Had a commenter in the last post say that humans always over-consume. When I said that commons had been stable for as long as centuries they answered that this was true, but that those families produced too many kids.

Humans change how they do things. Once we didn’t fly. Once there had never been democracy. Once there had never been kings. Once there were no domesticated animals. Once there were no monotheisms. Once there we no… (insert a million examples.)

If we assume that human nature is always bad or good, we’re fools. Human nature has a lot of range and is very dependent on conditioning.

Right now all the usual fools are screaming that there aren’t enough children being born.

So… we know that sometimes humans don’t over-produce babies and we know that sometimes, very long periods, humans manage commons.

Is there some way we can put those two things together at a reasonable replacement rate? Can we find a way to have a relatively stable non overconsuming good society to live in?

Can we change culture so that over-consumption and display is regarded with revulsion? Certainly there have been cultures like that.

Change is possible and because change is possible better worlds are possible. Because change is possible, worse worlds are also possible.

But we operate on the assumption that human nature allows for good outcomes because if we operate on the assumption that it doesn’t, then all that is left is to sit back and wait for extinction. And if we assume no solutions are possible, and they are, well, we won’t find them, having already written them off.

Intellectual honesty is “I don’t know if we can find a better solution but I also don’t know that we can’t, and I do know that humans have often found new ways of doing things.”

A better world is easy enough to imagine. And that’s the first step to change: find a pole star and navigate by it. We chose “let’s organize our society around greed” as a polestar and it changed the world. Now it’s running us off a cliff.

Perhaps there are other polestars which would work better?

Humans generally change societies radically after a crisis. But when they do so, they reach for the ideas that are hanging around. If those ideas aren’t good ones (neoliberalism in the 70s, for example) humans will turn a crisis into something worse by choosing a cure that is worse than disease.

So the job is to make sure good ideas hanging around. Eric Anderson has suggested a land ethic. Make your suggestions in the comments.

 

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