My Dream

Well Ian, I’ve gotta say, you made my heart simultaneously smile and break at the same time with this post. Smile because you captured my sentiments so precisely, but with eloquence I can only aspire to. And break because, sadly, it is all too true.

As I stated in an earlier thread, I wish we humans had default mechanism that held our population to no more than 3 billion people. I feel like every one of our problems are all truly traceable straight to back to carrying capacity. Why do people so howl and gnash their teeth every time population as a problem is discussed? I just don’t get it —

And as intimated above Ian, I loved this post. So, thank you for providing the work you do, like this article, for free. I know food isn’t, and I do value your work. I’ll be lending a hand tonight to help make sure it can stay both valuable and free.

A late thought I feel is apropos, again, courtesy of those that have gone before me in AA. You’ll often hear old timers say:

“Getting sober is simple, all you have to do is change everything.”

Our society is so stark ravingly not sober.

you’re a beautiful man. that’s why i reads ya. a kind soul gives me comfort. i’ll sleep a little better tonight, because of your words. Heck, I’m somewhat impelled do everything a little better when i hear that kind of talk.

you can tell how hungry i am for kind people.

I agree. This is my goal as well. But it is a lot narrower. As I have said many times here, we need first to deal with the three immediate problems of kleptocracy, wealth inequality, and class war before we can even get to the four much bigger problems of overpopulation, climate change, resource exhaustion, and ecosystem destruction.

If you look honestly at these problems, you can see that Trump and the current American political scene likely will make them worse, certainly will not make them better, and will waste precious time we do not have. And the US is perhaps the country best situated to have a shot to deal with them.

If you look at population estimates out to 2050, as I do, with an eye on economics, political events and climate, you can make your own assessments. Mine run something like this:

In North America, Mexico has a high likelihood of becoming a failed state as well as much of Central America. The US has a 70-30 chance of coming through although something less than a 50-50 chance of doing so as a democracy in a broad sense of that term. Canada’s chances are similar to those of the US, perhaps marginally better.

South America has a recently good chance of survival with most countries in the 60-40, with the exception of Brazil 40-60 (population, destruction of the Amazonian rain forest).

Africa is pretty much already past the point of no return (population, weak institutions), with the exception of South Africa 60-40, if it can deal with its immigration problems.

Europe has slightly worse, but overall similar chances to the US and Canada. Accidentally, Russia, with its declining population, lots of nukes, and large land mass, has a relatively good chance of survival, although with retention of its kleptocratic dictatorship.

In Asia, most of the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia will fail (population, weak social institutions). Iran is a toss-up, 60-40 in terms of population but some parts of the country may become uninhabitable due to climate change. Turkey I also would put at 60-40 in terms of population, but with the Erdogan dictatorship, it is destabilizing politically. So I put its chances of survival at 40-60. Indonesia and the Philippines also have high likelihoods of failure. East Asia’s chances would be better without North Korea. Japan has the best chances at 70-30, developed industrial society, followed by China 60-40, and South Korea 50-50 (because of North Korea).

Australia I would also put in the 60-40 group. It is relatively well situated with regard to population, but fairly poorly so with regard to climate change.

This may sound like a game, but it isn’t. Billions of lives are at stake. All this is subject to a multitude of caveats and unforeseen confounding events, but consider it is a first approximation.

I think we currently do have the resources to afford all people on the planet with a decent life. But 1) this would not be sustainable. We would need to immediately decrease family size to manage world population down to sustainable levels. And 2) to do so, would require immediate and radical economic, political, and social changes around the world. The odds of doing these two things are vanishingly small, which leaves us with something like the scenario I have sketched out. Worse, and still most likely, case is a population peak of around 10 billion by 2050 followed by a population crash to under one billion by 2100. Intermediate outcomes would be in the 2-3 billion range. That’s the future I see.

Absolutely we have to give up suburbia and waste and a whole load of stuff. But, Western humans will only choose that because they have no other option, they will never willingly give up their current lifestyle in the name of fairness and equality, because, fundamentally, humans are not fair. There are times and events and people that can convince them to behave more fairly, but, they will then always revert to type.

Agreeing with Hugh, the biggest issue is, as always, overpopulation. If the Earth’s basic carrying capacity for humanity is actually 1-2 billion, then, we won’t ever solve any of the other issues without solving that one first. But again I suspect the solution will force itself on us rather than be willingly chosen.

@Tom. Erdogan is not (yet) a dictator but he is trying to turn a halfway decent secular state into a repressive religious one. I don’t see how jailing the opposition and journalists makes a country more democratic.

Mr. Bannon certainly does seem intent on sowing discord and breakdown. His state goal is to blow it all up. Okay. We know were he stands. The Paul Ryan wing seems to tolerate Trump because he will sign any nonsense that will give more away to the 1% and the hell with everything else. But aren’t these goals ultimately at odds with each other? I mean how can the 1% enjoy their riches and make more and more if the world is burning down around them? Sure, for a while they will be protected. But for a very very short while.

I get the feeling more and more every damn day that everyone knows this long Greco-Roman experiment is closing down, no one knows what comes next, so the hell with it all.

Well, Ian, it’s a beautiful dream, and of course all decent people would support it.

The problem is, the world is currently under the iron-fisted control of people who are not at all decent.

Why do the decent people continue in their mass delusion that control of the important things can ever be removed from the currently powerful without the use of, or credibile threat of, force?

Are we just too decent for our own good?

Are we actually going to ‘decent’ ourselves into perpetual slavery?

Is it already too late to be having an honest discussion about this?

The thing is that you can’t force people to be prosperous, happy, or anything else. They have a program in South Africa where they appropriated commercial, productive farms and gifted them to the workers as a form of reparations. The properties now lie in ruins, not productive, and the small areas of subsistence farming while the new owners still work in other commercial farms in the area. The problem could be that the workers, mostly idigenous africans, don’t have the culture, the skills, or the mentality or appropriate mental framing to understand how large commercial operations work, what they need to succeed. Perhaps Africa would have been better without colonization, if the continent had remained ignorant about large commercial and capitalist operations and industrial scales. So even if humanity has the technology to feed everyone in the world, or the technology to bring peace to the world, it doesn’t mean that all the people necessarily want to go along with that, they may want to stay ignorant, tribal, at the smaller scale. Or many are not ready, they don’t have the cultural or mental framework to really understand this. People still sell their daughters in many parts of the world, cut off pieces of their private parts, kill and murder – and a lot of these people would prefer that to a boring, white culture, corporate existence where everyone has food, if peaceful, and just is… bored. And I’ve got to admit that it’s much more exciting in Syria, in Raqqa, then it is in Boise, Idaho. In Syria your life can mean something. And that’s part of the draw there. People want to feel truly alive, and that’s why Utopia will fail, because no one really has the same Utopia as everyone else. We should not exterminate everything on Earth though..

I believe they tried that in Venezuela.

The basic question is how much social control is needed and how should it be exercised. Ruling classes have always believed a lot is needed, and devised ways of making it necessary for most people to obey their betters. Distributing money through jobs isn’t just about making resources available. It’s about requiring employment as social control. Prior to modern vocabulary about employers and employees, unemployment was the problem of “masterless men”. Long after the job requirement had solved how to control the masses while appearing to grant freedom, the law still effectively forced women to obey men who obeyed their employer.

Rulers faced a problem from the rising productivity of industrial society. Edward Bernays brought psychology to governing public relations and to advertising, to create desires so that consumption would continue and increase the level of perceived need. (Here I put in my recurring plug for Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self on elite distrust of democracy, Edward Bernays, and what followed.) Another tactic was planned obsolescence. Products were designed not to last so that people would have to buy replacements. And even then, after WWII, the U.S. administration decided to stay on a war time economy to sustain demand. The F-35 and the booming homeland security businesses are the descendants of that decision. And reportedly, Obama ruled out single-payer health insurance because of all the private insurance jobs that would be lost, so we waste lots of money and create lots of misery for the sake of making sure people are in paying jobs.

The long-winded point I’m head towards is that human nature does not demand the ever-more materialistic greed that our society currently seems to produce. Without the constant advertising and the mindset it produces, we would not necessarily spend all our time on looking for things to want. And the need for jobs is a social and political decision that we can and should reverse.

@ Mike Cooper

First off the AK Party is a secular party and has always been a secular party and Erdogan has not passed one Sharia Law and kicked out of the AK Party people advocating for it.

The arrest of Journalists was not for Journalism but for being members of a terrorist organization. They all got trials, and hundreds have since proven their innocence and been made whole, while others were found guilty and punished.

At all times Erdogan has been within the law and has extensively put major legislation up for referendum by the people the latest of which is the proposed Constitution to replace the old one which pass Parliament with a super-majority to become law anyway, but is being given to the people to decide themselves whether to adopt it.

I second Nihil’s recommendation for Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self. It’s most enlightening and the whole thing is on YouTube.

People live in a localized optimum search based on their community that they identify with. This optimal search includes the culture, the technology used, and the geographical resources of their neighbors. As long as the person is in their localized optimum, they are happy, can breed successfully and have higher relative success compared to their neighborhood.

We as North Americans are aware of how much higher our localized optimum is then that of, say rural India. There may be a global optimum that is way higher than a communities current localized optimum but to get their each individual would need to adapt new cultural ideas, technology used and perhaps seek new resources. This would take them out of their localized optimum into a higher optimum but in the process lose their relative high standards of living compared to their community during the transition to a new community. So it is easy to say why don’t people just adopt these new technologies, standards, etc – but these come at a cost. This may make these people worse off then they were before, because now they are relatively poorer to their new global optimum neighbors and while on a absolute scale they are better on a relative scale in the new community they are worse and will lose their previous high social status and have to work their way up again. Perhaps not even have as easy access to breeding pairs as before.

It often takes a disruption of the current optimum, an ecosystem collapse per se, for people to reach for a new optimum.

@brian
I think Tiebout sorting is closer to what you’re trying to express:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiebout_model

Wholeheartedly agree. I used to try to improve the world (even wrote a book about it). But seeing how different the world could be—needs to be—from what it is and wants to be, broke my heart.

I now clean up at home, and try to live a good life.

Are there any studies which quantify the amount of damage sociopaths do to a society? Or, how would a society change if they could somehow be magically removed?

Ian.

Your manifest compassion is a major reason why I read your writings. I doubt, given our fallen nature, that your dream is attainable in toto. But even achieving some of it is a worthwhile and achievable goal.

Brian:
Unrelated, but I’m curious. You mentioned Boise upthread. Live in Idaho?

It’s easy to dream, Ian, and I suspect almost all of us share yours, but I am not so sure about the feasibility. Are you talking about an average standard of living or a minimum one? There is no way our planet can carry 11 billion people at a western standard of living; we can only aim at minimum ones, but even those can then still cause jealousy and resentment, and that leads to violence and terrorism. All we can do, as Churchill said, is just keep buggering on. I think most people, including Trump, are trying to do exactly that. They just disagree about the methods.

RE Oaktown Girl: Know what you mean, but the point you both miss that the boot will always be on the employers’ foot at less than full employment. The solution lies in full employment whether that is achieved either by fiscal, monetary, regional etc. policies or by controlling our borders.