Adaptive Landscapes

I normally blog about subjects for which I possess a secure appreciation or alternatively report and riff on someone else’s research and analysis. Here, I venture into a subject outside my expertise and am happy to be corrected.

The term adaptive landscape is used by DarkHorse podcasters Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein in their book A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century (2021), as yet unread by me with no plans to pick it up. As I understand it, an adaptive landscape operates in both biological and cultural paradigms and at accordingly different timescales. The idea is profound as it relates to developments and influences in human and nonhuman environments (a/k/a survival pressures) that demand behavioral adaptation. In biology, adaptation may lead to speciation. However, most long-lived, complex organisms don’t evolve nearly a rapidly as, say, viruses and insects, so that effect manifesting over evolutionary time falls out of scope for most discussions not restricted to evolution. Adaptive responses may thus be better understood as functioning in the cultural realm.

Organisms exist within biological niches that require individualized responses to their particular adaptive landscape. Even with highly social species such as ants and apes (admittedly broad categories), one should expect them to differ somewhat from place to place and time to time. So not all frogs, bears, birds, and bees behave or have always behaved the same ways. I expect much higher incidence of behavioral overlap in nonhuman species, however, than with humans precisely because human culture is demonstrably far more robust and varied. Don’t know with certainty, but my suspicion is that most species respond directly to survival pressure (nature red in tooth and claw) because they exist in a state of nature whereas humans live for the most part within civilization and so add a high quotient of cultural adaption and optimization well below life-and-death stakes. Yet humans face ongoing existential threats (including nuclear annihilation) like any other species, which often fail to register and/or be a spur to action.

Bringing this post around to one of the overarching themes of this blog, let me suggest that an inability to fully recognize and respond to looming collapse and likely near-term human extinction is due in part to mismatch between timescales, e.g., a human lifetime, human history, evolutionary time, and geological time, with cosmological time falling even further out of consideration. Another way of putting this appears in an article by Laura Hudson in Wired about philosopher Timothy Morton, who coined the term hyperobject to describe “phenomena that are too vast and fundamentally weird for humans to wrap their heads around.” I’ve wrestled with examples of the term ranging from deep time, oceanic garbage gyres, the irrationality and gamification of financial markets, rampant political dysfunction and institutional corruption, the Counter-Enlightenment, Transhumanism, the climate emergency, the metacrisis or polycrisis associated with the inability to make sense of reality when so much is purposely falsified in the information environment, and of course, the collapse of industrial civilization. For reasons unclear, I’m drawn to contemplation of issues that necessitate a god’s eye view (perhaps another way of grokking hyperobjects, see here and here), though I have neither the time, patience, nor inclination to systematize my thinking the way Daniel Schmachtenberg (and others) do with The Consilience Project, which I find an increasingly pointless bureaucratic response as planetary conditions worsen.

What I recognize is that, despite best attempts to address mounting existential threats (often in the form of hyperobjects) that inform the adaptive landscape, humans are not up to the task and cannot escape the energetic puzzle box we unwittingly trapped ourselves inside with the adoption of fossil fuels two to three centuries ago and subsequent build-out of the modern world. The human adaptive landscape is simply not powerful or widespread enough to produce the signal needed to fight effectively for survival. Instead, we feign concern, freeze in paralysis/denial of the immensity of such dark portents, and take flight from reality but cannot ultimately avoid failing.

Cultural Inheritance, pt. 01

Douglas Murray wrote a book called The Strange Death of Europe (2017), which is behind a long list of books as yet unread by me. Doubtful I will ever get to is. My familiarity with his thesis stems from his many appearances in interviews and webcasts describing the book. Murray continues a long line of declinists (mentioned here) prophesying and/or chronicling the long, slow demise of Europe, and in an only slightly wider sense, the West. Analyses of the causes and manifestations of decline range all over the map but typically include a combination of incompetence, exhaustion, and inevitability. For Murray, the strangeness is that it appears self-inflicted and openly desired out of some misplaced sense of guilt and shame following an entirely atypical (for the West) moral reckoning, perhaps for having been the dominant global culture for roughly five hundred years. This blog already says plenty about disaster, destruction, and doom, so let me instead pose a different question: Is the cultural inheritance of the West at all worth honoring and preserving? Won’t be an easy answer.

The question is partly prompted by the breathless announcement last fall in the alumni magazine of one of my alma maters of a newly created position (a further example of needless administrative bloat): Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion (among other flowery academic titles attached to the position). For reasons unknown, the full sequence Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (a/k/a DIE — yes, the initialism is purposely disordered) was avoided, but as with many trendy turns of phrase, precision hardly matters since the omitted word is inferred. Let’s first consider the term cultural inheritance. If one takes a warts-and-all approach, the full spectrum from glory to atrocity accumulated throughout history informs what descends from our forebears in the form of inheritance. Indeed, highs and lows are scarcely separable. Whereas individual memory tends to select mostly good parts, cultural memory records everything — albeit with interpretive bias — so long as one has the inclination to consult history books.

If one takes a charitable view of history, admirable events, practices, norms, and artifacts become the celebratory focus while nasty parts may be acknowledged but are nonetheless elided, forgotten, or shoved forcibly down the memory hole. But if one takes a pessimistic view, the very worst parts represent an irredeemable, permanent stain on everything else (the aforementioned moral reckoning). Recent arguments (revisionist history say many) that the founding of the United States of America, a political entity, should be redated to 1619 to coincide with the establishment of slavery rather than 1776 with the Declaration of Independence is an example. Uncharacteristically perhaps, I take the charitable view while the trés chic view in academe (echoed in corporate life and far-left government policy) is to condemn the past for failing to embody Woke standards of the present. Multiple influential segments of Western culture have thus succumbed to ideological possession as demonstrated by self-denunciation, self-flagellation, and complete loss of faith in Western institutions because of, well, slavery, genocide, colonialism, warfare, torture, racism, child labor, human trafficking, and other abominations, almost none not all of which are relegated to the past.

Living Among Refuse (re-redux)

Back to an old complaint on mine: living in a world so polluted that it’s impossible to assert that pristine, untouched (by human interventions) places exist anymore. Every bit of soil, water, and air is now affected by chemical alteration. degradation, and pollutants subtle and gross. Was intrigued to learn that despite despoliation, life finds a way (for now, anyway): a new marine ecosystem has formed in the middle of the ocean, normally devoid of much life, amongst the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (which goes by other names). Here’s the abstract from a scientific paper on the subject:

… the high seas are colonized by a diverse array of coastal species, which survive and reproduce in the open ocean, contributing strongly to its floating community composition. Analysis of rafting plastic debris in the eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre revealed 37 coastal invertebrate taxa, largely of Western Pacific origin, exceeding pelagic taxa richness by threefold. Coastal taxa, including diverse taxonomic groups and life history traits, occurred on 70.5% of debris items. Most coastal taxa possessed either direct development or asexual reproduction, possibly facilitating long-term persistence on rafts … results suggest that the historical lack of available substrate limited the colonization of the open ocean by coastal species, rather than physiological or ecological constraints as previously assumed. It appears that coastal species persist now in the open ocean as a substantial component of a neopelagic community sustained by the vast and expanding sea of plastic debris.

This news reminds me of flourishing ecosystems (significantly, absent humans) in Le Zone Rouge and the Chernobyl exclusion zone. To bright-siders, maybe these examples are glass-half-full observations, meaning take whatever good news presents itself and move on. Of course, I’m a glass-half-empty type, disgusted and dispirited by the very existence of all our floating refuse, which is expected to triple by 2060, largely from single-use plastics. (Readers are spared the indignity of stomach-churning pictures of trash floating in the ocean or beaches strewn with trash.) Everyone knows by now a good portion of human trash ends up in garbage gyres in all the major oceanic bodies. Yet transition to a better mode of packaging and consumption to avoid further wreckage appears nowhere on the horizon. Although each of us participates at some level (by virtue of being alive) in the cycle of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal, I really blame industry for refusing steadfastly to adopt practices that don’t lead to obvious harms; I blame governments for not regulating industries that pollute wantonly; and I blame economists for failing to account for externalities such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch because, well, to do so would invalidate most business models.

So chalk another one up for the bad guys. A tiny thread of sliver silver lining pokes through an otherwise suffocating blanket of darkness.

Social Contagion

Can’t remember how I first learned the term conversion hysteria (a/k/a conversion disorder a/k/a functional neurologic symptom disorder) but it was early in adulthood. The meaning is loose and subject to interpretation, typically focusing more on symptoms presented than triggers or causes. My lay understanding is that conversion hysteria occurs when either an individual or group works themselves into a lather over some subject and loses psychological mooring. I had my own experience with it when younger and full of raging hormones but later got myself under control. I also began to recognize that numerous historical events bore strong enough resemblance to categorize them as instances of group conversion hysteria. In recent years, clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet’s description of mass formation psychosis fits the same pattern, which is elaborated by him more formally. Some reports refer to Desmet’s description as “discredited.” I decline to referee the debate.

Two historical events where people lost their minds in response to severe disruption of social norms are the Salem witch trials and the Weimar/Nazi era in Germany. Two further, more recent episodes are Trump Derangement Syndrome in the U.S. and the Covid Cult worldwide, neither of which are over. The latter features governments and petty bureaucrats everywhere misapplying authoritarian force to establish biosecurity regimes over what turns out to have been a hypochondriac response to a bad flu virus (and yes, it was pretty bad) along with a maniacal power grab. What all episodes share is the perception — real or imagined — of some sort of virulent infection that triggers fear-laden desperation to purge the scourge at literally any cost, including destroying the host. The viral metaphor applies whether the agent is literally a virus alien to the physical body or merely an idea (meme) alien to the social body.

Let me acknowledge (as suggested here) Jordan Peterson’s comments in his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience that such events resemble social contagion that come and go in waves. However, those waves are not like the regular, established intervals of the tides or daylight/nighttime. Rather, they’re more like rogue waves or tsunamis that break across segments of a culture unpredictably. Peterson’s primary example was the very thing that brought him to prominence: Canadian legislation requiring that teachers use students’ preferred pronouns. While initially part of a broad social movement in support of transgender students in Canada and elsewhere, the issue has since become foundational to Woke ideology. Peterson said to Rogan that by pushing the matter into the mainstream (rather than it being at issue for a tiny fraction of students), Canadian legislators were quite literally opening the floodgates to a wave of confusion among youths already wrestling with identity. I can’t recall if Peterson said as much at the time (2017?) or is projecting onto the past.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 02

Continuing from pt. 01, the notion of privilege took an unexpected turn for me recently when the prospect inevitability of demographic collapse came back onto my radar. I scoffed at the demographer’s crystal ball earlier not because I disagree with the assessments or numbers but because, like so many aspects of the collapse of industrial civilization, demographic collapse lies squarely beyond anyone’s control. My questions in reply are basically Yeah? And? So? Do a search on demographic collapse and it will reveal a significant number of reports, with reporters themselves (including the worst contemporary media whore and glory hound who shall forever remain unnamed at this site) freaking out and losing their collective minds, on the hows, whys, wheres, and whens population will crash. The most immediate worrisome aspect is anticipated inversion of the youngest being the most numerous, the usual state of affairs, to the oldest being the most numerous and flatly unsupportable by the young. This has been the basic warning about Social Security for decades already: too few paying in, too many granted benefits. See also this documentary film being prepared for imminent release. I suspect supporting annotations will appear in time.

Probably not fair to call capitalism and its support structures a Ponzi scheme (latecomers to the scheme supporting earlier entrants), but the desire to perpetuate historical demographic distributions (as opposed to what? yielding to the drift of history?) is clearly part of the perpetual growth mentality. Traditionally, prior to the 20th century in the West, when the vast majority of people participated in agrarian and/or subsistence economies instead of the money economy, children were desirable not least because they provided free labor until they were grown, were positioned to take over family farms and businesses, and cared for oldsters when that time came. Intergenerational continuity and stability were maintained and it was generally accepted that each generation would supplant the previous through the seasons of life. The money economy destroyed most of that. Many young adult children now exercise their options (privilege) and break away as soon as possible (as I did) in search of economic opportunity in cities and form their own families (or don’t, as I didn’t). Estrangement and abandonment may not be complete, but families being spread across the continent certainly limits extended family cohesion to holidays and occasional visits. Oldsters (in the affluent West anyway) are now typically shuttled off to (euphemism alert) retirement homes to be warehoused prior to dying. Easier to pay someone to perform that service than to do it oneself, apparently. So if older people are currently privileged over the young (in some ways at least), that condition is being reversed because, dammit, children are in short supply yet needed desperately to keep growth on track.

Demographers point to a number of factors that have conspired to create the crisis (one of many interlocking crises some intellectuals have begun calling the polycrisis). The two main factors are declining fertility and reproductive choice. My suspicion is that the toxic environment, one result of centuries of industrial activity with plastics and drugs now found in human bodies where they don’t belong, accounts for many fertility issues. Add to that poor food quality (i.e., malnutrition, not just poor diets) and it’s easy to understand why healthy pregnancies might be more difficult in the 21st century than before. I’m not qualified to support that assessment, so take it for what it’s worth. Reproductive choice, another recently acquired female privilege (in historical terms), is a function of several things: financial independence, educational attainment, and availability of birth control. Accordingly, more women are choosing either to defer having children while they establish careers or choose not to have children at all. (Men make those choices, too.) Delays unexpectedly leave lots of women unable to have children for failure to find a suitable mate or having spent their best reproductive years doing other things. As I understand it, these correlations are borne out in some harrowing statistics. As the polycrisis deepens, a philosophical choice not to bring children into the world (just to suffer and die young) is also a motivation to remain childless.

Safely Distanced

/rant on

New Year’s Day (or just prior) is the annual cue for fools full of loose talk to provide unasked their year-in-review and “best of” articles summarizing the previous calendar year. I don’t go in for such clichéd forms of curation but certainly recognize an appetite among Web denizens for predigested content that tells them where to park their attention and what or how to think rather than thinking for themselves. Considering how mis- and under-educated the public has grown to be since the steady slippage destruction of educational standards and curricula began in the 1970s (says me), I suppose that appetite might be better characterized as need in much the same way children needs guidance and rules enforced by wizened authorities beginning with parents yet never truly ending, only shifting over to various institutions that inform and restrain society as a whole. I continue to be flabbergasted by the failure of parents (and teachers) to curb the awful effects of electronic media. I also find it impossible not to characterize social media and other hyperstimuli as gateways into the minds of impressionable youth (and permanent adult children) very much like certain drugs (e.g., nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis) are characterized as gateways to even worse drugs. No doubt everyone must work out a relationship with these unavoidable, ubiquitous influences, but that’s not equivalent to throwing wide open the gate for everything imaginable to parade right in, as many do.

Hard to assess whether foundations below American institutions (to limit my focus) were allowed to decay through neglect and inattention or were actively undermined. Either way, their corruption and now inter-generational inability to function effectively put everyone in a wildly precarious position. The know-how, ambition, and moral focus needed to do anything other than game sclerotic systems for personal profit and acquisition of power are eroding so quickly that operations requiring widespread subscription by the public (such as English literacy) or taking more than the push of a button or click of a mouse to initiate preprogrammed commands are entering failure mode. Like the accidental horror film Idiocracy, the point will come when too few possess the knowledge and skills anymore to get things done but can only indulge in crass spectacle with their undeveloped minds. Because this is a date-related blog post, I point out that Idiocracy depicts results of cultural decay 500 years hence. It won’t take nearly that long. Just one miserable example is the fascist, censorious mood — a style of curation — that has swept through government agencies and Silicon Valley offices intent on installing unchallenged orthodoxies, or for that matter, news junkies and social media platform users content to accept coerced thinking. Religions of old ran that gambit but no need to wait for a new Inquisition to arise. Heretics are already persecuted via cancel culture, which includes excommunication social expulsion, suspension and/or cancellation of media accounts, and confiscation of bank deposits.

A similar point can be made about the climate emergency. Fools point to weather rather than climate to dispel urgency. Reports extrapolating trends often focus on the year 2100, well after almost all of us now alive will have departed this Earth, as a bogus target date for eventualities like disappearance of sea and glacial ice, sea level rise, unrecoverable greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, pH imbalance in the oceans, and other runaway, self-reinforcing consequences of roughly 300 years of industrial activity that succeeded unwittingly in terraforming the planet, along the way making it fundamentally uninhabitable for most species. The masses labor in 2023 under the false impression that everyone is safely distanced from those outcomes or indeed any of the consequences of institutional failure that don’t take geological time to manifest fully. Such notions are like assurances offered to children who seek to understand their own mortality: no need to worry about that now, that’s a long, long way off. Besides, right now there are hangovers to nurse, gifts to return for cash, snow to shovel, and Super Bowl parties to plan. Those are right now or at least imminent. Sorry to say, so is the full-on collapse of institutions that sustain and protect everyone. The past three years have already demonstrated just how precarious modern living arrangements are, yet most mental models can’t or won’t contemplate the wholesale disappearance of this way of life, and if one has learned of others pointing to this understanding, well, no need to worry about that just yet, that’s a long, long way off. However, the slide down the opposite side of all those energy, population, and wealth curves won’t take nearly as long as it took to climb up them.

/rant off

Reality Check (redux)

/rant on

The previous time I was prompted to blog under this title was regarding the deplorable state of public education in the U.S., handily summarized at Gin and Tacos (formerly on my blogroll). The blogger there is admirable in many respects, but he has turned his attention away from blogging toward podcasting and professional writing with the ambition of becoming a political pundit. (I have disclaimed any desire on my part to be a pundit. Gawd … kill me first.) I check in at Gin and Tacos rarely anymore, politics not really being my focus. However, going back to reread the linked blog post, his excoriation of U.S. public education holds up. Systemic rot has since graduated into institutions of higher learning. Their mission statements, crafted in fine, unvarying academese, may exhibit unchanged idealism but the open secret is that the academy has become a network of brainwashing centers for vulnerable young adults. See this blog post on that subject. What prompts this new reality check is the ongoing buildup of truly awful news, but especially James Howard Kunstler’s recent blog post “The Four Fuckeries” over at Clusterfuck Nation, published somewhat in advance of his annual year-end-summary-and-predictions post. Kunstler pulls no punches, delivering assessments of activities in the public interest that have gone so abysmally wrong it beggars the imagination. I won’t summarize; go read for yourself.

At some point, I realized when linking to my own past blog posts that perhaps too many include the word wrong in the title. By that, I don’t mean merely incorrect or bad or unfortunate but rather purpose-built for comprehensive damage that mere incompetence could not accomplish or explain. Some may believe the severity of damage is the simple product of lies compounding lies, coverups compounding coverups, and crimes compounding crimes. That may well be true in part. But there is far too much evidence of Manichean manipulation and heedless damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead garbage decision-making to waive off widespread institutional corruptions as mere conspiracy. Thus, Kunstler’s choice of the term fuckeries. Having already reviewed the unmitigated disaster of public education, let me instead turn to other examples.

Wrong Things Getting Done Anyway

The difference between right and wrong is obvious to almost everyone by the end of kindergarten. Temptations persist and everyone does things great and small known to be wrong when enticements and advantages outweigh punishments. C’mon, you know you do it. I do, too. Only at the conclusion of a law degree or the start of a political career (funny how those two often coincide) do things get particularly fuzzy. One might add military service to those exceptions except that servicemen are trained not to think, simply do (i.e., follow orders without question). Anyone with functioning ethics and morality also recognizes that in legitimate cases of things getting unavoidably fuzzy in a hypercomplex world, the dividing line often can’t be established clearly. Thus, venturing into the wide, gray, middle area is really a signal that one has probably already gone too far. And yet, demonstrating that human society has not really progressed ethically despite considerable gains in technical prowess, egregiously wrong things are getting done anyway.

The whopper of which nearly everyone is guilty (thus, guilty pleasure) is … the Whopper. C’mon, you know you eat it do it. I know I do. Of course, the irresistible and ubiquitous fast food burger is really only one example of a wide array of foodstuffs known to be unhealthy, cause obesity, and pose long-term health problems. Doesn’t help that, just like Big Tobacco, the food industry knowingly refines their products (processed foods, anyway) to be hyperstimuli impossible to ignore or resist unless one is iron willed or develops an eating disorder. Another hyperstimulus most can’t escape is the smartphone (or a host of other electronic gadgets). C’mon, you know you crave the digital pacifier. I don’t, having managed to avoid that particular trap. For me, electronics are always only tools. However, railing against them with respect to how they distort cognition (as I have) convinces exactly no one, so that argument goes on the deferral pile.

Another giant example not in terms of participation but in terms of effect is the capitalist urge to gather to oneself as much filthy lucre as possible only to sit heartlessly on top of that nasty dragon’s hoard while others suffer in plain sight all around. C’mon, you know you would do it if you could. I know I would — at least up to a point. Periods of gross inequality come and go over the course of history. I won’t make direct comparisons between today and any one of several prior Gilded Ages in the U.S., but it’s no secret that the existence today of several hundy billionaires and an increasing number of mere multibillionaires represents a gross misallocation of financial resources: funneling the productivity of the masses (and fiat dollars whiffed into existence with keystrokes) into the hands of a few. Fake philanthropy to launder reputations fail to convince me that such folks are anything other than miserly Scrooges fixated on maintaining and growing their absurd wealth, influence, and bogus social status at the cost of their very souls. Seriously, who besides sycophants and climbers would want to even be in the same room as one of those people (names withheld)? Maybe better not to answer that question.

Demographics is Destiny

A friend put in my hands a copy of Peter Zeihan’s book The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (2022) with instructions to read (and return) the book. Without a moment’s pause, I exclaimed “oh, that guy!” Zeihan has been making the rounds of various podcasts and interview shows hawking his book and its conclusions, so I had gotten the bullet, so to speak, a few times already. This is frequently and understandably the case with authors doing the promotional circuit and repeating the same talking points with each appearance. Some fare better in that regard, some worse. Zeihan is among the worse, partly because he has recently entered the doomosphere (or collapse space, if one prefers) publicly, whereas I’m not an ingénue on the subject so not easily led. Thus far, I’ve only read the introduction, so rather than book blogging, let me instead admit a few of my biases openly, mostly based on what I’ve learned about collapse over the past decade and a half, without any expectation that Zeihan will dispel or overcome them in the course of 475 pp. (not counting acknowledgements and index).

Measurement. As a demographer, Zeihan repeats one of the most basic conceptual errors in science, namely, that by taking the measure of something one can reveal its secrets. With human population trends in particular, measurement is unambiguous and easily mistaken for staring into a crystal ball — so long as history remains basically continuous. Thus, the phrase demographics is destiny gets batted around (sometimes disputed — do a search) as though the prophesied future is as inevitable and inescapable as the rising and setting sun. Well, demographics is in fact pretty reliable until the appearance of one or more metaphorical black swans. Flocks of them have been circling around the early 21st century.

Totality. The term globalization might be properly limited to use in economics, but it describes industrial civilization as well. When one collapses, so, too, does the other. They’re inextricably linked and form a unity or totality. No doubt different regions and/or geographies will collapse differently; that’s not in dispute. However, the title suggests grievous loss followed (immediately?) by opportunity. As I’ve understood various collapse scenarios (those parts that can be reliably anticipated), none permit a quick restart or global reset. Rather, the bottleneck will be severe enough, the loss of habitat and resources so egregious, that what remnants manage to survive (no assurances) will be tiny, barbarous, and extremely localized (including the bolthole billionaires, but then, calling them barbarous is a tautology) compared to the nearly eight billion global citizens now alive in the short-lived Age of Abundance. The beginning of what, exactly? After most species succumb just as in previous major extinction events (usually an extensive process but this time sped up by orders of magnitude), it will be a very quiet Earth for tens or hundreds of millions of years if it bounces back at all (no assurances).

Terraforming. Like it or not, human activity and ingenuity have essentially terraformed the planet, but not intentionally or for the better. Sure, we have skyscrapers, giant transportation and energy networks, enough archived knowledge and entertainment to sate even the most insatiable intellects consumers, and all the manifold material glories and know-how of the modern era. But on balance, our own refuse is littering literally every place around the Earth (air, water, soil, in orbit), a mixture of plastics and toxic waste in waterways and soils make water (beyond headwaters) undrinkable and many foods unhealthy, lacking in nutrition, and even carcinogenic, and subtle alterations in atmospheric chemistry are changing the climate. These are catastrophes so big and diffuse they might as well be invisible; many people simply can’t grok them. The terraformed planet is now a sacrifice zone, exploited and despoiled ruthlessly for short-term gain leaving no future worth living. Global supply chains are already breaking down and will not be able to adjust fast enough to avoid a megadeath pulse.

Hubris. Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist. Even if he’s correct in his analyses and prognostications, even if leaders heed his advice and prepare responsibly, even if all of humanity pulls together somehow to address cascade failure and eventual collapse, there is no reason to expect that history writ large can be steered toward desired outcomes to avoid worst case scenarios now barreling at us. That’s simply not the way history unfolds, and experience demonstrates that those who try to exert god-like influence over human affairs become maniacs, despots, and tyrants who generally manage to make matters worse. The world is already experiencing diasporas from politically, socially, economically, and ecologically destabilized regions, and the obvious, humane response (i.e., take them in) has been limited because those countries regarded as lifeboats (true or not) can’t haul them all aboard. The book’s Table of Contents doesn’t indicate consideration of that demographic effect and the index doesn’t list the term diaspora. Yet Zeihan’s got everything figgered well enough to offer strategic advice?

I support the idea of studying history to better understand ourselves in the present. But that can’t be the limit of a book with the tease “… just the beginning” right there in the title. Macrohistory is going to roll over all of us no matter what, and it’s wishful thinking to believe much can be done at this point to redirect the terrible consequences and momentum of past centuries. Although academics can recognize in hindsight major influences, technologies, ideologies, and inflection points that delivered us to this point in history, and perhaps even see how some near-term developments will break good or bad depending on fortuitous circumstance, no one planned, directed, or chose any of the epochal shifts of the past. Rather, human societies and civilizations muddle through and adapt continuously until — at last — they can’t anymore. Then they collapse. It’s happened over and over but never before (that can be ascertained) at a global scale. Yet Zeihan promises a new beginning. I, OTOH, can offer no assurances.

Impulse Control

I’ve quoted Caitlin Johnstone numerous times, usually her clever aphorisms. Her takes on geopolitics also ring fundamentally true to me, but then, I find it simple and obvious to be against empire, needless war, and wanton destruction just as she is. That’s not the position of most warmongers important decision makers driving cultural and political narratives, who are reflexively imperial, excited by war, self-aggrandizing, and reckless in their pursuits no matter who suffers (it’s rarely them). Anyway, I had not checked her blog for a while, which for me is too much like staring at the sun. Indeed, that same reason is why I stopped reading TomDispatch and have mostly backed away from Bracing Views. Geopolitics is just too ugly, too incoherent, too raving insane to be believed. However, these paragraphs (from here) caught my attention:

Humanity’s major problems arise from the impulse to control. Ecocide arises from the impulse to control nature. Empire arises from the impulse to control civilizations. Oligarchy arises from the impulse to control political outcomes. Ego arises from the impulse to control life.

A healthy humanity would be free of the impulse to manipulate and exert control: over life, over people, over nature. But it would be so different from the humanity we know now that falling into that way of functioning would be a kind of death. And it would feel like a death.

Sometimes it seems like people want the world to end, want humanity to go extinct. I’d suggest that this may be a confused expression of an intuited truth: that there’s something good on the other side of ending all this. But it’s the end of our dysfunction, not of our species.

I initially misread the first sentence as “Humanity’s major problems arise from lack of impulse control.” Self-restraint (also self-abnegation?) is the quality I find most lacking in everyone, especially our species-level consumption, whether for nourishment, enrichment, or meaningless status. Writ large, we just can’t seem to stop our gluttony, or put another way, suffer the inability to recognize when enough is enough. Johnstone’s remarks that giving up control feels like death echo others who have described the leaders of industrial civilization, politicians and corporate CEOs alike, as members of a global death cult driving everyone ineluctably toward early extinction. While safety, security, and profit are ostensible near-term goals, mechanisms developed to achieve those goals involve no small amount of death dealing. And because civilizational dynamics (observed many times over by those who study such things) demonstrate ebb and flow over time (centuries and millennia) — e.g., the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization and knowing destruction of the planet (specifically, the biosphere habitable by humans and other species) — the willingness to pursue and perpetuate a destructive way of life is maniacal and insane. Whereas Johnstone believes giving up (illusory) control passes as eventual release from earthly torments or at least an opportunity to create something smarter, wiser, and perhaps more restrained than the outright energy binge we’ve been on for the past two centuries, my expectation is that self-annihilation will be total and complete. No one gets out alive; there is nothing beyond.