What I see in the world
This is an attempt to summarize my worldview of our current situation and what individuals can do about it. There are 2 sides of it which, in appearance, are in contradiction:
Let me start with the first side, which is rather lengthy and gloomy but important to eliminate many pathways which I believe can never solve our current societal problems.
If society were to become more efficient with its resource usage, such as reducing its energy consumption through digitalization, having 'cleaner' sources of energy 1 or reducing how much plastic is used in packaging, it wouldn't make much of a difference. Society doesn’t give back its surpluses to nature 2, even though it is wholly dependent on it to produce anything. To claim that such a thing would happen is hopelessly naive. Instead the system would reinvest the gains to further its growth, because that is the path that society is committed to: more growth, more infrastructure, no matter what damage it creates in human beings or the natural world.
The situation where an increase in efficiency leads to a total increase in resource usage is called Jevons paradox, and I would claim that there is nothing paradoxical about it if one understands that society has taken growth as its fundamental axiom, even if doing so will lead it to destroy the very ground on which its operation rests.
But why is society so fixated on growth, even if it creates hundreds of side effects which are far worse than the improvements it leads to? Why can it not foresee the consequences of its actions and change accordingly?
I talk about society as if it was some external entity that humans do not have control over, and this is because I believe this way of conceiving of it is far more accurate than thinking of society as an emerging property of human will and design. There is something fundamentally different about a group of friends deciding where they want to eat, and society 'deciding' that technological growth is so important that it needs to be maintained at all costs.
One difference we can already note between a casual group of friends, and a bigger organization like a large company 3, is that in sizeable groups, it is simply impossible to know everyone, let alone talk to all of them. This is formalized by Dunbar's number, the maximum number of people we can cognitively process, such that we know all of those people as well as all the relationships between them. This number sits at around 150, which isn't a precise number but an order of magnitude. A hundred and fifty people is tiny compared to the scale of the world today 4, so how does the modern world function at our scales? I do not pretend to give an accurate theory of how that feat is accomplished, but we could say that there are scaling mechanisms, which allow coordination to be scaled, which I would divide into 3 categories:
The point of those scaling mechanisms is that they essentially refer to some external entity, system or mechanism, to handle the coordination.
We could say that societal problems, largely speaking, occur from the various systems at play which allow coordination at our scale, but which simultaneously allow parasitism to emerge: resources being funneled into a few people, at the expense of the health of the whole. And so all these systems, mechanisms, infrastructure and institutions form what I would society, which I claim to be an external entity to human beings. It has its own needs, the same way that a company is treated in our society like an entity that exists on its own and needs to be maintained. The problem occurs when society’s needs are at odds with human values, such as when its need for growth leads to an utterly unsustainable system and the loss of human freedom, amongst other problems.
And the reason why our iteration of society is so successful in the first place, and why it has covered the entire globe is because it is so incredibly powerful. Scaling its worldview to human beings is a key aspect of that power, as cohesion leads the group to be more effective, and having a larger group is the simplest way to build power: larger armies, more people gathering resources, more inventors, etc.
The other side of its power lies in technology, which leads me to…
Technology is an incredibly broad term, as even a sheet of paper and a pen constitute a form of technology. Basically anything that humans use to further increase their control of the world, whether it is physical or not, could be seen as technology. Don't take this definition too literally, as I just wish to talk about technology in a way that is far broader than just the various modern forms that surround us.
Within this massively broad category, I would make an important distinction between tools and machines. Machines are made of specialized parts to accomplish a certain function, and are partially or fully autonomous, i.e. don't require human intervention. 5 For instance, a saw is a tool, but a chainsaw is a machine. A campfire is a tool, but a microwave is a machine. Language can be used as a tool 6, such as to communicate to your tribe what mushrooms are poisonous, but Chat-GPT is a machine.
This distinction runs into a few edge cases as you might imagine: a water wheel and a bicycle would be considered machines in this case, but they are far simpler than a car, a nuclear plant or a computer. The reason why the tool-machine distinction is so important to me has to do with freedom: tools, being much simpler, do not require a highly connected society to supply the raw materials, manufacture the parts, produce the energy and provide infrastructure for transportation of all of those elements. Because such a society would have to run into the coordination problem discussed previously, its focus has, historically speaking, always been about its own maintenance and growth rather than the flourishing of human beings.
Put simply, people work for the technological system, not the other way around. We still work 40 hour workweeks, even though many report that their job is mostly bullshit. Why does the time needed to work not seem to decrease with our ability to provide for our basic needs? It is because once again, the growth of the system matters more than the quality of life of human beings. 7
Aside from the coordination constraint I've mentioned already, we can also note that maintenance costs of infrastructure increase with higher complexity. Someone who only needs a bicycle to get by not only needs to spend far less time maintaining it compared to a car, but could probably do it themselves with some practice. The same cannot be said about cars. Even if you are willing to spend a lot of time to understand how a car works and how to maintain it, they have now become far more complex with the addition of embedded computer systems, thereby increasing the dependence on car manufacturers and repair shops. Higher complexity might result in a higher total productivity of the system, but it also leads to higher dependence and thus higher fragility, as well as frustration and the erosion of freedom for human beings.
This last point needs to be emphasized, and I'll add an example which has somewhat become a cliché, but which really needs to be understood because of its importance. When cars were invented, they obviously weren't widely adopted and only a handful of people could afford them. While this meant that there weren't as many accommodating roads for them, it also meant that traffic wasn't a problem and because society wasn't organized around everyone owning a car, whatever one needed was close by anyway. This meant that in the beginning, cars genuinely opened more options for whoever could afford one: perhaps a trip to a place one could never realistically travel to. As they became democratized however, the situation changed drastically and we now know what happened: cities are now mainly built for cars, traffic has become a nightmare in many parts of the world and cars have become essentially mandatory for the majority of people, since one’s job is unlikely to be close enough to be within walking/cycling/public transport distance.
This example shows that technological progress is not really concerned with an improvement in quality of life, and certainly not of human freedom. To say that cars allows us more freedom is to be blind to how much they cost to buy and maintain, how much time is spent in traffic, how they lead people to never use their own body to move around, and the air and noise pollution they generate. Technological progress is at the end of the day about the growth of the technological system, and helping humans is only helpful to the extent that it makes them compliant in working for it.
Finally, the last point I would like to make about the technological system is how utterly unsustainable it is. In fact it wouldn't surprise me it if was so on every axis, but here are the main ones I think about:
To focus on energy, the vast majority to this day still comes from fossil fuels (82% in 2022 according to this Forbes article), even though we are bombarded with narratives of a 'green future'. The way developed countries weasel their way around this fact is by exporting polluting industries to second world and third world countries, which they are totally dependent on, and then claim that 'the Western world is getting greener'. Or they focus only on where electricity comes from, ignoring that in many contexts such as transportation, the various derivatives of oil provide such massive competitive advantages that the idea of a green transition is pure utopia. We are only ‘getting greener’ within boxes that at convenient to draw.
In reality, the end of mass transport is the only realistic green scenario, but of course the system would never accept that willingly. Unfortunately, it will have to, because fossil fuels require more and more energy to extract, and are non-renewable at our timescale. I will not expand more on peak oil here, if you're interested, check out Peak cheap oil by James Ellis, or this great article by Darren Allen, or the numerous interviews of John Michael Greer (such as this one) on the state of industrial civilization, as well as his various posts on his blog Ecosophia (such as this one).
But if you come to see it for what it is, i.e. a hard limit on our energy sources, the future of society will not be AI infiltrating every aspect of our lives, though in the short and perhaps medium term it may happen, but rather an overall decline of the complexity of our society, resulting from its unsustainable infrastructures, which will happen through regular shocks (as opposed to a smooth descent, because society keeps running its course until it can’t anymore). How big will those shocks be, and when will they happen is a question I will not even attempt to answer. But preparing oneself for a future where modern technology will not be available is perhaps the most important part of the 'global pessimist' part of my worldview. Modern technology won’t be there forever, so better collapse now and avoid the rush.
Before moving on to the 2nd part, the local optimist one, it might be worth examining some of the attempts to solve the fundamental problems of society.
I think it's fair to say that society has always been a mess for as long as it has existed 8, at the very least we can be certain of this claim when it comes to industrial society, which has an endless amount of novels, essays and non-fiction books about its problems. And so unsurprisingly, there has been many people who have tried to give their own theory about what can be done.
I'm not sure it's really necessary to dive deeply into each category of proposed solutions and examine examples and give reasons as to why they might have failed, because here's how I view the situation: There have been many, many brilliant people in the past assessing correctly various problems of the society they lived in, who were able to convince many people of those ideals, which led to a movement big enough to create real change, but ultimately anything significant enough to disrupt the system either got subsumed by it or ended up essentially disappearing, because here we are. There might have been many manifestos, debates, revolutions, but still, here we are, assessing problems and discussing solutions. What has been solved exactly by all the attempts at global change that came before us?
As a result, I highly doubt that anything I can do, whether to spearhead global change or be part of yet another movement, would do anything to address the fundamental problems of society. Yes, call me defeatist, pessimist, or whatever. I call the first part of my worldview 'global pessimism' after all.
Why does global change seem to work so badly, broadly speaking? I would say that it is because we live in a climate of competing narratives, and that every attempt at a solution is either explicitly about or ends up devolving into siding for one of those narratives, or creating a new actor in the conflict. One of the many effects of this competition of narratives is that overtime, they end up claiming to be the one and only solution to our problems. For communists, it is the revolution of the proletariat, for the techno-optimists, it is about giving total reign to the technological system, which will lead to it solving its own problems. Feel free to do the same with any ideology you encounter.
This idea that there is one and only one correct way to organize human collectives is very dubious, if not totally wrong and insane, but the reason why it arises is again because of the constant conflict of narratives. Black and white thinking is appealing because it is simple and identifies a clear enemy to side against. Over time, a group organized around it will very likely do better when it comes to fighting with over narratives. When it comes to helping human beings make sense of the world and inform their decisions is another question altogether though. And yet, the latter is what actually matters to extract us from this mess.
So here is the broad summary of what this first part about global pessimism has been about. Human beings are not in control of society because there are various attractors that we find ourselves in, which result from the constraints of survival: the need for collective power through coordination and technology, amongst others. This leads to a whole bunch of mess and an inherent unsustainability of our modes of living, since society as an entity becomes more important than the human beings that build it. As a result, human beings discuss about ways to improve their circumstances, but these attempts are yet again subsumed into another attractor, the global narrative war, which by its nature could never be resolved with one side "winning" since other sides also wish to "win", i.e. impose their unilateral vision of the world.
So all of this sounds rather bad doesn't it? Well, what did you except from an essay titled 'global pessimism'? But there are various ways in which the prison of society isn't perfect. In fact the holes between the bars are actually incredibly obvious once you can see them, but discernment is precisely what society systematically destroys in human beings.
As you might expect, these will be the subjects of the 2nd part, on local optimism. My belief is that there are moves in face of society's problems that are worthwhile no matter what scale they happen at. In other words, it would be great if everyone could have a network of supportive friends, but if one starts by simply building it for themselves, something inherently valuable has been created, and which has a tendency to perpetuate itself for this very same value, rather than the parasitic strategies of society.
A more pessimistic person might say that the problem as a whole hasn’t been solved, but this isn’t about changing the world. This is about acting in a way that recognizes true value and what one can have impact over.
1 The claims that some technology is cleaner rarely take into account the entire process needed to bring it into existence. Solar panels and wind turbines obviously require the extraction of raw materials and various processes to manufacture them, but those are rarely taken into account in the publicly discussed balance sheet.
2 See The False promises of Green Energy for instance
3 Ever noticed how it is rather weird that we talk about 'companies' as if they were entities that literally existed? The health of the company, where ‘it’ is located, how much money ‘it’ makes, etc. Even common discourse implicitly acknowledges that collectives possess a certain identity of their own.
4 My understanding for why it is so small is that given a set of `n` people, there are roughly (n²)/2 relationships between them, which grows far faster than the linear curves our minds love so much. For 150 people, we have exactly 11.175 possible relationships, which is huge, considering how different they could all be, and have elements that refer to other relationships: Mandy is mad at Billy because he still thinks about his ex. Stacy, etc.
5 See also Darren Allen's piece on the technological system, which describes this distinction between tools and machines at length.
6 Language can also be used for poetry or storytelling of course, in which case it feels rather reductive to call it a ‘tool’.
7 See my essay The 40 hour workweek trap.
8 From Joseph Campbell:
> The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it.”
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2024-01-05