Cringeworthy Discombobulations
It is not news that societal collapse is baked into our future
It was news to the intelligentsia of the late 18th century when the potential for arithmetic (linear) increases in food production was compared to the geometric (exponential) increases in population growth. The rate of population growth had become so great as to be noticeable in one lifetime as was clear to the few paying attention in the 18th century and as was clear to everyone in the 19th century until all right thinking humans agreed to stop thinking about it.
While rudely reminded in the late 1960s to think about it, we soon (by 1980s) agreed that anyone who is so rude as to call our Anthropocene enthusiasm into question is also likely a racist.
That fossil fuels could be turned into food/feed/fodder even faster (for a time, e.g. until mid 21st century) than the human, pet, and livestock populations could grow was a welcome distraction.
Based on 1,742 attempts, Al Bartlett concluded, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” And in 1934, Upton Sinclair had noted why.
Living within limits is not what modern humans do or can do. Understanding why may be worth the endeavor. Two ways of understanding (compatible, i.e. not mutually exclusion) focus on human nature and our form of modern techno-industrial (MTI) civilization. Changing our innate (limbic and brainstem) predispositions may be more difficult than changing our cultural (learned/schooled) presuppositions.
It is not news that societal collapse is baked into our future and has been baked in for centuries. The only unknown was when would humanity be powerful enough and reality blind enough to destroy itself and much of life on Earth (via Anthropocene mass extinction event)? Well, it seems the answer is “the 21st century when the right thinking (well educated) products of MTI [modern techno-industrial] cultures rule the world.”
So, who do you think will win the Nobel Prize in economics this years?
Some focus on understanding how our brain/mind and human ecology functions to construe reality and how that applied to us as a species for the whole of human history (the last six million years of the past lives of homininans). Per our genes, there are two forms of human, one of recent (75k years ago) arising, and the default form.
About 99.9999% of humans alive today are of the recent form. Unless you are San, Hadza, Pygmy, or Sandawe with more than 50% of your pre-modern genome and culture intact, you are a modern human.
Some base their best guess on a new understanding of the nature and role of “forms of civilization”, a new concept which offers a new account of the evolution of fundamentally different types of cultures, and on the emergence and maturation of our MTI form of civilization.
From the point of view of the fate of MTI cultures in the next century or two, and given our power as MTI cultures over most of humanity and much of life, the discussion between the biological and cultural determinants continues, e.g. The Bill and Ruben Show.
Remember the critical point is that in the 21st Century we in MTI cultures will not change our trajectory by tweaking our form of civilization at the margins (e.g. ending climate change), nor will we learn what is necessary to learn (e.g. understand the implications of the exponential function) in order to fundamentally transcend our formation. We cannot end our form, but our form can end.
The thesis that innate (limbic and brainstem) evolved predispositions have become maladaptive in today’s mind-bogglingly complex rapidly changing combined socio-econo-politico-eco-environments is evidence based. In particular, the instinctive and emotional responses of multiple, large competing overcomplex societies (e.g. nation states) in a time of omni-crisis inhibits rational collective behaviour that might be possible at the evolved band-sized group level of 15–25* trusted with your life others.
The condition of living in (being a product of) metastatic modernity may be what it obviously is — a lethal impediment to the emergence of any understanding of ourselves, our past to present condition and our denormalized nature such as could lead us to the notion that there are alternative forms of civilization, and that we modern humans, qua metastatic moderns, can collectively construct a new more adaptive form of civilization.
*The mean group size of remaining Hadza is 21 and among San is about 20. The San and Hadza are the only pre-expansionist humans (not genetically descended from a small group of humans 75k years ago) with pre-expansionist culture (K-culture) mostly intact (they number about 10k). Occasionally they form large camps of 80 to 100 for a time (days/weeks). The increase in stress and conflict is noticeable, but for a time the benefits outweigh the harm. The condition of living permanently in large groups over multiple generations is lethally denormalizing long term. Metastatic modernity is the outcome having one final outcome.
That all humans must be part of the outcome is not necessary. The ending of the modern (r-selected) form of human is necessary (will be selected for long term). If any humans persist long term, and evolve into ‘endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’ will depend upon whether some modern human revert (reversion mutate) into their opposite (K-selected animals). Increasing the probability of this happening may be possible. Willing ourselves as free agents to transcend our metastatic form is not. We have a form of human problem and its ending is the only ‘solution’. Our condition of believing in belief, of not being able to listen to Nature who has all the answers, is lethal.
Eric Lee, cringeworthy idiot
aka H.narrator