution or risk, what information is easily available, and who is to be trusted, and so on.

Political systems can forcibly ignore pollution or the consequences of energy production, economic extraction, the wage system, and so on, effectively rendering them part of a general unconscious, which eventually ‘bites back’.

Economic System

Most of the dominant economic systems currently in action can be described loosely as ‘capitalist’. The economic system involves modes of appropriation, extraction, property, commodification, exchange, circulation of ‘products’, technological systems, energy use, as well as accumulation of social power and wealth and so on. Most of which depend upon the State for their existence and reinforcement, although they may also challenge organisation and politics within the State. There is no inherent stability in current economic systems.

In many sociological theories the patterns of economic organisation and behaviour are known as the ‘infrastructure’ and are held to be determinate of most other social behaviours, primarily because the economic system seems the most obvious determinate of what people have to do in order to survive.

This organisation may have apparently unintended consequences, such as producing periodic crashes, or destroying the ecological base of the economy, and therefore threatening that organisation. They also may have quite expectable consequences, which are downplayed. In capitalism, political and economic patternings tend to be describable as ‘plutocratic’; as wealth allows the purchase of all other forms of power. However, different factions in the State can ally with different or competing factions in the economic system. For example, different government departments or political factions can support different types of energy: fossil fuels, renewables, or nuclear. The political system legitimates and enforces, allowable modes of extraction, property and pollution, and regulates economic behaviour among different social groups. Economics always involves political as well as economic struggle; politics is part of ‘the market’. ‘Crony Capitalism’ is normal capitalism.

Extraction

The Extraction system is part of the economic system, but it might be useful to separate it out from the economic system because extraction is one of the prime ways in which economies interact with ecologies and because different kinds of economies can use similar extraction systems. Extraction not only involves extraction of what gets defined as ‘resources’ (minerals, naturally occurring substances such as oil, coal or timber, and so on) but also the ways that human food gets extracted for consumption, via agriculture, gathering, hunting, industrial fishing, and so on. Ecologies are not passive, and they respond to human or other actions in ways which are often unpredictable in specific, but still disruptive. Ecologies seem to need attention, for survival to be possible in the long term.

Extraction in capitalist and developmentalist societies, often seems harmful to the functioning of ecologies, perhaps because of the need for continual growth, and thus a need for increasing extraction. Clearly, not all forms of extraction need to be destructive of the ecologies and geographies they depend upon. Extraction systems can allow the ecologies to repair after extraction, or attempt to rehabilitate the land. However, repair of ecologies can be considered an expense leading to reduction of profit, and hence is not attractive in a profit emphasising system.

As such, we can distinguish recoverable extraction, in which the ecologies and economies repair the damage from extraction, from irrecoverable extraction in which the ecologies and economies do not repair the damage from extraction within a useful time frame.

The Global Footprint network, suggests that:

Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and eight months to regenerate what we use in a year. 

Global Footprint network. Ecological Footprint

If this is correct, then the current extraction and pollution systems are generally irrecoverable, and deleterious for human and planetary survival. Investigating the differences between harmful and less harmful modes of extraction may well produce useful insights.

Economies are not the only possible harmful extractive systems – cosmologies can also require irrecoverable extractive behaviour to build temples, or to show the ‘other-worldly’ specialness of humans, and so on.

Energy System

All life and its resulting ecologies involve transformation of energy. These transformations stretch from transformation of sunlight by plants, the digestion of plants, to thermal gradients in the deep sea, to atomic power. Eco-systems require a system of energy release, energy generation and energy transformation.

Transformation of energy, together with effective ecological functioning, is necessary for any human actions to occur. The human energy system powers all other human systems. Because food is necessary for human labour, cultivation of food can be considered to be part of the energy system. The energy system and its ‘infrastructure’, could seem to be as important as the economic infrastructure.

The human energy system is organised, at least in part, by the political and economic systems, and by the environmental systems available. The environmental system includes possible energy sources from plant material, animal strength and docility, fossil fuels, sunlight, wind and moving water. Human labour, and its organisation, is (and has been) part of the energy system, and while not yet, if ever, superseded completely, can be supplemented and possibly overpowered by technological sources of energy. Coal and oil power, for example, provide masses amounts more directed energy than can human labour, and this ability is important to understanding the patterning and possibilities of the economic and extraction system, and its relationship to colonial/imperial history. Modern military expansion and colonialism, largely depends on this ability to apply large amounts of energy to weaponry, movement and organisation.

Important parts of the energy system include the amounts of energy generally available for use, and the capacity for energy to be directed and applied. Non-directable energy is often wasted energy (entropy), and usually unavailable for constructive use.

Another vital point is that human production of, or using of, energy takes energy. No energy is entirely free.

The availability of energy is influenced by the Energy Return on Energy Input (EREI) or ‘Energy Return on Energy Investment’. The larger amount of units of energy applied to gain a unit of humanly directable energy output, the less excess energy is available.

Fossil fuels have historically had a very high EREI, but it is possible that this is declining otherwise nobody would be tempted by fracking, coal seam gas, tar sands, or deep sea drilling. All of which require large amounts of energy to begin with, have very high risks of extractive destruction, and fairly low profit margins when compared to the dangers.

Renewables and storage currently have a high energy cost to manufacture (and possibly a high extractive cost as well) but for most renewables, after they are installed, the EREI changes, as very little labour, or energy expenditure, is required to gain an energy output – it is more or less free – whereas fossil fuel energy generation requires continual energy use to find and process new fossil fuels and keep the power stations turning, and produce continual pollution from burning.

Social power and economics may affect the ways that energy is distributed, what uses are considered legitimate and so on. However, the energy system also influences what can be done in other systems, and in the costs (social, aesthetic, ecological or monetary) which influence choices about the constituents of energy systems The system’s pollution products, which may be significant factors in producing climate and ecological change, may eventually limit what can be done.

As the energy system determines what energy is available for use, it is not an unreasonable assumption that social power and organisation will be partly built around the energy system, and that changes in energy systems will change energy availability, what can be done or who can do it, and thus threaten established social orders. Threats to established orders will be resisted. If an energy transition does go ahead, it is likely that the established orders will try and preserve the patterns, of organisation, wealth and social power which have grown up under the old system.

One important question is ‘how do we transform the energy system without continuing a damaging extraction and pollution system?’

Waste, Pollution and Dispersal systems

Transformation of materials through energy use, or through energy production, produces ‘waste’. The simplest human society imaginable (and this is an overt simplification), turns edible material into energy and human excreta, which in this case can usually be processed by the ecology – although, even then, dumping excreta into rivers may not help those downstream.

Understanding the Waste, Pollution and Dispersal systems is also vital to understanding possible energy and economic transformations.

In this book we will define ‘Waste‘ as material which can be re-processed, or recycled, by the economy or eco-system, and ‘Pollution‘ as material which is not re-processable within an arbitrary useful time frame, say over hundreds of years or more. ‘Dispersal’ occurs when some essential material is dispersed into the system, and becomes largely unavailable for reuse without ‘uneconomic’ expenditures of finance or energy – as occurs with helium and phosphorus.

When too much waste for the systems to re-process is emitted, then waste becomes pollution. This is what has happened with CO2. CO2 is normally harmless, even required for the system to work, but too much CO2 changes the ways eco and climate systems work. CO2 has also been dispersed into the atmosphere which makes CO2 extraction, which is stated to be essential by the IPCC and IEA for climate stability, difficult and costly in terms of energy expenditure.

These concepts, along with ‘extraction’, directly import the ecosystem into the economy, while pointing out that what counts as allowable waste, pollution or dispersal can change, economically, politically, scientifically and ‘practically’.

Waste, pollution and dispersal from the energy system and from modes of extraction, enter into the political system because that system decides and regulates what can be emitted, and where, and who is too valuable to be poisoned by the pollution. The political makes the laws allowing, diminishing or preventing, pollution. Often localisable pollution is dumped in ‘wasted’ zones or on poorer, less noticeable and less powerful people.

Energy and extraction may not the only significant sources of pollution, and other sources of pollution need to be curtailed, or turned into sources of waste.

Information about pollution from the fossil fuel energy system and from the extraction systems, provide a major driver for energy transformation, partly because this issue seems ‘economically’ politically and energetically solvable, while other sources of pollution seem more difficult to deal with.

However, even facing the problem, provokes a likely politicisation of the information system. How would people, in general, become aware of pollution and who primarily suffers from its effects, especially when it threatens established systems of power?

Information System

What people become aware of, what can be understood or done depends on the Information System. This system determines what feedback is available to conscious humans, about what is happening in general. The information system, in theory, could allow humans to recognise eco-feedback in response to systems such as waste and pollution, or extraction. Information is vital to social functioning, and part of social functioning. Accurate information is even more useful.

Unfortunately, information about complex systems, such as societies or ecologies, is almost always limited and inadequate. Some information may tend to be symbolised rather than literal, because of the difficulties of representing the information in a literal form (these difficulties can be political as much as in terms of human capacity).

Information systems can also hide, or distort, ecological feedback, because of flaws in their design, or because powerful people do not want it to bring the problems to general attention. This adds to confusion, and to the possibilities, that the information system primarily reflects human psychological projection, fantasy and shadow politics.

The political and economic systems also directly impact on the information systems, as politics often centres on propagation of politically or economically favourable information and the inhibition of politically unfavourable or economically information. Economic power, ownership and control of sources of information can also influence what information is collected, processed and made widely available.

Information is not so much ‘received’ as interpreted, so Cosmologies and politics which provide a framework for interpretation, play a big part in how the information is interpreted and, then, what kind of information is transmitted.

Government, Religious, Economic, or military (etc) regulation can be a further important part of both the information and political systems, sometimes affecting what is likely to be transmitted. Information systems, in turn, indicate the availability or coherence of regulation and the understanding of problems and predicaments. Regulation is based on information selection as well as political allegiance, and regulations can be opaque, or hidden, as well as easily decodable. For example, until recently it seemed very difficult to find out what the NSW governments regulations for Renewable Energy Zones, meant in terms of business, building, or connection to the wider system.

The information system does not have to be coherent, thus we can be both informed and disinformed of the progress of climate change and energy transformation by the system. Certain groups are more likely to be informed than others, even though everyone tends to frame themselves as being well informed – especially in an ‘information society’ when being well informed is a matter of status. Information does not have to be accurate to have an effect, it is also part of socially constructed propaganda – as we can see with climate and covid denial, and this can influence political process, victories and inaction.

In summary, most information distortion comes from: economic functions such as business hype, secrecy and deception; from organisational functions such as hierarchy, silo-isation, lack of connection and channels; from politics where information is distorted for strategic advantage; and from the complexity of the systems that the information tries to describe and the inadequacy of the language or approach being used.

Technological Systems

Technological systems enable the kind of energy use, direction and availability, a society can have, the kinds of extraction it can engage in, the range at which political and economic systems can have an effect, the modes of transmission of information, and the types of waste pollution and dispersion which are likely to happen. Technologies also necessarily use properties of the environment and ecologies around them in order to work, and thus interact with those environments and again cause unintended consequences.

People use technology to extend their power over others, extend their capacity, escape regulation, or render previous technologies less dominant, and hence technologies tend to be caught in struggles between groups, thus provoking unintended social consequences.

We could hypothesise that technologies, as used under capitalism (and perhaps elsewhere), tend to extract people out of their environment, and break the intimacy between humans and ecology, or shift human perception onto the technology rather than the world, therefore making it easier to regularly engage in processes of destruction.

In the contemporary world, technologies become objects of fantasy, and metaphors by which we think about the cosmos in general. For example the clockwork universe is now almost replaced by the information processing universe.

Planetary systems and boundaries

Finally we have planetary boundaries. The planetary boundaries are ways of conceiving the limits and constitution of ecosystems, and are, as such, fairly abstract. These boundaries represent systems necessary for human and planetary functioning.

They do not necessarily form the one system, and can be separated out for purposes of analysis. They act as guidelines, and probable reactive limits which are essential for the consideration of ‘eco-social’ relations, and the likely long term success of those relations. Measuring the boundaries may have a wide margin of error, as due to the complexity of these systems and their interactions. We will not know for sure when they will collapse until they do, and once they start collapsing they will affect the resilience of other boundaries. So the known limits on the boundaries will change as we take more notice of them, and keep challenging them.

Exceeding the boundaries almost certainly leads to the rundown, or breakdown, of ecological functioning, and this breakdown then adds difficulties to maintaining other systems. If they are maintained ‘artificially’ then this requires extra energy expenditure, and may have further consequences. Kate Raworth’s ‘donut economics’ presents a quick and easy way of conceiving functional economies in terms of ecological boundaries and human betterment [1], [2], [3].

Any global system which does not preserve or reinforce planetary systems will probably give impetus to global ecological collapse.

The systems are usually listed as involving: climatic stability, biospheric integrity (distribution and interaction between lifeforms, balance between species, rates of extinction etc), water flows and cycles (availability of drinkable, non-poisonous water, and water for general ecological functioning), biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, dispersal of valuable materials which literally form the ‘metabolic rift’, etc), ocean acidity or alkalinity (which affects the life of coral reefs, plankton and so on), levels of particulates or micro-particulates (which poison life forms), ozone levels, and the introduction of novel entities into the global ecology and their unknown systemic consequences (new chemicals, plastics, microplastics etc.). [4]

It is the functioning and disruption of these boundary systems which make processes of pollution and extraction problematic. Thus they impact directly on society, and appear to limit the kinds of economic growth, extraction, energy and technological systems that can be deployed safely.

Capitalism and developmentalism tend to recognise boundaries only to ignore them, and claim that ingenuity and willpower, will overcome those boundaries forever without limit.

Geographic Systems

Then we have Geographic systems as a subset of planetary boundaries. Geography affects the layout of energy systems, the potential reach of political and economic systems, the ‘natural’ flow of air and water, changes in temperature, the availability of sunlight, and the kinds of extractions which are ‘economic’ or economic in the short term, but deleterious in the long term. Geography is relational, giving layout in space between spaces and constructions. Geography shapes and is shaped by politics, social activity, economics, pollution and so on.

Mountain ranges, forests, plains etc may affect the layout of Renewable Energy, or the RE may affect the land, if trees are felled, fields converted etc. Wind may be severe, putting a limit on size of turbines, or the angles of solar panels. Winter darkness, or heavy seasonal rain can affect the possibilities of solar power.

Geography constitutes the human sense of home, and transformation of geography or relations of geography can produce a sense of ‘unhoming’, or dislocation in place and in the future of place.

Conclusion and Provisional Advice

Recognition of the interactions of these systems, with their differing but interacting imperatives, seems vital to getting a whole and accurate picture of the problems and opportunities presented by energy transition.

All the systems that have been discussed here, are complex systems. They are composed of ‘nodes’ which modify themselves or change their responses in response to changes in the ‘system as a whole.’ The systems are unpredictable in specific. The further into the future that we imagine, the less likely our predictions are to be specifically accurate. We can, for example, predict that weather will get more tumultuous in general as we keep destroying the ecology, but we cannot predict the exact weather at any distance. Complex systems produce surprise and actions often have unexpected consequences. If we seek to apply a policy, we cannot expect it to work exactly as we think it should. For example, the political move to make ‘markets,’ the most important institution, did not deliver either efficiency or liberty, as was expected, almost the opposite in fact. In all cases of actions within complex systems we should seek for unintended consequences. Sometimes the only realistic way to approach unintended consequences is to realise that our theory could not predict those events, and without looking we might never even have seen the events, or realised their connection to what we did. Working in complex systems, all politics becomes experimental.

While complex systems adapt or seek balance, they do not have to arrive at the best conditions for human beings. From a human point of view, they can be maladaptive. For example, a social system can be maladaptive and destructive of our means of living. The ecology could arrive at a balance within which many humans could not live.

People involved in promoting Energy Transformation have to deal with the various complex systems we have discussed above. The complexity does not mean we cannot make any predictions, although we need to treat them cautiously.

  • People engaged in transition have to consider the effects of the political systems involved, and be aware that politics influences what is likely to be possible. A transition may be delayed by political action, and political patterning, no matter how sensible or affordable the transition is.
  • The Economic system will be entangled in the political system, and those who dominate the economic system will have disproportionate input into the political system, and this can cause problems. This recognition reinstates the economic process as both a political and a business process.
  • A transition has to fit in with existing economic patterns, or its supporters may have to be prepared to change those patterns.
  • Patterns of extraction, pollution and dispersal have to be less harmful than previous patterns or the harm will be continued, even if in a different manner.
  • Changing the energy system is a political problem, and may require a change in the economic system as well as in power relations.
  • We need to have the available energy to build the transformed system. As we are supposedly aiming to replace the existing harmful system without lowering the energy availability, this may prove difficult. Where does the energy come from to build the new system if not from the old? And we need to demolish the old system, because of its dangers.
  • We need to avoid using renewables to simply add to energy availability, without reducing energy from fossil fuels.
  • The new system and the path of transformation, has to reduce pollution and extraction damage, or ecological and climate crises will continue, and planetary boundaries will be given no chance to recover. A transition plan which does not consider this problem is probably futile.
  • Considering these problems may lead to conclusions about the necessity of some kind of degrowth.
  • Transition plans should consider diminishing the dispersal of rare and valuable materials. More of what is currently pollution and dispersal has to be transformed to waste, in amounts the systems can process.
  • The current information system does not seem to be functioning in favour of the transition. It seems highly politicised and does not report ecological feedback accurately, either denying crisis, or delaying the supposed arrival of crisis.
  • Our current information system is largely owned and controlled by the neoliberal fossil fuel based establishment, which is defending its power, wealth and ways of living in the world. Without an independent information system, it will be impossible to win the political struggle. At the same time accurate information will be attacked and dismissed as political.
  • Likewise, many people will see accurate information as political, because it potentially disrupts their way of living, or because of interpretation and projection issues.
  • At the least, people engaged in energy transformation have to be aware of the nature of complex systems and the normal arising of unintended and unexpected consequences. We need an information system that allows us to perceive such consequences, without attacking the transformation as a whole.
  • Geography will affect the layout and possibilities of the transition. Renewables appear to require far more land than fossil fuels per unit of energy although fracking and coal seam gas seem to require similar amounts of land and do far more permanent damage to that land.
  • Renewables should probably never be installed through deforestation.
  • Renewables should not monopolise agricultural land. They should co-exist with previous land use, or help rehabilitate the land.
  • We should note the capacity of any new form of energy generation, or large scale technology, to ‘unhome’ people. Fossil fuels are especially bad at this, and often also poisonous, but the information systems tend to find this easier to ignore.
  • The energy transformation should aim to avoid disrupting the planetary boundary systems as much as possible. They should be installed with the longer term target of restoring those systems.
  • Pointing to the range of boundaries will possibly remind people that climate change is not the only problem we face, and it should be clear that no energy, or social, system is going to survive if it violates these boundaries in the long term.

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Praxeology, Culture, Ecology

December 20, 2020

This post continues to explore the apparent lack of consideration given to context in the basic axioms of Austrian economics; in this case culture and ecology.

Not Recognising ‘Culture’

Discussing purposeful action, which is supposedly basic to the economy, Rothbard goes on to argue that a human must have certain ideas about how to achieve their ends. Without those ideas there is little in the way of complex human purpose.

However, this sidesteps the issue of where does this person get the ideas from, as well as the language to think about those ideas? The ideas are unlikely to be purely self-generated, with no precursors. In reality, ideas arise through interconnection with other people and previously existing ideas. This of course does not mean people never have original ideas, but without interacting with other people it is doubtful they would have complex ideas or language at all. Indeed, the people they interact with may have a massive influence on the ideas, and approaches, available to the person. Ideas are socially transmitted.

Even our individuality is based in the groups we have encountered, the ways we categorise our selves in relationship to others, and the child rearing we experience. It is not as if we are born fully conscious and evaluative, able to deduce everything all by ourselves from first principles….

However, in response to criticism, Rothbard states: “We do not at all assume, as some critics of economics have charged, that individuals are ‘atoms’ isolated from one another.”

  • (Note the way that his economics becomes all economics as opposed to ‘my economics’ or ‘our economics’).

Where is the evidence of this recognition in the initial axioms, from which all else is derived? Its certainly not clear to me that this recognition exists, other than to be wheeled in to get rid of objections. “You think people are isolated from each other” “No we don’t. I mention this in a footnote.” This recognition seems an add on – whereas it seems more likely that humans are both individual and collective from birth onwards. To some extent we can even say that humans have the capacity to learn to be individuals, to individuate, but it is not always easy.

I suspect that if we included culture’s (and social organisation’s) effects on exchange and economic action, then we might not be able to perform a supposed universal justification for capitalism, and its exemption from attempts to control it or regulate it to be less harmful. And this justification and protection, seems to be the purposeful action of Austrian economics from its beginning.

Ecologies

All action takes place within a web of actions – which is sometimes known as an ‘interactive network,’ or a ‘set of complex systems’ and sometimes, in Austrian economics, as a catallaxy, or as Hayek says “the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.”

It is possible that, with this term, Hayek is pointing towards what is now known as “emergent order,” which involves far more than just ‘individual economies,’ adjusting in a ‘market’ – as markets cannot be separated from other processes, including social and ecological process which also adjust to each other.

While it is often assumed to be the case, it should be noted that the ‘order’ which emerges from a complex system or ‘catallaxy’, does not have to be hospitable to humans. Historically we can observer that the ecological order is often changed by humans disasterously and, as a result, humans can no longer flourish in those new ecological orders.

Sometimes this ecological collapse occurs because some form of behaviour which once helped survival has been intensified to a level at which it:

  1. becomes destructive,
  2. blocks information flow and perception of danger which challenges the behaviour, or
  3. simply prevents change through entrenched power.

Hayek’s formulation uses the cultural assumption that order is ‘good’ for humans, to imply the market always brings ‘good’ results, when it may not, even if the ‘order’ arises ‘spontaneously’.

Economies occur within general ecologies: they can be said to be context dependent. An impoverished ecology is likely to produce an impoverished economy for most people, even if the wealthy are very wealthy and well provided for.

  • [Rothbard uses the term ‘catallactics‘ to refer to the “the analysis of interpersonal exchange”, or “study of money exchanges” which do not seem to be quite the same things as not all interpersonal, or intergroup, exchange involves money, although it is interesting that Libertarian economics tries to reduce all exchange and interaction to money. Neither does this usage seem to refer to the same kind of process as Hayek’s catallaxy].

Rothbard states on page 4: “With reference to any given act, the environment external to the individual may be divided into two parts: those elements which he believes he cannot control and must leave unchanged, and those which he can alter (or rather, thinks he can alter) to arrive at his ends”.

Earlier he talks about rearranging elements of the environment…

All this suggests that Rothbard thinks of the environment as a largely passive backdrop to human action, not a participant in that action, or even likely to react to that action. The environment is portrayed as essentially passive or dead, or humanly controllable, neither of which seem to be the case. Again the aim seems to be to reduce everything to the human individual, who determines what is to be done.

The approach not only does not recognise the importance of groups but appears to be anti-ecological, or anti the recognition of the necessity, and force, of ecological processes. This could be accidental, but perhaps it occurs because neoliberalism grew up to be anti-ecological in the roots of its thinking (thinking that humans are detached from each other and the world), perhaps because social movements recognising the importance of ecologies were seen as a threat to corporate profit and liberty, or perhaps it is just their overconfidence in the culturally backed idea of human specialness and isolation.

Rothbards adds that acts involve means, and this involve technological ideas. Both true, but forms of government and organisation can also be thought of as technologies. It is easier to hunt with hand weapons if we organise to hunt together, and use strategy and planning in that hunt.

“In the external environment, the general conditions cannot be the objects of any human action; only the means can be employed in action.”

I’m not sure what this means, but it seems to be suggesting that we cannot work with environments….

However, economies are enmeshed in environments. Economies do not exist without ecologies and, at the moment, without naturally livable ecologies. (Possibly in the future large numbers of humans may be able to live in purely constructed environments, but not now).

We have to grow food, we have to survive climate, we have to survive in the atmosphere, we need drinkable water, we need ‘raw materials’, we need energy supplies (more than just food and water if we are going to survive with any technological complexity). We need functional waste recycling systems and pollution processing, and so on.

If ecologies are destroyed then economies are highly likely to collapse, and in any case the aim of the economy becomes reduced to survival, and radically simplifies. Social support and social action is still vitally important.

Economies are also enmeshed in environments of social and political life, as people attempt to use rhetoric and persuasion and sometimes violence to protect their markets, regulate and structure the markets and so on. Wealth, earned on markets, gives power and that power is used to ensconce and intensify the position of the wealthy. At the least, all economies are political economies, in the sense that economic action involves politics and vice versa.

It seems to be the case, that extracting something called an economy from both social and ecological life, is a massive and probably dangerous over-simplification.

More Accurate Foundations

In these last two posts on praxeology, I have implied you cannot ignore history or social studies to formulate a study of economics, because that forms the conscious (or unconscious) data you draw your a prioris from. I’m not asserting that a prioris of any kind do not exist, they may, but it seems unlikely that social science a prioris exist, and that the a prioris of Austrian economics are inadequate and dependent upon unacknowledged (or unconscious) cultural foundations.

Let us reformulate the initial propositions as simply as possible, from the discussion above.

  • Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior.
  • Purposeful action almost always involves humans acting with or against other humans, human groups, and environments – often several at the same time.
  • Most human motives and means are learnt from, with, or against, other humans and the environment (often through trial and error).
  • Purposeful action often involves trying to influence, or sway, other people’s action and/or gain approval in some other humans’ eyes.
  • People are not always aware of the origins of their purposeful action – they can be unaware of their true purpose.
  • Human action normally results in unintended consequences.
  • What we interpret as disorder is as normal as what we interpret as order, and vice versa
  • Human being is social. People act in groups all the time, and belong to groups. Without some group backing, most humans would die when young. It may be easy to say people are individuals but it is not entirely correct, and so will take us to incorrect conclusions.
  • A group acting together is not just the sum of the individuals acting – this is one reason why humans act together.
  • Human groups tend to regulate, or govern, themselves, so as to act together. They team up to achieve individual and group objectives – which may just include company and conversation, or it may include world conquest, acquiring new resources through violence, teaming up to get governmental policy which favours the group, overthrowing the state or the lack of a State and so on.
  • Government is normal. Corporations and business involve forms of government both ‘internally’ (in relation to themselves) and ‘externally’ (in relation to the government of others). Like other forms of government, they can use threats and violence.
  • Corporations and businesses may attempt to influence the government of others.
  • Market action involves politics, persuasion and building of trust – it is based in social life.
  • Markets involve interaction with ecologies for food and resources. They can destroy the ecologies they require to function. The orders which arise from market/ecology interaction can be hostile to humans. That is, markets can suffer from unintended consequences. It is magic to expect that the order which emerges will always be ‘good’.
  • Interpretations of other people’s actions and ideas, can be false, but are generally based on cultural expectations. Economics is a tool of interpretation
  • Economics cannot be isolated from social, political, ethical, and ecological life.
  • Economic functioning depends on social and ecological functioning.

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Covid and Complexity 2

July 26, 2020

From my amateur alchemical/medical historian point of view there are some obvious human ‘knowledge disruptors’, that can lead to problems with medicine, which may need to be rendered explicit. These are:

1) Tradition and authority
2) Reaction
3) Misguided Logic
4) Anecdote and self-confirmation
5) Self-interest
6) Ethical staunchness

There may well be further obvious knowledge disruptors; this is not an attempt to limit them.

Nearly all medical problems are intensified, through the interaction of these human knowledge disruptors with biological complexity. However, these disruptors are not just present in medicine, they are likely to generate problems in people’s attempts to deal with complex systems of all types.

Furthermore, these knowledge disruptors all tend to be boosted when there are social groups, or social conflicts, involved.

If other people agree with you, praise the genius of those who agree with you, praise the ethical rightness of agreement, or condemn those who disagree with you as stupid or immoral, then that reinforces the knowledge disruption. As I have said many times before: for most of us, in most situations, knowledge is socially verified. Thinking we are independent, probably means we think similarly to those we classify as fellow independents.

1) Tradition and Authority.

This disruptor usually takes the forms of: “We have always treated the disease this way, and this way alone,” or “Galen, or Paracelsus, or Steiner or ‘some other important figure’ say we should treat this disease or this problem this way, and this way alone” or “We have always lived this way and it was really successful, so we should continue to live this way”. “Those other people who disagree with tradition and authority are traitors, and are at best misguided.” “Altering our treatments and behaviour would be immoral.”

There are several problems with these claims and procedures.

The first set of problems is that the tradition or authority may:

  • a) never have worked in the first place,
  • b) never worked without problems,
  • c) the makers of tradition came to their decisions by applying some of the other knowledge disruptors, or
  • d) have been enforced by violence, not through effectiveness.

For example the makers of tradition may have argued “Galen used treatment X on a person and they recovered” (Anecdote). Or people may have applied the logic that people with damp conditions should be treated by warmth (possibly Misguided Logic), or asserted that “Paracelsus used the elixir of Gold, which I can sell to you, to cure this disease” (Self-interest). Or they might argue: “Treatment X is traditional and anti-socialist, therefore it will work better than something that looks like socialist medicine” (Reaction and Ethical Staunchness). Ethical Staunchness is also likely to lead to enforcement by violence, in the same kind of ways the religion of love led to the inquisition: it’s how you save people.

The Second set of problems centres on the issue that we have a finite number of descriptive terms which can be applied to any disease. The description may ignore other important factors, which given that bodies have a huge range of possible responses, can render the normal treatment valueless in this case, or in this series of cases.

For example a disease may generate the sense of heat and damp, with a rash. It may be important as to whether the rash is red, pink, brown, mottled etc. Is the patient thirsty or dry? Given the limited vocabulary, diseases can resemble each other in the ways we describe them and yet be completely different in cause, prognosis and required treatment. Diseases are changing all the time, and new diseases appear. So a treatment which traditionally works for this apparent disease (as we describe it), may not work on the disease actually being faced.

Even if we diagnose a person by the presence of a ‘virus’ or bacteria within them then, as we can see from Covid-19, it may have radically different effects depending on its interaction with the system: random variation, the patient’s constitution, age, other diseases or poisonings present, etc… and thus require different treatments.

Even if the ‘same’ disease could be treated by herb X or antibiotic Y one hundred years ago with huge success, the disease may now have evolved to an existence in which those treatments no longer work. Or the medicines may interact, combine, or compound with new background chemicals in different ways and no longer help – the medicines may even harm people nowadays in ways they did not originally. The herbs themselves may have changed, or it may have been a variety of herb grown in a particular field with a particular chemical composition, that was actually effective, and that is not where the practitioner is getting the herbs from, as that variation was unknown.

It is also possible that part of the traditional treatment has been lost, because it was verbal, or imitative, and all we have of the tradition is the bit that seems (logically) plausible.

In summary. Tradition and Authority can be wrong, diseases and situations may change, may look the same but be different, and the items used in the treatment etc can change over time as well. Fear of violence, or being morally wrong (and or being punished for this), can lead to a lack of attention to the actual problems.

When tradition and authority succeeds, it is because the traditions have been useful in the past, and the past is similar enough to the present for them to be effective. The question is always, whether the situation is still the same as it was in the past, or whether the traditional ways of behaving have now created a problem, which further application of those ways of behaving cannot solve.

2) Reaction

This occurs when a group of people don’t like one or other tradition for whatever reason, so they avoid its treatments, even when the treatments seem to work, or when the practitioners take on board their criticism and improve.

Usually if people are in reaction they campaign forcibly to destroy the tradition or people’s use of that tradition, they do not believe it can work or be improved. Potential useful knowledge is lost- the classic baby thrown out with the bathwater situation.

Reaction can be useful if the previous, or other, system has failed. But that attacked system may have advantages which are in danger of being ignored. It is not uncommon for a system to modify itself in reaction to the challenge from another system, then defeat the other system and when that system is gone enforce the old destructive ways more thoroughly.

3) Misguided Logic

This is probably one of the most common ways of getting things wrong. ‘Logic’ is only as good as its assumptions and procedures, and few sets of assumptions and procedures are going to be able to completely deal with, and predict, a complex universe. The Logic and procedures may be faulty as well, but they backs up important assumptions made by the group.

We can see this when people make such arguments as that fatty arteries are found in people with heart problems, therefore no fats must be eaten. However, some fats need to be eaten, as they are essential for human biological functioning, so the procedure based on this fault logic may have bad health effects. Other people might argue that as some fats are useful, humans should eat almost nothing but fat etc. But what if some ‘types’ of people should eat more fat and others less fat, or different people should eat different types of fat. The issue needs ongoing investigation, not to be settled by tradition, logic, anecdote or self-confirmation.

When Donald Trump advised his medical teams to study the effects of injecting disinfectants and using light to fight Covid, he was engaging in apparently misguided logic of the form: “Disinfectants and light may kill the virus, therefore they might kill the virus inside the body.” The problem was that taking disinfectants internally might also be injurious, or even lethal, and many people expected the President to be aware of this, and not make the suggestion in public where it might lead some people to try it out without medical supervision (because of the authority of the President, who is a self-confessed super-genius).

Group logic tends to ignore the variety and complexity of life, the things we don’t know, or don’t value, and the side-effects of treatments. As well, because it is persuasive, the logic may not be tested. If the patient dies from applying the logic, the problem is said to arise from the patient (Self-confirmation). Perhaps the patient did not follow the instructions properly? Perhaps the logic was applied too late? Perhaps it is just one of those things, as the procedure normally works? May be there was a mistake in this situation, but it is generally effective? Much back surgery seems a great example of “follow the logic” going wrong, and the apparently large lack of success has been ignored.

Another logic error, takes the form of “if small amounts of something is good, then large amounts of it are even better”. People might argue that small amounts of substance B, have beneficial, even necessary, properties, so we should take large amounts of substance B, when it could actually be poisonous over a certain level. We can see this most obviously in climate denial were people can argue that larger amounts of CO2 will simply propel plant growth and not cause any problems at all. The logic does not recognise the change of state that can be induced by too much of something which is generally necessary.

In summary, the effectiveness of logic and theory is always limited in a complex universe. A deduction from the theory may be wrong in a specific situation, no matter how persuasive it is. Theory and logic has to be tested repeatedly, and data gathered which shows how effective the deductions are (and whether things have changed). That means someone needs to actively try and disprove the logic, as humans will tend towards self-confirmation, no matter how badly the deductions deliver.

4) Anecdote and self confirmation.

The George Carlin video, in the version discussed earlier, is a great example of this. He says he swam in raw sewage as a kid (or had exposure to ‘germs’ and pollution) and has always been healthy, and that no one in his locale had polio. We may know he did not get polio, but we only have the word of himself, a person who was not studying polio in his area, as to the lack of polio in his area, and we have no study of the connection between the exposure to germs and pollution in the Hudson sewage and the lack of polio that he claims was general. It is also not impossible there may have been a substance in the river which killed polio, while not affecting other diseases, so the success had nothing to do with the factors claimed.

We also don’t know whether people died of other things that we could attribute to such exposure, but which were so normal that they were ignored. We don’t know whether all his friends had life-long health from the same source, or whether some of them where sickly, or died in their thirties as a consequence.

Carlin has not looked for evidence that is not confirming, probably because he is in self-confirmation mode – and possibly because he made money telling his audiences what they want to hear. (“Disease is not threatening, you can get over it by being tough. Pandemics are never a problem for tough people as its only weak people who die. You do not have any responsibility to others, as that inhibits your ‘tough liberty.'”)

He might just be a naturally healthy and robust person. This fact is, in itself, interesting, but it may mean that his discussion of what keeps a person healthy is completely without generalisable value. Perhaps a person who is born robust enough can do things that would normally hurt other people, without any ill effect? We probably all know people who live in ways which would harm us, but which does not effect them that badly.

Self confirmation usually leads to people ignoring evidence which goes against their anecdotes or logics. If you have a group of people with the same biases, then self-confirmation is reinforced by the confirmation of trustworthy others in your group who are your compatriots and friends. And if people outside your group say you are wrong, they are ‘obviously’ untrustworthy and likely to be trying to deceive you. You keep your belief to avoid losing status in your group, or being exiled for heresy

Anecdote can open up interesting discussions, and it may be the only way to proceed at the beginning of a study, it may even be correct, but it is not compelling evidence, because it usually focuses on a limited number of cases, in a complex world of difference.

5) Self Interest

This may occur when the practitioner makes a living out of selling treatment. If you have a system, and someone comes to you, then you are likely use it, rather than wonder if another system might be better in this case. If a practitioner sells medicines, surgery, treatment, health planning etc, then they will try to sell these to their patients, to keep their livelihood. They may be tempted to sell the most expensive and glamorous treatment – because glamour confirms anecdote and gives authority, and because the practitioner might make more money out of it. They may over-prescribe. They may perform recondite surgery because they can and they can charge for it, and so on. Again, if others you admire do similar things then it reinforces the practice.

If a practitioner depends on selling treatment for their livelihood, they have even less incentive to test the treatments in the short term, and more likelihood of self-confirmation, following the authority which pronounces this a good treatment, using misguided logics to justify the treatment, and ignoring counter evidence. This does not mean all practitioners are corrupt by any means, but that many practitioners have an incentive to give unnecessary treatment – which may prove harmful.

Likewise if a researcher receives funding from a body which has a commercial interest in a product or treatment, then they are more likely to keep their funding by praising the product or confusing objections to the product. The purchaser of research may also suppress negative results and keep the positive results, because the negative results must be wrong, and its easier to see why they could be wrong. It does seem to be that Pharmaceutical Company research needs to be independently checked, rather than simply accepted.

6) Ethical Staunchness

Ethical staunchness comes about when a theory becomes identified with an ethical position which is taken to be fundamental. Change in the situation is irrelevant. Modification of the condemned, or the condemned procedure, is irrelevant. Failure of the moral position to generate what it considers to be success is irrelevant – the position is correct irrespective of the results. Ethical Staunchness basically implies that taking in evidence, aiming to find out what is wrong with an approach, or looking at the situation in detail is forbidden. If you criticise the position you are immoral, and not only face expulsion, but you cannot be listened to. People can be sacrificed to morals. Morality overwhelms observation.

Ethical Staunchness seems to be a refusal of complexity or negotiation – which is not the same as saying that ethics are unnecessary or always harmful… And sometimes ethical rigor may be required, to as not to compromise with something the person considers deeply immoral – as when people were staunchly anti-Nazi, and refused to support the persecution of those the Nazis had declared immoral. It may be that recognition of the problem does not lead to easy answers.

Complexity

With complexity it is tempting to try and limit the variations and hesitations that are a normal part of the knowledge and living process, and to foreclose to certainty. This simplification may help action, and to some extent may be useful for a while, but have long term consequences which are disruptive of our ways of living and knowing.

In this blog post I have tried to suggest how socially standard ways of knowing and responding to complexity, may disrupt our knowledge of the world, and our reactions to it.

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Covid-19 and Complexity 1

July 26, 2020

There is a video of comedian George Carlin being circulated as “George Carlin told us about the Corona panic years ago” This video seems to be receiving rave comments from sensible people, but it also seems completely inadequate as a guide to responses to the ‘panic’.

In summary Carlin argues:

People are encouraged to fear germs and the latest infections and people are panicking, and trying to avoid all contacts with germs…. However, the immune system needs germs to practice on. If you lead a sterile life then you will get sick, and you deserve it because you are fucking weak and you have a fucking weak immune system.

He lived along the Hudson River and ‘we’ swam in raw sewage. The big fear at that time was polio, but no one where he lived ever got polio, the polio never had a prayer. He concludes that he never got infections ever, because his immune system was strong through getting a lot of practice.

This is not all direct quotes. It is paraphrase. Go see the video if you think I’m wrong 🙂

I guess the framing of the video as “George Carlin told us about the Corona panic years ago” is meant to imply Carlin is telling us that the Coronavirus is a mere ‘panic’ – it is nothing serious. Indeed the implication, of the framing, seems to be that all pandemics are nothing serious.

There is some truth in what Carlin says. It is probably a good idea not to use germicides everywhere, in everyday life. This is because some exposure to normal disease is helpful for immune protection, and also because Germicides are poisons – they kill life forms after all.

However, this idea, that pandemics and death by disease do not occur in tough traditional societies, or old time cities, because people develop strong immune systems through bad hygiene, or living with dirt, ‘germs’ and infection, is just silly.

There are, and have been, plenty of places were people have been exposed to ‘germs’ as a matter of daily life, and they still get wiped by pandemics. Badly. Especially when the pandemic is new and people have not adapted to it. Think of the black death, and cholera. Diseases, like small pox, have even used as a weapon, and we rightly fear bio-warfare.

Building immunity is not all that this needed. Being ‘tough’ won’t help you completely. If Carlin really thought that exposure to random ‘germs’ and pollutants, such as found in the Hudson River when he was a kid, is a complete protection against pandemics, then he simply does not know what he is talking about, and is suffering the benefit of historical ignorance.

It is more than probable the reason the US, and Europe have had few pandemics recently, is because of public health measures, like clean water no sewage in the street, and a relative lack of malnourished people living in the street. Vaccinations, or other treatments might have helped, but public health is likely the main breakthrough. If Carlin’s statements were true you would have expected heaps of pandemics over the last 40 or 50 years as hygiene improved and people got ‘soft’.

The US has only been seriously threatened by one pandemic in the last 50 years and that was AIDs, and it turned out to be relatively easy to deal with. Carlin had no experience of a really hard pandemic.

We didn’t stop HIV-AIDS by vaccination, because it was impossible to vaccinate against. We did eventually manage to extend people’s lives. We further found that physical distancing, or not intaking other people’s sexual fluids and blood, largely solved the spread issue, so it became something we can live with.

That was pretty easy. It had nothing to do with swimming in raw sewage or ‘vaccinating’ through ingestion of random hazards.

Now people might say Carlin is engaged in humorous exaggeration and not to be taken seriously. However, whatever Carlin’s intent, I think it is being used quite seriously.

The issue is whether what he says tells us anything about the ‘corona panic’? About whether it tells us anything about a new supervirus that turns our vital organs to liquid shit – or in this case into solid shit.

In terms of exaggeration, the Hudson River would probably not have been 100% sewage, no river would be, it would not flow very well. However, it probably would have had a lot of chemical effluent in it as well, including heavy metals. If you object to vaccination, you probably should object to swimming in polluted excrement as well.

We only have his anecdote to show there is any evidence that people in his neighborhood never got polio. It would be interesting to see if that was true, unusual, or just another ‘humorous exaggeration’.

His statement: “if you die you deserve it because you are fucking weak and you have a fucking weak immune system” is a great way of wiping away any sense that you might have responsibility towards others in your ‘freedom’.

So I guess the message of the video for Covid, is ignore medical advice, eat sewage, and don’t worry you might pass the disease on to other people.

If you really want people to die by the millions or billions, but not feel guilty or sad about it, then following the advice in this video will probably help.

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Capitalism and Authoritarianism

September 11, 2019

For me, right-wing thought is thought which tends to support hierarchy, authority, power, expansion of power, dictation over people’s personal lives and the enforcement of heavily bounded social categories. It reduces all liberty to the right to buy the products you can afford. Thus the right tends to hate egalitarianism, feminism, anti-racism and so on. They rarely support liberation movements that openly oppose capitalism. As I have argued previously they tend to use quite a lot of force to suppress free-speech, and then suppress awareness of the suppression, just as they suppress awareness of the general political shift rightwards. Right-wing thought has very little to do with conservative thought.

The left tend to favour relative egalitarianism (no one thinks everyone will be completely equal in everything, just that superiority in earning money or inheriting money, should not lead to massive inequalities of power and opportunity). They tend to favour people reclaiming their power and being treated as important politically. They tend to think that the State should not regulate your sex and recreational life, and so on.

I’d add that both modes of thought, tend to be non-systemic and have only a few solutions to problems, and they tend to think that if their policy is not working this must be because:

  • Somebody is deliberately working to prevent the policy being successful.
  • They have not applied the policy strongly enough.

They both tend not to think that unintended consequences are normal and need looking out for, and adjusting one’s actions for. They tend to think knowledge is complete and causality is obvious. The left tends to value looking at a diversity of solutions more than the right does, but this is a fragile virtue, and easily overthrown.

Libertarians tend to think that they understand complexity issues, but they seem completely unaware of the (hopefully) unintended, but expectable, consequences of imposing ‘free markets’ in the context of corporate dominance.

Of course many people on the right are actually more leftish than they believe, and its fair enough to protest against this particular categorisation of politics, but if you look at actual Right wing politics, it tends to nanny the rich and boot the poor, or give more liberty to the already powerful and curtail the liberty of everyone else. At the best it promises to restore the exclusionary power of people who felt they were dominant, but have lost that dominance.

Is it possible to separate this kind of hierarchical and authoritarian thinking from capitalism? I suspect not. After all, libertarians, and social-democrats, have been trying for years, and capitalism has not changed. It has in fact got stronger and more severe in its politics over the last 40 years of constant chatter about the benefit of free markets. There is certainly less liberty, less ability to influence politics, less protection at work, less equity in wealth distribution, less support in misfortune, less interest in protecting essential infrastructure, unless someone makes a profit out of it. Capitalism is not incompatible with dictatorship, although that support then distorts it’s official ideology still further.

I suspect this authoritarianism occurs because capitalism is primarily about the reduction of all values and morality to profit and wealth. This always becomes support for the wealth hierarchy, disciplining the work force, keeping ordinary folk down and assuming that protecting profit is better than protecting survival and continuance. Capitalism seems to suppress empathy for others, unless there is a buck in it, as capital accumulation can generally only occur if you separate yourself from the needs of other people.

In capitalism wealth controls all the modes of power: it can buy politicians, it can buy laws, it can buy the police, it can buy the military, it can buy the media, it can buy ‘knowledge’ that suits it, it can buy the economics that suit it and so on. Almost nothing is beyond purchase, and capitalism spreads its managerial modes of organisation everywhere, even into Churches. Consequently, capitalism becomes unchallengable, taken for granted, part of our sponsored common sense. The only movement that is officially acceptable, and that has much chance of winning out, is to strengthen capitalism and intensify its effects and spread.

In this process, support for authority is so great, that unintended consequences, such as ecological destruction tend to be ignored. If destroying ecologies is what keeps the system going, then that is what the system will do to preserve its power structures. Hence, the ability of free market leaders to encourage destruction, and to try and lower the legal consequences of destruction. They do not see how they themselves are part of a bigger system they need for survival and which they are destroying, or they think that wealth and authority will protect them. Everyone else, all ordinary people, are just rubbish and should be culled, as it is their fault for having too many children or being relatively poor or something. Hence the population line they continually push.

In the contemporary world, capitalism has no serious challengers except for Islamic fundamentalism, and it is doubtful that Islam will ever have much appeal in the West in the short term, so there is no incentive whatsoever for capitalists not to support their own hierarchies and authority and impose it everywhere so as to cement that lack of opposition, their wealth and their power.

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“Solar radiation management”

September 10, 2019

Solar radiation management usually involves reflecting sunlight back into space to lower global warming. The cheapest versions of this proposal involve injecting particles or gasses into the upper atmosphere. The idea is it might give us time to reduce emissions, and reduce Greenhouse Gas levels in the atmosphere, through some kind of carbon removal technology which actually works at the kind of levels we need.

There are a few problems:

  1. We can only model the effects, and use those models to guide us in implementation. We will not know the effects until they arrive. Our models will always be out of date.
  2. Effects from this kind of geoengineering will not be immediate, so it will be even harder to judge what effects are arising from the technology.
  3. Some countries will suffer bad weather events after the process begins. We won’t know if they suffered those effects because of the process, because of climate change, or because of normal weather or a combination of all three.
  4. Some countries which suffer bad weather effects leading to famine or large scale destruction, might decide this is climate warfare against them – which could lead to conventional war. If not they would probably demand and deserve compensation, which would probably cause frictions between badly affected countries.
  5. We would have to have a world-wide agreement on this, and ownership of this, how it was used and what the effects are, to preserve peace and co-ordinate the practice. This is probably impossible.
  6. It will not stop the seas from getting more acidic, leading to ocean death, especially if it encourages delays to reduction of GHG emissions.
  7. It will be costly – not amazingly costly, but costly enough. If there is a world financial crash or war, then it could be discontinued, and climate change might “catch up” leading to more weather instability, and ferocity.

This is not a solution. But we don’t have a solution. This is a problem.

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